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Fever dreams

So my virus just keeps getting worse and worse.  Last night I coughed myself awake at 3 and decided, sagely, to continue coughing myself awake until about 10.  By that point, everything in my body hurt.  I then cancelled my class (I think the last time I cancelled a seminar was the day Jamie was born), made a doctor’s appointment at 2, and came home with Prednisone and Allegra-D and Augmentin and Nasacort and Tussionex with codeine.  Woo hoo!  It’s the health-care cliché—a boatload of meds!

Over the past few nights I’ve been having weird fever dreams about one of the books I assigned for this week in the Disability Studies seminar: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals.  I may be the first person in the world other than MacIntyre himself to dream about the book.  But that’s what happens when you have a fever and you’re preparing a seminar.  At one point on Monday, when I came upon this passage—

We therefore have to distinguish between what it is that makes certain goods goods and goods to be valued for their own sake from what it is that makes it good for this particular individual or this particular society in this particular situation to make them objects of her or his or their effective practical regard

-- I imagined, before I dropped off to sleep, that MacIntyre was driving an enormous RV into a highway rest stop, whereupon he saw that Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Richard Rorty were walking their dogs in the picnic area, and decided to turn the RV around and get back on the highway.  (This actually makes some kind of sense, since neither Smith nor Rorty would accept the category of “goods to be valued for their own sake,” insisting instead that the value of all goods, even those of the Aristotelian virtues, is contingent on the pragmatic ends they serve.  But why an RV?) Last night I fell asleep thinking that MacIntyre’s overwhelming emphasis on the development of independent practical reason (thanks to which we can provide justifications for the goals we seek and the means by which we seek them) leads him to (a) construe disability too narrowly as something that, above all, challenges the development of independent practical reasoners, as if blind people or paraplegics can’t be every bit as rationally self-critical about their goods and their goals as anyone else (cognitive disability is quite another matter), and (b) introduce the problematic of disability too late in the analysis, just at the point at which he needs it as the foundation of his (admirable) ethic of just generosity.  These are not entirely fair criticisms, by the way; my mind has been pretty cloudy of late.  But thought (a) really does appear plausible on page 75 of MacIntyre’s book, and thought (b) made me dream—before I woke myself coughing—that the question at issue was whether MacIntyre would have dinner on the table for Jamie by 8 pm.

But none of that was as weird as the fever dream I had about Newt Gingrich.  Late this morning, as I slipped in and out of consciousness, I dreamt that I read, on the Time.com website, a love letter to Newt that opened by praising his iconoclastic take on Hurricane Katrina. 

“How many of you have ever used an automatic bank machine overseas?” Newt Gingrich asks, and since this is a pretty affluent New Hampshire audience, a fair number of people raise their hand. “Do you get impatient waiting for the money? You’re 4,674 miles from home, in a foreign banking system, and there’s your money, in 11 seconds on average. Now, say you’re a small-business owner wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. How long does it take the Federal Government to respond to your emergency loan application? More than 11 weeks, on average . . . Katrina was a decisive moment for our country. It proved that our government is broken. We need real change, and here’s my new slogan: Real change means real change. Your experiences dealing with the government need to be more like the experiences in the rest of your life—more like using an automated bank machine.”

It’s almost always a joy listening to Gingrich when he’s on a tear. And he’s almost always on a tear of some sort.

Even in my addled state, I can understand a syllogism when I see one: if Gingrich is almost always on a tear, and it’s almost always a joy listening to Gingrich when he’s on a tear, then it’s almost always a joy listening to Gingrich!  Like when he blamed Susan Smith’s murder of her two sons on Democrats! That was teh joy.

But you know when Mia Farrow sits bolt upright in Rosemary’s Baby during the ceremony in which she is impregnated by Richard Perle Satan, and screams, “This is no dream?” Guess what?  This is no dream!  It’s a real column by Time magazine’s resident liberal, Joe Klein!

No, you say. Michael, you’re hallucinating.  But I’m not!  It’s real, I tell you!

Look at it this way. Newt Gingrich, more than anyone, was the man who put into practice Loveable Furry Old Grover Norquist’s plan to shrink the federal government to the size at which it could be drowned in the bathtub.  Behind the failure of Katrina lies not only the usual stupefying Bush Administration incompetence and cronyism, but the entire philosophy of “shut the government down” Gingrichism. And now the Gingrich behind Gingrichism appears in front of a bunch of affluent conservative New Hampshireans to tell them that Katrina proved that our government is broken? The man who helped to hobble government is going around the country crowing, “see, told you, government doesn’t work?” I think of Luke Menand’s review of Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, where Menand suggested that D’Souza decrying campus intolerance is a bit like having the guy who poisoned the well show up as the water inspector.

