Category: Politics

The contingencies of history: how John Hope Franklin might have become W. E. B. Du Bois’s assistant (thereby almost certainly preventing me and others from becoming Aptheker’s)

In November of 1943, Dr. Rufus Clement (1900-1967), President of Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, forced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to resign his professorship effective the end of June 1944. Their views on the best course of action for Black Americans were incompatible, and Clement had the upper hand.

Pondering his next move, Du Bois conferred with James E. Shepard (1875-1947), a longtime friend and founder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in the spring of 1944. Du Bois could have any position he wanted, Shepard promised. Perhaps Du Bois could continue editing Phylon, which he had founded at Atlanta U in 1940. Intrigued by this unforeseen offer, Du Bois replied in the affirmative, but said he’d need an assistant: at 76, he  still had many plans but had to be realistic about how much sand remained in the upper bulb of his life’s hourglass.

Shepard recommended John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). His parents had named him after Du Bois’s friend, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), past president of Atlanta and then of Morehouse College until 1936. Shepard suggested that the young scholar could take over editing duties when Du Bois retired. (No mere mortal knew that almost two decades of activism and writing still lay ahead of him.) Shepard introduced the men to each other, and they seemed to have hit it off, but Franklin knew he was but one of several men under consideration, and no decision was forthcoming for two years.

Suddenly, however, this prospect evaporated. Walter E. White (1893-1955), NAACP Executive Secretary, met with Du Bois during his trip to New York later that spring (1944), inviting him to return to the organization he had co-founded in 1909—the one he resigned from acerbically a decade earlier. White offered him the position of Director of Special Research with an office in its Manhattan headquarters on West 40th Street across the street from the main building of the New York Public Library.

The reservations Du Bois may have had about returning did not prevail. “Had Dr. Du Bois returned to North Carolina College,” Franklin wrote, “founded a magazine [sic: Phylon had already been founded], and subsequently retired, leaving the periodical in my hands, I can only surmise that my future would have been quite different.” (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 116-118.)

And not just his future. Moving to New York, Du Bois was back in the same city as Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), the white author of American Negro Slave Revolts, which Columbia University published in 1943. Aptheker asked to meet; they kept their appointment sometime in mid-1946.

Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was racially prevented from serving in the army at a level commensurate with his research training, but had years of teaching under his belt by the war’s end. Contrast his situation with that of Aptheker, a combat veteran of that war and a Columbia Ph.D., but one whose Communist Party affiliation in the early years of the Cold War made him academically radioactive. Also, a condition of his Guggenheim Fellowship (1946-1947) was that he couldn’t take any other employment.

In their conversations about editing Du Bois’s correspondence and papers, Aptheker suggested that he consider Black scholars not weighed down by Aptheker’s political baggage. Du Bois wouldn’t hear of it: Aptheker was “by far the best fitted person” for the job. (Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 62-63)

Ironically, Du Bois regarded his decision to return to the NAACP to be, as Franklin put it, “the worst decision he ever made.” Franklin says Du Bois’s “second autobiography,” that is, Dusk at Dawn, attests to this, but a book published in 1940 could not report on an event that lay five years in its future. Chapter XIX of his third autobiography, however, written 1958-1959, is entitled “My Return to the NAACP.” (Therein one finds much evidence supporting the judgment “worst decision,” but not those very words.) The contrast between Du Bois’s satisfaction with Aptheker and dissatisfaction with White’s abuse of the privilege of hiring him could not be starker.

But for White’s invitation to Du Bois—unexpected, given their strongly divergent views on the priority of Black education and racial desegregation—it is virtually certain that Hugh Murray and I would not have worked as Aptheker’s research assistants on the Du Bois projects in the early 1970s. What shape those projects would have taken under another’s editorial supervision and institutional connections and resources is a matter of speculation. But it is speculation that invites reflection on the seeming contingencies of history.

