Ad inclusion

Honey Maid put out an ad about wholesome families:

This created some fuss. So, they brought out a response ad:

Here is a family talking about itself:

And here is another:

Providing some good commercial feels.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The solution to the problem of outcasting is not more outcasting

So, the new (since March) CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich made a $1000 private donation in 2008 to the Proposition 8 cause. So, he is--or at least was in 2008--against equal protection of the law for (some) of his fellow citizens. A somewhat problematic proposition; one of a series of such propositions with a long and ugly history.

This private donation has come to light and the witch-hunt was on. Where once being outed as queer would have destroyed one's life and career, now being outed as actively (in a giving-a-donation-sense) anti-queer apparently can result in losing your job, as he has been forced out of his CEO position.

Brendan Eich: Outed as anti-queer

The hi-tech businesps is very queer-friendly, particularly in Silicon Valley, in the heart of liberal-gentry California. Even so, it is hard to see what Mr Eich's private political views has to do with his competence as a CEO, unless one form of illiberal moral puritanism has just been swapped for another. Apparently so, as having the wrong opinions seems to be a sackable offence.

Indivisible freedom

Time for a little lesson in what being a free and open society means. It means folk will have different views, even different views on whether categories of people are entitled to equal protection of the law. The ability within a media-saturated society to generate hi-tech hate mobs creates a threat to being a free and open society if the common opinion of the best-organised-hatreds win; if they can drive people out of their jobs. Hi-tech outcasting is no better than the traditional low-tech variety.

It also gives aid and comfort to the "can't trust the queers" voice. Yes, much of the outrage over Eich's ouster is deeply hypocritical (though not all): a highly paid straight white guy loses his job and they shriek to the ether their being offended, and the wrongness of it. The simple human consequences of traditional queer outcasting typically utterly pass them by. So, they say such things as:

We will not stand by and allow this kind of persecution to go unaddressed.  Nor should you.

Starting the piece on how outrageous it all is with:

Imagine going to work one day only to be, in effect, fired -- not because of anything you did or didn’t do at your job, but because of something you did in your personal life.

Yep, that was the fear and experience of gay folk for generations. But that is precisely the problem with moral exclusion, it generates an impoverished epistemology (if not an entirely crippled [pdf] one), rendering one (selectively) blind to human experience. Hence the call is made that:

You were terminated for no reason other than your personal religious, moral or political beliefs.  And the evidence is irrefutable.
Sue ‘em.  Sue their brains out.

All the time while the push is on to block queer folk from suing if it contradicts "religious liberty"--defined as the freedom to outcast. The "bigotry for me but not for thee" position.

Catholic defender of liberty

For one impoverished epistemology is not better than another. The problem with the US "culture wars" is so much of it is not about stopping moral exclusion, about stopping moral bullies; it is about who gets to be the moral bullies, who gets to do the outcasting. About whose bigotry gets to be on top. Lord Acton's comments on how limited the support for liberty typically is describe the contemporary American political landscape nicely:

At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws.

Yes, this is about liberty, precisely in the sense Lord Acton meant it:

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

And it is about liberty as the friend of diversity, and enforced conformity as liberty's enemy:

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

That would include minorities of sexuality, gender identity or opinion. For, as Lord Acton also put it:

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.

Strongest animus wins

So, it is perfectly true that many of those currently squawking in Eich's defence have been more than happy to invoke the minority status of queer folk to pathologise their nature, experience and aspirations and the "right" of the majority to deny them equal protection of the law. To, as Scalia J has put it, to show their "disapproval" of "homosexual conduct":

Of course it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings. But I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible–murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals–and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of ‘animus’ at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, the same sort of moral disapproval that produced the centuries old criminal laws that we held constitutional in Bowers.

Well, now the social realities have shifted, and folk are showing their "disapproval" of "anti-equality conduct". An animus which is most emphatically a moral disapproval. The sexual and gender correctness of the right is not superior to the political correctness of the left; in fact, they use the same mechanisms and meta-logic.

For bigotry is always and everywhere a moral claim--it is a claim about who does, or does not, have what moral standing. The notion that error has no rights is both the fundamental principle of tyranny and a moral claim.

