Is Free Will Merely an Illusion?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a brilliant physicist whose videos usually explain some aspect of physics. In this 11 minute video she argues that free will is an illusion, that it's contrary to the laws of physics and that belief in it is unscientific.

Hossenfelder's argument might be summed up in this claim:

These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

I think there are at least three problems with her argument.

First, she's basing her conclusion that free will is an illusion on an unprovable metaphysical assumption, the assumption that materialism is true. If it is true then determinism does seem to be the most reasonable position. If, as she claims, all we are is particles of matter then it's not hard to believe that - like planets, stars and every other material object in the universe - we're totally in thrall to physical laws.

However, there's no compelling reason to accept her assumption that materialism is true. She holds it simply as a metaphysical or psychological preference, and if materialism is false, if human beings possess immaterial minds not subject to physical determinism and which work somehow in concert with the material brain, then our overwhelming conviction that we have freedom of choice may not be an illusion at all.

In fact, the conviction of freedom is one reason for thinking that there actually is more to us than just our material selves. In any case, in lieu of a compelling reason to think materialism is true, her argument for determinism is unconvincing.

The second problem is that if materialism is true then our beliefs are merely the epiphenomena of particles whizzing around in our brains, and there's no reason to think that truth, especially truth about metaphysical matters, can emerge from mindless particles banging against each other.

Thus, given her belief in materialism, Hossenfelder has no good reason to think that her metaphysical beliefs are true, including her belief in materialism.

Moreover, if everything is determined then our beliefs are determined, and it follows that Hossenfelder's belief in materialism is a product of influences, many of them unconscious, that have acted on her throughout her life.

Given those influences it was inevitable that she'd be a materialist, but if her belief in materialism is largely the product of the unconscious effects of childhood experiences why should we be expected to accept an argument that reduces to something like "given my childhood experiences I [Hossenfelder] am convinced that materialism/determinism are true"?

Likewise, if materialism and determinism really are true but her listeners nevertheless reject them, they're not being irrational because their rejection is a decision that they were predetermined ever since the Big Bang to make. They could not have done otherwise. No decision we make in life could have been other than what it is.

There's no scientific argument that can demonstrate that materialism is true and good reasons to think it's not, but many scientists like Hossenfelder take it as their starting assumption because they find it psychologically congenial. Her entire argument for determinism, however, is predicated upon that assumption. It's the reason she privileges her faith in the laws of physics over the powerful experiential intuition that we're somehow free, and it's the reason she concludes that the powerful intuition of freedom must be an illusion.

Here's a third problem with her presentation.

In the video (8:05) she mentions moral behavior, but she's careful not to talk about it in terms of right and wrong acts. She's correct to avoid this language because if materialism/determinism are true there can be no moral right or wrong. People do what they're determined to do and though there may be a kind of responsibility in the sense which she explains it, there's no moral responsibility and no moral guilt.

If my behavior harms others they may not like it, and if they have the power to punish me they will, but that doesn't mean that I've done anything for which I should feel guilt or remorse. Humans, if we are determined, should no more feel remorse for harming others than a shark feels remorse for attacking a surfer.

The fact that we know what we're doing when we harm another and the shark doesn't know makes no practical difference. If we were programmed, as it were, to harm others and couldn't have done otherwise, then our awareness of what we're doing is irrelevant. There's no moral guilt, and feelings of guilt and remorse are merely a psychological trick played on us by nature.

Our belief that we are in some sense free, if we have that belief, is a properly basic belief. We're rational to hold it - given the powerful intuition we have that we really are free - unless and until we're faced with a compelling defeater for that belief. Hossenfelder's presentation is only compelling if one accepts her materialism, but why think materialism is true?

She doesn't tell us.

What Exactly Is "Court-Packing"?

High ranking Democrats have repeatedly threatened to "pack" the Supreme Court if they regain the White House and the Senate, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have repeatedly refused to say whether they'd go along with such a move if they were to take office in January.

Biden, feeling pressure to say something about his stance on this issue, recently mumbled that he's not a fan of court packing, which was about as tepid and non-committal an answer as one could imagine.

Democrats prefer to change the subject when the matter of court packing is brought up and one way they're doing this is by changing the meaning of the term.

The phrase "packing the court" refers to a gambit undertaken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when an uncooperative Supreme Court was stifling his presidential initiatives on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. Roosevelt threatened that he would appoint up to six more Justices to the Court (the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices) and that these would be Justices more amenable to the president's wishes.

By increasing the number of Justices, people who would serve for the rest of their lives, from nine to fifteen Roosevelt and the Democrats hoped to do an end run around the Constitution and the legislature and have their way politically for generations.

Roosevelt never carried out his threat, but now that President Trump is filling vacancies with Justices who esteem the Constitution and who believe that the proper role of courts is not to make law but to interpret it, the Democrats are in a panic and are pledging to do what FDR only threatened.

They realize, however, that it might look bad with the voters prior to the election to explicitly promise to destabilize the country in this fashion, so Biden and Harris are refusing to talk about it, offering instead the lame excuse that if they said what they'd do then that would become the issue, which, of course, it would and should.

Mr. Biden even declared that the voters "don't deserve" to know what he'd do before the election and that he'd deign tell us what he'll do after he's elected, a statement as full of arrogance and contempt for the American people as Speaker Pelosi's claim during the Obama administration that if Congress wanted to know what was in the Obamacare bill the House would have to pass it to find out.

A more brazen tactic emerging in recent days is to redefine what's meant by "court packing." Vice-Presidential candidate Kamala Harris led the way on this as Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal observes:

Sen. Kamala Harris rolled out the first try at a new defense last week when Vice President Mike Pence (rather than, say, the moderator) challenged her to justify the [court packing] proposal.

“Let’s talk about packing the court then,” she said, and an eager nation edged forward on its collective couch to hear, at last, the refined Democratic justification. But all we got, after a false story about Abraham Lincoln and a court vacancy in 1864, was an attempt to redefine the term “court packing” (delivered with trademark smiling condescension). She claimed it meant appointing insufficient numbers of nonwhite judges.