When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism

I recently acquired the new edition of Otis Q. Sellers’s 1961 booklet Christian Individualism: A Way of Life for the Active Believer in Jesus Christ (CI) which, to my surprise, I did not already own. [Learning of this gap in my collection, Sam Marrone, my friend and brother in Christ, graciously sent me a copy of the 3.5″ x 5.5″ original, which arrived April 10th. Thanks, Sam!—A.G.F.] The text was reset by the folks at The Word of Truth Ministry, which makes nearly all of Sellers’s writings and recorded messages available, mostly free of charge. The publication is available for sale on Amazon.

What caught my eye was his quotation of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), playwright, novelist, and philosopher of individualism.  I doubt he would have cited her on individualism (or anything else) had he known she was an enemy of Christianity.

In 1957 Rand had published Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, but even in 1961 she was probably best known for The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel that was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper six years later. In the year that novel came out, Rand began working on “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” A “condensed” portion (which you can read here) appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest.[1] When he cited it, it was already 17 years old and something that would have been collected in the war-related scrap drives. I’m inclined to think he had bought it when it came out and kept it from the paper salvagers.

Continue reading “When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism”

“Capitalism”: another socially engineered misnomer?

The label “capitalism,” a staple of anti-free market propaganda since the days of Das Kapital, reinforces the idea that history consists of a series of stages of which “capitalism” is but one, scheduled for displacement by another. It’s a misnomer but, as Hayek suggested, it’s one we’re probably stuck with.

Capital is what wealth becomes when traders do not consume the yield of their labor or trade, but invest it in an enterprise so as to earn interest or (as it was once called) “usury.”[1]

Capital is a factor of production, alongside two original factors, land and labor. “Capitalism” should clang in our ears as would “landism” or “laborism.” There is no justification for referring to any stretch of human history as “capitalism,” as though once upon a time people did not exchange property titles and will one day “return” to a marketless, and propertyless social order, all the wiser for having passed through the hell of “class society.”

In many ways it is misleading to speak of “capitalism” as though this had been a new and altogether different system which suddenly came into being toward the end of the eighteenth century; we use this term here because it is the most familiar name, but only with great reluctance, since with its modern connotations it is itself largely a creation of that socialist interpretation of economic history with which we are concerned. The term is especially misleading when, as it often the case, it is connected with the idea of the rise of the propertyless proletariat, which by some devious process have been deprived of their rightful ownership of the tools for their work.[2]

But are we stuck with “capitalism”? Must bad words drive out good as though in obedience to the linguistic equivalence of Gresham’s Law? Here’s the danger I perceive in acquiescing in the devaluation.

Monsignor William Smith

I remember hearing in the 1990s Monsignor William Smith (1939-2009), who taught moral theology at Saint Joseph’s Seminary, articulate this aphorism: social engineering begins with verbal engineering. The epigram may not have originated with him, but an article on the topic connects him to it and notes Chesterton’s insights into the verbal barbarism underlying the physical consequences of adopting it:

Whenever widespread social engineering of this magnitude occurs, it is invariably preceded by skillful verbal engineering. The late Msgr. William Smith observed that the argument about contraception was basically over as soon as modern society accepted the deceptive phrase, “birth control” into its vocabulary. “Imagine if we had called it, ‘life prevention’,” he once remarked. The great Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it this way: ” They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control,” and again: “Birth Control is a name given to a succession of different expedients by which it is possible to filch the pleasure belonging to a natural process while violently and unnaturally thwarting the process itself.”[3]

The pursuit of “equity” leads to unequal treatment under the law. Champions of “inclusion” and “diversity” exclude and oppress nonconformists. There’s nothing more illiberal than what marches under the banner of “liberalism.” Like military justice, “social justice” is to justice as military music is to music.[4] Any social order grounded in respect for persons and their right to acquire and exchange property profitably deserves a better tag than “capitalism.”

Notes

[1] As Jesus taught in His parable of the talents, it is sometimes morally imperative to earn interest (τόκῳ, tokō) (Matthew 25:27). Mosaic law, however, under which Jesus and his audience lived, prohibited an Israelite from charging interest to fellow Israelites. (Deuteronomy 23:20) In effect, the Israelite lender was obliged to make a gift to his fellow Israelite out of the foregone use of the loaned money.