It not that error has rights, but that people (should be) free and freedom is nothing if it does not include the freedom to be wrong. The problem is being able to see the mote in the other eye but not the beam in one's own.

A moveable feast

The most fundamental reason to defend equality before the law and freedom for all is precisely this: that moral exclusion is a moveable feast. That just because you have been the ones successfully doing the moral excluding does not mean you will remain so, that you will not become the morally excluded.

So, no doubt many of those outraged by the ousting of Eich will completely fail to "get" the deeper lesson. But those engaged in the hi-tech witch-hunt, shrieking that error has no rights, have also failed to get the real moral point of the fight for queer folk to have equal protection of the law.

The answer to one lot of moral exclusion and outcasting is not a "new, improved" version of the same. That is just the same errors and entitled hate, re-labelled and re-packaged. The fight to be the moral-bullies-on-top is a fight that should never be fought; and everyone who does, deserves to lose.

ADDENDA: Wondering when the "statute of limitations" will apply to supporting Proposition 8.
A nice piece on the perils of workplace purges.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

That honour thing

The last vestige in Anglosphere criminal law of the use of violence in defence of one's honour is the provocation defence. It is only a defence in mitigation, not exculpation, but it harks back to the historical role of honour as a social control mechanism.

The most recent controversy has been in NSW, where Yassir Hassan (54) was found guilty of manslaughter not murder when he stabbed his wife 14 times. In sentencing, Justice Garling said that Hassan:

was provoked into losing his self-control, which explains why he is guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter and not murder.

Since the other version of provocation which has generated controversy recently is the "homosexual panic" defence, it seems that heterosexual manhood is deemed worthy of special sensitivity. 

Protecting status
In both manifestations of the provocation defence, the lower status person (women, gay male) is held to be responsible for the state of mind of the higher status person (heterosexual male), thereby lessening the legal significance of the lower status person's death. Hence the provocation defence is on the way out, as it has become a little too obviously an offence against equality before the law. (Note that this is not an argument for not differentiating between murder and manslaughter, just against building status games into legal practice.) 

The problem with the defence-of-honour status game is indicated by some of Justice Garling's other comments during sentencing:

Mr Hassan was provoked by Ms Yousif immediately before the attack, [but] he was not acting in self-defence. 

I see no evidence of remorse whatsoever... He regards himself the victim of what occurred and not the perpetrator.

Hassan clearly takes his honour as being more important than his late wife's life. In this state of mind, higher status does not grant more responsibility, but less, as the lower status person becomes responsible for the state of mind of the higher status person and so "guilty" of not showing proper respect. It is not people, but hierarchical relations that are being protected. 

Medieval honour
Separating honour from hierarchy can be a tricky thing.

In his Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Philip Carl Salzman nicely defines honour as:

… a recognition of righteous behaviour, and a designation of high rank, while its absence is a recognition of failure to fulfill one’s duty, and a designation of low rank.

In medieval and similar societies, the implicit or explicit contract between warrior and lord both grants and recognises status. Any explicit oath invokes the honour of both parties. But the simple ability to provide such warrior service carries with its own honour and status.

The loss of honour can be a drastic thing. In Salzman’s words:

In the absence of honour, one is shamed, and one’s reputation in tatters, and one sinks to a low rank. The consequences are serious and can be severe: The willingness of others to work and cooperate with one, and to exchange children in marriage alliances … is based on reputation.

A person’s honour was a buffer against the actions of others, a personalised social space they were entitled to defend. One of the signs that Europe was moving out of the medieval—out of the society of franchised warriors—into a society of centralised states served by (employee) soldiers and police, is the decline in the standing that defence of honour was granted by legal systems. As the state took over coercion more and more completely, it took over the obligation of protection more and more completely. “He insulted my honour, so I killed him” steadily loses legal standing.

Hierarchy and violence
In one of his very informative papers on long-term trends in homicide, historical criminologist Manuel Eisner writes of honour that:

Much empirical research on the topic emphasizes the crucial role of insults in triggering situational conflicts. This is in accordance with a society in which ‘honour’ constitutes highly important social capital of the male person as a representative of his group (...). It requires retributive violence as a potential and culturally accepted means for maintaining one’s honour (...). Such a theoretical framework may help to better understand why the secular decline in homicide rates primarily seems to have been due to a decrease in male-to-male fights.  