Well, claiming that court packing is having too many white people on the federal bench is a creative riposte, but it's not at all what the term means. Other Democrats quickly realized, however, that redefining the term was a fruitful way to neuter the issue, much like redefining what constitutes a criminal act is one way to reduce crime.

Baker continues:

Now a second redefinition has emerged. In a barrage of comments over the weekend, Democrats and their supporters have alleged that their plan for the court is no different than what Republicans have been doing for the past few years—“packing” the judiciary with Republican-appointed judges.

The message has been widely disseminated and is now being regurgitated at volume. Democratic politicians and Biden supporters in the media have been parroting it. Sen. Mazie Hirono, always a reliable vehicle of whatever Democrats have been instructed to say, told CNN: “I’m really concerned about the court packing with the ideologically driven nominees now sitting on the court.”

So, if the president appoints too few people of color or too many conservatives that's what we're supposed to think court-packing is. In other words, court packing occurs when Republicans follow their Constitutional mandate to nominate Justices that they believe will uphold the Constitution regardless of the race of the nominee.

If the Democrats actually do add more Justices to the Court then the next time the Republicans control both the White House and the Senate they'll do likewise producing an escalating judicial "arms race" until we eventually have a hundred Justices sitting on the Supreme Court. By that time the Constitution will have long since ceased to have any legal significance.

Once upon a time Joe Biden recognized the stupidity of doing what he refuses to disavow today. In 1983 he said this:

President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate and Congress a proposal to pack the Court. It was totally within his right to do that. He violated no law. He was legalistically absolutely correct. But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. (emphasis mine)

That version of Joe Biden was wiser in 1983 than the version running for president today. Today's version has apparently sold out to the radical left-wingers in his party who are increasingly promoting that "bonehead idea."

What Postmoderns Assume

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites.

Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent who perhaps works through natural processes, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

A Metastasizing Hatred

Our society seems to sink further into hatred, division and coarseness every day. It's as though bitterness and bile are metastasizing throughout our culture like a virulent cancer.

Here's an example: Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said in her opening statement at her Senate confirmation hearing that,

[C]ourts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life. The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the People. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try.

This has enraged the left that a Supreme Court nominee should think it her responsibility to follow the Constitution and not to usurp the role of the legislature by making law.

One sweet individual responded to Coney's statement with this, "this is probably the one and only time i want misogyny to do it's thing and let this woman f***ing fail."

I doubt if this person limits his or her misogynistic wishes just to Ms. Barrett. Doubtless, any conservative woman would be the object of similar vituperation.

And there are worse examples.

Late last month ex-CEO of Twitter Dick Costello said in a tweet that “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.”

It sounds less like a simple prophecy than an enthusiastic endorsement of the prospect.

One of the premier haters in the media is a man named Keith Olbermann. Olbermann has been a pundit on MSNBC and ESPN and has recently hosted a YouTube show dedicated to defeating Donald Trump.

Olbermann recently delivered himself of this rant:

If Trump has triggered hate, as Olbermann alleges, it's a hatred primarily manifested among those who oppose him, not those who support him. Olbermann himself is exhibit A.

Mr. Olbermann chose not to specify the crimes Trump and his supporters "must" be prosecuted for. His listing of offenders (Mike Lee? William Barr? Amy Coney Barrett? Mike Pence?) sounds like nothing so much as the ravings of a lunatic driven over the edge of sanity by an irrational and perverse obsession.

"The fight," Mr Olbermann avers in his best Inspector Dreyfus impersonation (see below), "is not just to win the election, but to win it by enough to chase — at least for a moment — Trump and the maggots [Trump's supporters] off the stage and then try to clean up what they left."

It's hard to say what mess Trump has created, but then haters rarely get into specifics. They believe that emotional hysteria suffices to convince their audience that their point has been made. Who needs to present facts when visceral loathing and name-calling can be mustered instead?

President Trump's opponents sometimes say that our nation can't survive four more years of Trump. Maybe what they mean is that they themselves can't survive four more years. Four years is a long time to endure the debilitating sickness of the soul such as seems to afflict at least some of our friends on the contemporary left.

How Does the Brain Do It?

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

Indigenous Peoples Day

A student came across this post from Columbus Day 2019 and suggested that it'd be worthwhile to run it again this year. I concurred so here it is:

Monday is Columbus Day here in the U.S. and past observances of the day have elicited protests and disdain for the savage legacy of early European conquerors. The topic, in fact, brings to mind a stomach-churning book I read several years ago titled The Destruction of the Indies by a Spanish priest named Bartholomo de Las Casas. The book is an eyewitness account of the horrors inflicted upon the native American people in the West Indies by the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I thought of that book when I read of people who see Columbus as the initiator of the terrible oppression inflicted upon native Americans. I think the record regarding Columbus himself is a bit ambiguous, and I don't have too much sympathy for those who wish to efface his memory. Indeed, it's easy to suspect some of them of ulterior motives, but, be that as it may, neither have I much sympathy for those who wish to replace Columbus Day with what they're calling "Indigenous Peoples Day."

In the first place, there are no indigenous people, or if there were, they're lost to history. The Indians the Spaniard explorers encountered and often massacred had themselves driven out, slaughtered or assimilated other groups who preceded them hundreds, or even thousands, of years before.

But more importantly, if the Spanish Conquistadors were unimaginably savage and cruel, and they certainly were, many of the Indians they conquered (though not all) were their equals in barbarity. Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto illustrates this disturbingly well. So does an essay by Michael Graham at The Federalist.

About the Indians the Spanish encountered in the New World Graham writes:

[I]f we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.”

“Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten. “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865, by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Nor was the bloodlust and oppression limited to Central and South America:

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s The Jesuit Relations—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skin stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

The lesson in all this is that there is no race of people who is exempt from the human inclination toward savage depravity. White, black, brown and yellow, no race is free from the stain of a deeply corrupted human nature. As Graham points out, racism, violence and conquest are part of the human condition, they're not endemic to Europeans.

If Europeans have managed to dominate and oppress others throughout much of the last millenium or so it's not because they're more evil than others but because for the last thousand years they've been more technologically advanced. Every other group has behaved in exactly the same cruel fashion whenever they've been more powerful than their neighbors.

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that,

[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

What Solzhenitsyn said is true of every human being no matter what the race or ethnicity of the individual may be. In these days of identity politics that's worth remembering.

My Two Questions

The science writer at Forbes, Ethan Siegal, was once asked which of these five physics-related mysteries would he most like to have the answer to:

• Did cosmic inflation happen or was there another process?
• Is earth the only place in the cosmos with life?
• How [can we] merge general relativity and quantum mechanics?
• What is dark energy and dark matter?
• How did life begin on Earth?

These are all fascinating questions, and I'd like to know the answers to all of them myself, especially the last. Siegal gave good explanations at the link as to why these questions are significant, and interested readers should check it out, but for my part the two most fascinating science-related questions are not on this list.

The first question I'd like to read a convincing answer to is how did brute matter - atoms and sub-atomic particles - ever give rise in evolutionary history to human consciousness? Indeed, what exactly is consciousness? It would seem that the explanatory gap between material stuff and conscious experience is enormous so how was it bridged in human development and, for that matter, how is it bridged in each human brain?

The second question I'd like to see answered is what is matter in the first place? What is the fundamental constituent of matter? Is it something solid or is it a force of some kind? If it's the latter then how does solidity arise? Is solidity just an illusion? Is the material world objectively real and to what extent is it so?

Someone might dismiss such questions with the remark that the answers make no difference to how we live our everyday lives, and at one level they'd surely be correct. But, if, as a lot of very smart people think, the answers to these questions would point to an ontic reality beyond the universe itself, an intelligent mind, then the implications for everyday life could be considerable.

If, for example, it should turn out that consciousness cannot arise from matter but must itself be the product of yet another consciousness then it would appear that conscious mind underlies the cosmos, and if it should turn out that matter (or mass/energy) reduces to information then, since information is the product of minds, it would appear, again, that a mind must underlie the cosmos.

Those are conclusions of immense significance for every thinking person.

Perhaps we'll never know the answers. Perhaps we cannot know them. Perhaps solving these puzzles is as far beyond our intellectual capacities as solving quadratic equations is beyond the intellectual capacities of a rabbit. All the same, it'd be a stupendous achievement were the answers ever found.

Amy Coney Barrett and Her Democrat Opponents

As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett approach it seems that her Democratic opponents have decided not to try to attack her personally - although there've been simple-minded outliers, who've called her a racist, strangely enough, because she and her husband have adopted two Haitian children. But so far she's mostly been spared the sort of treatment meted out by Democrats to past judicial nominees like Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.

Her democratic foes have apparently decided to concentrate their attacks instead on the probable results of seating a Justice who believes that her decisions should be based on what the Constitution says and not on whatever happens to be progressive dogma on any given day.

The editors at The Washington Free Beacon write that,

Barrett is too squeaky clean for their [the Democrats] usual tactics to work. Democrats have instead gone to plan B, making clear what they've worked to obscure for the past three decades in previous attempts to derail Republican judicial nominations. If they can't attack Barrett's qualifications for the Court, they'll explicitly attack the political consequences of her nomination.

The Free Beacon article gives a short recitation of the sorts of attacks that have been employed against conservative nominees in the past, but beyond that, there's a very important issue at stake being raised here, one that has gone largely unremarked by our media: What should the role of a Supreme Court Justice actually be? Should Justices decide cases according to their personal political beliefs or should they decide them according to what the Constitution allows?

The opposition to Barrett stems entirely from a belief by her opponents that it should be the former. They want a Court which would in essence be a legislature that would circumvent Congress and impose their political views on the rest of us. That's what's behind the threats to "pack the court," i.e. add two more progressive justices to the Supreme Court, if they regain the White House and the Senate.

The Free Beacon editors add that,

This time around, the smears aren't sticking. Instead, Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud: At last week's presidential debate, Biden said he opposed Barrett not because of her qualifications but because she would hasten the overturn of Obamacare, [which is] once again before the Court in November, and because she would be a fifth or sixth vote against Roe.

Senate Democrats have followed suit. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) has refused to even meet with Barrett because he thinks she will "decimate health care," while Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) objected explicitly to Barrett's "closely held views that will impact a woman's right to choose."

These objections are completely wrong-headed. If those laws, or certain features of them, conflict with the Constitution then they should be overturned and sent back to the legislature for revision, and if they're not in conflict with the Constitution they should be allowed to stand.

To argue otherwise is to argue that the Court, an unelected body with lifetime tenure, should legislate rather than adjudicate, that the Justices should make law instead of interpreting it in light of the Constitution.

As the editors conclude,

Biden and his Senate colleagues are finally admitting what we've always known: They see the Supreme Court as just another venue for progressive rule and fear a judge who won't legislate from the bench. Claims about fitness and character were always a pretext for political ends.

Barrett is extremely well-qualified as even many of her opponents concede. The only question that remains, or should remain, is whether her decisions will be in keeping with what the Founders stated in the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments.

The problem is that this is the last thing the left wants. A Court whose majority hews to a judicial philosophy which includes an intense fealty to the Constitution would stop in its tracks the progressive ambition to "fundamentally transform" this country, as candidate Barack Obama put it in 2008.

Political Taxonomy

The presidential election is less than a month away and we're hearing a lot of talk about liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians. Unfortunately for those new to the political scene or just casual observers the terms are rarely defined so their meanings are often poorly understood.

