The Ferocity of U.S. Criminal Justice

Towards the end of a criminal trial in which a law partner of mine was defense counsel, he was approached by a journalist from a German newspaper who had been observing the trial. She asked him why American criminal justice was so ferocious towards defendants. The question is a good one. Our system is, in fact, anti-defendant to a degree perhaps unique in the civilized world. The German journalist’s question highlights a great divide in perception, for if you raised the subject of criminal justice with a random citizen of the United States, the question you might hear would be: “When are the courts going to close the loopholes and stop being revolving doors for criminals?”

When a Catholic Archbishop Declared Birth Control to be Worse than Abortion

"Heinous is the sin committed against the creative act of God, who through the marriage contract invites man and woman to co-operate with him in the propagation of the human family.To take life after its inception is a horrible crime; but to prevent human life that the Creator is about to bring into being is satanic. In the first instance, the body is killed, while the soul lives on; in the latter, not only a body, but an immortal soul is denied existence in time and in eternity."  Archbishop Hayes of New York Christmas Pastoral, 1921. (Hayes was later made a cardinal.)

This is a departure from the usual "It's unnatural!" condemnation of birth control, and implies that on any occasion in which the contracting marriage partners elect not to have sex when they would have conceived, they have forever denied existence to a soul and have committed a satanic sin, worse than abortion. Inasmuch as those born out of wedlock also have souls, any random pair that could conceive but declines to have sex would be chargeable by the soul precluded from existence with the same satanic wrong.

The Anti-Christian Nazis of "The Man in the High Castle"

The Man in the High Castle series by Amazon shows the Nazis, in their control of eastern North America and in their influence in the mountains neutral zone, to be decidedly hostile to the Christian religion. The Bible is banned. So far as I recall, there was no evidence of (above ground) churches, and in a late episode, we see a snatch of ritual of the Reich sponsored religion, apparently a marriage of fascism with ancient German mythology. Think swastikas, dirndls and lots of blond pigtails.

The implicit claim of the series, that Nazism was “godless” is historically inaccurate and politically dangerous. This sort of revisionism is particularly attractive to the right wing, especially the far right wing. The not so hidden message is: “There is no reason to be afraid of political movements just because they are nationalist, racist, and bind the state to capital, subjugating the employed classes. That isn’t what made Nazism bad; all the really bad stuff came from the fact that they were atheists.” For example, Dinesh DeSousa includes Hitler among the “atheist tyrants,” Hitler becomes a card carrying atheist, as if he were Madalyn Murray O'Hair or Ayn Rand.

Russian Doll: Time, Many Worlds, and Computer Simulations

For the first episodes, the Netflix series Russian Doll seems to be a darker reworking of Groundhog Day. Fatal accidents on the night of or day after Nadia’s 36^th birthday party keep bringing her back to the bathroom sink in the party apartment during the festivities. Nadia retains her memory of all the repeats, and the memories cumulate in an orderly fashion, e.g. she does not on loop 2 have memories of loop 1 and on loop one have memories of loop 2. So it is possible to regard each loop as having its own local time, embedded in order in a super-time experienced only by Nadia. This far we are within the Groundhog temporal metaphysics.

The Many World Metaphysics of "The Man in the High Castle"

The Amazon series in which the Axis powers won the Second World War is based on the premise that things might not have turned out with North America split between a Greater Nazi Reich in the east and the Japanese Pacific States, a largely lawless Rocky Mountain area separating the two. It is not too hard for us to imagine at least one war outcome different from this. 

The metaphysics of the series has it that both these possible worlds are actual, as are others, and that information transfer and human travel among them are possible. The political and human consequences of interacting worlds fuel much of the drama of the series. I am going to put aside world politics, fascism, terrorism, life, death and the longings of the human soul to focus, instead, on what I am sure got the audience clicking into episode after episode: the metaphysics of plural worlds.

It Is Impossible to Maximize Good Consequences.

In my last post I argued that utility monsters, genocide of the less happy, and barely happy multitudes raise problems for the maximization clause of the fundamental definitions of consequentialism. Looking again to those definitions, as standardly propounded, I am going to argue that it is impossible to maximize good consequences – even in the unlikely event that a coherent account can be given of the choice alternatives and their consequences.

The Consequences for Consequentialism of Utility Monsters and Barely Happy Multitudes

The fundamental definition of maximizing consequentialism is that the objectively right action is the action, among available alternatives, that maximizes net good consequences. Do barely happy multitudes and utility monsters mean that consequentialism so understood cannot provide the fundamental guiding principle of morality?

The Value of Beauty Never Seen

G.E. Moore was the Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in the early twentieth century when Cambridge was the center of the philosophical universe. Fellow Cantabrigians included Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand (the 3rd Earl of) Russell (one of only a trio of philosopher winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the others being Camus and Sartre), and Ludwig Wittgenstein, later Moore’s successor in the Professorship.

The Moore thesis for today is that it is better that a Beautiful World (hereinafter “BW”) exist, even if so distant that no one will ever see it. In this Moore was trying to refute ethical hedonism, as then expounded by utilitarian theorists, who claimed that the good (what is valuable in a way relevant for morality) is exhausted by desirable states of consciousness. Henry Sidgwick, the most prominent of these theorists, specifically contended that there could be no value in any beauty apart from its contemplation by conscious beings. [Methods of Ethics, book I, ch. IX, s. IV, pr. II, p.114).]