[2] F. A. Hayek, “History and Politics,” in Capitalism and the Historians, Hayek, ed., The University of Chicago Press, 1954, 14-15.

[3] Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D., “Verbal Engineering and the Swaying of Public Conscience,” Catholic Education Resource Center, 2009. (One can see Smith teach here.) See also Greg Schleppenbach, “Verbal engineering always precedes social engineering,” Southern Nebraska Register, February 21, 2014.

[4] Apologies to Robert Sherrill.

In defense of Lord Acton, revisited

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, Knight Commander Victorian Order, Deputy Lieutenant, January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902

On the birthday of the great liberal Catholic historian John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), I’ve decided to republish what I posted three years ago. (It will be new to some, if not most, of you.) It’s prefaced by links to Acton-related posts of mine and followed by the text of a 2006 answer to an attack on Acton—which I’d call ignorant were its author not a learned Catholic historian. Like my Christ, Capital & Liberty, whose chapters began as blog posts critical of another traditionalist Catholic, the arguments and evidence marshaled in my essay deserve more exposure than my old site can give them.—A.G.F.

 

 

John C. Rao, Ph. D. [Oxon.], Associate Professor of History emeritus, Saint John’s University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“In Defense of Lord Acton,” reproduced below, was written in January 2006 in response to “A Message from Bethlehem: Lord Acton Tends to Corrupt,” a smear of Acton as a “Gnostic” by Professor John C. Rao of St. John’s University. The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic periodical, published Rao’s defamation of Acton on the last day of 2005. Its original title of my response was, “Do Illiberals Tend to Smear? Or Is It Just Professor Rao When It Comes to Lord Acton?” The editor not only didn’t publish it, but even after more than one query, wouldn’t even acknowledge receiving it.

In Defense of Lord Acton

The significance of the Incarnation of the Prince of Peace for society is always a timely topic, and never a more welcome one than at Christmastime. It is the motif of Professor John C. Rao’s vast historical studies, and I expected his recent column in The Remnant1 to add one more variation on that theme. He more than disappointed any such expectation by taking the occasion of the season to impute heresy-mongering, if not heresy itself, to Lord Acton, a man who regarded communion with the Church as dearer than life itself. That is, Professor Rao maligned a fellow member of his own profession, a towering figure in European historiography who participated in the unearthing of many official archives. And he did it not by examining any of Acton’s own words, but rather by repeatedly asserting what he “really” meant. Feeling glum2 cannot excuse such a lapse from the standards of controversy. Continue reading “In defense of Lord Acton, revisited”

Pat Martino and Herbert Aptheker: Half-century Memories

Pat Martino (L) and yours truly, January 1, 1973, 3:20 A.M., Folk City, 130 West 3rd Street, NYC.

This photo was taken on January 1, 1973 at Folk City, 130 West Third Street, in Manhattan.[1] After several months of screwing up the courage to ask Jazz guitar legend Pat Martino (1944-2021) for a lesson (I had first spoken to him there on September 9, 1972), he agreed earlier that New Year’s Day to give me a lesson if I’d be willing to travel to his home in Philadelphia. Before taking the  train at New York’s Penn Station on January 24th, I noticed the  headlines of the newspapers that day: the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War would be signed three  days later.

A philosophy student at New York University (NYU)—where I took Sidney Hook’s last course—I had spent 1972 worrying about how I might avoid the military draft. Although my Selective Service (SS) number was 40, I heard they weren’t going to call higher than 25. Shortly after that, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the end of the draft.

I had been anxious about the future. Fighting my Vietnamese comrades was out of the question, but the various “draft-dodging” (or court martial-inviting) options were not much more congenial. You see, I was from 1971 to 1975 a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (CP), one who had registered with SS and was then assisting Communist writer and theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) with finding various books and articles pursuant to his literary executorship of W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers.[2]

That’s whom Pat Martino was posing with on New Year’s Day 1973. For the nearly five decades I knew him, I hasten to add, he was never aware of my politics.

