{"id":257,"date":"2003-11-21T04:49:46","date_gmt":"2003-11-21T04:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:24","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:24","slug":"oh_julian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=257","title":{"rendered":"Oh, Julian…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I meant to reply in kind to Julian Sanchez’ backhand<\/a> of Rob Lyman for his defense of “communitarian patriotism<\/a>,” but it slipped through the cracks. I was reminded tonight, because his post is at the top of our Technorati<\/a> list. <\/p>\n

Click on over and take a look; pay careful attention to the obvious respect and consideration with which he treats Rob. Then notice the giant mound of Swiss Cheese he erects as an argument.<\/p>\n

Simply put, Julian made two gross errors in his argument, and caps it with an even more gross error in his behavior.
\nFirst, he makes claims about what Rob wrote that aren’t true.<\/p>\n

Sanchez:<\/p>\n

Step one: individuals in a democratic society bear responsibility for the actions (or failures to act) of their governments. This, as you may recall, is Osama bin Laden’s justification for killing American civilians. It’s asserted without argument. If it strikes you as plausible on face, notice that this is not the weaker claim that citizens are obligated to make a good faith effort to participate in the democratic process, vote for the best people given the information available to them, and so on. This is\u2014and has to be for the purposes of this argument\u2014a “strict liability” theory that looks at consequences. Bad policy enacted by the guy you voted against? Your fault. Some covert-op that only folks at the NSA knew about turns into a massive cock-up? You take your share of the blame as well.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lyman:<\/p>\n

Consider: Americans enjoy a democratic government which is, to a greater or lesser degree, responsive to our will. We are the authors of our government’s actions. If I vote for someone whose platform is opening up the prisons, I am partly to blame for the victimization of innocents which results when all those murderers and rapists get turned loose. If I vote for a politician whose platform is unilateral disarmament, I am partly to blame for whatever military catastrophe results. If Americans are killed by terrorists that my government failed to hunt down and kill, I am partly to blame<\/b>.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice a few differences? Julian’s positions are two: either you buy into tribal blood-connection a la Bin Laden, or you have a procedural authorship that comes from your ‘good faith effort to participate.’ Rob isn’t making that point at all. he’s making the same point Schaar and I make, that we take on obligations by living in a society; some of the obligations are not of our choosing or making, but we bear them nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Next he attempts to drive Rob’s argument off a cliff.<\/p>\n

Sanchez:<\/p>\n

Step three: Therefore (and I use the term loosely) each of us has a responsibility to be especially concerned with the welfare of our fellow Americans, rather than with people in general. This is my favorite. If you tilt your head and put your ear to the screen, you can almost hear these lines hollering: “Hi! I’m the fallacy of composition! You may remember me from such arguments as John Stuart Mill’s justification for utilitarianism, and Gladys the Groovy Mule.” If you’re bored and have some free time, see how many invalid arguments you can construct using this obviously incorrect form of inference. I’ll get you started: Corporations have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to be profit-maximizing. Therefore, shareholders must each act as profit maximizers in their own lives. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gosh, Julian, I’m just not sure where to begin patching the holes in your argument. There’s a whole literature on obligation and citizenship; Waltzer and Schaar would be good places to start. And if theoretical arguments based on history and literature make one squirmy and uncomfortable, I’ll suggest a brief detour into emergent computation<\/a> once he gets past the Introduction to Logic class.<\/p>\n

I’ve got three problems with Julien’s post. <\/p>\n

First, he carelessly misreads and misrepresents what Rob actually said.<\/p>\n

Second, he ignorantly misapplies elementary logical propositions to a complex system, and ignores a whole raft of readily accessible literature both within the areas of logical analysis of complex systems, the limits of formal logic in modelling complex systems, and human history and politics – which was, after all, what we were talking about. I don’t know Sanchez’ writing well, so I can’t tell if he’s being willfully obtuse or just ignorant about the notions of obligation and citizenship, from a political theory perspective (note that I’ll make a careful distinction here between political philosophy and political theory. For a good primer, take a look at my post<\/a> on it or at Chris Bertram’s<\/a>, Russell Fox’s<\/a>, or Matthew Yglesias<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I have other philosophical issues with the ahistorical, atomistic individuality that his post infers, but I really don’t have enough data to know that’s where he’s coming from, so I’ll look around a bit before going there.<\/p>\n

And finally, his dismissive and superior tone – particularly when combined with the intellectual failures set out above – set him up for the only appropriate response I can come to – which is to ask just exactly whose argument was it that is busted?<\/p>\n

I don’t care whether you’re on the right or the left, Stalinist or Libertarian. There is no excuse for not treating your intellectual or political opponents with some modicum of decency and courtesy. When people don’t, I’ll certainly make it a point to nail them for it, as I’m nailing Julian (the fact that his arguments were such a wonderful example of pseudointellectual arrogance was a perk), and I hope that other people will as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I meant to reply in kind to Julian Sanchez’ backhand of Rob Lyman for his defense of “communitarian patriotism,” but it slipped through the cracks. I was reminded tonight, because his post is at the top of our Technorati list. Click on over and take a look; pay careful attention to the obvious respect and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}