#13: Voting as Earned Privilege Rather than Right

The remark "democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried" is attributed to Churchill, who was also no friend of Socialism. It is worthwhile to consider whether there is a relation between the two. I think there is, and that it is this.

What makes democracy attractive is that it gives a voice in governance to the governed by a supervised mechanical means, the vote. Thus the people are governed by representatives whom they have chosen. The risk still remains, however, that the majority will then exercise the same dictatorial powers exercised by individual tyrants or oligarchs over a minority. To some extent, this is usually controlled by the existence of protective laws, but laws can always be changed, and so the risk remains.

Given that power is acquired in a democracy by means of the vote, the candidates for power will necessarily compete for the largest share of votes from the population at large. This means that candidates will inevitably follow the populist strategy of promising new and more costly benefits to the voters. Given that the process is competitive, the candidates will vie with each other in promising ever more to the voters. Given further that there are always limits to state wealth, even taking into account the ability of the state to borrow or print money, the process must inevitably lead to the offer of the re-distribution of wealth. In effect, the candidates will offer to the voting public at large the wealth of one of its subgroups, that of the most successful.

The implication of this is that democracy inevitably morphs into socialism simply as a consequence of the mechanism by means of which power is acquired.

But Churchill was right that all other forms of government have proven less attractive than democracy. What, then, is to be done?

Perhaps the answer lies in the modification of democracy rather than its replacement.

Since the problem lies in the power-acquisition mechanism, it would seem that this is what should be modified. But how? In some way, what we want is to retain the feature of democracy that fairly allocates power to the governed people, while eliminating the motive to re-distribute the wealth of minorities. The answer is at once both utterly clear and absolutely beyond implementation.

As long as the society allows large contingents of people who do not contribute to the gross national product to vote, the move towards Socialism, a system of centralized government theft, is inexorable. What we want is a system of power distribution that takes into account what the voter has at stake in the system and, more important, what the voter contributes to the system.

What must be changed is universal suffrage, the principle of one person, one vote. It is inevitable that as long as universal suffrage is in place, one or more "parties" will a) promise the wealth of others to the many, and b) attempt to increase the number of the non-producing many as much as possible.

In the U.S.A., the Democrat party has been very energetic on both counts. The current president, Obama, has been quite clear that he is interested in redistributing wealth, a euphemism for institutionalized theft. But the Democrat party has been active since the times of Kennedy and Johnson in increasing its voting base, primarily using the civil rights movement. The welfare policies put in place in those times had the double desired effect of exponentially increasing the number of impoverished and government dependent blacks born, on the one hand, and exponentially increasing the number of government dependent social work functionaries. All of these, it was correctly anticipated, would inevitably vote Democrat.

At the current time, that same Democrat party is working to the utmost to allow roughly twelve million illegal aliens to become citizens, an automatic twelve million additional Democrat votes in one blow.

The strategy is not subtle and it is not new, it has been followed by the Catholic Church for hundreds of years as it has roamed the earth seeking ever new poor, un-educated, primitive souls to enlist in its enterprise.

Karl Marx was both right and wrong. There is a mechanical aspect to the flow of history that, in some cases, does lead inexorably to socialism. He was wrong, however, in his identification of the mechanism. It is not the inner workings of capitalism that move us in this direction, but rather the nature of the political mechanism at play in the acquisition of democratic power.

#12: When the Government or the Public Make You Say "Uncle"

When we watch a televised confession in which an American soldier confesses to all sorts of crimes against some Muslim this or that, we take it for granted that the man is in fear for his life and we discount what he says automatically (if our judgment is unimpaired). We are also a bit bemused by the thought that anyone would take this nonsense seriously. Yet there seem to be cases, ever more common, in which we accept the very same thing within our own Western shores. There are three that come to mind immediately: the forced apology, the forced remorse, and the forced sensitivity training.