I thought it might be helpful to correct this lack of understanding by rerunning a post (slightly edited) that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and which explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we get closer to the election readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed above denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quibble, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. The late Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to lean toward libertarianism in some respects, particularly in their belief in free markets, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the federal government in Washington and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is believed to be a conservative. Conesrvatives also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is a contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is a well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. Joe Biden is an example of a liberal politician.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives often tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here;. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as is current VP candidate Kamala Harris.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to transfer wealth to poorer communities and reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, so is Antifa, which is shorthand for "anti-fascist."

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it traditionally didn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today, though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation.

Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

Senator Bernie Sanders denies being a communist but he has throughout his life been sympathetic to communist governments, even spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the confirmation hearings for Judge Barrett and in the campaign for the presidency that will continue this month. Reply Reply All

The "Flow" of Time

Philosopher and physicist Bernardo Kastrup challenges readers in an article in Scientific American to consider that our apparent experience of the flow of time is really an illusion. He writes,

There can only be experiential flow if there is experience in the past, present and future. But where is the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not.

What makes you conceive of the idea of the past is the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been a single point in your entire life in which the past has been anything other than memories experienced in the present.

The same applies to the future: where is it? Can you point at it and say “there is the future”? Clearly not. Our conception of the future arises from expectations or imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations or imaginings.

There has never been a single point in your life in which the future has been anything other than expectations or imaginings experienced in the present.

But if the past and the future are not actually experienced in the, well, past and future, how can there be an experiential flow of time? Where is experiential time flowing from and into?

He goes on to draw an analogy from space: Let’s make an analogy with space. Suppose that you suddenly find yourself sitting on the side of a long, straight desert road. Looking ahead, you see mountains in the distance. Looking behind, you see a dry valley.

The mountains and the valley provide references that allow you to locate yourself in space. But the mountains, the valley, your sitting on the roadside, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life.

Kastrup argues that just as you wouldn't construe from seeing the mountains ahead and the valley behind while you sit by the roadside, that you are moving on the road. You aren't; you are simply taking account of your relative position on it. You have no more experiential reason to believe that time flows than that space flows while you sit admiring the landscape.

He concludes with this:

The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story.

The implications of this realization for physics and philosophy are profound. Indeed, the relationship between time, experience and the nature of reality is liable to be very different from what we currently assume....

The article is fairly brief, but Kastrup manages to fit several other interesting insights into it. If the ontology of time interests you, you should check it out.

The Predatory Leucocyte

Back in the 1950s the late David Rogers at Vanderbilt University, using a 16-mm camera, made a short film of a white blood cell (leucocyte) pursuing a bacterium under a microscope.

Michael Denton, in his just-released book The Miracle of the Cell, writes that,

What one witnesses there seems to transcend all our intuitions: A tiny speck of matter, invisible to the naked eye, so small that one hundred of them could be lined up across the head of a pin, is seemingly endowed with intention and agency.

It's like watching a house cat chasing a mouse ... or a man chasing down a kudu in the Kalahari.

Yet, the cell has no mind. It doesn't "know" what it's doing. Or does it?

Cells possess internal clocks and can measure the passage of time. They can sense electrical and magnetic fields, and communicate via chemical and electrical signals....[many of them have] courtship rituals...that include conjugal mating dances, reciprocal learning, repeated touching of prospective mates, and even deceit and cheating when communicating reproductive fitness to potential mates.

Denton states that "it is hard to resist the feeling that these microscopic life forms are sentient, autonomous beings."

Indeed, as one biologist has said, if a single-celled protozoan were the size of an average mammal "its behavior would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute these things to the dog."

And, Denton adds, "It doesn't lessen the amazement to conclude that this ability must arise somehow from the atomic complexity that lies within this wondrous speck of matter."

Indeed, but where did this ability come from, and how did it arise?

In his new book A Series of Fortunate Events, cosmologist Sean Carroll blithely imputes such marvels to the wonder-working power of genetic mutation and natural selection. Carroll states that although fortuitous mutations are rare, given enough time and enough attempts, prodigies of complex design can be achieved. He compares it to "an amateur golfer who, given enough swings, will eventually hit the target."

This, though, is much too facile. The difficulty of blind, mindless processes just producing something like a single functional protein, let alone an entire white blood cell or protozoan are more akin to watching a man who has never hit a golf ball in his life, blindfolded and disoriented so that he doesn't know where the ball is or in which direction the green lies or how far away it is, and witnessing him nevertheless hit five consecutive holes-in-one.

For Denton - an agnostic, as far as I know - the emergence of such phenomena in biology are strong evidence of intentional, guided engineering, "whether imposed on nature at the origin of the first life, or built into the fabric of nature from the beginning." (i.e. the creation of the universe).

It's logically possible, of course, that mindless nature could have produced life without input from any intelligent agency, just as there's some non-zero but infinitesimal probability that our blindfolded man randomly swinging his golf club could sink five consecutive holes-in-one, but it takes so much faith in random chance to believe that it actually happened, not just once in our world, but at least hundreds of times (since there are hundreds of proteins in a minimally functioning cell), that I confess it's beyond my feeble powers to will myself to believe it.

Fire and Water

Geneticist Michael Denton has just this week released the latest in a series of wonderful books on the subject of how the natural world, specifically the chemical properties of the world, appear to be exquisitely calibrated to permit intelligent life to exist on our planet. His latest book is titled The Miracle of the Cell, and having read Denton's earlier work, I look forward to sitting down with this one as soon as it arrives.

The Miracle of the Cell follows two other books which are both easy for the layman to grasp and very much worth reading. The first was titled Fire-Maker, and the second is titled The Wonder of Water.

Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the physical and chemical properties they do, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible. Certainly living things as complex as human beings could never exist.

In Fire-Maker, for instances, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of an animal such as human beings that have to be just as they are for that animal to be able to use fire. He then examines what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed.

It all leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.

Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:

The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything has just the properties it does. Everything about the world - the universe, the earth and living things - seems to shout that it was intentionally engineered.

