Passive Racism

     I was just arguing with someone about the definition of racism. He seemed to believe that racism was all about hate, that if you didn't hate you weren't racist. So I proposed the following thought experiment: Suppose you're a white person living in a society in which nobody hates anyone, but everyone believes everyone else is racist. You're sitting in a coffee shop full of white customers, when in walks a black customer. You don't mind, but you look around a bit because you want to see how the other customers react. The shopkeeper looks nervous, too, and seems to be trying to get the black customer to leave, pretending not to notice them at first, then when that doesn't work, serving them very brusquely and putting their drink in a to-go cup instead of a china mug. It seems a little rude, actually, but you don't say anything because, well, it's none of your business and anyway nobody else will back you up, since as far as you know, you're the only person who doesn't hate blacks. (You don't know it, of course, but the only reason the shopkeeper is acting this way is because she's worried she'll lose you as a customer if she doesn't get rid of the black customer.)

     This dynamic applies throughout this hate-free society. Black applicants have trouble getting hired, getting loans for housing, getting witnesses to exonerate them when accused of crimes, etc. Nobody hates them, but everybody thinks everybody else does, and nobody wants to anger the majority. Maybe some people even go out of their way to pander to what they think the majority wants. Maybe the coffee shop puts up a sign "No Colored" and refuses to serve black customers at all. Not out of hate, but just because they think (perhaps even accurately) that the black customers they lose spend less than the white customers they'll gain. Just a business decision, no racist motives involved. Maybe a politician decides to pander even more, promising policies of segregation and selective advantages for whites, not because he actually hates blacks but because he wants white votes. And, depending on how cleverly he makes his pitch, it might actually work. After all, if he offers a 10% tax cut to all whites, for example, it's pretty easy to rationalize that isn't really taking anything away from anyone else (even though it is), so hey, why not vote for it?

     And so, you could end up with a full-blown apartheid state, full of aggressively discriminatory policies and institutions, in which each and every person can still quite sincerely and honestly profess not to hate anyone. Not a single racist to be found anywhere, and yet a society that is every bit as thoroughly and consistently racist as if it were deliberately set up by racists. 

     Now imagine someone protests this state of affairs, and suggests that maybe we should reform some of these unjust institutions that just happen to have these racist effects. You might wholeheartedly agree in principle, because after all you’re not racist. But that 10% tax break for whites? Hey, you need that; how else can you afford to support your family? And you’re not racist; why should you be punished by a tax hike? That might be going a little too far, and so maybe you voice some opposition to the idea. Pretty soon you’re actively opposing efforts to implement the sorts of changes that a truly equal society would require. And now you’re acting like a racist, though not because you hate anyone because golly you know deep down you really truly don’t hate anyone. You just don’t think it’s fair that you should have to give up any of the advantages you’ve come to feel entitled to. But heck no, you're not racist, are you? Of course not! And anyone who says so just doesn't understand the real you, right?

     This isn’t quite the sort of world we live in, but only because in our world, there actually are people who genuinely and openly hate on the basis of race, though I suspect there are relatively few of them. Most people today really like to think they’re not racist, and if hatred were a necessary ingredient of racism, then they’d be right. 

But as the thought experiment shows, you don’t need hate to have a thoroughly racist society. You don’t even need indifference. Maybe you weep the sincerest tears of private anguish at the racial injustice of your society, and maybe your participation in these institutions and practices is with the greatest reluctance, but remember that every single other member of your society might be weeping their own tears just as sincerely over the very same injustice, and yet somehow it persists, because nobody is willing to do anything about it.

     And believing “I’m not racist!” is one of the ways we tell ourselves we don’t have to.

Now is not the time

     After another shocking mass shooting, emotions are always high.  People are understandably afraid and angry, and desperately looking for a solution -- any solution -- without stopping to carefully and rationally consider how those "solutions" will actually affect their long term security. They just want to do something about it.
     And of course, there will be people who try to cynically exploit these passions for their own ends.

     But now is not the time to be trying to sell more guns. Out of respect to the victims, I am calling for a  ___ day moratorium on the sale of firearms, one day for each victim. Stop trying to monetize this tragedy!

A Strange Pathology of Lying

     In my last post, I mentioned the Kantian analysis of the morality of lying, something I've been contemplating a lot lately. I've been trying to understand the reasons why people tell lies. Sometimes the reasons are obvious (using a falsehood to convince someone to give you something, for example) but sometimes it can be baffling. Especially confusing to me is the blatant, obvious lie, told directly to the person best equipped to recognize it as such. I've encountered this many times, but the first I can recall was way back when I was in junior high school. I went (as I often did) to the local convenience store with a friend for our usual dose of unnecessary sugary snacks. Having made my purchase first, I went outside to wait, and while sipping on my slush, a couple of girls I didn't know arrived with their dog, who (as dogs do) immediately started sniffing at my crotch. I look at it, it looked at me, and suddenly it yipped and bit my thigh. Playfully, I suppose; it didn't draw blood or even hurt, but it did tear a small hole in my trousers.
    I was startled, and said, "Your dog just bit me!"
    "No it didn't," the dog's owner said.
    "No, look! It tore a hole, right here!"
    "You had that hole before. I saw it," she replied instantly.
    That she would say such a thing surprised me even more than the dog biting me. I was so dumbfounded at the audacity of the lie that I just stood there blinking incredulously as my friend came out with his purchase, and we left.