And let’s not even bother with the other half of this little vignette, the ATM.  The human mind cannot yet imagine what a Bush Administration ATM would be like.  It would eat your card and charge you $250 billion for Iraq and charge your children five to ten times that to pay for crony-capitalist tax cuts, that much is sure.  But it would do even more.  It would somehow manage to identify certain ATM users as candidates for torture or extraordinary rendition.  Don’t ask me how.  Only John Yoo can say.

The point is that Gingrich’s remarks are simply obscene.  In fact, they are so obscene that they make me want to qualify “obscene” with an adjectival bad word, but I will not do that, because the Washington Post might find out and label me a member of the Angry Left.  So I must not say bad words.

And to have this obscenity celebrated by a fatuous ass like Klein is obscene-upon-obscene.  First, we have a man who gets up and says—not in an unguarded drunken moment, mind you, but as a calculated piece of public speech—that Katrina proved our government is broken, after having devoted his energies as a Congressman to breaking the government.  A decent society would shun such a man and give his children looks of pity in the town square.  A somewhat more vengeful society would have him tarred and feathered.  But Joe Klein hears this claptrap and is seized by paroxysms of happy, happy, joy, joy.

In a way, Gingrich and Klein are made for each other.  The one embodies everything that is wrong with American politics, the other everything that is wrong with American “liberal” media.  But it’s not merely that Klein has fallen for a right-wing talking point on Katrina that is only a half-step less offensive than “Katrina proved that black people are lazy and criminal.” There’s something else at work here as well.  You know, you keep hoping that the “liberal” media would have learned something about the incompetents they’ve been covering for the past six years.  But perhaps, as the example of Klein demonstrates, that’s a bit too much to hope.  Not because the “liberal” media are uniformly suckers for right-wing talking points; sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not.  But because these people—who are, after all, the people who will cover the election of 2008—have not learned anything about the juvenile priorities they bring to what they think of as “political” coverage.

In other words, Klein hearts Gingrich not merely because one fatuous ass often finds much to admire in another fatuous ass, but because our Beltway press corps just loves to be entertained.  And on a certain level, Gingrich is definitely entertaining.  He proposes a “rhio wiki”!  He has an idea about guest workers!  And—get this—he doesn’t endorse the teaching of Intelligent Design in science courses!  (Talk about defining iconoclasm down: compared to craven ideologues like William Kristol, a man who wants to be considered an intellectual but will not rule out the possibility that science courses should be based on supernatural beliefs, Gingrich is now an “intellectually honest policy work,” in Klein’s words.  This is what we have come to. News Flash: Republican Accepts Evolution.) Or as Klein says: “Gingrich was certainly wild with ideas last week, flicking them off at warp speed, like a dog shaking himself clean after romping through a pond.” Yes, well, I imagine that he was very like a wet dog.  At warp speed, too!  One wonders if Gingrich travels with an aide whose job it is to remark on the blazing speed of Gingrich’s ideas while speaking in a Highlands brogue: “Cap’n Gingrich, ye can’t keep it up!  The main idea generrrator’s about to bloo!” It would make a certain kind of sense, since so many of Gingrich’s “ideas,” back in the day, consisted precisely of warmed-over Alvin Toffler- George Gilderisms.  “Look,” Newt would say to an adoring press gaggle, “if we could just harness the power of the mind in a controlled fusion experiment, we could travel into the future at the speed of thought, which is even faster than the speed of light and wouldn’t involve us gaining all that nasty extra mass as we approach c.  That way we could eliminate the estate tax right into the 23rd century and start investing the proceeds today.” “Sigh,” replied the gaggle, “he’s so dreamy.  And intellectual, too.”

That’s the way your “political” media work, basically.  Gingrich, McCain: Fun!  Joy!  Actual policy wonks who know what they’re talking about and appoint competent people to FEMA: bo-ring.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something on the hockey playoffs.  I will not say very much about the Rangers’ last five games, because I must not say bad words.