On the advice of CP attorney John Abt, who urged me to claim my First Amendment right of freedom of association, I declined to answer the Army’s questions about my political affiliation. After isolating me from other registrants for a few hours and then interrogating me, the SS officers dropped the matter and let me go home. I never heard from them again. I returned to my NYU classes the next day. They probably have a thick file on me.

January 1973 is also the month Aptheker acknowledged my assistance and that of others in his introduction to The Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (Kraus-Thomson Limited, 1973), which he edited along with an additional 40 volumes of Du Bois’s writings.

In 1946 Aptheker returned from Europe where, rising to the rank of Major, he had commanded the all-Black 350th artillery unit. That’s the year Du Bois (1868-1963) made Aptheker—unable to secure an academic position in the Cold War’s first year—the executor of his literary estate. In that introduction my name appeared in a scholarly publication for the first time.[3]

Herbert Aptheker signing over W. E. B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts in 1973 (that is, the portion that had been entrusted to him: the rest went to Fisk University and to Ghana, where Du Bois took up residence in 1961, never to return to the country of his birth).

In a few years I’d part company with him, a story for another time. I eventually settled accounts with my erstwhile political conscience in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. 

Over the last fifty years I pursued philosophical, political, and musical studies in ways I could never have imagined (or, if I could, would necessarily have welcomed). At 19, a half century (a reasonable unit of historical account) seemed impossibly long to me. It does not feel that way today.

Aptheker, a widower in his last four years, passed away at age 87 almost two decades ago; Pat, having made a seemingly miraculous comeback from amnesia-inducing brain surgery in the early ’80s, succumbed to a long illness last year, age 78.

Socially isolated, I left the Party in 1975 and Marxism altogether a couple of years later; I never became either a professional guitarist (not for want of trying) or a professor of philosophy. Each man left his mark on my sense of life. I enter the new  year appreciative of their influence and hope by God’s grace to continue to build on what I’ve learned from knowing them and so many others.

I wish all my subscribers and visitors a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

Anthony G. Flood

January 1, 2023

My wife Gloria, Pat Martino, and me, September 9, 1995, Blue Note Club, NYC, directly across the street from where Folk City was, 23 years to the day after I had first spoken with him.

Notes

[1] The Fat Black Pussycat night club/comedy venue does business there now. Before Folk City, there was Tony Pastor’s Downtown (1939-1967).

[2] Of the countless requests he gave me over the years, here are four.

 

[3] 

 

What’s in store for 2023

Otis Q. Sellers, 1901-1992

While my country is being invaded (to name no other enormity about to befall us) I will, God willing, finish my manuscript on Otis Q. Sellers, about whom I’ve blogged (and drafted a lot apart from this platform) over the past few years.

One challenge I’ve faced is how to represent myself. I’m not a professor of Hebrew or Greek or of the Bible, but then I wasn’t a professor of American Communism when I compiled the chapters of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness; or of political economy when I blogged Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic into existence; or of philosophy (which I did study formally at the graduate level) before writing the posts that became Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. Nevertheless, I’m proud of their contents and stand by them.

Reflecting on these books, I see that each expressed a polemical impulse to set a record straight, not to bolster a curriculum vitae. Were I to write my Sellers book to, say, impress a church historian or scripture scholar, I would doom it to failure. I also don’t think I could muster the interest to see it through.

If, however, I were to order my historical and biographical material to tell the story of my Christian Individualism (the new working title for Maverick Workman) as it found fulfillment in Sellers’s, I believe the book can resonate with fellow Christian truth-seekers. (If they manage to stumble upon it.)

While that’s going on in the background, I’ll be giving expression to other interests, especially Marxism, with which I had more than a nodding acquaintance a half-century ago, an ideological cancer that’s metastasizing throughout the body of Western culture (or what remains of it). It continues to scramble people’s minds, and it’s about time I say what I have to about it. Continue reading “What’s in store for 2023”

C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography

The following of review of John L. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022) was published on Amazon today. I’m preparing a libertarian Christian evaluation of James’s life and work, to be published, God willing, next year.—A.G.F.