     I have thought about this incident occasionally over the years, and others like it. For quite some time, I could not make any sense of why she would have expected me to believe her testimony against my own experience. In the moment, the strategy worked by simply stunning me; I just was not prepared for so brazen a falsehood, spoken with such confidence. But I found it hard to imagine that being a viable long-term strategy, because sooner or later people will stop being surprised.
     Eventually, it made sense when I realized she wasn't lying to convince me; she was lying to her friend, who would very probably trust her over a complete stranger, and feel obliged out of loyalty to back her up. She may also have been signalling to me that she was prepared to lie if I took the matter to some authority, and that I should expect her friend to support her story over mine. For her friend, it was a loyalty test.

      And so I can see how a narcissist can easily fall into the habit of lying like that. Quite apart from the fact that it often works (at least with people who are unprepared for it) to deflect an accusation, there must be a sense of power and affirmation, when your friend who knows you're (probably) lying, goes along with it out of loyalty to you. When you persuade your friend to do the right thing, you can't really take all the credit for it, but if you get them to do something wrong out of loyalty to you, you know you can take it personally. It must be quite a rush.
   
   

Guns for Self-Defense: A Kantian Answer

     I've always been fond of Kant's intensely logical approach to ethics that culminates in his categorical imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
     That's pretty dense text, so let me illustrate it with probably the most famous example, his stand on lying.

     Suppose you're in a situation where you might be considering telling a lie. Say, for example, you're applying for a loan, and the applications asks you to state your annual income. You know that if you put down anything less than $50,000 a year, you will be refused the loan.  You also know you only make $42,000 a year. So the only way you can get this loan is if you lie about your current income.
     Now, applying Kant's categorical imperative means that you should be able to wish that everyone in your situation would act exactly as you would. If you decide that you should lie on the loan application, then you're deciding that everyone ought to lie when it's the only way to get the loan. But that would mean that the loan officer would expect people to lie, and thus know that she couldn't rely on the information on the application form. And this, of course, would completely defeat the purpose of lying in the first place. Thus, you cannot rationally lie on the form while wishing that everyone else would do the same thing in your situation. You end up having to either accept that you have a moral duty not to lie, or come up with some special rule that only applies to you and nobody else. And while lots of people do indeed think they're just that special, it's kind of hard to get the rest of us to agree on who that one special exempt person should be. (And, in the case of lying, it still won't work because you need your status as the one special person to be a secret, or again, no one will believe what you say.)

     Well, there's a very similar logic to the issue of carrying guns for self-defense. Just yesterday I saw (again) one of those "share if you agree!" memes urging for Canada's laws to be revised to allow people to carry concealed firearms to protect themselves. And sure, at first glance, that seems like a reasonable thing to want. If you're afraid some random stranger might attack you, naturally you're going to want to be able to arm yourself.
     But what happens if you apply the categorical imperative here? You, in arming yourself against random strangers, must also wish that everyone else should arm themselves against random strangers who might attack them. And bear in mind: to them, you are one of those random strangers who might attack them.
     I often hear from gun advocates that we shouldn't be afraid of them being armed because obviously law-abiding citizens aren't going to shoot you if you don't attack them first. And yet, their argument for going around armed is based on a fear that they will be attacked by a random stranger they didn't attack first.
     The rule cannot be universalized. At some point they have to resort to special pleading. Their fear of random strangers is rational enough to warrant getting a gun, but our fear of random strangers is not rational enough to warrant prohibiting them from getting a gun. The problem is that there is no principled way to distinguish between good guys who just want to defend themselves and any other random stranger.

     In short, if you can't trust me not to attack you, why should I trust you not to attack me?

Another idiot. Stay calm, people.

     Last night, in my home town of Edmonton, Alberta, someone smashed a car into a barricade and stabbed a police officer before running off. Later, in a rented truck, the same person (it's alleged) led police on a violent and dangerous chase, deliberately running down pedestrians before flipping the truck and finally being apprehended. It's being investigated by police as an incident of terrorism, in part because reportedly an ISIS flag was found in his car.

     Again, I want to urge people to keep this in perspective. Some idiot did roughly the same amount of damage as a single drunk driver; the only difference is that maybe he was drunk on ideology instead of whiskey.
     I've said most of what I ever want to have to say about this kind of thing. Here and here and here. These guys are idiots, and there's no reason to be more afraid of them than of a drunk or negligent person in any other capacity. And indeed, there's good reason not to be afraid of them, because unlike the drunk driver, the wannabe terrorist is actively trying to make you afraid; that's his whole goal. If we stop reacting as if these idiots are some huge powerful monster that Must Be Stopped, maybe they might figure out sooner that random acts of violence don't really advance their cause. (Yes, of course they must be stopped, but rewarding them by panicking in abject fear/rage is not an effective way to do that. They are basically criminals, and we have a legal system designed to deal with criminals; they're not an enemy army, as much as they may be deluded into thinking of themselves as such, and we don't need to treat them as one.)

     I think all I want to add right now is to just comment on how spectacularly pathetic this sort of terrorism is, when you stop to think about it. I mean, Edmonton suffers dozens of traffic deaths and hundreds of serious injuries every year, simply as a result of basic incompetence behind the wheel. "Meet our demands, or we will crush you with our mighty incompetence!"
     Look, all you devout DAESh sympathizers and wannabe martyrs. These vehicular assaults do not show you to be righteous or heroic or mighty or determined. You're literally doing what the rest of us do by accident. The message this really sends is that you are so miserable, powerless and desperate that you can't think of any better way to express yourselves than to make other people suffer unnecessarily. That's terribly sad on so many levels, not least of which is that you make it pretty much impossible for any decent person to actually help you. And the thing is, most of us actually want you to be happy and fulfilled. Happy and fulfilled people don't do that stuff.