All of these books can be ordered from my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds Bookstore in south central Pennsylvania.

Systemic Racism

Everywhere we turn, it seems, we're confronted with the allegation that our society is shot through with "systemic racism," and we hear it so often many of us simply assume it must be true that this vague but pernicious evil corrupts every institution of our culture. We might pause amidst our self-deprecation, however, and ask ourselves exactly what it is America is being accused of. What exactly is "systemic racism"?

Harvard Government professor Harvey Mansfield has written an editorial for the Wall Street Journal in which he dissects the idea and finds it to be pretty much vacuous. Here are some excerpts from his column:

Systemic racism, also known as institutional or structural racism, is a new phrase for a new situation. We live in a society where racism is not, and cannot be, openly professed. To do so not only is frowned upon but will get you into serious trouble, if not yet jail, in America.

Yet even though this is impossible to miss and known to all, “systemic racism” supposedly persists. The phrase describes a society that is so little racist that no one can respectably advocate racism, yet so much racist that every part of it is soaked with racism. We live with the paradox of a racist society without racists.

Systemic racism is said to be a result of structuring our institutions to privilege whites and consequently to be, perhaps unconsciously, biased against blacks. Mansfield notes that, "It is strange to describe an unconscious effect as racism, for an ism is an opinion, a doctrine, not a mere condition. A doctrine has adherents who articulate it; it cannot be held unconsciously as can a prejudice."

Nor is criticism of blacks ipso facto racist as is often alleged by those on the left:

Racist doctrine says that blacks are a naturally and inherently inferior race. To criticize the character or behavior of blacks, individually or even on average, is not racism. Criticism implies that blacks are not living up to their potential, hence that they are capable of behaving well. Criticism implies an essential equality between critics and whomever they criticize. This is contrary to racism.

He also puts his finger on another paradox:

The idea of systemic racism proclaims that racism is unjust but exists nonetheless despite ourselves. How could this happen? It is the bad result of the behavior we regard as good. The good behavior of conscientiously striving to better oneself is joined to the bad behavior of always preferring oneself.

Thus any privilege one earns and deserves is tied to undeserved privilege: A successful life if you are white comes out as white supremacy. Despite your verbal rejection of that result, the system behind your intentions brings it about.

The notion of systemic racism is designed to make you feel guilty about this if you are white. But why should you? The system did it, not you. You can’t change the system; that’s what “systemic” means....

The movement against systemic racism must fail. How could it succeed where Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t? Systemic racism exists despite our intentions; so it can’t be cured by changing our intentions — as by protesting.

In other words, those who accuse white culture of systemic racism tell us there's nothing we can do about it no matter how much we may want to. If that's so, however, and if whites benefit from these unjust structures there's no reason to feel guilty about it since things couldn't have been otherwise.

Moreover, those who declare that society is systemically racist are themselves operating under an assumption that can only be described as itself racist:

Systemic racism ...tells blacks that they are quite OK, and that it is entirely up to whites to change their thinking and their behavior. This means that blacks must allow whites to hold their future for them.

But is not the claim that black well-being depends on white behavior an implicit claim that blacks are helpless unless whites take care of them? It might also be said that if the structures of society are unavoidably and inveterately racially repressive and nothing can be done to change them then the implication is that they must be torn down or else blacks will never be able to thrive in America. The foolishness of the conclusion demonstrates the foolishness of the premise:

Systemic racism ignores the agency of black citizens, leaving them nothing to do except to protest in the streets or cheer from the sidelines. Meanwhile whites are told by the same idea that all their past efforts against white supremacy have been in vain. Nothing they have done has worked or could have worked.

All along our history, the Constitution and the Rights of Man we thought we practiced and defended were nothing but the power of white men. All the heroes of both races and their sacrifices were defeated by systemic racism and went for naught. What we might do now differently from what we have done in the past is left totally unclear. More affirmative action and more subsidies—what can they do that will now help instead of hurt? Call them “reparations”—will that do any good?

What is the evidence that our institutions are arrantly racist? We're often told that the evidence is the unequal representation of races in various fields of endeavor, but this racial inequity, if it exists, can hardly be evidence that racism is afoot. If it is then the most racist institutions in our country are professional sports leagues, which, except for hockey, are dominated by blacks.

As one letter writer to the Journal asks, "How is it possible for a country stricken with pervasive racism to have, over the years, elected black mayors and appointed black police chiefs? How can it be that these pervasive racists also elected a black president twice?"

Actually, there is institutional racism in this country, but it's not the sort that the progressive left thinks it is. Indeed, the institutional racism in this country is in institutions dominated by the left. Our universities systematically deny highly qualified Asians admission because of their race, blacks are often given preference in hiring and college admissions because of their race and the Democratic party refuses to allow black parents to send their children to the schools of their choice where they'd have a much better chance of getting an education that would help them succeed as adults.

Each of those is an example of racism in this country that progressives are perfectly happy with.

Fledging Their Young

From time to time I've posted on birds that I've been fortunate to see in my little corner of the world. One bird that makes it into eastern Pennsylvania once or twice each winter is a resident of Greenland but which occasionally wanders south in the winter into the Middle Atlantic states.

The bird is called the Barnacle goose and it's perhaps the most handsome of all the geese seen in the United States. A couple of years ago, one of these birds turned up in a park about an hour and a half from my home, so, since I had never seen one before, I took a drive to see this one.

One thing that makes Barnacle geese especially interesting is the manner in which their young are fledged. They're hatched on ledges high up on cliff faces, but their natural milieu lies in the water hundreds of feet below. Watch this video to see the remarkable manner by which they get from the ledge to the water:

That any of them survive is surely one of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

The Sizes of Stars

The universe we inhabit is full of wonders. It's filled, for instance, with hundreds of billions of galaxies, of which our Milky Way is just one, and each of those galaxies is comprised of billions of stars. These stars range in size from very big to unimaginably huge, thousands of times larger than our sun.

