Stolen valor

Here's an interesting discussion of the ethics of the legality of falsely claiming to have won a medal. The author, Dan Demetriou, suggests that such false claims should not be illegal, as they are under the Stolen Valor Act of 2006, and that "the law should not enforce the honor code, but [...] private individuals should through public denunciation and social sanction."

I'm not sure what I think about this (I do reach a conclusion by the end of the post though) but it's interesting to me because for nine years I wore the uniform of the unorganized Virginia militia, which to the untrained eye looks exactly like a US Army uniform. (Most VMI faculty members wear this uniform, but it took a while for everyone to realize that non-US citizens like me are not supposed to do so.) As a result I was stopped more than once on the street and thanked for my brave service to the nation. A real soldier once even asked me where the nearest PX was, which meant I had to explain that I wasn't a real soldier and didn't know. This was all embarrassing, and I felt as though I was involved in a kind of fraud. You can imagine how little college professors dressed as soldiers actually look like soldiers. The VMI line is that we should wear the uniform with pride, and make an effort to keep in shape, learn how to salute properly, and so on, so that we don't look silly.

Some military people take the view that being allowed to wear the uniform is an honor. Others believe that this honor only makes sense when those wearing the uniform do so because they have earned the right to do so, by joining the real military. It's reminiscent of the Chesterton story in which Father Brown explains that a deconsecrated church is no longer a church, no matter how much it looks like one (which in turn is reminiscent of  Socrates' joke at the expense of Crito, who asks how they should bury him--Socrates replies that it is only his body that they will bury, not Socrates himself (it isn't a very funny joke)). It reminds me also about the debate about same-sex marriage and whether this would be real marriage or merely resemble it, and whether such resemblance would matter or not.

We can take different views when it comes to uniforms/medals, churches, bodies, and marriages, but in each case two positions stand out. There is the view that technical differences make all the difference, so that it does not matter at all what happens with deconsecrated churches, dead bodies, gay "marriages" (scare quotes to reflect the position of people who would not recognize such unions as marriages in any sense that mattered, which is not my position) or non-real-military uniforms. Call this the Father Brown view. And there is the view that apparent similarity matters. Turning a deconsecrated church into a public toilet or a brothel would then be blasphemous. Throwing Socrates' body in a landfill would be an insult to Socrates (as well as to human dignity), wearing the uniform of the unorganized Virginia militia badly would be an insult to the US Army, and allowing same-sex marriage would say something about traditional marriage. (Whether this something was an insult or not--I don't think it would be, but others disagree--would depend on the propriety of same-sex marriage.) Call this the Anscombe view (because I think it's what she would think about at least a couple of these issues).

I side with Anscombe (or "Anscombe," if we're being careful), but I don't know how much I can do to justify this. It's tempting to think that what matters is the intention or attitude of the people doing the alleged insulting (you get this a lot when the issue of confederate flags comes up--"I have no conscious racist motive, therefore my waving the battle flag of an explicitly pro-African-and-African-American slavery army is not a racist act"), but I think it's easy to see that this is wrong. The cultural meaning of actions matters, but not the individual intent so much. If I urinate on a church or a corpse then I have insulted it, whether I meant to do so or not (perhaps I was drunk and didn't know what I was doing). But if I am in a culture where urination is an act of respect then I have not insulted it. That's a silly example, but the traditional example of ways of disposing of dead bodies makes the same point. In some cultures burning a body is an insult, in others it's respectful. My point is only that the culture determines what is an insult and what is a mark of respect, not the thoughts of the individual agent, and not the reaction of any alleged victim ("It doesn't offend me, therefore it's not offensive"). If I take offense unreasonably then I have not been insulted, even though I feel as though I have been. And if I  am very thick-skinned, or just beaten down by constant abuse, then I will not feel feel insults that are still perfectly real. Nor can I turn a compliment into an insult by a secret mental act. Respect and disrespect are public, cultural acts, not private, mental ones on the part of the agent or the patient.