I will be forced to...

     There's something that happens a lot in movies and TV shows, and it always annoys me when it does. Scenario: Bad guy is threatening some evil act unless their demands are met. Let's say they're threatening to kill hostages if they don't receive a ransom. And then they says something like, "Do this, or I will be forced to kill a hostage."
     Forced. That's the part that always irks me, because it's such an obvious lie. Maybe it wouldn't bother me so much if it were actually refuted in words, but usually the hostages are rescued or the bomb is defused or the disaster averted by some heroic act of violence (usually aided by some clever detective work). I find myself wishing the negotiator or hero or whoever would just say something like this:

     "No. Let's be clear: Nothing I do forces you to kill hostages. You chose to create this situation, you took those hostages, and you are responsible for the choice to kill them or not. You don't get to pretend this is someone else's fault. You want to be in control? Fine. You're in control. But don't turn around and tell me I'm the one who decides whether they live or die."

     Of course, I'm not a trained hostage negotiator. I have no idea what they are taught about how to deal with this sort of situation, and it might be that what I long to hear in a crime drama is the exact opposite of what a knowledgeable professional would be saying in real life. Even so, in the TV drama, I'd like at least to hear the argument refuted, maybe not directly to the bad guy, but by someone on camera.

     To be sure, as I’ve written before, it can be rational to tie your hands, to make it impossible for you to change your mind about a course of action, so as to make for credible threats or promises. It can, therefore, be a perfectly sensible strategy for the hostage-taker to commit irrevocably to killing the hostages if the demands are not met. This was the whole idea behind Mutual Assured Destruction, which arguably helped prevent the Cold War from heating up. 

     But the antagonists in the Cold War went to great lengths to establish technical systems to actually take away the element of choice in order to render the retaliatory threat credible; the typical hostage-taker in a movie or TV show usually hasn’t had the time or resources to do that, and attempts to rely on getting people to believe them, that they’re 100% serious and they really really mean it, they’ll kill a hostage, they swear. And the trouble there is that it’s actually only half of what they need to convince people of, and the less important half at that; I might very easily believe you're willing to kill the hostages, but if I doubt you'll release them after I meet your demands, you'll have a hard time getting me to cooperate.  (This is probably the main reason there have been so very few airline hijackings since 2001; passengers and crew now believe there is absolutely nothing to be gained by complying or cooperating in any way.)

     So that's what bothers me about the "I will be forced to..." language. It's not just that it's a lie. It's that it's such a stupid lie, inconsistent with its own purpose on so many levels. It's uttered by someone who's trying to assert absolute control over the situation, while at the same time it disingenuously disavows that very control. Meanwhile, its success depends on creating trust (the trust that compliance will be rewarded) even as it undermines that very trust.

On Property Rights and Game Rules

     The new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has taken the position that property rights should be enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I'd like to take a moment to explain why that's actually not such a great idea. I’ll start by talking about a problem I struggled with many years ago, designing a rules system for a live roleplaying game.

     In most any roleplaying game, there’s a fictional world in which the players' characters live and operate, and that world usually includes physical artifacts like weapons, tools, money and so on, many of which can change hands during the course of the game. In a live action roleplaying game, where players wear costumes and move around in an actual physical site, these items are represented by actual physical props or tokens.

     But here’s the problem: those actual physical props often belong to individual players, and while a player may be obliged under the game rules to let an opponent take the imaginary game world item the prop represents, the prop itself may be something they’re unwilling to part with. 

     Now, there are a number of ways to get around this, and in practice it’s not usually a huge problem because the players usually understand from the outset what’s involved in playing the game. But I was still interested in structuring the game rules so that they’d mesh with the laws of the real world.

     The solution I adopted was to issue paper chits to represent (and to document the in-game effect of) every game item for which these issues might arise, and to constitute all of these chits as the legal property of the game organizers, not the players who may happen to be in possession of them. The players would be permitted to carry and use the game items, subject to the rules imposed by the game organizers. You could use your own costume or prop items for roleplaying purposes, and players often would tape these chits to their prop weapons to make brandishing them more dramatically satisfying, but as far as the game itself was concerned, the chit was the item; the player’s real-world property was merely a visualization aid.

     So, within the game world, there was an emergent economy. Some players might have skills or abilities that they used to collect various natural resources (represented by chits) that other players might process into various other goods (also represented by chits) that might be traded to other players, and so on. And within that context, it would be completely appropriate for your character to speak of the chit in your hand as your sword, your own rightful property that it would be immoral and illegal to steal from you, while in the ‘real world’ the chit was legally the property of the game organizers, whose property rights would be violated if you failed to deal with it in accordance with the rules they’d specified. You’d be cheating (and breaching a real-world contract) if you failed to turn it over to a player whose character had satisfied the game rule requirements to take it from you by game-force.

     Consider, then, what happened here. The goal of the game organizers is to create a playable game world in which people can pursue various objectives, interact in a variety of ways, and exchange various items in ways that advance the storytelling objectives of the game organizers. And so rules were created governing how the game resources, i.e. the items, would change hands within the game world. The question of which character owns any given item is answered with reference to those game rules: did the character obtain possession of it in accordance with the rules of the game? Ownership is not a fundamental fact-about-the-world that precedes the rules;  it is a consequence of applying those rules. 