Posted by on 04/19 at 09:54 PM

  1. Man, I sure hope you feel better soon… juxtaposing the loathsome strains of the loathsome Klein orgiastically reciting the loathsome rants of the loathsome Gingrich is like… loathsome…

    I’m feeling all… like I need to take a shower…

    Also on the general topic… was it one of my fever dreams, or did I see that Time magazine was promoting Matt Cooper (Columbia College ‘84) to be its political editor? 

    I guess Barack Obama (C.C. ‘83) will be “man of the year” any day now…

    Posted by the talking dog  on  04/19  at  11:43 PM

  2. You’re so brilliant when you are unwell. And other times, too.

    Posted by Hattie  on  04/20  at  12:25 AM

  3. ”...neither Smith nor Rorty would accept the category of “goods to be valued for their own sake,” insisting instead that the value of all goods, even those of the Aristotelian virtues, is contingent on the pragmatic ends they serve.”

    Why are pragmatic ends not instances of “goods to be valued for their own sake”?  Put the other way around, why may not Aristotelian virtuous activities be included among “pragmatic” ends?

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  01:24 AM

  4. I’ll never forget seeing Gingrich in the early days of c-span talking about the threat of nicaraguan army walking across the border to invade the USA.

    certain is the capta word.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  01:34 AM

  5. Whoa.  Is a prescription required for that particular cocktail?  Wish I had health insurance and could afford it, but that’s wishful thinking…

    On second feeble thought, this is a “Blame the Drug” society, so ascribing that brilliantly inspired riff to pharmacological intervention is probably delusional.  But if you figure out a way to bottle it let us know, OK? 

    Hang in there, and watch for that sun to come out tomorrow.  Hope this missive (2:20 AM Eastern) finds you in the midst of a good night’s sleep.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  02:17 AM

  6. Actually, my one experience as a (non-affluent) New Hampshirite abroad, watching one of my siblings use an ATM, was “Wow! That’s amazing! You can get money from our bank in Manchester just as fast as you could if we were there, but we’re in Rome!!! It’s just like Star Trek! What will they think of next?”

    (It would have been more impressive, if we had had more money, and hadn’t gotten a “Sorry, Dave, I Can’t Do That,” message the next time...)

    Posted by bellatrys  on  04/20  at  06:07 AM

  7. And yeah, that bug is not fun. It was going around New England two weeks ago. Forgetfullness is part of it, along with the weird dreams - it really does eat your brain, more than a usual fever. Watch out for that chest-cold thing: some people up here ended up w/pneumonia, too. I’m still hacking up phlegm occasionally myself.

    Posted by bellatrys  on  04/20  at  06:10 AM

  8. “Cap’n Gingrich, ye can’t keep it up!  The main idea generrrator’s about to bloo!”

    You got me with that one.

    For some reason the Tom Waites song “The Piano Has Been Drinking” popped into my head as I read…

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  06:31 AM

  9. "(This actually makes some kind of sense, since neither Smith nor Rorty would accept the category of “goods to be valued for their own sake,” insisting instead that the value of all goods, even those of the Aristotelian virtues, is contingent on the pragmatic ends they serve.  But why an RV?)”

    It doesn’t make sense to me. “Pragmatic ends they serve” doesn’t make sense unless those pragmatic ends are valuable in themselves. Not everything can be an instruemental good, an infinite regress looms.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  06:42 AM

  10. I got a flu shot. I am happy, now.

    Be that as it may, I just want to recommend to everyone that, if you read closely only one essay that refers in its course to the regal triumvirate of Rorty, Menand, and “Ren ‘n’ Stimpy,” this is the one to peruse.

    Jon Stewart’s analogy, not the best, but a crisp one, of the press corps during the 2004 campaign still stands: it’s a soccer game among kindergartners. Hey, look! There’s the ball! Chase it! Running plays, learning from experience, that’s the sort of thing that one doesn’t do, or can’t. Journalists are not without writing talent, and must have some analytical skills. I wonder whether this generation of them feels any tug of service to the readers, or whether, if they did, the readers would just grip about that damned liberal bias showing.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  07:44 AM

  11. Help, I need MB Lite. These posts are so looooong! Or MB Screenful, for those of us with short attention spans! MB Slimfast, MB for the Easily Distracted…

    Posted by A. G.  on  04/20  at  07:58 AM

  12. Timothy, unless I’m misreading you, you’re not saying that my little fever dream doesn’t make sense; you’re saying that pragmatism doesn’t make sense, because the pragmatic ends invoked by pragmatists have to be “valuable in themselves.” But feverish as it may sound, pragmatists really wouldn’t talk that way.  They really wouldn’t want to posit one goal or one good that is “valuable” independent of any context in which it might be sought or espoused, and they would contest your claim that “not everything can be an instrumental good” because their concept of the “good” is instrumental all the way down.