In high homicide societies (pdf), over 90% of victims are male and high status individuals are frequently perpetrators of homicide. In low homicide societies, 30% or more of the victims are female and homicide is much more commonly by marginalised individuals.  

Hence the importance of how law and wider social norms regard the "social capital" of honour. In low homicide societies, violence is pushed to the social fringes and the intensely personal. In high homicide societies, violence is part of the protection of social standing. As Eisner discusses in his first above-cited paper, Emile Durkheim's argument that rising individualism helps lead to a decline in violence because people are less motivated by collective connections has considerable empirical support.

Which makes the provocation defence--at least to the extent that it gives legal significance to status games--look even more retrograde. Salzman notes that, in the lineage-driven societies of the Middle East, while men can gain honour (specifically, sharaf, fluctuating social standing), women can effectively only lose it (ird, the honour of female chastity and continence). If a women is seen as publicly shaming her lineage, that can lead to dishonour killing; the main targets of which are women and homosexuals. The very groups the legal significance of whose killing can be lowered by the provocation defence when it buys into honour-status games. 

In their different ways, both Norbert Elias, in The Civilizing Process, and Durkheim examine the social and personal aspects of the form of self-control that reduces homicide rates. The problem with the provocation defence--when it buys into status games--is that it gives legal standing to violent protection of personal honour in a way which works against the inculcation of that self-control by allowing defence of honour as a legally mitigating way to lose self-control.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The Russian conundrum

Bryan Caplan thinks there should be more analytical humility: in particular, that none of us know the best way to deal with Russia.

Part of the difficulty is trying to work out Putin's intentions. According to someone who spent some years as his major economic advisor, they are to take what he can get away with (via). (Which is not the same as saying an invasion of, say, Finland is imminent.) So, that when Putin said:

First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

he was not kidding. Since there is no sign Putin hankers for a return of the command economy, it is presumably Soviet Union-as-Russian Empire whose passing he regrets. And that he falls more on the "flight from Europe" than the "search for Europe" division within Russian history.

Another part of the difficulty is working out what the proper policy aim is. If we take minimising disruption to the world state system as the aim (which includes minimising the risk of war, which is a significant disruption of said system, without giving it absolute priority) then consideration of the general patterns of war and peace is useful. Historian Geoffrey Blainey's principle that:

When nations prepare to fight one another, they have contradictory expectations of the likely duration and outcome of the war. When those predictions, however cease to be contradictory, the war is almost certain to end.

suggests that clear signalling is very important. Given that the US and its allies have clearly much greater military power than Russia--Putin goes on and on about the US spending 25 times what Russia does on defence--the danger is mutual misunderstanding about where the limits are.

Putin with toys

So, what are the limits of implicit or explicit Western defence guarantees? NATO membership fairly obviously, EU membership presumably. Hence Putin's hostility to expansion of either. Hence also the attractiveness of both to nervous neighbours.

The question then becomes--what are the limits to Western acceptance of Russian actions to block expansion of either? The extent of German sympathy for Russian actions suggest an answer of "whatever Putin wants". Though the Budapest memorandum says he can't use nuclear weapons.

So, the way to "deal" with Putin and Russia is to work out what the West would find unacceptable as means of pressuring Russia's neighbours not currently in the EU or NATO and then make that clear to Putin. Geoffrey Blainey's analytical principles that are particularly relevant:

If it is true that the breakdown of diplomacy leads to war, it is also true that the breakdown of war leads to diplomacy.

And the most pertinent one of all:

In human behaviour few events are more difficult to predict than the course and duration of a war: that is one of the vital unlearned lessons of warfare.

But that gets into the biggest difficulty of all--the strength of current "priors". If one simply presumes that Putin could not possibly have a "more territory is better" and "malign forces manipulate events" view of the world, then that sort of clear thinking and signalling is not going to be engaged in. Which is why I like the above approach--it presumes very little, it just makes clear what the constraints are.

Failing to do so, however, could be much more dangerous.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

ADDENDA: Reasons to be nervous about Eastern Ukraine.