     And those rules can change from time to time, as the rulemakers recognize some inadequacy or injustice that needs to be fixed. Sometimes that means a player is going to be disappointed, say, when an overpowered magic sword gets nerfed, and players do sometimes complain bitterly when something like that happens. Changing the rules in any way introduces disruptions and continuity issues, and is generally to be avoided, but players have no particular right to be insulated against changes to the game rules. 

     I want to argue that this is almost exactly analogous to the property rights we enjoy in the ‘real’ world. We have, as a society, developed elaborate rules to facilitate the distribution of goods and services in a free and democratic society, and these rules involve a concept we call “ownership”. It’s a pretty good system, overall, though it does lead to some injustices and might need some tweaking now and then. Intellectual property is an example of such a tweak, intended to allow creators of ideas (which, once created, are no longer subject to rules of scarcity) to participate in an economy where the food, clothing and shelter they need are in finite supply. 

     So this is what I mean when I say that property rights are not fundamental. They’re not the basic rights upon which the entire legal system is built, but rather consequences of that legal system. You claim to own a parcel of land? Okay, we can apply the rules and test that claim (checking the registry at the Land Titles Office), and if you think there’s a mistake you can argue for a judge to issue an order registering what it ought to be. Your right to a fair procedure in answering the question is fundamental to our entire system; your right to a particular outcome of that procedure is not.

     That is why I argue that property rights should not be enshrined explicitly in the Charter. We may decide, as happens from time to time, that there’s a flaw in our property system, and when that happens we can and should be able to fix it. That someone ends up less well-off does not necessarily mean that they have suffered an injustice, and to see this most clearly one need only consider the example of chattel slavery. At one time, the law recognized property rights in human beings: some people were owned by other people. Eventually that came to be recognized as just plain wrong, and the law had to change.

     Did that change violate the property rights of the former slave holders? Did they lose something for which they ought justly to be compensated? Or did we just come to recognize that we were all wrong about what property rights they actually held, and they were never truly entitled to it? People don’t have a right to be compensated for taking away something they should never have had in the first place.

     Slavery may be an extreme example, but it illustrates clearly that even legally recognized official title to something (or someone) may turn out to be a gross injustice to be remedied. Society needs to be able to adjust the rules of property from time to time, and it will not always be the case that a right that’s taken away needs to be compensated in some way. 

     To put it another way, our economy is in some sense a game, and when we adjust the rules to make the game better, we have no obligation to preserve the advantages enjoyed by the people who have been winning under earlier versions of the rules.

Idle Thoughts on Two Symphonies

     Some time ago, there was some mention on the radio about a piano concerto, Beethoven, and the number five, and my father (who absolutely adores the Emperor Concerto) leapt at the chance to go. And so we got a phone call from my mother asking if we would like to go to symphony. Of course, when we got there, we found out that it was actually a Prokofiev piano concerto, and Beethoven’s 5th symphony, which was kind of a disappointment for my dad.

     But not for me. I don’t like to talk about favourites, because there are so many things to like about so many things, and I’d much rather talk about what I like about something than try to identify a favourite symphony or food or anything else. But Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies both come pretty close to what I’d call favourites, if I were forced to use that word. And they’re almost complete opposites, at least in the way I hear them.

     Consider the Fifth first. If you don’t know anything about classical music, you almost certainly know the opening bars of the fifth: da da da DUM! Well, this theme, this rhythm actually runs through all four movements of the symphony in various forms. I never noticed this until it was pointed out to me, many years ago in an introductory music appreciation course, but now it’s obvious. 

     For me, the Fifth is like someone explaining Newtonian physics. It starts with the bold, simple statement in four symbols: “F=ma”, which it repeats for emphasis: F is m a.  And then it illustrates with example after example after example, driving home the basic principle that force equals mass times acceleration.  In the first movement, it’s plain and obvious, like the ideal frictionless scenarios of introductory physics courses, but the motif appears in ever more subtle and complex guises in subsequent movements, as if showing how the complications of friction and gravity are really just special cases of the same basic principle. F is ma. It is a spectacular, brilliant, elegant truth that, once you learn how to look for it, is everywhere in everything. 

     While the Fifth is expository, exploring and explaining an explicit motif from the very beginning, the Ninth to me represents the process of discovering such a principle. It begins in somber D minor (the saddest key, as Nigel Tufnel observed) and seems to paint a mood of angst and despair. The world is a dark and dangerous place, life is scary and seems hopeless. But as the piece progresses, there are little hints here and there of hope, little snippets of the familiar Ode to Joy that will come. The melody emerges, not as a sudden epiphany but as a gradual realization, following subtle lines of inference to a conclusion that only seems obvious once you actually understand it, though once you do you marvel at how you could ever have failed to notice it. I’d mentioned in a previous blog post how I once fell asleep listening to the Ninth, and dreamed I had logically proved the existence and immortality of the soul; that’s the kind of triumphant joy I feel in the Ninth.

     

Sharia in Canada: Don't Panic

     What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the words “common law”?

     If you’re like most people, it’s probably something to do with people living as a married couple without benefit of a formal church wedding, or, as it used to be called, “living in sin”. And if you happened to be someone who thought this sort of sin was a very big deal, you’d probably be alarmed to hear that our own Canadian courts regularly applied common law.