The public apology is today nothing more than a test of strength. Can we force a CEO of a company to apologize for doing something he obviously thought (and still thinks) was the rational thing to do? He clearly has had no reason to change his mind, but he equally clearly has been given reason to say publicly that he has. The apology, if it comes, is insincere, but a change of heart was never the objective; the objective was to force a public humiliation. Essentially, the apology has become the component of a ritualistic contest, a battle of wills, a test of strength.

This is clearly what is happening in the Obama vs Crowley incident. Crowley sensed that he had a better hand than Obama and announced, in a kind of pre-emptive strike, that HE, for one, was NOT going to apologize. The question then became whether or not Obama could be made to do it. Of course, Obama couldn't bring himself to do that, for more reasons than can be mentioned here. But that doesn't matter, Crowley has won the exchange. The bottom line is this: Obama was the one who should have apologized (by the ritual rules), he didn't, and now he's just a weasely bad sport. He lost, he just doesn't have the grace to admit it.

The other example is that of "expressing remorse." It is one of the questions that parole bodies consider in making their decisions. Does the prisoner express remorse? It should be clear to anyone not ideologically brain-damaged that very few criminals actually FEEL remorse, so the questions is really only whether the prisoner can be sufficiently humiliated by expressing feelings he does not have for the sake of getting out. What the parole board is really asking is whether the prisoner can be forced to grovel for his freedom.

And, of course, the forced "sensitivity training" is nothing other than public humiliation and the imposition of power. It comes directly out of the Orwellian play book, out of the Stalinesque use of psychiatric institutions, and it is one of the most dramatic examples of a western democracy sliding into the speech control of something like Lenin's Russia or the Jacobins of the French Revolution.

There are other instances also in which people are made to say things that they don't believe.

There is a wonderful Seinfeld episode in which whenever a character refers to homosexuality, he quickly follows it with the phrase "not that there's anything wrong with it!"

This is an amusing case of applying the weasely legal disclaimer attached to almost everything these days to daily conversation. Just as you can market something dangerous or unpopular by carefully marking it as such, so you can say many things considered bad, as long as you cover yourself with the appropriate disclaimer.

This technique is transparently being applied to criticisms of the American Black President. Politicians and pundits, ever the crafty and cautious lot, now regularly cover their criticisms of Obama with obligatory conventional phrases of admiration: "he is, of course, brilliant, but," "he is, of course, an enormously talented [politician, speaker, orator, charismatic personality, etc.]". They realize that they are dealing with a very large population of people who suspect that other races do not really have as much respect for them as a group as they would like. And so we see a ubiquitous conventional genuflection: he is so wonderful, they are so wonderful, blah blah blah. It is a case of political realities forcing a universal game of let's pretend.

All of this can be entertaining in a dismal kind of way, except that it is ultimately seriously damaging to a democratic republic to systematically teach the public untruths, and this is certainly being done within the Western democracies. It is being done by the politicians, who shun the truth as a vampire does garlic or the cross, by the historians, who have been left-wing cult members since the early 20th century, and by the creators and marketers of popular cheap entertainement (advertisers and movie/televisions producers), who do it for the profit motive.

#11: Paul Johnson's "A History of the Modern World"

The following is a brief excerpt from Johnson's book, the best introduction to this important period I have seen. Not to put too fine a point on it, this book is superb, and every citizen of a democracy should consider it essential reading. Certainly every High School student in the U.S. and Canada should be required to read it.