    Does this involve an infinite regress? Anti-pragmatists usually think so:  they insist that sooner or later, something has to be good in itself or the whole system of values falls apart.  But pragmatists would say—while, I think, emphatically agreeing with MacIntyre about the function of independent practical reason as a means of providing justification for means and ends—that they can stop providing reasons, not when they reach the Good In Itself but when they reach a good that is not contested in the context.  To take yeti’s question:  Why are pragmatic ends not instances of “goods to be valued for their own sake”?  Put the other way around, why may not Aristotelian virtuous activities be included among “pragmatic” ends? Your friendly neighborhood pragmatist would say that the value of any one of the Aristotelian virtues—temperance, courage, generosity, etc.—depends on the context of its deployment.  It is not always good to have courage, as Susan Sontag once pointed out, and it may not be a virtue to be temperate about such things as torture or “extraordinary rendition.” But if the pragmatist can get a large number of people to agree that torture and “extraordinary rendition” are to be opposed vehemently, s/he would consider that good.  Is opposing torture good in itself?  For some people, yes.  For others, only insofar as it fosters the ideals of a democratic and humane society.  But for the pragmatist, even the democratic and humane society isn’t good in itself.  It beats the alternatives, but your pragmatist has to explain why; s/he can’t say, “it just is.” I took a stab at this a few years ago in an essay I wrote for Dissent: 

    Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what “participatory parity” itself means. That debate will be interminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms for more specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what is now known as universal design.

    . . . I think there’s a very good reason to extend the franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make disability central to our theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a society can incorporate into the deliberation of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that deliberation will in fact be transformative in such a way as to enhance our collective capacities to recognize each other as humans entitled to human dignity.

    In that vein, I once remarked to Barbara Herrnstein Smith that despite her attempt to construe all goods as instrumental and context-dependent, there was one thing that functioned in her work (particularly in Belief and Resistance) as what Charles Taylor would call a “hypergood”—namely, the long term.  For Smith (as I said to Smith), gauging the value of a good over the long term is always better than gauging its value over the short term, and even her defense of pragmatism relies on the argument that it is better suited, over the long term, to grappling with unprecendented moral contexts that theories of “intrinsic” goods might have trouble with, because of its commitment to the supple and capacious.  Smith denied it strenuously, of course:  I might as well have said, “there’s a Thomistic idea of the common good in the middle of your pragmatism.” But that conversation took place seven years ago, and I wonder whether she’s thought about it—over the long term.

    Well, you asked.  As for me, today I’m inclined to believe that Prednisone is good in itself.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  08:12 AM

  13. See, the real problem with Gingrich here is the ATM analogy.  How about, you know how when you’re trying to divorce your wife while she’s recovering from uterine cancer?  That’s like how the government has treated New Orleans since Katrina.

    Or how when you run on a family values platform and try to impeach the president because of his sexual escapades, while all the while you’re cheating on your own wife?  That’s like how the gov’t reacted post-Katrina.

    Captcha:  study.  Good reminder.

    Posted by Crazy Little Thing  on  04/20  at  08:58 AM

  14. Oh, Crazy Little Thing, you’re such a skeptic.  Don’t you see that these little details are what make Newt so much fun to watch?

    Posted by Michael  on  04/20  at  09:04 AM

  15. I love your fevered rhetoric. I’ve been coughing up various lobes of my lungs for three weeks now, but my temp has stayed resolutely normal so I have been unable to reach those febrile heights of writing.

    “Paroxysms of happy, happy, joy, joy”? Is anyone else looking fruitlessly for someone, perhaps their own personal Stimpy, to smash buttocks with?