     But before you start creating panicked memes about moral decline, it’s worth understanding that the phrase “common law” actually refers to the legal system in use throughout most of the English-speaking world. Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia are all common law jurisdictions.

     English common law evolved over many centuries, and began with the King sending around judges to resolve disputes and administer royal justice. Very often, cases came before these judges that weren’t clearly covered by some royal decree, and so they’d have to apply their own careful judgment to figure out what was a fair decision in accordance with the principles of natural justice. Judges carefully recorded their decisions and, more importantly, the reasoning they relied upon, so that the same principles could be consistently applied in all subsequent cases. It’s important, after all, for people to be able to know what their obligations are if they’re to be expected to obey the law, so judges take pains to ensure that their judgments follow precedent. In principle, the laws pronounced by one judge should be the same laws commonly applied by any other judge; hence the name “common law”.

     In the legal profession, the term “common law” has come to mean judge-made law, the traditional principles applied by judges in previous cases. This is distinguished from statute law, where the King or Parliament or a legislature enacts a written statute that explicitly spells out new rules (or sometimes simply codifies the existing common law). An Act of Parliament is a formal, punctual event that brings a law into existence, while common law rules generally have no such birthdate; common law principles are thought to derive from natural justice and reason, and thus were in a sense always there, just waiting to be articulated and refined by whatever case happened to bring it out to be examined.
     So compare, then, a common law partnership with a legal marriage. In a formal wedding, some legal or religious authority officially pronounces the couple married, as of a certain date. The marriage comes into existence with that act, much as a statute comes into existence via Act of Parliament. But a common law partnership is one which is deemed to exist by virtue of the practical characteristics of a marriage: these people live together as spouses do, share resources, perhaps raise children, and so a court would find them to be married in practice, whether or not they had any formal ceremony declaring them to be so.

     You see, then, that while common law marriages are a part of the common law system, they are really just one relatively small part of the entire legal system we call the Common Law. But you can imagine how, if you didn’t know that (and you happened to have some fairly puritan ideals about marriage) you might be opposed to a proposal to apply common law in Canada.

     Now, what do you think of when you hear the phrase “sharia law”? Stoning adulterers? Executing apostates?

     Well, it turns out that sharia is, like the common law, actually an entire legal system, and like the common law it includes provision for the definition and punishment of crime. And yes, in some sharia jurisdictions, some of those punishments are barbaric. (The same has been true in some common law jurisdictions, some of which have sanctioned slavery, and some of which still carry out executions, though most have abolished the death penalty.) But it’s important to recognize that sharia also includes a large and well-developed set of civil law principles governing everything from commercial transactions to marriage and divorce. After all, people in Islamic countries tend to have the same basic needs as people anywhere else, and their courts need to resolve the same sorts of disputes.

     Most of these sharia civil law principles work fairly well, and are no more inherently unjust or regressive than the ones we use in the common law tradition. They’re just different. For example, the Koran forbids charging interest on a loan, which is a pretty important part of many common law commercial transactions. But commerce doesn’t grind to a halt in Islamic countries. Instead, they have a different way of structuring their financial arrangements that relies more on equity than debt. Loans are treated as investments; what we’d call the “lender” in common law receives a fair share of the proceeds of whatever the “borrower” does with the money. The end result is essentially the same; it’s just a bit different how they calculate it.

     Now, you’ve no doubt heard people who are worried that Canadian courts are going to start implementing sharia law. The fact is, though, that Canadian law has always been implicitly receptive to applying certain parts of sharia, or indeed any other legal system. And this is actually fundamental to how Canadian (and all common law countries’) courts work.

     Courts ultimately exist for just one purpose: to resolve disputes. If people agree on what is to be done, then there’s no reason for a court to get involved; it’s only when someone objects and they can’t negotiate a compromise on their own that an impartial third party needs to be called in to arbitrate.

     Accordingly, courts don’t usually interfere with things that all the parties before them agree on. So, for example, if two parties agree to resolve a dispute by flipping a coin, and they want an impartial judge to observe and confirm the toss, the judge won’t usually object, provided the court is satisfied everyone really does freely consent to the process.

     And this is fundamental to the concept of a contract. Parties can create legally binding obligations upon themselves, obligations that will be enforced by a court of law, by agreeing to the terms of a valid contract. Courts generally do not care what those terms are, so long as it doesn’t require someone to break the law. So if two people enter into a commercial contract that uses definitions from sharia law, the courts will enforce those terms just as they would any other. Indeed, the freedom to contract is fundamental to Canadian law, and prohibiting sharia-based contracts would be profoundly inconsistent with the common law itself.

     So this is really what people are talking about when they say that sharia is being applied by Canadian courts. Remember that courts are about resolving disputes; it’s only if both parties agree to a sharia principle that the courts will feel in the least bit bound to enforce it. In contract and family law disputes, courts can and should consider and apply sharia principles if the parties agree to them. And because there are significant numbers of Muslims relying on sharia based contracts and family arrangements, it’s actually a good idea for judges to receive some training in how these sharia principles work, since these sorts of cases come before the courts with some regularity.

     But there’s zero danger of Canadian courts applying sharia criminal law to cases in Canada. We aren’t going to be stoning adulterers anytime soon. Even if the adulterer agreed to follow sharia law in such a case, the Crown prosecutor wouldn’t be bound by that, and would still prosecute those who cast stones.

