The Rise of Irrationalism

[Seattle Zack]

I don't know if anyone has read the Waxman Report, a study commissioned by the California Democrat regarding Bush's "Abstinance Only" education programs that are federally funded in 25 states.

If not, you can read it here (pdf format)

The abstinence programs, which have been embraced by President Bush, will receive $170 million in the current government spending year, more than double what the government was spending when Bush took office in 2001. The abstinence curriculum may not include instruction in contraceptive use as a condition of federal funding.

Among the highlights:

A 43-day-old fetus is a 'thinking person.'
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

The program also raises question about whether condoms can stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. "The popular claim that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs, is not supported by the data," the program's teacher's manual says.

The Centers for Disease Control and other researchers have found that consistent and correct condom use does protect against transmissions of many STDs, the report said.

Other programs asserted as fact sharply contested claims. The FACTS middle school program, developed by Northwest Family Services, says, "Conception, also known as fertilisation, occurs when one sperm unites with one egg in the upper third of the fallopian tube. This is when life begins."

Here's another one: "Twenty-four chromosomes from the mother and twenty-four chromosomes from the father join to create this new individual," the report said. The correct number is 23 each.

Some curriculums also rely on what Waxman called damaging stereotypes about boys and girls, including that girls care less about achievement and their futures.

The Why kNOw curriculum teaches: "Women gauge their happiness and judge their success by their relationships. Men's happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments."

Good Lord, it gets even worse....... it would almost be comical, except I know that these anti-choice anti-science religious zealots actually believe this crap.

I know no one will read the actual report (geez, it's 26 pages after all) because we're Americans -- we want our news in bite sized little pieces from Yahoo or CNN, without any reflection or introspection that will disturb our preconceived notions.

 

[Guest]

hiyas... this is worth a double thread but thought i would point out that Shereads had started it the other day.

the other thread

 

[Seattle Zack]

Well, I rarely visit Lit more than once a week anymore, so shereads may have scooped me.......

In the meantime, I would recommend Wendy Kaminer's book Sleeping with Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety which says it far more eloquently than I ever could.

Just for fun, here's a little bit she wrote for The American Prospect way back in 1997:

It is easier to believe that God is in heaven and all's right with the world than it is to imagine an irreverent politician questioning whether there is a God in heaven or any benefit to prayer. Even political theorists and commentators, right and left, are apt to shrink from criticizing religious belief or religious communities. Etiquette demands respect for piety and the presumed virtues of faith, and most people believe in God anyway.

So it is hardly surprising that religion is being touted as the antidote to crime, drug use, and teenage pregnancy, although proof of religion's particular utility in treating or preventing social ills is quite equivocal. The religiously oriented Alcoholics Anonymous, generally considered the most successful treatment program for alcohol addiction, cannot count its failures. How do you track its anonymous and always changing membership? And religious leaders who run successful neighborhood programs, delivering faith-based services, cannot measure how much of their success depends upon religious proselytizing and how much it reflects their active and devoted membership in the communities they are trying to save. Belief in God is commonly presumed to inculcate virtue in us, although I don't think anyone has ever demonstrated that religious people commit fewer crimes—or sins—than atheists. And nothing—other than conventional wisdom—says you have to be religious to minister effectively to people's needs.

But if religious forays into social welfare don't necessarily "heal" us, conservatives may hope that they wean us from dependence on government programs. Faith-based social service programs, vouchers directing public funds to parochial schools, and legislation assigning public school teachers to parochial schools to conduct classes in basic subjects like reading and math are giant steps toward privatization. ("Why not close down the public schools and leave schooling to as many qualified groups as wish to undertake the challenge and provide good quality education?" Bishop William F. Murphy asked not long ago in the Boston Globe.)

Religious institutions, after all, don't generally seek partnerships with the state, which would hold them accountable to bureaucrats; they seek access to state funds and control over policy. Their proposed takeover of welfare programs, drug treatment programs, and schools will lend justification to the government's abandonment of social services and redistribute public funds to private sectarian institutions. It's no coincidence that support for these programs has flourished at a time of widespread disdain for the federal government, a time when the President acts more like the Mayor of the United States—or the Preacher of it.