    And who else would like to see an en dash joining “Alvin Toffler–George Gilderisms”?

    captcha: yes (I said yes)

    Posted by Orange  on  04/20  at  09:33 AM

  16. From my bout with mononucleosis, I recall that a Prednisone side effect is a pervasive sense of well-being which, combined with the disease’s effect on one’s stamina, made for some bizarre contrasts, i.e., “It’s awesome that I can finger the remote control now without getting winded!” As a confirmed liberal even before my infection, though, I might never have experienced this “pervasive sense of well-being” without the use of a steroid, so I couldn’t complain. Enjoy it while it lasts and score a few pills for the road, if you can, because eventually you’ll be cured and might be tempted to start caring about whether the dog is shitting on the dining room oriental again, and a dose right then and there will be just what Dr. Nearly Anonymous Commentor ordered.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  09:48 AM

  17. Michael,

    Yes, I’m missing the fun, but for two reasons:  one, I’m in the midst of grading essays with an Icy Hot patch on my wrist thanks to the strength of my 65-pound puppy.  And two, in high school, my nutty American History teacher made our class watch Gingrich’s press conference about the Contract with America.  I was pretty vocally making fun of him and his ideas, so she screamed at me.

    But hey, I didn’t even mention the $300,000 ethics fine Gingrich faced.  His paying that back would probably serve as a good analogy, too.

    captcha:  late.  How does this thing know me so well?

    Posted by Crazy Little Thing  on  04/20  at  10:13 AM

  18. What makes someone a journalist in contemporary society?  One of two talents: a) looking / sounding pretty, or b) being able to write to deadline.  Being able to write to deadline means being both facile and continually satisfied to never learn anything.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  10:29 AM

  19. Crap...I’ve got the same bug. Do you think the military industrial complex has designed a killer plague that only affects liberal college professors?

    I didn’t get the good drugs, though, so I’m just tired and cranky and dreamless.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  04/20  at  10:55 AM

  20. Newt Now! Who better to fubar the fubar than Fubar’s Fubar. Former Speaker Gingrich was nothing if not the Big Dog’s bitch as Ms Ivins has noted, pointing out that Bill’s eccentric exchanges with Monica lead directly to Newt getting fired.

    Too bad Klein had to get all intergalactic effusing about being tight with the Former Speaker. Now we can’t trust his distinction between Newt/dog “shaking himself clean after romping through a pond” and the obvious shaking himself dry. Did Newt/dog get into that fenced in pond over behind the water works again? If he has, why is Klein just standing there letting it rain on him?

    Posted by black dog barking  on  04/20  at  11:13 AM

  21. Gingrich, Klein match up with VD Hanson, Nial Fergusen, and Evangelical Stoltz who are the pure academic flame bearers of the neo-con. The fact that Klein was never treated as a professional leper matches Ferguson’s ability to make an academic success out of his utter bullshit.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  11:17 AM

  22. Sounds to me like your virus isn’t getting worse and worse—it’s getting better and better.  Keeping you up all night, inducing fever dreams, cancelling classes—these are signs of a good, strong, effective virus.  You may feel worse, but your virus is only improving.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  12:11 PM

  23. pragmatism is an alluring beast, but i just can’t wrap my head around this “instrumental good all the way down” business. sigh. sure, courage and eyesight and such aren’t good in themselves and aren’t always instrumentally good, but still, lurking down there at the bottom, can’t we still speak of the well-being of all moral patients?

    and michael, I don’t know whether you’re right about barbara h-s, but william james seems to privilege the long term over the short term, no?

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  12:42 PM

  24. As you can see from these very comments, ben a., there are always alternate descriptions for any moral or epistemological context you care to name.  Here you speak of “the well-being of all moral patients,” and Houdini’s Ghost points out, quite rightly, that what I construe as ill-health is just a virus doin’ fine.  Go figure.  But I suppose someone has to speak for the virus’s point of view in all this.

    And actually, I think every sane pragmatist privileges the long term over the short.  James, Dewey, Rorty too (it’s not as if Rorty calls for a sense of human solidarity and a mitigation of human cruelty but only for next week).  Ecologically, fiscally, politically, it’s hard to make a case for the advantage of short-term reasoning as opposed to the broad perspective over the long haul.  Even though (or perhaps because) in the long run we’ll all be dead. 

    Posted by Michael  on  04/20  at  12:55 PM

  25. The words “fatuous ass” cannot be used often enough in conjunction with Newt’s nutty name.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  01:08 PM

  26. MB, I’m as interested in the next guy in the boundaries of the human--heck, I’m more interested, so long as that guy isn’t Donna Haraway--but my knowledge of ethics is nil. So, forgive me if I come off as fatuous, but does this long term thing translate into: history will judge me/us/this?