Existence, Extension and the Ontological Argument

Note: This is a paper I wrote as an undergraduate, which used to be on my old (pre Y2K) website. I thought I had transported it here, but apparently hadn't got to this one yet. The topic came up in another discussion online, so I here it is for reference.

     Nearly everyone is aware that pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, is an irrational number. That is, it cannot be expressed as the quotient of two whole numbers, no matter what those whole numbers are. In other words, although we've only actually calculated the value of pi to a few sextillion digits, we can categorically state that the string of digits will stretch out to infinity without ever settling into a permanent pattern of repetition. Indeed, we can even show that this is true despite the fact that no one has ever drawn, or will ever draw a perfect circle. It follows implicitly from the theoretical definition of a perfect circle; for pi to be rational, a circle would have to have a finite number of sides, which is incompatible with the meaning of the word circle.

     St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God hinges upon the assumption that existence is a predicable quality in the same sense that perfect, circle, and irrational are. In order for the argument to hold water, we must accept that the quality of existence follows implicitly from the concept of That Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived, just as the irrationality of pi follows implicitly from the definition of a perfect circle.
     In order to answer the question of existence's predicability, we must first articulate what it is we mean by predicability, and then see whether or not it is something which may be said of existence, i.e. is predicability predicable of existence?
     At first glance, we might well be inclined to assert that it is. Grammatically, at least, it is incontrovertibly a predicate, since it is a verb, and an intransitive one at that. One may intelligibly say of something that it exists, and perhaps more importantly, one may intelligibly say that something does not exist.
     However, the objection has been raised by the likes of Parmenides that being is in fact not a deniable trait. That is to say, it is contradictory to define something as non-existent. Anything which can be described can be described as "something which..."; to include non-existence among its characteristics is equivalent to describing it as "nothing which...". We might invent a class of objects called "not-beings", which have all the characteristics of beings except existence, and have the explicit quality of not-existence. Such definitions are inherently paradoxical, since by definition they cannot exist (or they'll be just ordinary beings, not non-beings) and they cannot fail to exist (since by failing to exist, they satisfy their definitions and therefore exist). This paradox is, by the way, of the same sort that Bertrand Russell used to attack set theory, i.e. by introducing the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.
     Very well, then. We have shown that the denial of existence cannot intelligibly be predicated of a thing. From this, it would seem to follow that the assertion of existence is obligatory. Does this mean that everything that can be spoken of or referred to in any way must necessarily exist? That dragons and minotaurs and those ghastly creatures of chaos, the unicorns, exist? Even more bizarre, that round squares and honest politicians exist?
     The last two we can deal with easily enough by the self-denial paradox; round squares are by definition logical impossibilities, just as are non-beings. And, just as the logical impossibility of self-denial allowed us to dispose of the denial of existence, we may handily dispose of the notion that predicated existence necessitates actual existence, or indeed that it has any connection whatsoever to actuality.
     What do we mean, then, when we say that something does not exist? Surely it is not nonsensical to say, "Dragons do not exist." How can we reconcile the implicit being in the definition of everything with the denial of being in the statement "Dragons do not exist"?
     Bertrand Russell did it by arguing that what we call existence is not a quality of the things themselves, but of the ideas of those things. That is, when we say that dragons do not exist, what we really mean is that of all the things there are, none of them are referred to by the word dragon or its attendant definition. (That definition, of course, must implicitly include being, if the definition is to be intelligible or possible.) Likewise, when we say that dragons DO exist, we really mean that the word dragon extends to something it intends. In other words, "Dragons exist" is a convenient shorthand for "The term dragon has an extension."
     Of course, this just puts Anselm's argument into different terms. Rather than saying that the maximally perfect being must exist, now, he would say that the intension of a maximally perfect being implies an extension. This seems a preposterous claim; how can an intension necessitate extension? And yet, there are simple examples. The word word, by its intension, cannot possibly fail to have extension. How might That Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived necessarily imply its own extension?
     Let us assume the existence, i.e., the extension of something. What it is precisely is unimportant. In fact, we might just point to some lump of matter, and label it with the convenient word, This. (If we wish, we can take nothing for granted, and take This to mean ourselves, after Descartes.) Its intension is very simple; it means whatever we happen to be pointing at, and thus is identical with its extension. Now, conceiving such an entity is trivially easy, as is accepting its existence. Since any whole is at least as great as any of its parts, it should also be possible to conceive the whole formed by This and some other thing. As long as there exists something outside of This, it is possible to conceive of something greater, namely [This + something else].
Following this to its ultimate conclusion, we find that That Than Which Nothing Greater Can Be Conceived intends simply the totality of everything which can be conceived. (Given that being is implicitly predicated of anything intelligibly conceived, it is trivially true that being is predicable of TTWNGCBC.) Is it sensible to say that TTWNGCBC lacks extension?
     It is possible, of course, to conceive of things which lack extension. However, some things are their own extensions, like the word word. The intension of TTWNGCBC says nothing specifically about physical existence; it only refers to something conceived. Nor does it necessarily have to be conceived; it need only be conceivable. Therefore TTWNGCBC need only be a potential idea to have extension. It is impossible to conceive of anything greater that the totality of all things conceivable, so there is nothing implicitly paradoxical about the intension of TTWNGCBC. Ergo, it is a potential idea, and is its own extension.