Still, it's unlikely that all religions will benefit equally from the disbursement of government funds. When Wall Street Journal editorial writers exalt faith-based social services, they're not suggesting that we teach troubled teenagers channeling or encourage them to don saffron robes and chant. They're advocating government support of only a few established religious institutions: churches, synagogues, and maybe mosques—or maybe not. Former Senator Bob Dole, for example, endorsed a welfare bill effectively requiring states to use churches as welfare providers, exempting the churches from federal employment discrimination laws and expressly allowing them to dispense federal aid in sectarian environments—but he also excoriated the Clinton administration for hiring the Nation of Islam to police public housing projects. As Jeffrey Rosen noted in the New Republic, Dole expressed concern about the Nation of Islam's discriminatory hiring practices and the likelihood of federal funds being used to support religious proselytizing.

Senator Dole's momentary conversion to separationism when confronted with federal support for a radical, minority religion he disdained revealed the majoritarian impulses behind campaigns for faith-based social services and other church-state alliances. Although right-wing Christians have begun presenting themselves as a beleaguered minority in competitions for government support, their demands for state-sanctioned religious practices are often demands for majority rule—reflected in familiar attacks on the Supreme Court's occasional defense of minority rights.

In the Weekly Standard, for example, Dennis Teti, the research director for the Tricentennial Foundation for America, argued that Congress should pass legislation allowing the states to post the Ten Commandments on government property, effectively overturning a 1980 Supreme Court decision keeping the Ten Commandments out of public schools. There is "a consensus across religious faiths that the Commandments should be publicly respected as the foundation for our constitutional principles," Teti declared, overlooking the constitutional principles that shield individual religious preferences from popular "consensus." And even beliefs that are shared "across religious faiths" may be anathema for nonbelievers. Religious freedom is not simply the freedom to worship as you choose; it includes as well the freedom not to worship—a freedom that should surely extend to welfare recipients and patients in federally funded drug treatment programs.

The context for faith-based social services is a campaign to align public policies with majoritarian religious practices and ideals. Consider the outcry against Romer v. Evans, the 1996 Supreme Court decision that struck down Colorado's Amendment 2, which prohibited the state from protecting homosexuals from discrimination. Like the Court's school prayer decisions, Romer was condemned for overruling a majority vote denying equal rights to homosexuals, whose behavior many considered sinful. (It also fueled demands for a Christian revolt against our godless regime.) But what critics of the Supreme Court's "arrogance" in thwarting the majority fail to recognize is that the Bill of Rights is intended to protect minorities, even—or especially—when majority rule derives from religious belief. Thirty years ago, when the Civil Rights Act was passed prohibiting race discrimination in public accommodations, many people probably harbored religious beliefs about the sinfulness of integration. For some, white supremacy was divinely ordained. A hundred years ago, many believed that male supremacy was a divine right and obligation—a belief the Promise Keepers organization is apparently fighting to revitalize today.

But current demands for religiosity in government cannot simply be attributed to the religious right. Left-of-center communitarians share much of the credit (or blame) for prevailing critiques of secularism and celebrations of majority rule. Communitarians have lauded religious institutions as paradigms of community and sources of civic virtue; they have associated assertions of individual rights with selfishness and anomie; they have given majoritarianism new respectability by calling it a renewal of community. Of course, liberalism has also long stood for restraining the market behavior of individuals to promote a greater social good, but it has fought government attempts to control private behavior. Communitarianism extended the liberal critique of individualism in the economic sphere to the sphere of personal relations and civil liberties. It romanticized religious belief and the spiritual power of communities, injecting the left with hostility to existential demands for individual autonomy.

In this climate, appeals to Jeffersonian ideals of separating church and state and reminders of the threat to minority rights posed by state-established religions will do little to counter anecdotes about recovering addicts who find God or born-again welfare recipients who find the will to work, as well as jobs. But if the principles restraining majoritarianism fail us, sectarian rivalries may restrain the formation of majorities, as the Founders anticipated. ("Security for religious rights," Madison wrote in Federalist No. 52, depends on "the multiplicity of sects.")

Will right-wing Christians fight to give Muslims the power to conduct prayers in public schools or administer government funds? Will Muslims and Orthodox Jews join Southern Baptists in a fight to post the Ten Commandments in the nation's courts? Historically, religious minorities in America have supported the separation of church and state, recognizing in it a grant of religious freedom. But if they begin to feel more threatened by secularism than by a theocracy in which a majority rules (with the promise of benevolence), then First Amendment strictures against establishing religion may fall. If sectarianism doesn't emerge early to prevent church-state alliances, it will emerge with a vengeance, too late.