Wearing medals you have no right to wear devalues the currency of respect. It is counterfeit valor, it seems to me, more than stolen valor. And this is a harm to the valorous (assuming that medals are awarded for valor and not for, say, mindless obedience to the imperialist dictates of the military-industrial complex). It takes away some of the respect, or honor, that has been bestowed upon them. Dishing out medals too readily might have much the same effect, but it isn't necessarily dishonest, and it would be difficult to use the law to ensure that it never happened. Pretending to have been awarded a medal not only contributes to "respect inflation" but it also does so in a way that shows disregard for the respect in question (whereas simply awarding too many medals is compatible with high regard for what each medal means--it shows rather an overestimation of the worth of some actions). 

Apparently free speech is considered relevant to this issue by some people, but I don't see any reason to believe that people have a right to make false claims. Jokes, yes. People should be allowed to wear fake medals for purposes of satire, political protest, and theater. But it seems right to me that deception for personal gain should remain illegal.  

The blame game

Ethical theories can be thought of as ways to tell us who or what to praise and blame. But blaming itself can be a moral issue. That is to say, publicly attributing responsibility for an action sometimes seems to call for moral reflection. There is the question of who to blame, or which acts are blameworthy, and then the further question of whether to make the attribution of blame public. Not to mention other questions of how much blame to attribute and what punishment, if any, should go with the blame.

This Economist blog post rightly says, of Terry Jones' Qur'an burning and the subsequent murders by Afghan mobs, that, "The buck stops in each zealous breast."  That is, Jones is responsible for his irresponsible and offensive actions, and the mobs are responsible for theirs.  Jones is not responsible for the murders just because they would not have happened were it not for his actions.  In some sense he is the cause of these murders (the sense in question is the one I just explained, i.e. that they would not have happened without his action), but this is not, I would argue, to say that he is morally responsible for them. Anscombe uses adultery as an example to make this point, although she leaves the example very undeveloped.  Here is what I think she means.


Imagine a man suspects his wife of having an affair and confronts her about it.  She has done no such thing and refuses to dignify his questions with an answer.  He takes this as a confession and so cheats on his wife to get revenge. The adultery (we can imagine/stipulate) would not have happened if she had responded differently to his accusations (and perhaps also if she had not done whatever it was that made him suspicious in the first place).  So she is part of the causal chain that led to adultery.  But she is not remotely guilty of adultery in this case.  He is.  Being a link in a causal chain is not the same thing as being morally responsible for what comes at the end of that chain. (We might think she should have handled the situation differently, or we might not, but either way this does not affect the question of who is guilty of adultery in this case.) 


The Economist article goes on, though, to say that: "It's imprudent to issue official statements that suggest otherwise—that suggest responsibility rests with those who try to incite and not with those who choose to be incited." This is its criticism of 

General David Petraeus and Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, [who] issued a joint statement condemning the Florida zealot's zealotry and offering "condolences to the families of all those injured and killed in violence which occurred in the wake of the burning of the Holy Qur'an", omitting to note the agency and responsibility of the zealots actually responsible for the deadly mob violence, almost as if zealots in Florida are expected to control themselves while zealots in Afghanistan are not.  

But here is the statement in question:

In view of the events of recent days, we feel it is important on behalf of ISAF and NATO members in Afghanistan to reiterate our condemnation of any disrespect to the Holy Qur'an and the Muslim faith. We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Qur'an.

We also offer condolences to the families of all those injured and killed in violence which occurred in the wake of the burning of the Holy Qur'an.

We further hope the Afghan people understand that the actions of a small number of individuals, who have been extremely disrespectful to the Holy Qur'an, are not representative of any of the countries of the international community who are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people.

As far as I can see, this is the entire statement.  There is no false blaming of the victims here, no suggestion that the mobs are not responsible for what they have done.  It strikes me as very misleading to talk about what the statement almost suggests by what it omits to note.

Nor does the Economist explain why it is "imprudent" to issue such statements.  Is it because the general understanding of responsibility will be nudged closer to consequentialism as a result?  That seems unlikely.  I suspect the objection is not so much to any imprudence as it is to the unfairness of singling out one bigot who has insulted about 1.5 billion people when bigoted mobs have murdered 24 people in a related set of incidents.  There is a kind of unfairness about this.  Murder is much worse than insulting.  But it is the job of diplomats to be prudent, and any intelligent person reading the statement will realize that prudence is the name of the game here.

