John C. Wright's Blog, page 119
September 4, 2012
APOLOGIA PRO OPERE SUI part II
1.
2.
3.
4. THE QUESTIONS
4.1. IS MARRIAGE A CONTRACT?
The Libertine position posits that marriage is a contract only, revocable at the will of either party, even if the other party is not at fault. The reason for this is that the licit nature of the sex act rests on the consent of the parties: when the consent is withdrawn, the sex is no longer licit.
As a contract, the terms exist only as what the parties signatory so agree. So, for example, if Ayn Rand wishes to have sexual liaison with Nathaniel Branden, the affair is licit (according to the Libertine position) provided only that her husband and his wife provide an informed consent. If marriage is a contract only, the provision that one’s spouse “forsake all others” is open to renegotiation. For a foursome in an open marriage, the adultery is licit.
As a contract, the terms bind only the signatories. So, to use a completely hypothetical example, if a hypothetical and imaginary character named Mark Sanford is married and his paramour Maria from Argentina is not, and she further has never signed a legally binding document promising otherwise, she is free to form a sexual liaison with him. He is in violation of his contract, but his guilt is not shared with her. For her, adultery is licit. If licit, then no one, not even Mrs. Sanford, has the right to criticize or condemn her acts, and for Mrs. Sanford to display offense at Maria from Argentina would be unjust, even petulant.
The first doubt concerning the Libertine position surfaced when these conclusions intruded itself onto my reluctant awareness. In theory, the adultery of Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden should have worked out to the satisfaction of all parties involved. Instead the opposite happened: Rand and Branden became bitter enemies to the end of her life.
It did not work out in that particular case, nor in any similar case that can be brought to mind. Why not?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
APOLOGIA PRO OPERE SUI part I
As frequenters of my humble weblog may know, in recent days a certain article appeared in this space, where I complained, not without abundant sarcasm and scorn, that the Sci-Fi Channel (or Syfy Channel, if you insist) had yielded to the forces of political correctness, and were persuaded (or cowed) into publicly apologizing for their relative lack of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered characters on their programs (only two in the year in question), and promised to have writers include more. The express purpose of that inclusion was to influence the public mind into abandoning traditional norms of public decency and decorum to adopt the norms of toleration of the political-cultural Left.
It was, in other words, an expression of loyalty to the idea that art and entertainment exist subordinate to the crusades of politics. If you doubt this, imagine what the reaction would be if the Sci-Fi channel had publicly apologized to a television evangelist and promised to have more programs promoting family values or displaying Christians in a more favorable light.
As I science fiction writer, I have more than a passing interesting in maintaining, not just for myself, but for the whole field, a certain level of artistic integrity and freedom: I voice no objection to putting characters of any description, gay or straight (or practitioners of sexual habits as yet undreamed by modern men) into a story when the story calls for it. My objection was to putting GLBT characters into stories as part of a political agenda, when the story does not call for it, in an attempt to change the moral convictions of the audience under the cover of entertainment.
Such attempts are not the province of artists and entertainers, but of the Thought Police. Artists serve the muses; Thought Police serve the Party.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
More of the Same
Part of an ongoing conversation. Nostreculsus writes:
Mr wrf3 is making an interesting claim.
Imagine that radio antennae pick up a series of radio signals – intervals of activity (above a certain threshold) alternating with periods of radio silence. It can be transcribed as a sequence of ones and zeroes. If the sequence is long enough, we can ascertain its statistical properties. Hence we can measure its degree of disorder (its entropy).
The information per symbol and the distribution of information throughout the sequence are therefore measurable physical properties. But Mr wrf3 goes one step further. He quotes Douglas Hofstadter approvingly and claims that we can deduce the “inherent meaning, i.e. where the symbols alone [are] enough to convey their meaning” purely from the message. We can tell if it is a message and not some natural phenomenon.
Isn’t this akin to the claim of those who believe in “intelligent design”? They assert that by measuring the complexity of DNA sequences they can decide whether or not the sequence is designed. But Mr Wright contends that “Meaningfulness is not a material property.”
Let me stipulate that the sequence is not a transmission directed from the space aliens to us. So there is no allusion to areas of common knowledge: no lists of primes or encoded star maps. If it is a message, it is an intercepted signal from one group of aliens to another, discussing some alien topic. But we can download as much of it as we wish.
So, I ask, how does the intrinsic meaning of a sequence “emerge” from its bare material description?
Mr wrf3 asked me to be rude to him when I was trying my best to be polite by being aloof from his flippant snipes and dishonest accusations. He seemed to think my courteous reserve was funny, and he mocked it by daring me to be rude to him, saying it would amuse him. I thought the rudest thing I could do was ban him, which I have. Perhaps he is amused, perhaps not.
If any reader can find a way to argue his position perhaps more clearly than he did, I am happy to reply.
Before we begin, let me state my basic thesis.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
September 3, 2012
Save CITY OF HEROES!
This is practically the only online game I play. Between work and novel writing, I usually only allow myself to play on Wednesdays. Any kind hearted persons out there, please sign the petition.
Here’s the link with the announcement:
http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php
And here is the link to the Petition to ask NCSoft not to shut down CoH:
http://www.change.org/petitions/ncsoft-keep-ncsoft-from-shutting-down-city-of-heroes#intro
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 30, 2012
Neil Armstrong 1930-2012
There is too much to say, and my words too little for the passing of a man every inch a hero. Any science fiction fan should admire the first man to do what so many of us have so often dreamed, and left a footprint on a world beyond this world.
