Tag Archives: Logic

“Conservative” Confusion

Posted on by

Keith Burgess-Jackson is a self-styled conservative with whom I had a cordial online relationship about a dozen years ago. Our relationship foundered for reasons that are trivial and irrelevant to this post. I continued to visit KBJ’s eponymous blog occasionally (see first item in “related posts”, below), and learned of its disappearance when I I tried to visit it in December 2017. It had disappeared in the wake of a controversy that I will address in a future post.

In any event, KBJ has started a new blog, Just Philosophy, which I learned of and began to follow about a week ago. The posts at Just Philosophy were unexceptionable until February 5, when KBJ posted “Barry M. Goldwater (1909-1998) on the Graduated Income Tax”.

KBJ opens the post by quoting Goldwater:

The graduated [income] tax is a confiscatory tax. Its effect, and to a large extent its aim, is to bring down all men to a common level. Many of the leading proponents of the graduated tax frankly admit that their purpose is to redistribute the nation’s wealth. Their aim is an egalitarian society—an objective that does violence both to the charter of the Republic and [to] the laws of Nature. We are all equal in the eyes of God but we are equal in no other respect. Artificial devices for enforcing equality among unequal men must be rejected if we would restore that charter and honor those laws.

He then adds this “note from KBJ”:

The word “confiscate” means “take or seize (someone’s property) with authority.” Every tax, from the lowly sales tax to the gasoline tax to the cigarette tax to the estate tax to the property tax to the income tax, is by definition confiscatory in that sense, so what is Goldwater’s point in saying that the graduated (i.e., progressive) income tax is confiscatory? He must mean something stronger, namely, completely taken away. But this is absurd. We have had a progressive (“graduated”) income tax for generations, and income inequality is at an all-time high. Nobody’s income or wealth is being confiscated by the income tax, if by “confiscated” Goldwater means completely taken away. Only in the fevered minds of libertarians (such as Goldwater) is a progressive income tax designed to “bring down all men to a common level.” And what’s wrong with redistributing wealth? Every law and every public policy redistributes wealth. The question is not whether to redistribute wealth; it’s how to do so. Either we redistribute wealth honestly and intelligently or we do so with our heads in the sand. By the way, conservatives, as such, are not opposed to progressive income taxation. Conservatives want people to have good lives, and that may require progressive income taxation. Those who have more than they need (especially those who have not worked for it) are and should be required to provide for those who, through no fault of their own, have less than they need.

Yes, Goldwater obviously meant something stronger by applying “confiscatory” to the graduated income tax. But what he meant can’t be “completely taken away” because the graduated income tax is one of progressively higher marginal tax rates, none of which has ever reached 100 percent in the United States. And as KBJ acknowledges, a tax of less than 100 percent, “from the lowly sales tax to the gasoline tax to the cigarette tax to the estate tax to the property tax to the income tax, is by definition confiscatory in [the] sense” of “tak[ing] or seiz[ing] (someone’s property) with authority”. What Goldwater must have meant — despite KBJ’s obfuscation — is that the income tax is confiscatory in an especially destructive way, which Goldwater elucidates.

KBJ asks “what’s wrong with redistributing wealth?”, and justifies his evident belief that there’s nothing wrong with it by saying that “Every law and every public policy redistributes wealth.” Wow! It follows, by KBJ’s logic, that there’s nothing wrong with murder because it has been committed for millennia.

Government policy inevitably results in some redistribution of income and wealth. But that is an accident of policy in a regime of limited government, not the aim of policy. KBJ is being disingenuous (at best) when he equates an accidental outcome with the deliberate, massive redistribution of income and wealth that has been going on in the United States for more than a century. It began in earnest with the graduated income tax, became embedded in the fabric of governance with Social Security, and has been reinforced since by Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc., etc., etc. Many conservatives (or “conservatives”) have been complicit in redistributive measures, but the impetus for those measures has come from the left.