"In the outside world, the magnitude of the Stalin tyranny -- indeed its very existence — was scarcely grasped at all. Most of those who travelled to Russia were either businessmen, anxious to trade and with no desire to probe or criticize what did not concern them, or intellectuals who came to admire and, still more, to believe. If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot -- and his crimes -- so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. Thus, Amabel Williams-Ellis wrote an introduction to a book about the building of the White Sea Canal, later so harrowingly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which contains the sentence: `This tale of accomplishment of a ticklish engineering job, in the middle of primaeval forests, by tens of thousands of enemies of the state, helped — or should it be guarded? — by only thirty-seven OGPU officers, is one of the most exciting stories that has ever appeared in print.’ Sidney and Beatrice Webb said of the same project: `It is pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially expressed of the success of the OGPU, not merely in performing a great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in human regeneration.’ Harold Laski praised Soviet prisons for enabling convicts to lead `a full and self-respecting life'; Anna Louise Strong recorded: `The labour camps have won a high reputation throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have been reclaimed.’ ‘So well-known and effective is the Soviet method of remaking human beings', she added, `that criminals occasionally now apply to be admitted.’ Whereas in Britain, wrote George Bernard Shaw, a man enters prison a human being and emerges a criminal type, in Russia he entered `as a criminal type and would come out an ordinary man but for the difficulty of inducing him to come out at all. As far as I could make out they could stay as long as they liked.‘

The famine of 1932, the worst in Russian history, was virtually unreported. At the height of it, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley found `a level of physique and general health rather above that to be seen in England'. Shaw threw his food supplies out of the train window just before crossing the Russian frontier `convinced that there were no shortages in Russia'. `Where do you see any food shortage?' he asked, glancing round the foreigners-only restaurant of the Moscow Metropole. He wrote: `Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago, and I take off my hat to him accordingly.' But Shaw and his travelling companion, Lady Astor, knew of the political prisoners, since the latter asked Stalin for clemency on behalf of a woman who wished to join her husband in America (Stalin promptly handed her over to the OGPU) and she asked him, `How long are you going to go on killing people?' When he replied `As long as necessary', she changed the subject and asked him to find her a Russian nurserymaid for her children."

Paul Johnson -- A History of the Modern World (Weidenfeld and Nicolson: 1983), pp. 275,6.

#10: Solecisms: (Intentional) Contributions Gratefully Received

Here is my admittedly incomplete list of popular offenses against the English language. Please join me in a moment of silence in honor of the part of the language that has died today (sigh).

"Very fraught"

"very unique"

"are key" for "are very crucially important"

"equally as" for "equally"

"these ones" for "these"

"He was looking for a high quality of beer" for "He was looking for a high quality beer," where what he is looking for is a beer of a certain kind, rather than a quality of a certain kind.

"wanna go and get some beers?" as opposed to "wanna go and get some beer?"

"he was too good of a fellow" in which the "of" is superfluous.

"Begs the question" (for "raises the ..")

"graphic" for "explicit" or "disturbing"

"Impact" as verb

"Access" as verb

"critique" as verb

tone of voice suggesting a sequence of examples where there is only one

"necessarily" thrown in as an emphasizer

"Hopefully"

"and whatnot" in place of "and so on" or "etc"

"garnished" for "garnisheed"

"mum" or "mom" and "dad" in place of mother and father

"scary" in place of frightening

"I"/"me" confusions

"infer"/"imply" confusions

"went" in place of "said"

"he was like" followed some verbal expression

"My name is Trooper Jones" for "I am Trooper Jones"

"I'm not sure" for "I don't know"

"us" or "we" instead of "I" or "me"

"could care less" for "couldn't care less"

"even" as in "don't even get me started" -- What does "even" do here? This usage presumes a tacit minimum that has not been reached in order to make sense, but it is frequently used as an emphasizer where no such minimum exists

"literally" as an emphasizer when it is not being contrasted with "figuratively" ("it was literally three inches long")

"nauseous"/"nauseating" confusion

"irregardless of"

#9: On Relativism.

Relativism is the doctrine said to follow from the Nietzschean "death of God." It is far from clear exactly how the living God managed to let us avoid relativism. As I've argued below, once God gave us free will, we became able to choose any way of life at all. God's preferences were among our possibilities, but others were there to be chosen as well. In this situation, what does it mean to say that "Absolutism," as opposed to "Relativism," holds sway?