 

[cantdog]

That's a good one, Zack. I hadn't been following the poli sci of the thing, only the law-student end. This takes up the dynamic of the struggle, the reactions to the reactions which drive the ebb and flow of it. Informative, to me. I used to pay little attention, since as an atheist I had imagined there were many more relevant ways to spend my time than watching irrationals squirm. But I liked this one.

Yer still a cunthead, though. Some of us can read 26 pages and still be Americans. Drone.

edited to add, just to stir the shit: You seem to like spanking people, to go by the avs, anyway. So I expect you always have to come up with some "reason" why someone has been "bad." Is this why you always come off so contentious? Do a lot of tops carp all the time because the world doesn't suit them?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well personally, I'm all for teaching more republican youth to abstain from sex altogether. Forever.

Let them all go extinct.


---dr.M.

 

[Just-Legal]

Y'know thats a great idea mabs...

 

[rgraham666]

I'm not going to agree that 'irrational' things are necessarily bad.

Many of the finest traits of human beings are irrational. Empathy, love, courage, none of these are especially rational.

And rational can be just as big a source of evil as irrational. The Holocaust was carried out in a rational manner. The impulse behind it was irrational, indeed insane, but the people who carried it out were for the most part, the flower of rationality.

Communism, still an endless source of pain, was created and administered by very rational people.

And capitalism, whose record in many ways is a bad as communism, is a supremely rational system.

As one of my favourite writers points out, any single trait of humanity, on it's own, becomes a dark reflection of itself. Only when they work together, balancing their strengths and blocking their shortcomings can they actually accomplish anything good.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by rgraham666
I'm not going to agree that 'irrational' things are necessarily bad.

Many of the finest traits of human beings are irrational. Empathy, love, courage, none of these are especially rational.

And rational can be just as big a source of evil as irrational. The Holocaust was carried out in a rational manner. The impulse behind it was irrational, indeed insane, but the people who carried it out were for the most part, the flower of rationality.

Communism, still an endless source of pain, was created and administered by very rational people.

And capitalism, whose record in many ways is a bad as communism, is a supremely rational system.

As one of my favourite writers points out, any single trait of humanity, on it's own, becomes a dark reflection of itself. Only when they work together, balancing their strengths and blocking their shortcomings can they actually accomplish anything good.

Umm... no.

Essentially, the Holocaust was not a matter of rationality. It was neither sound nor valid. It was in congress with no real experential confirmation, conceptual clarity, or coherance. To say that it was "carried out in a rational manner" I think is to say "it was carried out in an organized manner"... there is no such thing as a "rational manner" of carring things out unless you're talking about the relations between ideas--which if we are, then no, the relations between the ideas of the Holocaust were rationally flawed.

Not to be a stickler, but I think putting genocide in the corner of the objective science of reason is an unfair idea.

 

[cantdog]

He started out killing retardates. It would make the race stronger, he said. By the science of the time, it made complete sense.

He built a structure of history, with Hegel's ideas and many others, that showed the Aryan race to be superior. Thus if you eliminate the Semitic and the Gypsy, there is no chance for miscegenation and weakening of its purity.

Some of them, most of them, didn't leave, no matter how much they burned and threatened and beat them in the streets. Many didn't run far enough, and the Empire swallowed their havens.

No, the thing appealed to reason.

cantdog

 

[cantdog]

Irrationalism doesn't have to "rise," anyway. There's always plenty more where the old stuff came from.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by cantdog
He started out killing retardates. It would make the race stronger, he said. By the science of the time, it made complete sense.

He built a structure of history, with Hegel's ideas and many others, that showed the Aryan race to be superior. Thus if you eliminate the Semitic and the Gypsy, there is no chance for miscegenation and weakening of its purity.

Some of them, most of them, didn't leave, no matter how much they burned and threatened and beat them in the streets. Many didn't run far enough, and the Empire swallowed their havens.

No, the thing appealed to reason.

cantdog

Which is fine, I don't think anyone's trying to argue that what it was in theory and even practice was an attempt to participate in reason... just that it isn't Reason, itself; it isn't a model or icon of rationality. Far too much of it had nothing to do with Logic.