     TTWNGCBC therefore unquestionably exists, inasmuch as any idea may be said to exist. Anselm has chosen to call TTWNGCBC by the name God. I think a more elegant name would be simply Being, or perhaps Existence. In this way, Existence is most certainly not a predicate, but a noun, and the extent to which we say things exist depends in fact upon the extent to which their various predicates partake in Existence. Thus, dragons partake in Being by being large, fire-breathing, carnivorous and imaginary, while toads partake in Being by being small, fly-eating, amphibious and real.

Objectives in Online Argument: Why We Fight

     Last post, I talked about how formulating your goals properly can help to improve your patience and endurance in rhetorical conflict. But improving your endurance only matters if you actually have some reason to engage in an argument in the first place, and I often hear it said that getting into arguments (especially on the internet) is a waste of time and effort. I'll admit, as someone who often does get into arguments on the internet, that it can become quite frustrating, and in those moments it's easy to succumb to the belief that it's all futile and you should just never bother messing with the idiots.
     In this post, I want to argue that it is important to engage in debate, even with idiots, and I want to share the five objectives (in rough order of importance) I have every time I respond to some inane Facebook meme or comment on a blog or news item somewhere.

1.  Show up.
     It's been said that success is often just a matter of showing up, and this is true in rhetoric as well. If there's a contest, and only one person shows up, that person wins, no matter how inept or terrible they might be at whatever skill the contest is nominally intended to test. So if someone posts some argument online before an audience, no matter how flimsy a house of cards it may be, it stands if no one knocks it down.
     This may not seem important, but it is. There's a subtle but powerful psychological phenomenon at play here. If you're at a meeting, and a particular claim is repeated three times, you're likely to come away from the meeting with the impression that it was the consensus view, even if only one person repeated it three times and no one else was convinced. Imagine that. 10 people attend a meeting, and nine of them come away thinking they were the only ones who disagreed with the consensus view. And later, chatting with someone else from the meeting, you're maybe just a bit deferential to what you believe is the consensus, qualifying your comments with "I know you'll probably disagree with me here, but..." or maybe you won't bring it up at all. (Note that even if your friend agrees with you, the fact that you expected her to disagree actually reinforces the presumption that you two are in the minority, and everyone else still agrees with the original speaker.)
     Pay attention to this. It's why demagogues so often try to portray their opponents as unpopular losers, and why they so often couch their claims with phrases like "Everyone knows" or "Everybody says so" or "A lot of people are saying..."
     So my first objective in responding to something online is simply this: to foil the attempt to establish something as the conventional wisdom by showing that there's at least one person who doesn't actually agree.
     And it's worth noting that this objective is really easy to achieve. It doesn't call for any special skill at rhetoric, no special background knowledge. Just the ability to say, "I disagree," or even "I'm not sure I agree..." That's all it takes to prevent a stupid idea from winning by default.

2. Normalize disagreement.
     There's a widespread belief in many cultures, including ours, that it's rude to contradict someone. And while there are certainly many situations in which it is better to politely nod and smile, that's simply not the case when someone is trying to propagate ideas to the public (or semi-public circle of acquaintances). As I've argued before, there's a big difference between respecting a person and respecting their beliefs, and in fact, I think they're actually incompatible; it's disrespectful to a person's intellect to treat their beliefs as exempt from critical scrutiny.
     So one of the things I am trying to do by refuting things people post or share online is to show that it's okay to disagree with ideas, and that you can do so in a respectful manner. In particular, I want to convey the message that it's okay to disagree with me; if you think I'm wrong, I really do want you to tell me so and why.
     This objective is a little harder to achieve than the first, but only a little. It requires a bit more tact, because simply hurling out "You're WRONG, you idiot!" doesn't help to create a culture of reasoned discourse. And, if you're going to do it right, you really do have to demonstrate a good faith willingness to be corrected yourself, to admit when you're wrong and acknowledge when someone else is right. But these are things we should all be striving towards anyway, and so I think we should strive to model the behaviour we want to see in others. That means making it okay to argue.

3.  Improve your own understanding.
     Nothing teaches you a subject so effectively as trying to teach it to others. The process of trying to explain your position, or your doubts about someone else's position, is extremely helpful in clarifying your own understanding. And engaging with ideas you disagree with is especially good for this.
     Rhetoric, understood here as the art of reasoned debate, improves with practice. As with martial arts, there's much to be learned from facing new opponents, whose techniques may vary somewhat from the ones you've trained on. I learn something from every debate I have with anyone. Sometimes it's about the subject matter of the debate itself (and I end up having to revise, refine or even abandon my position on it entirely, which is "losing" the debate but winning in the bigger picture). Sometimes it's about rhetorical technique itself. But I always learn something.
     Note, by the way, that this applies not only to your own personal understanding but also to that of your allies on whatever issue you're debating. In martial arts, you can learn a lot also by watching others fight, and the same is true of rhetoric. Even if everyone in the audience is already on your side, they can benefit from watching your argument, learning perhaps new turns of phrase or analogies to support their position, or recognizing and learning from your missteps, so that when they find themselves in debates with other opponents elsewhere, they'll be better prepared.