KBJ then trots out this assertion: “Conservatives, as such, are not opposed to progressive income taxation.” I don’t know which conservatives KBJ has been reading or listening to (himself, perhaps, though his conservatism is now in grave doubt). In fact, the quotation in KBJ’s post is from Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. For that is what Goldwater considered himself to be, not a libertarian as KBJ asserts. Goldwater was nothing like the typical libertarian who eschews the “tribalism” of patriotism. Goldwater was a patriot through-and-through.

Goldwater was a principled conservative — a consistent defender of liberty within a framework of limited government, which defends the citizenry and acts a referee of last resort. That position is the nexus of classical liberalism (sometimes called libertarianism) and conservatism, but it is conservatism nonetheless. It is a manifestation of  the conservative disposition:

A conservative’s default position is to respect prevailing social norms, taking them as a guide to conduct that will yield productive social and economic collaboration. Conservatism isn’t merely a knee-jerk response to authority. It reflects an understanding, if only an intuitive one, that tradition reflects wisdom that has passed the test of time. It also reflects a preference for changing tradition — where it needs changing — from the inside out, a bit at a time, rather from the outside in. The latter kind of change is uninformed by first-hand experience and therefore likely to be counterproductive, that is, destructive of social and economic cohesion and cooperation.

The essential ingredient in conservative governance is the preservation and reinforcement of the beneficial norms that are cultivated in the voluntary institutions of civil society: family, religion, club, community (where it is close-knit), and commerce. When those institutions are allowed to flourish, much of the work of government is done without the imposition of taxes and regulations, including the enforcement of moral codes and the care of those who unable to care for themselves.

In the conservative view, government would then be limited to making and enforcing the few rules that are required to adjudicate what Oakeshott calls “collisions”. And there are always foreign and domestic predators who are beyond the effective reach of voluntary social institutions and must be dealt with by the kind of superior force wielded by government.

By thus limiting government to the roles of referee and defender of last resort, civil society is allowed to flourish, both economically and socially. Social conservatism is analogous to the market liberalism of libertarian economics. The price signals that help to organize economic production have their counterpart in the “market” for social behavior. That behavior which is seen to advance a group’s well-being is encouraged; that behavior which is seen to degrade a group’s well-being is discouraged.

Finally on this point, personal responsibility and self-reliance are core conservative values. Conservatives therefore oppose state actions that undermine those values. Progressive income taxation punishes those who take personal responsibility and strive to be self-reliant, while encouraging and rewarding those who shirk personal responsibility and prefer dependency on others.

KBJ’s next assertion is that “Conservatives want people to have good lives, and that may require progressive income taxation.” Conservatives are hardly unique in wanting people to have good lives. Though most leftists, it seems, want to control other people’s lives, there are some leftists who sincerely want people to have good lives, and who strongly believe that this does require progressive income taxation. Not only that, but they usually justify that belief in exactly the way that KBJ does:

Those who have more than they need (especially those who have not worked for it) are and should be required to provide for those who, through no fault of their own, have less than they need.

Did I miss KBJ’s announcement that he has become a “liberal”-“progressive”-pinko? It is one thing to provide for the liberty and security of the populace; it is quite another — and decidedly not conservative — to sit in judgment as to who have “more than they need” and who have “less than they need”, and whether that is “through no fault of their own”. This is the classic “liberal” formula for the arbitrary redistribution of income and wealth. There’s not a conservative thought in that formula.

KBJ seems to have rejected, out of hand (or out of ignorance), the demonstrable truth that everyone would be better off — far better off — with a lot less government involvement in economic (and social) affairs, not more of it. That is my position, as a conservative, and it is the position of the many articulate conservatives whose blogs I read regularly.

It is a position that is consistent with the values of personal responsibility and self-reliance. Conservatives embrace those values not only because they bestow dignity on those who observe them, but also because the observance fosters general as well as personal prosperity. This is another instance of the wisdom that is embedded in traditional values.