The Boundaries of a Mind’s Quilt

In his biography of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), published the year before its subject died, James scholar Paul Buhle predicted that James’s story “will look different, more complete and more understandable, from the mid-twenty-first century than from” the late 1980s (C. L. R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 1). Before even this century’s quarter mark, John L. Williams has mined and elegantly refined much of that progress in completeness and intelligibility.

The subtitle, A Life Beyond the Boundaries, echoes James’s memoir 1963 Beyond a Boundary. That title in turn reflects his passion, as player and commentator, for cricket as well as his intellectual interest in perimeters, those of the game, of society, and of empire.

A glance at James’s literary accomplishments alone before he reached the age of 40 should move the most casual observer to take notice: Minty Alley (written in the 1920s, published in 1936), the first novel by a African-Caribbean author to be published in the United Kingdom; the translation of Boris Souvarine’s first of its kind and massive Stalin from the French (1936); the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (1934), in which James performed with Paul Robeson; the ground-breaking The Black Jacobins (1938). Each in itself was a tour de force; collectively (this list is not exhaustive) they almost beggar belief, yet those who knew the polymath came to expect that level of achievement from him.

Williams follows the pattern of his profiles of Shirley Bassey, Eartha Kitt, and Michael X; there as here, he is more investigative journalist than intellectual historian. Having enjoyed this book, however, this reviewer believes it’s about time that CLR (as Williams refers to him throughout) got a more personal treatment. In this respect, Williams has delivered. Continue reading “C. L. R. James: First Amazon Review of New Biography”

Newsflash: They’re godless commies!

Bingeing these days on YouTube lectures by Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin, I had a flashback when I heard his answer to Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson:

. . . it occurred to me that you have probably spent more time reading Soviet archives than any other person. And I said to you, Stephen, what’s the one central finding? And you replied immediately, “They were communists.” The leaders of the Soviet Union really believed that stuff and they really wanted to achieve the communist goal of worldwide revolution.[1]

This reminded me not only of Kotkin’s documented evaluation of the Bolsheviks in general and Stalin in particular—they were not cynics, but convinced Marxists who expressed themselves behind closed doors as they did in their propaganda—but also of the opening paragraph of Murray Rothbard’s, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist.”

The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth.[2]

They weren’t cynics, but dreamers. The real-world nightmare that claimed hundred million lives and enslaved billions in the 20th century began as a 19th-century Christian apostate’s dream. As Gary North summarized Marx’s legacy:

Karl Heinrich Marx, the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father, was born in Trier, in what is now Rhineland Germany, on May 5, 1818. He was a Jew by birth, but in 1816 or 1817, his father joined the state’s official Christian church, and he saw to it that his children were baptized into his new faith in 1824. After a brief fling with a liberal, pietistic form of Christianity, young Karl became a dedicated humanist. He took his humanism to revolutionary conclusions. Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, would become the rabbi of Europe’s most important religious movement: revolutionary humanism.[3]

He inspired generations of murderous missionaries, counter-evangelists—dysangelists, if you will—proselytizers of the bad news of this world’s God (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; John 12:31). Remember that the next time of “social justice warriors” nonchalantly claim to be “trained Marxists.”[4] Their corrupt plans do not stop at exploiting “white guilt” for pecuniary gain, but extend to society’s every nook and cranny.

Notes

[1] Uncommon Knowledge, 5 Questions for Stephen Kotkin, February 5, 2022. See Robinson’s other interviews of Kotkin, “Hoover Fellow Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Rise To And Consolidation Of Power,” October 6, 2015.

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Rothbard and Walter Block, eds., The Review of Austrian Economics. 1990, Springer. Republished as Chapter 22 of Rothbard, The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School, Edward Elgar, 1997. Free pdf.

[3] Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution: Regeneration through Chaos, Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989, 7-8. Free pdf. On North, however, see my “Dominion Theology: Salvation or Snare for Liberty?,” April 20, 2020.

[4] Jason Morgan, “Black Lives Matters Goes Full Marxist,” Crisis Magazine, April 19, 2021

 

Abortion, euphemism, and moral evasion

“Congratulations, Ms. Smith! The abortion was a success. Here’s your new baby girl!”