Apart from that, however, it seems a dishonest move to go from we have choices to none are any better than any other. Enthusiasts of indigenous peoples and hut dwellers everywhere keep insisting that those peoples are not "primitive" or "uncivilized" in comparison to westerners because, they ask rhetorically, "Who is to say?" and "What makes us any better than they?"

Well, since the opinion in question is ours, I think the answer to the first question is "we." We are to say, and why not? Our response simply reflects our preferences, and most people in the west prefer to live like westerners and not like aboriginals. They do think that living that way is better. And it is not difficult to find what makes us better also.

I prefer a culture, using this term loosely, that has a written language; one that enjoys the rule of law, rather than the individual; one that has written laws; one whose religion is not animistic; one whose religion does not involve the sacrifice of living things; one that does not subordinate one sex to the other; one that does not accept slavery; one whose political process is democratic.

I could probably go on, preferring, for example, that the culture have a developed mathematics and technology, but this listing seems large enough to make the point.

Are my criteria "absolute"? Of course not. I don't know what such criteria would be like. What gives them their authority then? The only source available: that I prefer such a culture very strongly and would be willing to fight to preserve it.

#8: On Atheism.

Sartre has the most interesting take on the God question. Though considered by most to be the ultimate intransigent atheist, he is actually something quite different for which there exists no ready made name. Sartre is a Uselessist, for lack of a better name. His point is that once human freedom is given, which it is by Christianity (and which it is not by Mechanists, whether Early Modern or Contemporary), God becomes irrelevant, even if he exists.

The most God can do for us on moral principles or issues, once human freedom is assumed, is order or advise us. But since we still have to choose, even after his no doubt excellent advice, he really does not help us very much. We all have the ability to do what Satan did, which was, when you get right down to it, nothing more than say, "Thanks, but no thanks -- I think I'd really rather go my own way." Of course, Christian theology made enormous efforts to make Satan's choice something more than a mere exercise of autonomy, something rather, in essense, inherently evil; but the more that using our freedom to go contrary to God's suggestions is made evil, the more it ceases to be freedom at all. Since God is infinitely more powerful than man, he can always punish us terribly when we go counter to his will, but this is really nothing he can be proud of. If anyone can be proud in this nasty confrontation, it is the weaker one who persists in the face of overwhelming force.

Thus, arguments over whether God exists or not are juvenile and beside the point, silly exercises in dialectic for precocious teenagers or emotionally arrested adults. The question is really not whether God exists or not, it is only whether you're going to decide to do what he tells you.

#7: Camus: Life is not the Problem -- Death Is..

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus interprets the question of the meaning of life as the question of whether it is possible to find a rational ground for continuing to live. His phrasing of the meaning question is this: does not finding a meaning for life entail that one commit suicide. He gives as one example of a character who said yes, Kirilov in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Kirilov kills himself because he can't find a reason for living. So far, so good. But Camus makes a further move that is not always appreciated, a more subtle one. He challenges, in effect, the tacit key assumption that underlies Kirilov's decision, namely that the burden of proof rests on the decision to live. Perhaps we should not be asking for a reason for living, but rather a reason for dying. But going even beyond that, he points out that the Kirilovian thinking rests on the further assumption that living requires a reason, a justification, a defense. Camus denies this key assumption.

Much has been made of Camus' admiration for Kafka's The Trial, and justifiably so. The Trial is arguably the inspiration of The Stranger and sets the agenda for Camus in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. Kafka's Joseph K. is on trial for an unnamed offense. This is a clear representation of the framework of Western "meaning of life" thinkers: just as Joseph K. must defend himself against an unnamed charge, they accept that man must also find a "meaning" to defend his continuing to live just as if he were on trial. The view that life is something that must be justified is deeply rooted in Christianity itself, where it is completely evident in the doctrine of original sin. Every man is born not only charged, but already found guilty.

It is against the background of Joseph K. and his trial that we must interpret Camus when he writes that he wants to approach these puzzles using only what he himself clearly knows and understands, and that is limited to this: I exist and I am innocent.