    If so, that’s eerie. Those disembodied long term judgments tend be inhabited in the short term by actual, powerful bodies in the now.

    You know what else is eerie? Last night I dreamt I’d been shanghaied into a glee cub jazz singalong of Mozart’s Great Mass. This morning I’m telling the Intended about this, and I sing her a bit--shuddering, because contempo versions of centuries old melodies give mee the heebies--and she says, dolt, that’s the Requiem Mass. Merely exclamatory D’oh!

    Captcha: slowly, as in, this conference for which I haven’t yet written the paper is not approaching slowly enough.

    Get well soon, PZM and MB.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  01:28 PM

  27. Captcha word: “idea” as in: hey now that Scotty’s gone, maybe Newt would take the Press Secretary job.  Then we would be treated to those stacatto tempo utterances in a setting befitting his own desires for what he feels is good.  Being able to be in the Oval Office every day!  Imagine how good Joe Klein would feel about his past fawning coming around as a special connection--dog wagging tail wagging dog.

    Synchronicity being present at all times, as was sitting here typing the above, Stephen Colbert in the background asked the prescient question: “Am i better than a fern?” Newt no; MB, yes.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  01:46 PM

  28. Much shorter Spyder:

    “Homemade absinthe, Michael, with a steriod chaser. It does a sick body good.”

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  03:11 PM

  29. "But pragmatists would say?while, I think, emphatically agreeing with MacIntyre about the function of independent practical reason as a means of providing justification for means and ends?that they can stop providing reasons, not when they reach the Good In Itself but when they reach a good that is not contested in the context.”

    Berube I understand what you are saying but I think you are confusing two issues. worth can be relative to what isn’t contested in the situation ( this is what you are arguing if I am reading you correctly, substitute this for whatever it is you are defending if I have misread you), but this doesn’t necessarily imply that there is no such thing as intrinsic worth, why can’t intrinsic worth, defined roughly as whatever it is we should aim at even if it doesn’t achieve anything else, be relative to situations and people’s assent?

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  06:37 PM

  30. And what makes this instance of Klein’s intellectual fellatio particularly piquant is that the ATM comparison is a tired old hobby horse of Gingrich’s that he uses for a variety of illustrative purposes. For instance, a quick search yields the following: contrasting it with voting accuracy, as a an illustration of the transformative power of technology and (many references) as a contrast to the ineffeciencies of the healthcare system (as in this equally degrading piece in the WaPo by Ceci Connolly).

    One can imagine Klein covering the Henny Youngman “Gravely Funny” tour.
    “Take the government, please”, Youngman started off, showing that even in death he retains his instinct for fresh, smart comedy ...”

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  06:41 PM

  31. But if we assign the value, Timothy, what makes it “intrinsic”?  We could, of course, say “we hereby decree that X has intrinsic worth,” but then its “intrinsic"-ness is something of a communal fiction.  However useful the fiction might be.

    My suggestion is that the infinite instrumentalist regress ends when a sufficient number of people agree on the good—whether it be MacIntyre’s “just generosity” or Rorty’s “solidarity.” If those people want to call that good “intrinsic,” I won’t actually fight them to the death.  That wouldn’t serve any good purpose.

    Posted by Michael  on  04/20  at  07:01 PM

  32. Is there an essay of yours that summarises your views on meta-ethics that you could recommend?

    Personally I’m an error theorist and a fictionalist about morality, so I don’t believe in intrinsic worth. The up shot of this is that I also don’t believe in instrumental moral worth either. But that doesn’t imply that relative to different value systems, or indeed any normative system, there doesn’t exist intrinsic worth.

    Posted by  on  04/20  at  07:33 PM

  33. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, very fortunately), I’ve never written such an essay, Timothy.  But I agree that any value system worthy of the name has a normative component and a measure of gauging (and protocols for evaluating and contesting) acts of evaluation.  Real relativism—the kind that would have to be agnostic about the value of relativism itself—just isn’t an evaluative possibility.  I just think the term “intrinsic” brings up a number of difficulties better left avoided.  (See also Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality, in which he argues that all assignments of “function,” let alone value, are observer-relative:  that is, for Searle, once one says “the function of the heart is to pump blood,” we are in the realm of social fact rather than brute fact.)

    Posted by Michael  on  04/22  at  04:06 AM

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