To get an idea of the range of size of the stars in our galaxy watch this video:

The word "awesome" is overused in our discourse, often employed to describe things that are really quite ordinary or mundane, but it's entirely appropriate, I think, to use the word to describe red giants.

It's also appropriate to invoke the word "awesome" when reflecting on the fact that scientists believe that the atoms that make up our earth and everything on it, including our bodies, were created long ago in the cores of stars that no longer exist. According to the scientific consensus you are indeed, stardust.

Amy Coney Barrett

As anticipated, President Trump has selected Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Much of the left will do their worst to destroy Ms. Barrett, personally and professionally just as they tried to do to Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, but there are some intrepid folks on the left willing to risk the opprobrium of their fellow lefties by proclaiming their belief that Judge Barrett is an excellent choice for the Court.

Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman is a prominent example. Feldman is very liberal and disagrees with Barrett on judicial philosophy, but in a recent article at Bloomberg.com he offers an endorsement that will give his fellow liberals serious heartburn.

The whole article is worth reading, but here are some of the more significant outtakes:

I disagree with much of her judicial philosophy and expect to disagree with many, maybe even most of her future votes and opinions.

Yet despite this disagreement, I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed. Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them.

I got to know Barrett more than 20 years ago when we clerked at the Supreme Court during the 1998-99 term. Of the thirty-some clerks that year, all of whom had graduated at the top of their law school classes and done prestigious appellate clerkships before coming to work at the court, Barrett stood out.

Measured subjectively and unscientifically by pure legal acumen, she was one of the two strongest lawyers. The other was Jenny Martinez, now dean of the Stanford Law School.

When assigned to work on an extremely complex, difficult case, especially one involving a hard-to-comprehend statutory scheme, I would first go to Barrett to explain it to me. Then I would go to Martinez to tell me what I should think about it.

Barrett, a textualist who was working for a textualist, Justice Antonin Scalia, had the ability to bring logic and order to disorder and complexity. You can’t be a good textualist without that, since textualism insists that the law can be understood without reference to legislative history or the aims and context of the statute.

To add to her merits, Barrett is a sincere, lovely person. I never heard her utter a word that wasn’t thoughtful and kind — including in the heat of real disagreement about important subjects. She will be an ideal colleague....This combination of smart and nice will be scary for liberals.

I don’t really believe in “judicial temperament,” because some of the greatest justices were irascible, difficult and mercurial. But if you do believe in an ideal judicial temperament of calm and decorum, rest assured that Barrett has it.

Barrett is also a profoundly conservative thinker and a deeply committed Catholic. What of it? Constitutional interpretation draws on the full resources of the human mind. These beliefs should not be treated as disqualifying. I hope the senators at her hearing treat her with respect.

And when she is confirmed, I am going to accept it as the consequence of the constitutional rules we have and the choices we collectively and individually have made. And I’m going to be confident that Barrett is going to be a good justice, maybe even a great one — even if I disagree with her all the way.

I want to be extremely clear. Regardless of what you or I may think of the circumstances of this nomination, Barrett is highly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

We might all hope that Democrat senators treat her with respect, but if history is any indication, they won't. One point of their attack has been and will be Barrett's religion. Some Democrats believe that anyone who takes religion seriously is ipso facto disqualified from being confirmed to the bench, but, of course, this is silly.

Barrett herself explained why in an event last year at Hillsdale College where she was asked "What role, if any, should the faith of a nominee have in the confirmation process?” Her answer was "None."

She went on to explain:

I mean, we have a long tradition of religious tolerance in this country. And in fact, the religious test clause in the Constitution makes it unconstitutional to impose a religious test on anyone who holds public office.

So whether someone is Catholic or Jewish or Evangelical or Muslim or has no faith at all is irrelevant to the job.

I do have one thing that I want to add to that, though. I think when you step back and you think about the debate about whether someone’s religion has any bearing on their fitness for office, it seems to me that the premise of the question is that people of faith would have a uniquely difficult time separating out their moral commitments from their obligation to apply the law. And I think people of faith should reject that premise.

So I think the public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences, be they moral, be they political, whatever convictions they are. The public should be concerned about whether a nominee can set those aside in favor of following the law.

But that’s not a challenge just for religious people. I mean, that’s a challenge for everyone. And so I think it’s a dangerous road to go down to say that only religious people would not be able to separate out moral convictions from their duty.

She's right about that. Why should one's religion be uniquely problematic? Why not a candidate's ideology or judicial philosophy? Why not a candidate's fervently held personal beliefs on any issue likely to face the Court? To single out religious conviction as uniquely disqualifying is both manifestly unconstitutional (the Constitution prohibits religious tests for high office) and grossly bigoted.

We should desire that the most highly qualified people be seated on the Supreme Court, people who have a deep reverence for the Constitution and who see their role as interpreting the law, not making it.

What we don't need are more justices who are little more than partisan hacks deciding cases according to their personal ideological preference, cultural fashion or political expediency.

Questions for Mr. Biden

Kimberley Strassel, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, lists eight topics Joe Biden should be compelled to address in tomorrow night's debate with Donald Trump. There are others, of course, but he should be asked at least about these:

• Hunter Biden. Joe Biden wants this election to be about character. Fair enough, but that requires addressing the ethical swamp that was his son’s business during the Biden vice presidency. As a new Senate report makes clear, the candidate’s son was cashing in. The vice president was warned and did nothing about it. Will this kind of influence-peddling be the norm in a Biden presidency?

• The Supreme Court. Mr. Biden in June said he was compiling a short list of black women for the high court, and that he’d release it after further “vetting.” He now refuses, saying such a list could subject his picks to “attacks.” Mr. Trump has been entirely open about his vision for the court, and the names on his list have withstood scrutiny. Doesn’t Mr. Biden have a similar obligation to transparency, especially as he says the 2020 winner should fill the seat vacated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI spent 2016-17 investigating a GOP political campaign, using tactics that were condemned by the Justice Department inspector general and are now the subject of a U.S. attorney’s investigation. How briefed was Vice President Biden on this probe? Why did he personally unmask Mike Flynn? Does he agree with the inspector general that these tactics were wrong? Should the public fear a Biden FBI will also investigate Mr. Biden’s political opponents?