The scope of moral concern

What Americans call "the culture wars" operate around different presumptions about human nature, social action and the scope of moral concern. Presumptions economist Thomas Sowell divided into conflicting visions; the constrained or tragic vision of human nature versus the unconstrained or utopian vision of human nature. The former sees human nature as a constraint, the latter sees it as an vehicle for social transformation (either because our "true" nature has been suppressed or because it is malleable in controllable ways).

Our nature has innate features in the sense that our minds are organised in advance of experience, not that they are unable to be revised. While common bodily functions and experience also provide shared constraints. None of which denies the reality of human diversity, just that there are ongoing, and recognisable, patterns and structures to human nature and behaviour. After all, if there were not, social action and organisation would become largely impossible since there would be insufficient common levers and expectations to work with.

Steven Pinker has argued very strongly against the "blank slate" view of human nature beloved of those who wish to believe all social ills to be directly tractable to the "correct" application of public policy. Note that accepting the reality of an underlying human nature is very far from an argument for pessimism or fatalism, as Pinker himself demonstrates. His The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and its Causes is very much a good news book. (TED talk here.)

Pinker's work does, however, enjoin us to deal with people as they are, not as we would like them to be. As uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan recently noted, it is a great line that liberals believe nothing is genetic but homosexuality, while conservatives believe everything is genetic except homosexuality. For conservatives seem to think that public policy can "stop" homosexuality (and the failure to do so will "spread" it, or at least its baleful influence) while liberals hold that human sexual and gender diversity should just be accepted: something of a reversal of their more usual presumptions about the effective scope of public policy.

That moral conflicts might be something other than just a conflict between "stupid" liberals and "evil" conservatives is the subject of the work of Jonathan Haidt, particularly his The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. (TED talk here.) His ongoing research into the foundations of human moral perceptions and judgement seeks, in part, to explain why moral perspectives can vary as much as they do. It is a striking feature of contemporary life that, after the collapse of socialism as a plausible alternative to capitalism, the left v. right political conflicts went right on happening. In some ways, at least in the US, seem to get even more intense.

Acts or people?

The conservative presumption of the tractability of human sexuality and gender identity to public policy--or, at least, that they need to be policed--is very much based on particular moral conceptions. In particular, a strong belief in the centrality of acts to moral concern. The opposing view revolves around a strong belief in the centrality of people to moral concern. The former view is fading, and the latter view growing, in public support as people shift from focusing on acts to focusing on people. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah captured this nicely in his The Case for Contamination essay:

But if you ask the social scientists what has produced this change, they will rightly not start with a story about reasons. They will give you a historical account that concludes with a sort of perspectival shift. The increasing presence of “openly gay” people in social life and in the media has changed our habits. And over the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people.

This difference in whether the focus of moral concern is acts or people fits in with the research of Haidt and others, which finds that Western liberals tend to be largely driven by the care/harm and fairness/cheating moral foundations (plus liberty/oppression, if that is added as a sixth foundation), while conservatives also put emphasis on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation moral foundations. Homosexual acts are treated as a betrayal of God, a degrading of the body and a perversion of the nature of sex while transgender identities are similarly betrayals of God, a degrading of the body and a perversion of the nature of gender. The opposing view being that queer folk are citizens and entitled to equal protection of the law.

The dynamics of belief

Much of this is simply religiously based--it is wrong because God says so. But, as Mark Lilla sets out in his The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, religion is a deeply flawed basis for public policy. Even within specific religious traditions, there is bitter dispute about what God does or does not enjoin us to do. The more the authority of God is treated as absolute, the more politics becomes a murderous dispute of entitled monologues. God is not a present-in-public Person who can be questioned, or even definitively commonly heard, after all: so monologues claiming entitlement via God's authority become the natural metier of unavoidable disputes. This without considering the reality that clerics and priests have vested interests in outcasting, in displaying their authority as gatekeepers of righteousness by dividing human society with deep moral gaps. The more vulnerable the group, the better moral exclusion target they make--hence queers and Jews being such perennial targets.