Positive law often conflicts with and undermines traditional values. That is why it is a conservative virtue to oppose, resist, and strive to overturn positive law of that kind (e.g., Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges, Obamacare). It is a “conservative” vice to accept it just because it’s “the law of the land”.

I am left wondering if KBJ is really a conservative, or just a “conservative“.

Related reading: Yuval Levin, “The Roots of a Reforming Conservatism“, Intercollegiate Review, Spring 2015

Related posts:
Gains from Trade (A critique of KBJ’s “conservative” views on trade)
Why Conservatism Works
Liberty and Society
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
Defending Liberty against (Pseudo) Libertarians
Defining Liberty
Conservatism as Right-Minarchism
The Pseudo-Libertarian Temperament
Parsing Political Philosophy (II)
My View of Libertarianism
The War on Conservatism
Another Look at Political Labels
Rescuing Conservatism
If Men Were Angels
Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Political Correctness
Disposition and Ideology

The Fragility of Knowledge

Posted on by

A recent addition to the collection of essays at “Einstein’s Errors” relies mainly on Christoph von Mettenheim’s Popper versus Einstein. One of Mettenheim’s key witnesses for the prosecution of Einstein’s special theory of relativity (STR) is Alfred Tarski, a Polish-born logician and mathematician. According to Mettenheim, Tarski showed

that all the axioms of geometry [upon which STR is built] are in fact nominalistic definitions, and therefore have nothing to do with truth, but only with expedience. [p. 86]

Later:

Tarski has demonstrated that logical and mathematical inferences can never yield an increase of empirical information because they are based on nominalistic definitions of the most simple terms of our language. We ourselves give them their meaning and cannot,therefore, get out of them anything but what we ourselves have put into them. They are tautological in the sense that any information contained in the conclusion must also have been contained in the premises. This is why logic and mathematics alone can never lead to scientific discoveries. [p. 100]

Mettenheim refers also to Alfred North Whitehead, a great English mathematician and philosopher who preceded Tarski. I am reading Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World thanks to my son, who recently wrote about it. I had heretofore only encountered the book in bits and snatches. I will have more to say about it in future posts. For now, I am content to quote this relevant passage, which presages Tarski’s theme and goes beyond it:

Thought is abstract; and the the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect. this vice is not wholly corrected by the recurrence to concrete experience. For after all, you need only attend to those aspects of your concrete experience which lie within some limited scheme. There are two methods for the purification of ideas. One of them is dispassionate observation by means of the bodily senses. But observation is selection. [p. 18]

More to come.

The Circularity of “Racism”

Posted on by

 

Wherever blacks fail to attain a “fair” outcome, as defined by a leftist, the leftist immediately blames the failure on “racism.” The “logic” runs like this:

 

The failure of blacks to do as well as whites in any endeavor is evidence of racism.

 

Blacks do not fare as well as whites in ________.

 

Therefore, the failure of blacks in ________ arises from racism.

 

The second premise is superfluous to the “argument,” and fails to address causes of failure (e.g., the generally lower intelligence of blacks). The conclusion simply restates the first premise. The “argument” is circular; that is, it begs the question of why blacks do not fare as well as whites in a particular endeavor.

What Is Truth?

Posted on by

There are four kinds of truth: physical, logical-mathematical, psychological-emotional, and judgmental. The first two are closely related, as are the last two. After considering each of the two closely related pairs, I will link all four kinds of truth.

PHYSICAL AND LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL TRUTH

Physical truth is, seemingly, the most straightforward of the lot. Physical truth seems to consist of that which humans are able to apprehend with their senses, aided sometimes by instruments. And yet, widely accepted notions of physical truth have changed drastically over the eons, not only because of improvements in the instruments of observation but also because of changes in the interpretation of data obtained with the aid of those instruments.