“Thank, Doc! I didn’t want to kill her . . . I just didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. Thanks for making that happen!” 

Said no maternity patient ever.

Is there anyone who believes that the death of the unborn child is merely an unintended “secondary effect” of a procured abortion for which the procurer, the mother, is not culpable?

Is not that death the primary, intended consequence of the “procedure”?

Abortion-speak has ever been plagued with euphemisms—like “procedure,” as though snuffing out a life were on the level of a tonsillectomy.

Some recognition of reality is reflected when the “procedure” is conflated with its fatal effect, i.e., a dead human being. One now regularly hears of “aborted babies.”

What is subject to a possible abortion (military, aeronautical, or clinical), of course, is a process. Whenever NASA aborts a scheduled launch, what was going forward is halted. The missile is not destroyed.

A procured abortion—another euphemism—results in the “termination of a pregnancy.” That’s accurate as far as it goes, for the pregnancy is a months-long process whose natural terminus is childbirth.

But no one calls an induced labor an “abortion,” even though it ends a pregnancy as surely as a miscarriage (aka “spontaneous abortion”) or mifepristone.

The woman who procures an abortion, surgical or chemical, doesn’t want to “terminate her pregnancy” as much as she wants what has been living in her since conception dead. The ironic bite of the opening fictitious dialog depends on recognizing that homicidal primary intention.

Again, for her, it’s not enough not to be pregnant anymore, that is, to “reclaim her bodily autonomy.” No, heteronomy—in the extreme form of the destruction of another’s body—is the goal. (And if the latter’s distinctive DNA is not a sufficient criterion of physical otherness, nothing is.)

Nothing above is meant to imply that taking an unwanted pregnancy to term is easy, or that one suffering it isn’t deserving of compassion as well as assistance—material, psychological, and spiritual—from people ready, willing, and able to do for the baby what she cannot do, if only she would let them know.

It is meant only to remind those in her situation (and their loved ones) that not all possible solutions to a problem are morally permissible. 

Being “pro-choice” (another euphemism) is meaningless, or at least misleading, if it implies that anything that suits one’s fancy falls within the range of morally permissible choice.  That range does not include the intentional taking of innocent human life.

Of course, those who dismember babies in effigy, as one deranged person did on a church’s steps the other day, attempt to intimidate Justices to influence their deliberations and conclusions, or firebomb pro-life offices are not susceptible to attempts at rational  persuasion.

And they’re supported by millions who knowingly vote for politicians who will not uphold the law.

To combat evil, reasoning is necessary, but not sufficient. The legal order must compensate for the deficiency of “mere argument.” But what is our recourse if those charged with upholding that order fail to do so?

See also

William F. Vallicella, “Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained,” May 13, 2022

Anthony Flood, “Murray Rothbard: on my late friend’s lamentable error,” January 7, 2019

 

There is no right to “opportunity,” equal or otherwise: my objection to Simon Clarke’s defense

Simon Clarke, American University of Armenia

Although the meaning of “opportunity” has evolved over the last hundred years to refer narrowly to the chances of being economically employed, it has never lost its tie to the broader idea of “circumstance” or “set of circumstances.” Losing that connection has entailed adverse social consequences. Politics, the sphere of demands for non-market, state-enforced outcomes for some at the expense of others, has driven that constriction.

In a 2005 essay for The Philosophers’ Magazine, Dr. Simon Clarke (then lecturer in philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; currently Associate Professor and Chair, Political Science and International Affairs, American University in Armenia) offered a case for what has euphemistically been dubbed “affirmative action,” governmental and corporate policies that favor hiring members of certain groups.

Clarke presupposed, but did not argue for, the alleged moral obligation on which his argument is grounded, namely, the one to improve the self-esteem of certain group members by increasing their visibility in employment.

In my 2006 rebuttal to his article (reproduced below), I made many points, to which I’d like to give a wider audience. Unfortunately I did not, however, hammer this deficiency as hard as I should have. I’ll try in this preface.

Continue reading “There is no right to “opportunity,” equal or otherwise: my objection to Simon Clarke’s defense”