The great trick of the Western Enlightenment was, as Lilla points out, to change the question from the relationship between God and people and turn it into one between people and the world. That was a shift not without its own difficulties, failures and disasters; but we only have to look to contemporary Islam, or back to the Europe of the Wars of Religion, to see the problems of societies which apparently cannot manage that trick. Which remain blighted by murderous disputes of entitled monologues.

Sacred homicide.

Priests and clerics are going to tend to want to keep the moral focus on acts and not people, for that generally better suits their role as gatekeepers of righteousness. Hence regulation of belief acts, clothing acts, food acts, sexual acts, ... Religious taboos are act-based precisely because we have to go to the priest or cleric to negotiate our way through the divinely-ordered moral landscape. Taboos are also ways of signalling religious commitment (thus invoking common loyalty and deference to shared authority).

Notions of sanctity and degradation are thus natural buttresses to priestly and clerical authority, since they are so amenable to very different constructions of what sanctifies and what degrades. To the Aztecs, after all, mass human sacrifice was the highest form of sanctity. The invading Spanish took that as horrifying degradation; but thought that throwing "third gender" cross-dressers to the dogs to be eaten alive was a sanctified and pious act. (We may also notice a divinely sanctioned sense of entitlement operating in both cases.)

When a Christian claims to be "defending Christian tradition" in their opposition to homosexuality, an obvious response is "so you think committers of homosexual acts should be publicly burnt alive, do you?" That is, after all, a very traditional response. In reality, contemporary conservative Christians have partaken in the wider shift from moral focus being on acts to it being on persons. They have simply not gone as far down that shift as others have done.

A rationalising device

The most intellectually sophisticated buttress to moral concern being focused on acts rather than persons is provided by Thomist natural law theory. Over the centuries, any form of outcasting or moral restriction the Catholic Church has wished to engage in--such as against homosexuality, heretics, Jews, denying women control over their fertility (no abortion, contraception, divorce or rape within marriage)--Thomism has found justification for. That St Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, and the Dominicans tended to run the Inquisition, was a useful conjunction.

More sacred homicide (to punish "morally degraded" heathen drag queens).

One explanation for this ready application to whatever outcasting was required is that Thomism is simply philosophical truth and the Catholic Church just keeps getting it correct. An obvious problem with such a claim is that the Church has shifted its views on many of these issues. With Thomism successfully "keeping up" with the shifts.

An alternative view is that Thomism is actually a very sophisticated way of rationalising whatever conclusions are required, at least within a fairly broad ambit. It does so by two key features. The first is that it focuses on acts rather than persons. While it does claim to ground its moral reasoning in "human flourishing", it turns out that acts deemed to contradict such "human flourishing" are given much more importance than specific persons or classes of person.

This is obvious in the case of homosexual acts, against which  the experience and aspirations of bisexuals and homosexuals have no standing--they do not count as part of "human flourishing". But is hardly less so in the case of Jews, heretics and women. For the last, since procreation is deemed absolutely central to sex and marriage, according to Thomist reasoning (in accord with Catholic doctrine) women cannot have abortions, use contraceptives, get a divorce or deny their husbands sex (no rape within marriage, as they are "one flesh"). The consequences for women of so profoundly denying them control over their own fertility are also not part of "human flourishing".

St Dominic presiding over error having no rights; including any to live.

As "error has no rights", whoever is deemed to be sufficiently in error is outside (positive) moral standing or concern. The morality of acts trumping the morality of persons. Terribly useful in rationalising the role of priests and clerics as gatekeepers of righteousness.

It is a basic principle that the wider the scope of moral concern for acts, the narrower the coverage of moral concern for persons (as the easier it is to lose or lack moral standing). Thus, while freedom of speech and belief can be argued for on truth-discovery grounds--which does not apply if a definitive source of truth is available--such freedom is also about the legitimacy and autonomy of individuals. Conversely, censorship is all about focus on acts trumping such personal legitimacy and autonomy.

A device for dismissing inconvenient evidence

The other feature of Thomism which makes it so useful for outcasting (and supporting religious doctrine generally) is that it uses its conclusions to set the ambit of its premises. For example, that the purpose of sex is procreation so the only legitimate use of sex is for procreation or binding procreators. The notion that, once created, something has a single definitive purpose is not an inference from reality, it is a metaphysical principle imposed on reality which permits contrary evidence to be ignored: that is, the conclusion gets to set the ambit of its premises.