The latter point brings me to logical-mathematical truth. It is logic and mathematics that translates specific physical truths — or what are taken to be truths — into constructs (theories) such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, the Big Bang, and evolution. Of the relationship between specific physical truth and logical-mathematical truth, G.K. Chesterton said:

Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other. Logic is concerned merely with the fidelity and accuracy with which a certain process is performed, a process which can be performed with any materials, with any assumption. You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs. On the assumption that a man has two ears, it is good logic that three men have six ears, but on the assumption that a man has four ears, it is equally good logic that three men have twelve. And the power of seeing how many ears the average man, as a fact, possesses, the power of counting a gentleman’s ears accurately and without mathematical confusion, is not a logical thing but a primary and direct experience, like a physical sense, like a religious vision. The power of counting ears may be limited by a blow on the head; it may be disturbed and even augmented by two bottles of champagne; but it cannot be affected by argument. Logic has again and again been expended, and expended most brilliantly and effectively, on things that do not exist at all. There is far more logic, more sustained consistency of the mind, in the science of heraldry than in the science of biology. There is more logic in Alice in Wonderland than in the Statute Book or the Blue Books. The relations of logic to truth depend, then, not upon its perfection as logic, but upon certain pre-logical faculties and certain pre-logical discoveries, upon the possession of those faculties, upon the power of making those discoveries. If a man starts with certain assumptions, he may be a good logician and a good citizen, a wise man, a successful figure. If he starts with certain other assumptions, he may be an equally good logician and a bankrupt, a criminal, a raving lunatic. Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessarily an instrument for using logic—for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity. Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it. [Thanks to The Fourth Checkraise for making me aware of Chesterton’s aperçu.]

To put it another way, logical-mathematical truth is only as valid as the axioms (principles) from which it is derived. Given an axiom, or a set of them, one can deduce “true” statements (assuming that one’s logical-mathematical processes are sound). But axioms are not pre-existing truths with independent existence (like Platonic ideals). They are products, in one way or another, of observation and reckoning. The truth of statements derived from axioms depends, first and foremost, on the truth of the axioms, which is the thrust of Chesterton’s aperçu.

It is usual to divide reasoning into two types of logical process:

  • Induction is “The process of deriving general principles from particular facts or instances.” That is how scientific theories are developed, in principle. A scientist begins with observations and devises a theory from them. Or a scientist may begin with an existing theory, note that new observations do not comport with the theory, and devise a new theory to fit all the observations, old and new.
  • Deduction is “The process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises; inference by reasoning from the general to the specific.” That is how scientific theories are tested, in principle. A theory (a “stated premise”) should lead to certain conclusions (“observations”). If it does not, the theory is falsified. If it does, the theory lives for another day.

But the stated premises (axioms) of a scientific theory (or exercise in logic or mathematical operation) do not arise out of nothing. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, they are the result of observation and reckoning (induction). Get the observation and reckoning wrong, and what follows is wrong; get them right and what follows is right. Chesterton, again.

PSYCHOLOGICAL-EMOTIONAL AND JUDGMENTAL TRUTH

A psychological-emotional truth is one that depends on more than physical observations. A judgmental truth is one that arises from a psychological-emotional truth and results in a consequential judgment about its subject.

A common psychological-emotional truth, one that finds its way into judgmental truth, is an individual’s conception of beauty.  The emotional aspect of beauty is evident in the tendency, especially among young persons, to consider their lovers and spouses beautiful, even as persons outside the intimate relationship would find their judgments risible.

A more serious psychological-emotional truth — or one that has public-policy implications — has to do with race. There are persons who simply have negative views about races other than their own, for reasons that are irrelevant here. What is relevant is the close link between the psychological-emotional views about persons of other races — that they are untrustworthy, stupid, lazy, violent, etc. — and judgments that adversely affect those persons. Those judgments range from refusal to hire a person of a different race (still quite common, if well disguised to avoid legal problems) to the unjust convictions and executions because of prejudices held by victims, witnesses, police officers, prosecutors, judges, and jurors. (My examples point to anti-black prejudices on the part of whites, but there are plenty of others to go around: anti-white, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, etc. Nor do I mean to impugn prudential judgments that implicate race, as in the avoidance by whites of certain parts of a city.)