But note how deep and important the second conjunct is: I am innocent.

A person who is innocent is not in need of a defense, not in need of a justification, not in need of a meaning. Searching for a meaning of life is to treat life itself as some kind of metaphysical offense that is tolerable only if it can be defended by appeal to some kind of transcendental justification.

Camus has not accepted the view that living needs a defense.

And while death does not need justification, defense, or meaning, it does need to be denied, rejected, and fought. Death is the ultimate enemy.

#6: On Worship and the Great Chain of Being

Whether or not there could be a religion lacking the concept or the act of worship, the fact is that the religions we do have, do essentially involve worship. But worship is a concept that tacitly but essentially involves a metaphysical presumption that has been abandoned in all other modern arenas of thought, the presumption of gradations of perfection among existing things. Arthur Lovejoy famously called this the doctrine of "the Great Chain of Being."

We are quite comfortable today with the idea that one thing may be better than another from the point of view of function. A steak knife is better than a butter knife for cutting steak. This is "betterness" with respect to a purpose of some kind. But for a very long time it was believed that there are also degrees of goodness that independent of any purpose, that are attached to things in their very nature. The obvious example is that of God, who is better than any other thing, and, perhaps, Satan, who is worse than any other thing. But in addition, there are such things as angels, who are better than men, but worse than God. And, so goes the theory, everything is located somewhere on the Great Chain of Being. Things have their location irrespective of what they do, they have their location because of what they are.

There is an interesting instance of the Great Chain being presumed in the racial anti-Semitism of the late 19th century in Germany. Prior to that time, the objective of anti-Semitism had been conversion. The converted Jew was, officially at least, less objectionable or not objectionable at all: the problem had been a property that was not inherent or intrinsic to the Jew in question -- he could abandon or remove it. Once racial anti-Semitism was adopted, this option ceased to exist for the Jew. The problem, as the anti-Semite would have phrased it, is not what you do, it is what you are. You can change what you do, but you cannot change what you are. On this doctrine, Jews were simply inferior as entities, lower on the Great Chain than regular human beings. It was this view that was adopted during the Third Reich.

When we worship, what we are acknowledging is the superiority of the thing we worship. Presumably, it is a superiority over everything else that exists, but certainly a superiority over us. And it is clear that this is not a superiority of any natural kind, e.g. being simply stronger, or bigger, or smarter; it is rather a superiority associated with the way in which the thing exists. We have difficulty with this notion today. We have difficulty understanding how "existing" can be done better or worse. But there was a time when this was believed, and the words used to describe the "quality" that varied were "nobility" and "perfection." God was the most "perfect" and the "noblest." Of course, the most perfect being will also be the stronger, bigger, smarter, etc.., but these qualities follow being absolutely perfect, they do not entail being absolutely perfect.

And so, what is puzzling and interesting is that while we generally reject the Great Chain of Being as a metaphysical premise, we nonetheless retain the concept of worship, since it is essential to retaining religion.

I don't mention this as a reason for rejecting religion, something I suspect we don't in any case have the option of doing, but only as social/psychological/historical anomaly.

The 5 posts below should be read in numerical order, starting with #1

#5: No Reason for Thinking that Morality "Requires" Justification, Defense, or Reason

The philosophical scam begins, probably, with Socrates, as Nietzsche noted. Socrates easily persuades the gullible sons of the wealthy that moral matters require not only justifications, but also the trappings of the rational, such as consistency. Once they have made that fatal move, they have, in effect, bought the farm.

Morality is a matter of personal preference, it is NOT a matter of REASONING, justification, or defense. If you prefer strawberry ice-cream over chocolate, you do not think for a moment that this demands a defense. If people point out to you that your preferences in deserts are "inconsistent," do not follow from any general principle, you reply: So what? Your moral "attitudes" are no more complex than your attitudes on food. The super-structure of justification and defense do make sense within the artificial context of the law, but that is because the law expresses previously agreed upon generalizations that are based on the preferences most common in our society. Morality is logically and psychologically and historically antecedent to the law. We write law by appeal to our de facto preferences, but this does not imply that our preferences are themselves an expression of an underlying law-like structure.