Free speech

Since I'm in the midst of a blogging frenzy (spring break starts this afternoon, so there is not much work I need to do right now), I might as well add my two cents' worth (it might be less than that) to the debate about the Westboro Baptists case. I pretty much agree with what Jahel Queralt Lange writes at Practical Ethics: "surely there is a lot of room for improvement in our democratic systems but to allow hateful speech doesn’t go in that direction."


What is at issue, it seems to me, is what value insults can possibly have.  For those unfamiliar with the case, (as I understand it) a family that hates gay people calls itself a "church" and "protests" at military funerals, insulting both gay people and the dead soldiers, in order to get publicity for their views.  The US Supreme Court has upheld their legal right to do this.  A commenter at Practical Ethics writes that: "if we are not confronted with opposition to our most commonly held beliefs then, as you say, we will not be able to “provide better arguments in favour of our convictions”, and understand the real meaning of our hatred of hate speech."  He is paraphrasing J.S. Mill, but seems to endorse Mill's view.  But arguments are not what you use to counter insults, are they?  In response to the paper I am going to be revising over spring break, one reviewer provided a number of comments along the lines of, "You assert x, but I don't believe x. Give me an argument that will change my mind."  This is the kind of comment that might cause me to improve the paper, so it clearly has value.  A comment along the lines of "This sucks!" or "God hates your paper" would have no such value.  Of course, in the face of such abuse I might improve the paper, but this would not be a direct response to this kind of opposition.  A direct response would be to insult the reviewer back.  


I was once called "four eyes" while walking down the street, minding my own business.  Was this opposition to my belief that I am not inferior because I wear glasses (or contact lenses)?  Did it spur me to provide better arguments in favor of my conviction that it is OK to be short-sighted?  Of course not.  And I see no reason to think that the answer would be different if I had been insulted because of being visibly gay, or a  soldier, or African American, or what-have-you.  The insults in such cases are more serious (I was genuinely amused by the weakness of the insult in my case), but this does not make them more valuable as spurs to argument in defense of cherished beliefs.  It makes them less valuable. 


One problem might be drawing a line between arguments or expressions of opinion, on the one hand, and insults, on the other.  For instance, denials that the Holocaust happened are surely often insults, produced in order to offend, not because they are believed.  But some people might genuinely believe that it did not happen.  I would not try to remove anyone's right to express opinions like this, nor the right to insult people as mildly as my insulter did.  Actually, what I mean to say about insults is that I would not support a law against such mild insults, because its enforcement would probably cause more problems than it solved.  But I see no value in a right to insult as such.  If pornography can be banned (within the limits set by the US Constitution), why not other forms of obscenity?  And how is it not obscene to insult the dead at a funeral? 

I, you, here, now

One of the passages in In the Heart of the Country that makes me think Coetzee has Wittgenstein in mind is this:

74. My father is exchanging forbidden words with Klein-Anna. I do not need to leave my room to know. We, he is saying to her, we two; and the word reverberates in the air between them. Now, come with me now, he is saying to her. There are few enough words true, rock-hard enough to build a life on,and these he is destroying. He believes that he and she can choose their words and make a private language, with an I and you and here and now of their own. But there can be no private language. Their intimate you is my you too. Whatever they may say to each other, even in the closest dead of night, they say in common words, unless they gibber like apes. How can I speak to Hendrik as before when they corrupt my speech? How do I speak to them?

This is not Coetzee speaking, of course, and the character who speaks might even be insane at this point, so we have no real reason to accept what is said here, beyond the words themselves and our own thoughts and experience. But the basic idea seems true to me. Just as my father's sleeping with another man's wife (not that he would!) might change the relationships between the four of us, so might the words used in the forbidden act become colored by this use.