A close parallel is found in the linkage between the psychological-emotional truth that underlies a jury’s verdict and the legal truth of a judge’s sentence. There is an even tighter linkage between psychological-emotional truth and legal truth in the deliberations and rulings of higher courts, which operated without juries.

PUTTING TRUTH AND TRUTH TOGETHER

Psychological-emotional proclivities, and the judgmental truths that arise from them, impinge on physical and mathematical-logical truth. Because humans are limited (by time, ability, and inclination), they often accept as axiomatic statements about the world that are tenuous, if not downright false. Scientists, mathematicians, and logicians are not exempt from the tendency to credit dubious statements. And that tendency can arise not just from expediency and ignorance but also from psychological-emotional proclivities.

Albert Einstein, for example, refused to believe that very small particles of matter-energy (quanta) behave probabilistically, as described by the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. Put simply, sub-atomic particles do not seem to behave according to the same physical laws that describe the actions of the visible universe; their behavior is discontinuous (“jumpy”) and described probabilistically, not by the kinds of continuous (“smooth”) mathematical formulae that apply to the macroscopic world.

Einstein refused to believe that different parts of the same universe could operate according to different physical laws. Thus he saw quantum mechanics as incomplete and in need of reconciliation with the rest of physics. At one point in his long-running debate with the defenders of quantum mechanics, Einstein wrote: “I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice.” And yet, quantum mechanics — albeit refined and elaborated from the version Einstein knew — survives and continues to describe the sub-atomic world with accuracy.

Ironically, Einstein’s two greatest contributions to physics — special and general relativity — were met with initial skepticism by other physicists. Special relativity rejects absolute space-time; general relativity depicts a universe whose “shape” depends on the masses and motions of the bodies within it. These are not intuitive concepts, given man’s instinctive preference for certainty.

The point of the vignettes about Einstein is that science is not a sterile occupation; it can be (and often is) fraught with psychological-emotional visions of truth. What scientists believe to be true depends, to some degree, on what they want to believe is true. Scientists are simply human beings who happen to be more capable than the average person when it comes to the manipulation of abstract concepts. And yet, scientists are like most of their fellow beings in their need for acceptance and approval. They are fully capable of subscribing to a “truth” if to do otherwise would subject them to the scorn of their peers. Einstein was willing and able to question quantum mechanics because he had long since established himself as a premier physicist, and because he was among that rare breed of humans who are (visibly) unaffected by the opinions of their peers.

Such are the scientists who, today, question their peers’ psychological-emotional attachment to the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The questioners are not “deniers” or “skeptics”; they are scientists who are willing to look deeper than the facile hypothesis that, more than two decades ago, gave rise to the AGW craze.

It was then that a scientist noted the coincidence of an apparent rise in global temperatures since the late 1800s (or is it since 1975?) and an apparent increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. And thus a hypothesis was formed. It was embraced and elaborated by scientists (and others) eager to be au courant, to obtain government grants (conveniently aimed at research “proving” AGW), to be “right” by being in the majority, and — let it be said — to curtail or stamp out human activities which they find unaesthetic. Evidence to the contrary be damned.

Where else have we seen this kind of behavior, albeit in a more murderous guise? At the risk of invoking Hitler, I must answer with this link: Nazi Eugenics. Again, science is not a sterile occupation, exempt from human flaws and foibles.

CONCLUSION

What is truth? Is it an absolute reality that lies beyond human perception? Is it those “answers” that flow logically or mathematically from unproven assumptions? Is it the “answers” that, in some way, please us? Or is it the ways in which we reshape the world to conform it with those “answers”?

Truth, as we are able to know it, is like the human condition: fragile and prone to error.