In fact, it is perfectly clear from observation of nature that sex has many functions. Not least because procreation is a lot more complicated than mere conception, and the more complex and social a species is, the more that is true. (A standard trope of conservative mis-reasoning is to conflate conception with child-raising under the term "procreation".)

Sex has a wide range of functions in nature--conception, binding partners, building alliances and networks, diverting aggression, providing catharsis. Humans, like other primates, are capable of broad range of intense sexual pleasure and experiences because, as in other primates, sex has a wide range of functions among humans. Evolution does not just stop, it does not stand still; biological features evolve, and natural selection can alter and expand their uses. Particularly given the importance of culture in human evolution.

Creating culture

Which may help explain how queer people evolved. Precisely because they are less likely to have children of their own, they have more reason and time to invest cultural activities--they have reason to provide cultural services so other people's children will have reason to look after them when they get older.

It is not merely that queer folk are currently, and have historically, been disproportionately involved in cultural activities: it is that human culture itself is wildly disproportionately their creation. The notion that queer folk have less interest in the functioning of society than straight folk because they are less likely to have children is the exact opposite of the truth. Precisely because children are less likely to be their pension plan (i.e. their support and protection in old age), queer folk have more reason to seek to have their society be willing and able to support them and what they provide. They have more reason to invest in the effective functioning of the wider society, not less. It is therefore not surprising that they are disproportionately active in cultural activities and caring professions.

From people to morality

But that is to infer from the fact of the diversity of the human to a conclusion, it is not to use a conclusion to pathologise the diversity of the human. By focusing moral concern on acts rather than people, by using conclusions to set the ambit of premises based on imposing a confining metaphysical principle on a much more complex reality, Thomism is a splendid vehicle for rationalising religious doctrine. Including religious outcasting; the buttressing of the clerical and priestly role as gatekeepers of righteousness given that the more intense the moral focus on acts, the more moral protections can be withdrawn from actual people.

The utility of Thomism as a sophisticated system of rationalising the withdrawal of moral protection is nowhere clearer than in the notion that "the" defining purpose of sex is procreation. Yes, such reasoning does appear in Greek natural law reasoning. But it was not held to have much moral import; it was taken as (falsely) indicating that humans were different from other animals in their sexual diversity, but not much more than that. It is only when monotheist religious taboos were added in, that it became a justification for judicial homicide. And we can see how the trick was done; through the focus on acts rather than persons and using a metaphysical principle that allows contrary evidence to be dismissed: that allows the conclusion to set the ambit of its premises.

It was Philo of Alexandria's application (in On Abraham: XXVI-XXVII and Special Laws III: VII--the former in particular including a strong dose of misogyny) of Greek natural law reasoning to Genesis 19 which, when adopted by early Christian writers, shifted the focus of the Biblical tale from the traditional rabbinical interpretation that the cities of the plain were destroyed because of their withdrawal of moral protection from the vulnerable to one which focused on homosexual acts. Given that the only reference to such acts in the Biblical narrative is an implied threat of group rape, it is a fairly heroic "re-interpretation" of the scriptural narrative--one worthy of post-modernism--to make homosexual acts the focus of the story, but a re-intepretation that natural law theory was up for.

Philo was a "cultural warrior" in the Jewish-Greek kulturkampf of the time, so using the philosophical tools of the Greeks to damn their degenerate pagan ways no doubt had a certain delicious appeal. Just as St Paul ("Apostle to the Gentiles") and Church fathers sought to use the established philosophical and intellectual language of Greek natural law reasoning to engage in their own culture wars against paganism. A role which still has a certain resonance in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

The difference between the ambit of moral concern being persons rather than acts also occurs in other traditions--in modern libertarianism, for example. Jeffrey Tucker's distinction between (via) libertarian humanism, which focuses on freedom of (and for) people versus libertarian brutalism, which focuses on acts of freedom, regardless of consequences for people, is very much the difference between people and acts as focus of moral concern. Hence the latter's natural affinity for conceptions of religious "liberty" which focus on the right to outcast and to impede women having control of their fertility.