On the other hand, if these words are spoken in private, how much difference can this use make to the general use of those words by others, who do not know what has been done with them in private?  If just two people attach special meaning to the words we and two, then this won't make much difference to the meaning of these words.  Unless the two people make up a large percentage of the community in question.  If others pick up on the fact that something is associated with these words, then using them might become awkward, or funny, or romantic, or whatever.  And then the language has changed, if only slightly.  So even private (i.e. behind closed doors) uses of words, in thought alone even, can change the public, shared language.  But they don't have to.

I wonder what this implies for solitary language users.  I wouldn't want to say that a Robinson Crusoe could not speak a language, but he might face problems with meaning, with making sense, that the rest of us don't.  If you're already inclined to agree with Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein then this will hardly be news, but I'm not, so it's interesting to me.

It also makes me think about original meaning and current use as determining the meaning of a word.  There was quite a discussion here about "the c-word" and whether its use is sexist or not.  Roughly speaking, Americans seem to think it is (necessarily) sexist because a) that's how it tends to be used in the US (as a nasty, reductive alternative to 'woman') and b) its origin is clearly gender-specific so its use as an insult must imply that there is something bad about that gender.  On the other hand, British and Australian people seem to think it is not sexist because, whatever the original intent of the first person to use it as an insult, it is not used as anything but an insult (i.e. meaning something like bastard, only stronger).  I lean towards this latter view, but of course words can carry historical baggage.     

Surely what matters is what words still carry with them, or have come to carry with them, not the original luggage they left home with, as it were. It doesn't matter if 'welch' (meaning to fail to pay a gambling debt) originally came from 'Welsh' (meaning of or pertaining to Wales) if no one remembers this connection. (Does it? According to my dictionary the origin of 'welch' is unknown, by the way.) But it is no easy matter to know what someone remembers, or might remember, or might come to think. Words with a dubious past are always liable to have this past brought up, but innocent words (such as 'niggardly') might still upset people. And this kind of damage seems more important to me than questions of etymology in deciding which words to use when. What words should remain in currency seems to be a kind of political decision, and the politics of Robinson Crusoes are hard to imagine or understand. Which relates to the idea of ethics for one that Christensen addresses.

Being offended

The paradigmatic letter to the editor in England is signed "Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells." Hence The Anti-Nowhere League's calling themselves the band that disgusted Tunbridge Wells. Since I used to live there, I like to think of myself as something of an expert on disgust and being disgusted. People get it wrong all the time.

The Kenneth Howell case is back in the news again. On p. 14 of the report we read:

Offensiveness. From the foregoing it should be clear that students have no right not to be offended; indeed, students deeply committed to some economic, political, religious, or philosophical teachings may be profoundly offended by having to engage with faculty criticism of those teachings—the more serious and thoughtful the criticism, the greater the likelihood of offense. We could not do our job, which is to instill the habits of a critical mind, if we had to be chary of giving offense. Accordingly, Professor Howell’s observations on homosexuality, relevant to the subject of moral natural law and its relationship to utilitarianism, should not be held to account because a student took offense. But they can be faulted on grounds having nothing to do with hostile student reaction; that is, as the Committee reads it, for being unlearned and jejune.

But surely students do have a right not to be offended. What they don't have is a right not to feel offended or to take offense. Professors should not insult their students, nor be offensive in other ways. A commenter at insidehighered.com complains of being offended by political correctness. But this is not offensive. At worst it is ridiculous, but it insults no one. A professor who casually uses "the N word," on the other hand, is being offensive. Howell's email was borderline, I think (I haven't re-read it very carefully, but a quick scan didn't reveal any obvious horrors). It's more a bit stupid and insensitive than anything else.

It seems to me that Howell is pretty muddled about natural law ethics, but it's what he says about utilitarianism that has got the most attention. The report says this:

Though Howell connected utilitarian analysis to the role of individual consent, utilitarianism does not; utilitarianism takes a purely consequential approach to moral reasoning irrespective of individual consent. Further, according to McKim, Howell’s account of how a utilitarian would assess a decision of whether to engage in homosexual activity misstates how a utilitarian would assess the full range of interests at stake.

