Can Biology Dispense with Purpose?

by Gene Callahan

Mario called into doubt the usefulness of purposive explanations in biology in this thread. I started to write up the following as a comment, but it grew long enough, and, I hope, of enough general interest, that I found it appropriate to elevate it to “post level.”

I think the evidence is very strong that biologists just have not been able to do without thinking of the “purposes” of biological features, despite the scientistic prejudice against regarding any such consideration as scientific.

Why the Catholic Position on Homosexual Marriage Is Not Mere Bigotry (But Still Is Mistaken)

by Gene Callahan

“Summum autem bonum si ignoratur, vivendi rationem ignorari necesse est.”* — Cicero

My friend Roger Koppl, in a recent discussion on this blog, contended that the only reason anyone might object to legalizing gay marriage is “bigotry.” Now, it is always a good bit o’ fun to insult one’s political opponents like this, but it may not always be helpful. So, I wish to take a moment here to demonstrate that at least the Catholic position contra gay marriage is not based on mere bigotry.

Healthcare Game

by Chidem Kurdas

Funny thing about the Obama healthcare plan. It resembles a Rube Goldberg machine, as did the 1990s Clinton version. The present proposal “relies on a combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs,” according to Paul Krugman in the NYT.

Why not simply extend Medicare to everybody? Oh, I forgot, Medicare Part A is projected to run out of money by 2017. And the only reason the other parts don’t face potential insolvency is that they’re financed from general tax revenue. Given the government’s track record with medical entitlements, the claim that a new  public plan will hold down costs is laughable.

Medicare costs more than half a trillion dollars a year now; within a decade it will require almost $1 trillion a year. If you want to skirt the cost issue, it’s best not to mention Medicare. This is the kind thing Charlotte Twight identified as a way proponents of larger government quash opposition. Concoct an elaborate new program of subsidies and regulations, mask the cost, focus on the new entitlement, and you’ll get more people behind the program.

Why Mathematical Reasoning Cannot Be a Simple Matter of Definitions and Formal Rules

by Gene Callahan

The point I wish to make here has been made before, notably, by Lewis Carroll in his essay “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles“, as well as by Wittgenstein, in his work on what it means to “follow a rule,” and by Gödel in his famous paper on undecideability. But, as I recently encountered a very, very bright young philosopher who seemed unaware of the import of such arguments, it is, perhaps, a point worth making once again.

The contention at hand is that, contrary to those who hold that mathematical knowledge offers us an example of objective truths that are of a non-physical nature, mathematical truth is “simply” a matter of positing some arbitrary set of definitions and rules for drawing conclusions from them.

What Should Be The State’s Role In Marriage?

by Mario Rizzo 

I suggest that it should be the same as in contract law. In other words, the State should not define the terms of the relationship. It should allow the parties to do that for themselves and then simply enforce it. The current one-size-fits-all civil marriage should be abolished except as a default option for those who do not want to build their own contract.  

Man: The Political Animal?

by Gene Callahan

I recently saw a prominent anarchist saying, in effect: “Look, we can all go wrong — after all, one of the greatest thinkers in history called man ‘the political animal.’”

This statement, I think, exhibits a common misunderstanding of what Aristotle meant here. Man is a political animal, the Philosopher held, because he is the one animal that tries to order his social arrangements according to his sense of, and rational arguments about, the justice of those arrangements. Thus the anarchist, in debating the justice of the State, is illustrating, and not disputing, Aristotle’s point.

It is, in fact, Hobbes’s position that the anarchist should dispute — if man is not naturally a political animal, then justice is just a creation imposed on the natural human exogenously, and there really is no arguing against the justice of the Leviathan — there simply is no justice in the absence of whatever it defines as just!’

Juicy, Delicious Firms and Reproducing Cars

by Gene Callahan

After hearing good things about Kenneth Boulding for a number of years, I eagerly snapped up his A Reconstruction of Economics for a dollar at New York’s best used bookstore. (The original price? $1.95) Well, the book is interesting, but I’m sorely puzzled by some of the moves Boulding makes here. Is it really useful to consider cars as organisms with a “birth rate” and “death rate”? Are firms usefully viewed as organisms trying to keep their balance sheets in “homeostasis”? Do any firms really want to see static balance sheets rather than ever growing net worth? Boulding claims the homeostatic balance sheet approach can tell us a good deal about firms without introducing prices or profit maximizing. But don’t the entries for these balance sheet items depend on prices? And isn’t profit maximization the whole reason that a firm wants to balance them as much as it does?

Is this book representative of Boulding’s work? Did he continue with this line of thought later in his career? And did he always have that wacky hairdo?

Keynes versus Hayek: A rerun of the 1930s

by Mario Rizzo  

[This was submitted to the Financial Times as a possible op-ed piece. Unfortunately, it was rejected. Nevertheless, it seems to me that most readers of the financial press are still unaware of just how fundamental a challenge F.A. Hayek made to the economics of J.M.Keynes. Hayek’s challenge often gets homogenized with other free-market approaches that are still macro-economic in nature. Hayek questions the macroeconomic way of thinking.]  

Robert Skidelsky wrote in the Financial Times that recent debates among economists are a rerun of the disagreements between John Maynard Keynes and the U.K. Treasury in the early 1930s. To a certain extent this is true. But it might be more instructive to pay some attention to another debate in the 1930s. This is the debate between Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.   

Geertz

by Gene Callahan

I’ve been reading the anthropologist Clifford Geertz‘s book, The Interpretation of Cultures, this week. I had read a little Geertz when doing my master’s at LSE, and liked him then, and I like him even more now. For instance, Hayek, Oakeshott, Polanyi, Wittgenstein, MacIntyre and others have all noted how the Enlightenment goal of freeing reason from all allegiance to traditions, customs, habits and so on is not an ideal we should approach as closely as possible but an impossibility, and an impossibility that, if held as a goal, only creates mischief. Here is Geertz making much the same point:

‘Undirected by culture patterns — organized systems of significant symbols — man’s behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless’ (46).

Geertz also drew on the work of some of my favorite philosophers, including Whitehead, Cassirer, and Langer.

Fashionable Fictions

by Chidem Kurdas

Vanity Fair is not a magazine I follow, so I was taken aback when I flipped through an issue someone left behind at a café. According to the Editor’s Letter, “the chain of catastrophic bets made over the past decade by a few hundred bankers may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history.”

Really? A few hundred bankers made millions of people live beyond their means, buy wildly over-priced houses, drive gigantic SUVs and put huge amounts of debt on their credit cards. Without those actions, the twin credit and real estate bubbles could not have inflated and hence there would have been no collapse.

“Never before have so few done so much to so many,” writes Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.  That’s a very convenient way of looking at it—some banker made me do it, he should pay for it and be hung, drawn and quartered. Always a handy story and right now supremely fashionable.