One of the great patterns of our times, in some ways the greatest, has been the shift from moral focus being on acts to it being on persons. We are all in this together, after all. Something that a certain religious figure also suggested, did he not, as he urged the shifting of moral concern from acts to persons, concern for whom was central to his teaching.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

About that consequences thing ...

Putin's Crimean grab looks like it may lead to a halting, or even a reversal, of the 20-year long shrinking of US military forces in Europe. Whether that is in Russia's strategic interest (one would have thought not) it is definitely a good thing for the US to be sending clear signals about where lines exist.

ADDENDA: President Obama is now running right up against the contradiction between his ambitious goals and contracting means.  Meanwhile, Syrian continues to be a serious balancing conundrum for his foreign policy. While Crimea is continuing a basic theme of Russia's foreign policy for the last 20 years (and, if one goes back to pre-Soviet days, even longer).

About the Malaysian airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared

Email apparently from a retired AF colonel, now a pilot for AA, flying the Boeing 777.

All,
Just a quick update with what I know about the Malaysia 777 disappearance.  The Boeing 777 is the airplane that I fly.  It is a great, safe airplane to fly.  It has, for the most part, triple redundancy in most of its systems, so if one complete system breaks (not just parts of a system), there are usually 2 more to carry the load.  It’s also designed to be easy to employ so 3rd world pilots can successfully fly it. Sometimes, even that doesn’t work…as the Asiana guys in San Fran showed us.  A perfectly good airplane on a beautiful, sunny day…and they were able to crash it.  It took some doing, but they were able to defeat a bunch of safety systems and get it to where the airplane would not help them and the pilots were too stupid/scared/unskilled/tired to save themselves

There’s many ways to fly the 777 and there are safety layers and  redundancies built into the airplane.  It is tough to screw up and the airplane will alert you in many ways (noises, alarms, bells and whistles, plus feed back thru the control yoke and rudder pedals and throttles.  In some cases the airplane’s throttles ‘come alive’ if you are going to slow for a sustained period of time)  All designed to help.  But, it’s also non-intrusive.  If you fly the airplane in the parameters it was designed for, you will never know these other things exist.  The computers actually ‘help’ you and the designers made it for the way pilots think and react. Very Nice.

Now to Malaysia.  There are so many communication systems on the airplane.  3 VHF radios. 2 Sat-Com systems.  2 HF radio systems.  Plus Transponder and active, ‘real time’ monitoring through CPDLC (Controller to Pilot Data Link Clearance) and ADS B(Air Data Service) through the Sat-Com systems and ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) thru the VHF, HF and Sat-Com systems.  The air traffic controllers can tell where we are, speed, altitude, etc as well as what our computers and flight guidance system has set into our control panels.  Big Brother for sure!  However, most of these things can be turned off.  

But, there are a few systems that can’t be turned off and one, as reported by the WSJ, is the engine monitoring systems (not sure what the acronym for that is, but I’m sure there is one….it’s aviation…there has to be an acronym!).  The Malaysia airplane, like our 777-200’s, use Rolls Royce Trent Engines (as a piece of trivia….Rolls Royce names their motors after rivers….because they always keep on running!)  Rolls Royce leases these motors to us and they monitor them all the time they are running. In fact, a few years back, one of our 777’s developed a slow oil leak due and partial equipment failure.  It wasn't bad enough to set off the airplane’s alerting system, but RR was looking at it on their computers.  They are in England, they contact our dispatch in Texas, Dispatch sends a message to the crew via Sat-Com in the North Pacific, telling them that RR wants them to closely monitor oil pressure and temp on the left engine.  Also, during the descent, don’t retard the throttle to idle…keep it at or above a certain rpm.  Additionally, they wanted the crew to turn on the engine ‘anti ice’ system as the heats some of the engine components.

The crew did all of that and landed uneventfully, but after landing and during the taxi in, the left engine shut itself down using it’s redundant, computerized operating system that has a logic tree that will not allow it to be shut down if the airplane is in the air…only on the ground.  Pretty good tech.  Anyway, the point was, that RR monitors those engines 100% of the time they are operating.  The WSJ reported that RR indicated the engines on the Malaysia 777 were running normally for 4 to 5 hours after the reported disappearance.  Malaysia denies this.  We shall see.