Much of philosophy has been plagued with the sometimes tacit conviction that our surface behavior is a clue to an invisible underlying rational structure that can painstakingly be teased out by clever philosophers. Wittgenstein had an idea like this in his Tractatus period and he explicitly rejected it in 1927. It is what he meant when he wrote "ordinary language is all right." Well, "ordinary" morality is also all right -- that is, not an expression of a logically perfect underlying morality.

None of this means that one cannot fight for one's preferences. How hard one fights is just a matter of how strong one's preferences are. What we have to give up is our reluctance to fight for our preferences in the absence of a "justification."

Interestingly, we actually have a strategic advantage over the "Social Justice" types. The SJs cannot release us from the need for justification. In the absence of a need for justification, they cannot claim that we "must" cooperate with their re-distribution agendas; and if we don't "have to," we likely won't. But, at the same time, if they hold on to the doctrine that moral matter must be justified, then they come face to face with the fact that there is no defense of a moral theory: de gustibus non est disputandum!

It is precisely because of this dilemma that "Social Justice" theorists always couch their appeals in terms of Post Modern obscurantism and pseudo-technical bafflegab; if they attempt to make their case in the arena of common sense and ordinary language ... they fail.

We, other other hand, dispense with justification on moral matters, but retain the willingness to fight for a world we prefer, and fight solely on the ground that that is the world we prefer.

The point I have been arguing with respect to conceptual analysis applied to ethics is also applicable mutatis mutandis to conceptual analysis in general.

#4: Problem Two for "Social Justice."

The second problem is that moral theories themselves are nothing more than pure politically motivated SCAM. Of all of them, the only one to have even the smallest claim to defensibility is Bentham's, when he introduces his utility theory as a way of accelerating legislation (he offers other reasons also, but they won't fly).

Consider this:

When a moral theory is tested, it is always by reference to our moral intuitions -- against what we spontaneous feel regarding specific moral cases. When the theory yields results consistent with our intuitions, we consider it confirmed, and when it doesn't, disconfirmed. But which cases do we use? We use cases in which there is uniform or near uniform strong intuition (otherwise, there's no test).

Now if there is strong uniform response on those cases, we can legitimately ask whatever do we need the theory for? Surely our intutitions are perfectly adequate to the job. The response is that we need the theory to instruct us when we move into important decision arenas where our intuitions are not strong at all! But here lies the crux of the question!

What reason do we have for accepting the authority of the theory AT ALL when our intuitions have failed?

The model being mis-applied is that of empirical science and induction. We form generalizations on the basis of observations -- fine. We use those generalization in order to predict and retrodict into regions not accessible to our observations at the time in question. Fine. But what legitimates the process is that there actually are further observations that tend to confirm the hypothesis. NOTHING LIKE THIS EXISTS IN THE PROCESS FOLLOWED BY MORAL THEORISTS.

Applying a moral theory beyond the reach of our strong intuitions has absolutely no justification at all!

This becomes really clear when we apply Moore's argument against idealism against the application of a moral theory.

A bright young vegetarian colleague of mine asked me at a dinner how I could in good conscience eat my chicken. He asked if I did not oppose pain and suffering in my loved ones. I said I did oppose it. Well, then, he said, since there is no significant difference between your loved ones and other sentient creatures, you must subscribe to the generalization that no sentient creatures should be allowed to suffer.

I said I didn't subscribe to his generalization. He asked then (triumphantly), what precisely the difference was between my loved ones and other sentient creatures?

I replied (after swallowing a mouthful of chicken) that I didn't know, but that the generalization had to be flawed since I was ok with suffering chickens, but not ok with suffering loved ones (QED). Remember, the intuitions TRUMP the generalizations.