I would say that the Holocaust was no more "the product of rationality" than The Salvation Army or Ghandi.

 

[TheEarl]

I don't know Joe. What's was so illogical about Hitler's plans? He wanted a stronger 'Germanic' race. So he set about a plan of eliminating those who weren't 'Germanic' enough. Seems very logical if you remove morality from the issue.

The Earl

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by TheEarl
I don't know Joe. What's was so illogical about Hitler's plans? He wanted a stronger 'Germanic' race. So he set about a plan of eliminating those who weren't 'Germanic' enough. Seems very logical if you remove morality from the issue.

The Earl

A number of the premises were in question. Like I said, I think we're meaning to say "it was done in an organized fashion"... it would be a disservice to the nature of logic to say "it was done in a rational fashion". Again, because it we are interchanging those things, then there really is no end to the positive or negative cases of things that were done "rationally". Ghadi is a good example.

My original statement was more or less a response to rationality getting a bad rap, hastily.

 

[rgraham666]

The person who envisioned and drove The Holocaust was insane, however the people who carried it out were very rational.

They used all the tools a rational society had created. Technological ones to create the tools of mass murder. Organisational ones to make sure it was carried out smoothly. Philosophical ones to justify it all. All used in a cool, calm, rational manner.

Very few people did the irrational thing which was to apply empathy to the situation and say, "I'm not doing it." Most rational thought told the people involved that if The State ordered, you must comply. Reason told them that the people they killed were a danger to society and didn't fit into a reasonable cost/benefit analysis. Which is why the weak were killed first. No profit. The strong could be worked until they were too weak to do so anymore so some use was made of them. A very rational thing to do.

Reason alone will fail, every time. It is a useful tool but it is linear, short sighted and exclusive. Without the balance of other, irrational traits it will follow itself to the logical end, which may or may not be to a good end. Logic doesn't care.

And the irrational ones will come to just as bad an end without reason to restrain them.

We, as individuals and as a society, need them all to prosper.

 

[cantdog]

Quite so, rg. TheEarl says, "if you remove morality," but you might as well have said 'compassion,'; 'Humanity (in the sense of that which is humane)'; or 'empathy.' None of these are contained in reason. Without them, reason leads people directly to holocausts. Depleted uranium, as an example. That's a very dense ballistic material, very penetrant of armor, which is not generally designed againt it. Plus, it is an elegant use of a waste material.

So logical, and yet it should be a war crime to employ it, since it powders and is an extremely toxic substance, causing birth abnormalities, disease, and whatnot, even to your own troops, and even after hundreds of thousands of years.

But ya can't beat it for armor-piercing, and the enemy is never human.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

It need not be the Nazis or the military, either.

That same spirit of rationality is alive today when bean-counters total up the numbers to decide whether it is cheaper to spend money stonewalling the legal system and setting aside so much for payments to suppress any legitimate claims of liability, or to recall a product and have the fault repaired.

As long as the suffering and death can not be charged against the company, it is not rational to pay more money to correct their product so that it does not cause the death of a few hundred people amongst the millions of customers who use their product.

Killing, and the causing of accidental death, can be justified through very rational arguments.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Still sounds like "excusability" or "organized" than "rationality". Rationality is a pretty mechanical thing. If we're to say it is as responsible a factor in the Holocaust as we're saying, we have to accept it as a responsible factor in the Civil Rights Movement or Humanitarian Aid.

I don't think we can be objective and fair to rationality by saying "it always leads to horrible" or things like that "without irrationality, no good will come"... because, honestly, they're common tools for all sides of that.

 

[TheEarl]

A number of the premises were in question. Like I said, I think we're meaning to say "it was done in an organized fashion"... it would be a disservice to the nature of logic to say "it was done in a rational fashion". Again, because it we are interchanging those things, then there really is no end to the positive or negative cases of things that were done "rationally". Ghadi is a good example.

My original statement was more or less a response to rationality getting a bad rap, hastily.

I'm not really saying it was organised (although I'm sure it was). I'm looking micro-perspective at the Hitler from Mein Kampf. Hitler wanted no more Jews in Germany. The Jews wouldn't all leave. Therefore the solution was to kill them. It's a logical answer, if not a very sane one.