Let us keep his dream aloft. No man born after 1935 alive now on this world has set foot on any other. 43 years after he walked on the moon, we should have been erect his tomb and monument there, in the great gray silence.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 29, 2012
Illustrations of the Natural Law
This is taken without amendment from the first Appendix of C.S. Lewis’ THE ABOLITION OF MAN. The purpose here is to show the universality of certain moral precepts, especially those on which even men who say they doubt the universality of such precepts rely first in their lives, and second in their discussions of these and other matters.
Illustrations of the Tao
The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. The list makes no pretence of completeness. It will be noticed that writers such as Locke and Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course, be absurd if I were trying to collect independent testimonies to the Tao. But (1) I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes that ‘civilizations’ have arisen in the world independently of one another; or even that humanity has had several independent emergences on this planet. The biology and anthropology involved in such an assumption are extremely doubtful. It is by no means certain that there has ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in all history. It is at least arguable that every civilization we find has been derived from another civilization and, in the last resort, from a single centre—’carried’ like an infectious disease or like the Apostolical succession.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
Vacation and the Naturalist Fallacy
Just a note to those interested in any ongoing argument here at the my Journal that this is vacation week for me, and I have been out of communication for several days, and shall be for several more.
Lest I be misunderstood, one of the ongoing conversations concerned a question of Natural Law, where I asked the gentleman (or lady, or robot. On the Internet, one never knows) named wrf3 if he had an obligation to answer me honestly, and I assured him I would not answer him honestly in the absence of such an obligation.
After some hemming and hawing, distraction and diversion, he did sort of provide two answers, one in terms of game theory, saying that if it were my purpose to communication, then honest communication is a logical necessity, and one in terms of saying that I had a contract with Jesus Christ to be honest to those who treated me dishonestly. This, I admit, may not have been quite his point, but he expresses himself so elliptically that I assume I can be forgiven for assuming.
Oddly enough, he DID answer, albeit he phrased his reply in gibberish without realizing what he was saying. But, a deal is a deal (or so the maxims of the Natural Law state) and so I am required to answer.
My lack of an answer was not due to his failure to live up to his side of the deal, but was due to no access to computers.
This one evening only, I waste an hour out of a sense of duty to reply:
Please notice that both these responses from wrf3 presuppose the Natural Law and are meaningless without it.
To express that if one has a given purpose then to act rationally in reference to that purpose may be true as a statement of fact, but it is not a maxim of behavior, not an imperative, unless one first assumes an imperative to do the purpose proposed, and one assumes (as I do) a moral duty to be rational, that all one’s act be non-self-defeating.
To express that one should obey a sovereign, human or divine, or to abide by a covenant or contract likewise is meaningless unless one first assumes a maxim of behavior, namely, an imperative that one ought to obey legitimate authority, one ought be true to one’s oaths or covenants.
If there is any other basis on which a maxim of behavior, that is, an imperative statement, can be made except on the basis of an axiom containing an imperative, I cannot imagine it, and I challenge any reader to provide me with an example otherwise.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 25, 2012
Polling my Readers
My local bookstores are neither carrying my latest COUNT TO A TRILLION, nor the paperback of my beautiful and talented wife’s latest masterpiece, PROSPERO IN HELL. So I would like to conduct a completely nonscientific poll and ask anyone willing to leave a note here on my blog: Did you see either book in your local bookstore?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
August 24, 2012
More on Natural Law
A reader weighs in with a comment on Natural Law which is more clearly written than what I could say. Allow me to reprint his words here without further comment from me:
Here’s hoping our host won’t mind if a longtime lurker waxes philosophical a bit in defence of the natural law. While it’s true that the natural law arises somewhat spontaneously in men through the moral intuitions, it seems to me that these are only failsafes should we happen to discard our intellects. Mr Wright’s account of the natural law might benefit from the introduction of some metaphysical components that to clarify matters to the honest sceptics in his audience. If one allows for an Aristotelico-Thomistic view, the Natural Law should be rationally defensible (and, I believe, has been held to be so by philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas) even to one who initially doubts its existence or has corrupt moral intuitions.
The traditional natural law theory is grounded in the idea of teleology or Final causality, which is the idea that things are, by nature, directed towards specific ends, and the idea of Formal causality, that things have a particular substantial form in virtue of which they are what they are. Together, they are the two forgotten members of the Four Causes which have been banished by the modern materialist or mechanistic paradigm to frankly disastrous effect. Of course, the two causes that remain, Efficient and Material causes, are unintelligible without these former two, a consequence which the materialists seem to be for some reason blissfully unaware of.
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
The Self-Impeaching Denial of Natural Law
Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader with the abbreviated name of wrf3 has illogically denied the existence of Natural Law in a fashion as to show he knows not what the term means. Attempts to explain the term to him have met with failure.
He imagines it to be an axiomatic system like geometry for deducing specific conclusions, rather than a set of moral intuitions by whose means the justice or otherwise of Positive Law (that is, law posited by men, manmade law) can be measured. Absent Natural (or nonmanmade) Law such Positive (or manmade) Laws as we see made by princes and parliaments and enforced by police or by custom cannot be criticized nor affirmed.
Basic on this misunderstanding, wrf3 puckishly offered that he would believe in Natural Law if he saw it in operation, for example, if Dr Andreassen would convince me of the moral probity of fornication, or I him of chastity.
What if we agree on some other point? Does this not prove the existence of Natural Law just as well (or just as poorly)?
Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.
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