BUT, if the intuitions must trump the generalizations (and here's the lethal point), then MORAL GENERALIZATIONS ARE USELESS. They are useless because if the case in point is intuitively clear, then we don't need them; and if the case in point is not intuitively clear, then they have no authority.

Well, they aren't actually useless, they're just useless for any legitimate purpose. They are very useful for selling favored moral doctrines to naïve captive audiences in state supported indoctrination camps, madrassahs called public schools and universituties.

#3: Problem One for "Social Justice."

The first problem for "Social Justice" is that unless it is marketed as a moral theory, a theory that has authority over everyone, it cannot be used in its campaign to re-distribute private property. Consequently, it argues that certain distributions of goods are morally superior to others. In many cases, it even argues that these distributions are so much better, that those who are unwilling to accomodate them ought to be forced by whatever means necessary to cooperate. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Mao all subscribed to this view. But sticking to the bottom line again, there really is no theoretical defense of ANY theory of distributive justice. Rawls is just as much bullshit as the Kantian themes he borrows.

Kantian deontological theory attempts to ground moral rightness in pure rationality. That is, the moral thing to do in any case is identical to the perfectly rational thing to do, morality and reason converge. For Kant, the purely rational thing to do is only that thing that can be based on a purely general rule; it's rationality (and hence its morality) is essentially tied to the generality of the rule that entails it. The implication of this is that the individuality of the agent involved in the act is not only irrelevant, it is in fact obstructive to morality. It is a further implication of this theory that given any two agents in an identical situation, there is one and only one moral action and they would both do precisly that. But why should we believe any of this? Why should we accept the totally counter-intuitive claim that morality is necessarily and essentially impersonally rational? Why should we accept the claim that "reason" has anything at all to do with "morality"?

It is further notoriously well known that utilitarian theory is incapable of defending any theory of distribution. The reason, of course, is that Utilitarianism is a doctrine in which the Right is determined by appeal to a quantitative measure, namely the greatest net amount of pleasure produced. But this means that Utilitarian doctrine might actually defend a distribution that the advocates of "Social Justice" would find manifestly unfair, namely in which one or a few had almost everything.

Neither deontological nor utilitarian theory can provide a defense of ANY theory of distributive justice.

#2: On Selling "Social Justice."

"Social Justice" is a phrase in the Orwellian Post-Modern lexicon of verbal flatulence. Post modernism is nothing other than politically motivated obscurantism, so let's stick to what "Social Justice" issues are really about. They are about who gets to have what, and how much of it. They are about the distribution and possible re-distribution of goods and services. There's nothing else to them.

Theories of this kind are introduced when people are looking for narratives with which to market the unmarketable, with which to sell the implausible, with which defend the indefensible. Social justice is name of the doctrine that wants to "justify" the forcible removal of the goods of one person to give to other people. On the face of it, this is a hard sell, which is why it needs an obscure barrage of bullshit with which to shovel it to masses only too happy to find out that their desire for the wealth of others is actually praiseworthy and "right." The point of "Social Justice" lies in the magical transformation of theft into virtue. People don't mind stealing quite as much as stealing without a "story" to give their stealing moral camouflage.

#1: On "Social Justice."

This is an instructive case study in Orwellian newspeak. There really is no justification for the existence of this term, it is nothing more than an effort to avoid the negative charge attached to the word "socialist." "Social justice" is nothing other than "socialist justice" and, whether one is "for it" or "agin it", it is important to fight the good fight of calling things what they are. And, by the way, while Orwell drew attention to the political practice, it actually evolved out of the socialist rumblings in Europe from the 1850s on, to be perfected and put into practice by Lenin from the time he took over the peasants' revolution of 1917. There are fascinating and instructive passages in Dostoevsky's The Possessed (sometimes The Devils) in which the techniques of taking over a state by revolution are described in chilling detail, and that's around 1870. The political transformation of language is included among those techniques.