• Political norms. Mr. Biden talks about Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking, and he has a point. Will he call out his own party’s norm-breaking? Will he oppose abolishing the Senate filibuster? Will he oppose court packing? Will he acknowledge the damage of politicized impeachment proceedings?

• The economy and spending. By one count, Mr. Biden has pledged some $11 trillion in new spending over a decade. Yet his tax proposal will raise only one-third this amount. Where’s the rest, and does he truly propose adding further to a spiraling deficit? Meanwhile, his tax proposal (the largest permanent increase since World War II) and regulatory regime would impose new costs on companies and families reeling from shutdowns. Spending doesn’t equal jobs. So how, specifically, does Joe intend to revive the economy?

• Energy. Mr. Biden insists his fracking ban would apply solely to public lands. How does he reconcile that with past promises to get rid of all fracking? Where does he stand on coal? Does he acknowledge that his plan for net-zero carbon emissions, by necessity, requires the elimination of most fracking and coal jobs?

• Administration. Mr. Biden ran as a moderate but has made significant concessions to retain progressive support. What will his cabinet look like? Will he return to Obama-era familiars? Or will we see Secretaries Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar?

• Religious liberty. Mr. Biden speaks often of his Catholic faith, attempting outreach to religious voters. How does he square this pitch with his promises to roll back religious freedoms, like ending conscience protections for nuns and other religious employers?

• Health. Mr. Biden would be the oldest president ever, and even some Democrats express concern about his mental acuity. Will he provide comprehensive medical records to assure voters of his fitness for office?

I'd also like to see him asked about exactly what he would have done differently in response to the Covid-19 pandemic than the Trump administration did, why it took him so long to say anything at all critical of the rioters in our cities, what he thinks about efforts to defund the police, what he thinks about the Democrats' Green New Deal proposal, how he reconciles his support for unrestricted abortion rights with his profession of Catholic faith, whether he supports gun confiscation, abolition of the electoral college, granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, allowing biological men to use girls' restrooms, sanctuary cities, and racial "reparations," and whether he supports offering poor families the choice of which schools their children will attend.

His responses to such questions, were they honest, would be edifying for many voters.

Strassel closes her column with this:

To listen to the media, Mr. Biden will have “won” the first debate if he merely remains upright. But let’s set the bar appropriately. The former vice president was long known as a capable debater, and he’s supposedly spent much of the past month prepping.

Americans deserve to know exactly what they are signing up for in this election. And these questions are the bare minimum of understanding what a Biden presidency would be like.

Justice and the Death of Breonna Taylor

Riots are again tearing at the fabric of our cities, this time because the rioters are dissatisfied with the verdict handed down by a Lexington grand jury which investigated the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky last March 13th.

The grand jury found no evidence to warrant indictments against the two officers who were directly involved in the shooting, although they did bring an indictment for wanton endangerment against a third officer who was outside the building. The mob has deemed this inadequate and have taken their dissatisfaction out on their community in the usual fashion.

As National Review's Andrew McCarthy observes, however, their belief that justice has been denied is simply not supported by the facts of the case.

Anyone interested in this tragic episode is encouraged to read McCarthy's entire column from which I've excerpted the portion which describes the events surrounding the actual shooting. I've edited it slightly for clarity:

On March 13, after working, Breonna met her boyfriend Kenneth Walker for dinner. They returned to her apartment where they watched television, and she went to sleep after midnight.

At about 12:40 a.m., the police, led by Sergeant Jon Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, knocked on the door and announced themselves as police. Taylor and Walker were startled out of their sleep. Walker, a licensed owner of a nine-millimeter Glock, says he did not know it was the police at the door and speculated that it might be Breonna's former boyfriend and convicted drug dealer Jamarcus Glover breaking in.

For their part, the police expected that Ms. Taylor would be alone — they had not seen Walker enter the dwelling with her.

It was dark and there was a long hallway between the bedroom and the front door. There was screaming. Walker fired as Mattingly came through the door, striking him in the leg and severely wounding him. Mattingly and Cosgrove returned fire into the hallway in the general direction of where they believed the shooter was.

When the smoke cleared, Walker was unharmed, but Taylor had been struck six times. FBI ballistics experts eventually determined that Cosgrove fired the fatal shot.

Meantime, a third officer, Detective Brett Hankison, who was in the parking lot outside the apartment, began firing when the commotion, which he could not have seen, began. He sprayed the patio and a window with ten bullets — irresponsibly, to be sure, but fortunately without harming anyone.

Hankison, who had a spotty disciplinary record in almost 20 years as a cop, was terminated when police officials judged that his conduct during the raid shocked the conscience.

This was certainly an awful tragedy, but neither of the officers did anything that violated any law or police procedures. As a result, the grand jury, on the basis of the evidence provided by the state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, an African American, refused to bring an indictment against them.

McCarthy's column goes on to describe Taylor's involvement with Glover and why the police were at her apartment in the first place and closes with this:

What happened to Breonna Taylor was a calamity. That is why the city of Louisville just paid $12 million dollars to settle the wrongful death lawsuit her family filed, rather than trying to fight it. Obviously, the money cannot bring her back to life, and will never be adequate compensation for her loved ones’ loss.

But that could also have been said for the politicized filing of unprovable homicide charges. The legal system can only do the best it can; it cannot fully compensate for tragic loss, and its criminal processes are not equipped to address catastrophes that are not crimes.

The state of Kentucky was right not to opt for mob justice. Unfortunately, the mob has a different conception of “justice,” and it is ripping the country apart.