Utilitarianism is standardly understood as being purely consequentialist, but Anscombe invented the word 'consequentialism' in order to distinguish a new kind of theory from utilitarianism. So it seems reasonable to me to treat utilitarianism as not taking a purely consequentialist approach. Consent then could come into it, but it isn't clear how it does so. Not in Howell's simple way, I'm pretty sure.

How a utilitarian would assess a decision of whether to engage in homosexual activity is an interesting question. The fact that the views and prejudices of others might figure so much in the decision is a sign that utilitarianism is wrong. Again, anyway, Howell gets this wrong too.

Mosque outrage

The talk about a mosque at Ground Zero seems like a complete non-story, since it's not a mosque, it's not at Ground Zero, and it is to be built on private property in a free country. Two things about it are interesting though. One of these is the fact that it has become a story, partly because some people seem to be little more than generators of some substance that needs to be spewed out and that can only be discharged in the form of words relating to an item in the news. It's also seemingly because no one is ever reported as being anything but either for the mosque or against it. So if you say that you believe in freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom to do what you want on your own property as long as it's legal, then you are reported as being "for the mosque." There aren't allowed to be more than two sides to any issue and whoever complains about something first gets to dictate what the issue is.

The other interesting thing is that this is an issue that brings up the question of insults. Imagine that someone did want to build an actual mosque at (not just near) Ground Zero. Imagine further that it was not a nice Sufi imam behind the plan but an al Qaeda sympathizer. Wouldn't this be at best insensitive and at worst horribly insulting to the victims of the September 11th attacks? It seems to me that the US Constitution would protect the right to build such a mosque in such a place, but it wouldn't be a non-story. And so, it seems to me, just pointing out that we have freedom of religion, etc., is perhaps not the best response to the opponents of the Cordoba Initiative's Community Center. It is also helpful to point out, as has been done, that it isn't actually a mosque, isn't actually at Ground Zero, Muslims are not the same thing as terrorists, etc.

Because of all this, the proposed center is not an insult to the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center. Even if some people think it is. What is or is not an insult is not determined solely by how the offended party feels. The relevant consideration is more something like how a reasonable person, informed of all the pertinent facts, would feel. So the fact that some people could be caused to feel offended by just about anything is neither here nor there. The limits of the right to insult are hard to draw, but fortunately we don't need to do so in this case.

Thinking the unthinkable

Elizabeth Costello objects to Paul West's having thought his way into and brought back to life the executions of people who plotted to kill Hitler. Stephen Mulhall discusses this on pp. 203-213 of The Wounded Animal.

If I were him I would have brought in Plato's story about wanting to go and look at some dead bodies behind a wall (he mentions Plato, but not this story specifically, as I recall). Plato tells the story (as I remember) to defend his belief that in addition to the rational part of the soul and the monster of desire, we also contain another part, one that can get angry when we stoop to such base acts as rubbernecking at faces of death. Costello's view is, roughly, that there are some things we should not look at, some places we should not go. The curious, lustful monster should be kept in some kind of check.

Mulhall contrasts this with an ideal of realism, which demands that we seal ourselves off from no bit of reality. He writes that Coetzee goes ahead and represents the very things that Costello, in Coetzee's story, refuses to represent (see p. 211). But it isn't clear to me that this is true. There is a difference between writing a novel that quotes bits of West's book, on the one hand, and writing a book like West's, on the other. I haven't read all of Coetzee's work, but I don't remember him going into (porno)graphic detail when it comes to torture, rape, and murder.* These things happen, but off-stage. So he does, it seems to me, retain a sense of the obscene. Its existence is not denied, but it is not inhabited either. You might leave one of Coetzee's novels knowing (in some sense, to some extent) what it is like to be, say, him, but not with any improved sense of what it is like to be a torturer or rapist. So here is a point where I think Mulhall goes wrong (although, of course, it might be me that is wrong).

Does Coetzee then fail to be a true realist? Well, perhaps that isn't what he really wants to be. But no, I don't think he does fail in this way. Preserving the phenomena, capturing the facts, keeping it real means not pretending that obscene things don't happen, but also not pretending that they are not obscene.

*I'm not saying that West does this, but it seems to be Costello's view that he does.