The Earl

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by TheEarl
I'm not really saying it was organised (although I'm sure it was). I'm looking micro-perspective at the Hitler from Mein Kampf. Hitler wanted no more Jews in Germany. The Jews wouldn't all leave. Therefore the solution was to kill them. It's a logical answer, if not a very sane one.

The Earl

There's a difference between "it was a logical answer based on these premises" and "it was logical". The former says "I can give bad premises and have necessary conclusions", the latter says "the premises and the conclusions were necessary and sound, rationally valid".

The former is what people seem to be talking about. But because those premises aren't valid, the argument isn't valid. Basic logic. The end is an argument that is... irrational. Lacking rationality.

 

[TheEarl]

Surely whether the premises were sound is a matter of opinion. To Hitler's mind, Jewish people were inferior and a blight on Germany. To Hitler's mind, Germany needed to become stronger. With that premise, killing the Jews is logical. The premise is not sound to our minds, but why not?

With the evidence available - Jewish people worked most of the money-lending and non-productive (by this I mean they did not of themselves produce anything) services. Therefore it is entirely plausible to suggest that most Jews did not increase Germany's GDP. It was also possible to realise that, as Germany had unemployment problems, removing one race of people would provide more jobs. Plus enslaving some prisoners would provide cheap labour that could be burned and then thrown away, adding to the war effort.

Inhumane - yes. Got some major flaws in it - yes. But it is possible to argue.



Having thought about it over this post, I have to come to the conclusion that I do agree with you. Logical with those premises is true. Logical overall, maybe not. But I still maintain that overall is relative and every premise is subjective. Who are we to say that our premise and our POV is where logic is definitive?

I've left the first three paragraphs mainly because it was bloody hardto try and work with that kind of mindset, to find the reasons for killing people, to write something against my morals and opinions. Interesting exercise and something any historian should try.

The Earl

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by TheEarl
Surely whether the premises were sound is a matter of opinion. To Hitler's mind, Jewish people were inferior and a blight on Germany. To Hitler's mind, Germany needed to become stronger. With that premise, killing the Jews is logical. The premise is not sound to our minds, but why not?

With the evidence available - Jewish people worked most of the money-lending and non-productive (by this I mean they did not of themselves produce anything) services. Therefore it is entirely plausible to suggest that most Jews did not increase Germany's GDP. It was also possible to realise that, as Germany had unemployment problems, removing one race of people would provide more jobs. Plus enslaving some prisoners would provide cheap labour that could be burned and then thrown away, adding to the war effort.

Inhumane - yes. Got some major flaws in it - yes. But it is possible to argue.



Having thought about it over this post, I have to come to the conclusion that I do agree with you. Logical with those premises is true. Logical overall, maybe not. But I still maintain that overall is relative and every premise is subjective. Who are we to say that our premise and our POV is where logic is definitive?

I've left the first three paragraphs mainly because it was bloody hardto try and work with that kind of mindset, to find the reasons for killing people, to write something against my morals and opinions. Interesting exercise and something any historian should try.

The Earl

You've hit the nail on the head. Essentially, there is objectivity in Logic--there is truth there.... but its a set of tools, nothing more. Its the science of the relation of propositions. The Holocaust was an event, parts of that event may have employes some kind of "reason"... but its not "rationality" at all. Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement was an event and parts of it employed some kind of "reason... but it isn't "rationality" either.

We can't moralize Logic. Its just a method. Makes about as much sense as moralizing math... like saying "The Holocaust USED MATH! Math... it leads to evil".

 

[cantdog]

The point of rg's post was not simply and starkly that reason leads to holocausts and other missteps. The point was that to correct the missteps, to perceive them, requires compassion, humanity, empathy, and the rest. That there is nothing Reason can do to intercept the path of these ideas to their end. Some other factor must be added to balance it off. There are examples.

It is, rg said, in the balancing of other values against reason that good policy and decent societies are created. Rely entirely on reason, you err. Eschew reason entirely, you err. Any single absolute principle leads to error if unchecked. Hence the best path is in an equilibrium of things.

You are reducing the reason rg spoke of to logic, which is merely the science of relating propositons. Logic wasn't the subject of rg's post.

Reason, in rg's sense, is characterized by the sort of calculated mayhem Burley referred to. here's the example of which I spoke. Is it cheaper to fix the deadly product or to let it kill people and pay the occasional damages judgement?