It's very unfortunate that so many people in our society are eager to resort to violence before they even know why they're doing so. It's almost a reflexive response to news they don't like, and they're not interested in waiting until they know the facts before they decide that an injustice has been done and that it's time to loot, burn and even kill.

Such people are either morally stunted or not very smart. Or both.

Can a Secular Society Condemn Sexual Assault?

Until the pandemic hit and dominated the news cycle there was a lot of talk about the frequent allegations of sexual assault and other forms of abuse by men in positions of power who prey upon the women in their orbit. The tacit assumption, pretty much universal in all the discussion, was that this is despicable behavior, and it is, but there's an irony buried in this assumption.

In a secular society comprised of people who have largely declared God to be irrelevant what does it mean to say that the behavior of these men is despicable or morally wrong? Having abandoned any transcendent moral authority to whom we are all accountable, must we not also give up the traditional notion that there are any objective moral norms and obligations?

It's certainly difficult, as even most secular thinkers have acknowledged, to see how there can be a standard of moral good without an adequate objective authority whose moral nature serves as that standard, and if there is no objective standard there really is no objective good, at least in the moral sense, and therefore no objective moral wrong.

Thus, good and bad, right and wrong if they exist at all, must be subjective which means that they're dependent on one's inner feelings or preferences. If one person's feelings differ from another's, though, neither person is right nor wrong, they're just different.

This subjectivity expresses itself differently among the three main groups of people involved in these sex scandals.

First, there are the victims who, lacking any objective standard by which to assess what was done to them, simply allege their aversion and revulsion. For them what was done to them is wrong for no reason other than they were made uncomfortable, repulsed, harmed or frightened by it or the like.

Then there are the perpetrators. Lacking any objective reference point for their behavior, they intuit that there's nothing wrong with forcing themselves on a weaker individual as long as they can get away with it.

In other words, for these men, might makes right. Others may deplore what they do, society may choose to punish what they do, but if they can get away with it they're not doing anything wrong in any meaningful, moral sense, and, if they're powerful enough to be immune from social sanctions why should they care what society thinks? The sad truth is that powerful men often do get away with it, with the help of the next group, as the case of former president Bill Clinton illustrates.

The third group are the commentariat in the media and elsewhere who condemn what these men do, who suspect, perhaps, that there's something deeply wrong with sexual assault, but who can give no real reason for their suspicions. They may insist that people have a right not to be violated in such intimate ways, but upon reflection they may realize that such rights are simply conventions fabricated by society.

Having abandoned God they've also abandoned the ability to cite any truly objective rights. After all, what could it actually mean to say that it's morally wrong to violate a "right" if there's no ultimate accountability for what anyone does?

This is why they often employ weasel words like "inappropriate" or "unacceptable." At some level they're aware that they cannot justify using stronger language like "morally reprehensible" or "evil." On a secular understanding of the world there simply are no moral evils. These are some of the same folks who pooh-poohed the allegations of women back in the 90s who testified of Bill Clinton's escapades and predations. Clinton's defenders insisted that "character doesn't matter in a president," only competence matters.

So, for this group, right and wrong are pragmatic. Nothing's really wrong except insofar as it harms the prospects of one's political party or, more cynically, if it can be used to harm the prospects of one's political opponents. Put differently, these people believe that whatever hinders their own political aspirations is wrong and whatever promotes them is right.

So, they'll ignore the odious behavior of the Clintons, Jeffrey Epsteins and Harvey Weinsteins of the world as long as it does no harm to their party, and they'll express moral outrage at the similarly odious behavior of their opponents if they can gain political advantage by so doing.

Thus, what the growing host of offenders in Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and corporate penthouses are alleged to have done is only wrong for the pragmatist because the members of the victim group are exposing the perpetrators in such a way as to harm their respective party's prospects among the vast numbers of unenlightened voters who still believe in objective moral values and who still believe that preying on women is objectively evil.

Lucifer?

Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970) describes in vivid accents the modern man who prides himself in his rational approach to life unencumbered by the silly superstitions believed in by gullible religious people. The modern rational man, typified in her telling by someone like the 18th century philosophical icon Immanuel Kant, is a man who ...

...confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason . . . . This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d’être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek . . . .

He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it.

In fact, Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Lucifer? Satan? Why such a harsh judgment? Perhaps because the modern, "rational" man believes only what science and his senses tell him. The rational man looks at himself and his fellows as little more than flesh and bone machines, animals, whose only real "purpose" is to reproduce, experience pleasure and avoid pain.

He regards morality as an illusion. His reason affords him no basis for caring about the weak or the poor, no basis for human compassion, no particular point to conserving the earth's resources for future generations.

Whereas Kant thought that reason dictated the categorical imperative, i.e. the duty to treat others as ends in themselves and not merely as a means to one's own happiness, the fact is that reason, unfettered from any divine sanction, dictates only that each should look to his own interests.

In practice modern man may care about the well-being of others, but he must abandon his fealty to science and reason to do so because these provide no justification for any moral obligations whatsoever.

Indeed, the purely rational man is led by the logic of his naturalism to the conclusion that might makes right. The pursuit of power frequently becomes the driving force of his life. It injects his life with meaning. It leads him to build abattoirs like Auschwitz and Dachau to eliminate the less powerful and less human. It leads him to employ vast prison camps like the Soviet Gulag to dispose of the millions who hold inconvenient political opinions or who otherwise stand in his way.

Would Kant have endorsed the notion that might makes right? No, but then Kant wasn't quite in tune with the modern, rational man. Kant believed that in order to make sense of our lives as moral agents we have to assume that three things are true: We have to assume that God exists, that we have free will, and that there is life beyond the grave.

The modern man, of course, rejects all three, and in so doing he rejects the notion of objective moral value or obligation. That's why reason has led men in the 20th century to embrace ideologies that have produced vast tracts of corpses, and that's why, perhaps, Murdoch uses the name Lucifer to describe them.