4.  Win over the audience.
     Most people, when they get into any kind of argument, instinctively think that the objective should be to convince their opponent. This is quite natural, and indeed correct when you get into a face-to-face debate with your spouse about where you should go for dinner, or when you're trying to convince your boss to give you a raise. But in a typical internet debate over politics or vaccines or chemtrails, what's at stake is what beliefs prevail and become widely accepted, and your opponent is only one person out of potentially many in the audience. It's a numbers game, here: if there's just one undecided lurker and your opponent and no one else, and you manage to convince the lurker, you win 2-1. And usually there are more than just one lurker in the audience.
     Winning over the audience is not just more important because of the numbers; it's also much more realistically achievable. Both you and your opponent have invested quite a lot in publicly stating your positions, and however open minded and virtuous a rhetorician you might be, it always stings a bit to acknowledge a defeat (though it gets easier with practice). You cannot always rely on your opponent arguing in good faith and being a good sport. But the people in the audience, especially if they haven't spoken up, can change their minds more easily without losing face.
     The audience is always my priority in any online debate (outside of private email, of course) for these reasons, but also because it is another way to keep my cool. I keep reminding myself that however viciously ignorant my ass of an opponent is, there might be someone in the audience who innocently and sincerely thinks maybe he has a point. And so, rather than angrilly lashing out at my opponent for his stupidity, I have to address his arguments seriously enough to respect the intelligence of that undecided and presumptively reasonable lurker, to explain things clearly and persuasively enough to convince them, not my opponent.

5.  Win over your opponent.
     This objective is listed last, for reasons I've already mentioned in the previous entry: It's just not likely enough to be worth the effort. But it can happen, and when it does it's quite satisfying; there's a reason this is what we think of when we think of winning an argument.
     It's tempting to think that this is just icing, and it mostly is, but in the war of ideas, a decisive victory in one battle can be strategically important, because that's one fewer person who will be showing up for the other side, one person who won't be repeating that same lie three times at the meeting. It's one more demonstration for all to see that disagreement is okay. It's a sign you've improved your understanding as well as that of your (former) opponent, and perhaps a blueprint for your allies to follow to similar victories. And finally, it's a good indication that, if you've persuaded the person with the greatest motivation to oppose you, you've very probably won over most if not all of the audience, too.

     So, these are the objectives I have in mind in every online debate. I have found that it's extremely helpful to keep my mind focused on what I am trying to accomplish. It helps keep me from being distracted by irrelevant ad hominem attacks, to maintain my patience, and to better exploit weaknesses in my opponent's position. What's more, they're also useful in helping to decide when it's appropriate to just walk away from a potential argument.

Improving Your Rhetorical Stamina

     I have a feeling I'm going to be writing quite a bit more about this whole conceit of rhetoric-as-martial-art. I'm actually thinking of opening a dojo to teach and practice rhetorical technique in the Socratic style.

     This post, I want to talk about endurance in argument. Like physical martial arts, rhetorical combat can be tiring in its own way; it takes a lot of mental and emotional effort to do well, and the longer an argument goes on, the more tiring (and tiresome) it gets. Again, as with the physical martial arts, proper technique can help a lot, because it helps you to apply your effort more efficiently. As well, knowing proper technique reduces stress, which is itself very tiring.

     But there is another trick to improving your staying power, and that is to frame your goal differently.

     Many people go into a debate with the objective of convincing their opponent, which makes a certain amount of sense. After all, that's what all of your arguments are (or should be) built for: to be as persuasive as possible in supporting your claim. So it's natural to say to yourself, "I'm going to keep arguing until I win! As soon as I convince my opponent, I'll be done!"

     This is a fine objective, but the problem is that however confident you may be that you're right, your opponent wouldn't be arguing if she didn't feel just as certain she's right. And she's probably made up her mind to keep on arguing until she convinces you. Neither one of you considers defeat an option; victory or nothing! And you can't both win on those terms.

     Now, while determination to succeed is certainly a good thing, it's a bit of a trap in this case. If you're determined to fight until you win, and your opponent is anywhere near as determined as you are, eventually one of you will become so exasperated at the other's unwillingness to see reason that they'll conclude victory is impossible, and give up. Not concede defeat, mind you; they'll just say something like "It's pointless arguing with you!" and storm off. 

     The person who gives up first is often perceive to have lost, at least in the contest of wills, which is why they so often try to frame their retreat in face-saving terms that blame the opponent for being so unreasonable. It may or may not be an actual victory for the person who stays, but it is at least an advantage in the eyes of most audiences.

     The point here is that if you set out planning to argue until you win, you've got maybe a 50/50 chance of being the one who gets frustrated and gives up first, regardless of how right you are. Indeed, the more certain you are of your position and the obvious wrongness of your opponent, the likelier you are to conclude that their refusal to see reason is due to wanton stubbornness, rather than genuine good-faith disagreement.

     So do not set out to argue until you win. Instead, set out to argue until you lose. That is, decide that you will continue to defend your position until you are persuaded that it is no longer defensible, and you are forced to change your mind.

     I have found this approach to be very helpful in allowing me to keep up my patience in an argument, because it is no longer my failure to persuade my opponent that is prolonging things, but my opponent's failure to persuade me. That alone significantly reduces the mental stress and emotional fatigue of debate, but there is another significant advantage to framing the goal this way: it is the proper stance to take to effectively apply the Socratic method. 

     If my goal is to be convinced, rather than to convince, I will take pains to help my opponent express her position as clearly as possible, so that I may better understand it. And to that end, I will try to make my objections as clear as possible, in order to help my opponent (who may have already faced and overcome these same objections) put them to rest.

     

     Some people will think there is a danger to this approach, in that you might actually end up losing the argument, and being convinced by your opponent. I don't actually consider this losing, because you end up with a better understanding than you had before, but even if it is a defeat, this is another respect in which rhetoric is a martial art: a win is empty without the real possibility of defeat, and there is much to be respected in the warrior who acknowledges having been honourably beaten.