If that is the only question the company with the deadly product asks, then it is reason, unbalanced. If it were informed by another principle, humanity, say, or morality, or common sense, then the idea of not fixing the thing and allowing hundreds of deaths to occur which would have been easily if expensively prevented would have been called into question from the new direction of the other principle.

I'll stop now. Have you followed me, or did I leave something out you couldn't bridge?

 

[cantdog]

http://www.poclad.org/images/illustrations/personhood.jpg
http://www.poclad.org/images/illustrations/black_quote.jpg

Corporations make decisions like the one Burley mentions every day. The only proper criterion upon which to base a corporate decision is the bottom line, we are told. The corps are limited by Market forces, the Market's Invisible Hand.

But that Hand isn't protecting people very well. Like the air traffic controllers, and the citizens of Bhopal, and the public lands and wilderness reserves of the United States, and the people of Haiti.

Here's a link to a small pamplet POCLAD has been distributing at some meetings I've been to, recently. Guys in shiny black FBI shoes took down the license plate numbers of attendees at these meetings. Which took me back. *Sigh* I remember the good old days of the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-Vietnam-War movement. Guys took our license plate numbers then, too. Nice to know they have still kept the faith.

cantdog

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Originally posted by cantdog
The point of rg's post was not simply and starkly that reason leads to holocausts and other missteps. The point was that to correct the missteps, to perceive them, requires compassion, humanity, empathy, and the rest. That there is nothing Reason can do to intercept the path of these ideas to their end. Some other factor must be added to balance it off. There are examples.

It is, rg said, in the balancing of other values against reason that good policy and decent societies are created. Rely entirely on reason, you err. Eschew reason entirely, you err. Any single absolute principle leads to error if unchecked. Hence the best path is in an equilibrium of things.

You are reducing the reason rg spoke of to logic, which is merely the science of relating propositons. Logic wasn't the subject of rg's post.

Reason, in rg's sense, is characterized by the sort of calculated mayhem Burley referred to. here's the example of which I spoke. Is it cheaper to fix the deadly product or to let it kill people and pay the occasional damages judgement?

If that is the only question the company with the deadly product asks, then it is reason, unbalanced. If it were informed by another principle, humanity, say, or morality, or common sense, then the idea of not fixing the thing and allowing hundreds of deaths to occur which would have been easily if expensively prevented would have been called into question from the new direction of the other principle.

I'll stop now. Have you followed me, or did I leave something out you couldn't bridge?

Nothing I couldn't bridge... I'm still not certain that "it was carried out rationally" or "flowers of reason" are fair terms. More or less because it wasn't carried out even soundly, much less validly. As I said to Earl... really, its a matter of preferential language. But I think it enough of a point to make only because successive interpretations of what "rational" can be shouldn't start with "the manner of the Holocaust".

*shudder*

 

[shereads]

The point of rg's post was not simply and starkly that reason leads to holocausts and other missteps. The point was that to correct the missteps, to perceive them, requires compassion, humanity, empathy, and the rest. That there is nothing Reason can do to intercept the path of these ideas to their end. Some other factor must be added to balance it off. There are examples.

It is, rg said, in the balancing of other values against reason that good policy and decent societies are created. Rely entirely on reason, you err. Eschew reason entirely, you err. Any single absolute principle leads to error if unchecked. Hence the best path is in an equilibrium of things.

You are reducing the reason rg spoke of to logic, which is merely the science of relating propositons. Logic wasn't the subject of rg's post.

Reason, in rg's sense, is characterized by the sort of calculated mayhem Burley referred to. here's the example of which I spoke. Is it cheaper to fix the deadly product or to let it kill people and pay the occasional damages judgement?

If that is the only question the company with the deadly product asks, then it is reason, unbalanced. If it were informed by another principle, humanity, say, or morality, or common sense, then the idea of not fixing the thing and allowing hundreds of deaths to occur which would have been easily if expensively prevented would have been called into question from the new direction of the other principle.

Sometimes I stumble around in the AH for a sleepless half-hour, and can't remember why it once seemed like a rewarding place to read and participate in social debate. Then one of you reminds me. Often as not, it's a church-affiliated athiest shaman missionary fireman, typically from Maine.

Thank you, Cantdog, for your impassioned restraint. There's a bit of Paul Wellstone in you and God knows we could use him now. Liberals need role models. I hope you won't mind if I put your name on the list.

< returns the thread to its topic >