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Update:  When I saw the quote originally posted here, I researched it and found an attribution to a source.  (The Birth Control Review of 1933-34).  It turns out that attribution was mistaken.  For posting an inaccurate quotation I apologize.  That said, the general views expressed in the quotation were in fact held by Margaret Sanger.  I replace the original post with this from Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”:

 

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. “Our living-room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.” A member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed “What Every Girl Should Know.” The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.” Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children…and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.” When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit…no permit shall be valid for more than one child.”47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

Sanger believed — prophetically enough — that if women conceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a necessary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were. This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the above-mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes…is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

It is possible that Sanger didn’t really want to “exterminate” the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the Progressives’ motives. It wasn’t difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of “race suicide” at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to “genocide against the black race.” And he added, in block letters, “AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS.” This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.

Just a few years ago, the racial eugenic “bonus” of abortion rights was something one could only admit among those fully committed to the cause, and even then in politically correct whispers. No more. Increasingly, this argument is acceptable on the left, as are arguments in favor of eugenics generally.

In 2005 the acclaimed University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt broke the taboo with his critical and commercial hit Freakonomics (co-written with Stephen Dubner). The most sensational chapter in the book updated a paper Levitt had written in 1999 which argued that abortion cuts crime. “Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.” Freakonomics excised all references to race and never connected the facts that because the aborted fetuses were disproportionately black and blacks disproportionately contribute to the crime rate, reducing the size of the black population reduces crime. Yet the press coverage acknowledged this and didn’t seem to mind.

In 2005 William Bennett, a committed pro-lifer, invoked the Levitt argument in order to denounce eugenic thinking. “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” What seemed to offend liberals most was that Bennett had accidentally borrowed some conventional liberal logic to make a conservative point, and, as with the social Darwinists of yore, that makes liberals quite cross. According to the New York Times’s Bob Herbert, Bennett believed “exterminating blacks would be a most effective crime-fighting tool.” Various liberal spokesmen, including Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, said Bennett wanted to exterminate “black babies.” Juan Williams proclaimed that Bennett’s remarks speak “to a deeply racist mindset.”

In one sense, this is a pretty amazing turnaround. After all, when liberals advocate them, we are usually told that abortions do not kill “babies.” Rather, they remove mere agglomerations of cells and tissue or “uterine contents.” If hypothetical abortions committed for allegedly conservative ends are infanticide, how can actual abortions performed for liberal ends not be?

Some liberals are honest about this. In 1992 Nicholas Von Hoffman argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Free cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don’t want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster… At their demonstration, the anti-abortionists parade around with pictures of dead and dismembered fetuses. The pro-abortionists should meet these displays with some of their own: pictures of the victims of the unaborted — murder victims, rape victims, mutilation victims — pictures to remind us that the fight for abortion is but part of the larger struggle for safe homes and safe streets.

Later that same year, the White House received a letter from the Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington, urging the new president-elect to rush RU-486 — the morning-after pill — to the market as quickly as possible. Weddington’s argument was refreshingly honest:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I’m not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can’t afford to have babies. There, I’ve said it. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged as discriminatory, mean-spirited and… well… so Republican.

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . , . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery . . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.

How, exactly, is this substantively different from Margaret Sanger’s self-described “religion of birth control,” which would, she wrote, “ease the financial load of caring for with public funds . . . children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation”?

The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as “barbaric” and called abortionists “bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names.” Abortion resulted in “an outrageous slaughter” and “the killing of babies,” which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.

So forget about intent: Look at results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. That rate has held relatively constant, though in some regions the numbers are much starker; in Mississippi, black women receive some 72 percent of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nationwide, 512 out of every 1,000 black pregnancies end in an abortion. Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion centers are in or near minority communities. Liberalism today condemns a Bill Bennett who speculates about the effects of killing unborn black children; but it also celebrates the actual killing of unborn black children, and condemns him for opposing it.

Of course, orthodox eugenics also aimed at the “feebleminded” and “useless bread gobblers” — which included everyone from the mentally retarded to an uneducated and malnourished underclass to recidivist criminals. When it comes to today’s “feebleminded,” influential voices on the left now advocate the killing of “defectives” at the beginning of life and at the end of life. Chief among them is Peter Singer, widely hailed as the most important living philosopher and the world’s leading ethicist. Professor Singer, who teaches at Princeton, argues that unwanted or disabled babies should be killed in the name of “compassion.” He also argues that the elderly and other drags on society should be put down when their lives are no longer worth living.

Singer doesn’t hide behind code words and euphemisms in his belief that killing babies isn’t always wrong, as one can deduce from his essay titled “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong” (nor is he a lone voice in the wilderness; his views are popular or respected in many academic circles). But that hasn’t caused the Left to ostracize him in the slightest (save in Germany, where people still have a visceral sense of where such logic takes you). Of course, not all or even most liberals agree with Singer’s prescriptions, but nor do they condemn him as they do, say, a William Bennett. Perhaps they recognize in him a kindred spirit.

 

 

Comments
5. Preposterous. Dr King stated he received the award in Sanger’s name with pride. This goes directly to the point that it is clearly unfair and inappropriate to denigrate Sanger as a racial bigot.
It has absolutely no bearing on the matter of whether or not Sanger as a was a racial bigot, and whether or not the quotes attributed to Sanger (accurate or not) are a fair representation of Sanger's actual views. Because a black man - even a famous one - accepts an award "with pride" that bears the name of some other individual doesn't mean the name on the award is not the name of a racial bigot. Dr. King simply might not have known about the true views of Dr. Sanger. Dr. Sanger and her cronies had an entire disinformation campaign that recruited ministers of many black churches into her cause by use of propaganda and spin. Many are pained when their heroes - such as Darwin and Sanger - are outed as racial bigots, and attempt a form of apologetics by claiming that "most intellectuals" at the time were racists. Yes, they were - and, thanks to Darwin, their racist views and programs were given the authoritative veneer of science and the intellectual high ground. You might keep that in mind when atheists attempt to use science to give them and their nihilistic views and programs the supposed intellectual high ground and the authoritative veneer of science in other matters. The persecution of religious beliefs, for example, by atheists under the veneer of science is no different from the persecution of other races and those who vary from the norm physically/mentally in pursuit of some sort of Darwinian concept of "fitness".William J Murray
April 21, 2013
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kairosfocus 1. We all have a responsibility to respond with fairness and not persist in implied accusations. 2. The offensive, defamatory forgery has now been visible for five days on the mobile site - many would agree that fairness and a determination not to persist in false accusations would make fixing it a top priority. 3. Your point 3 is not comprehensible and I have no idea what you're referring to that happened in 2004. 4. In the context of a thread that slurs Sanger as a racist with two fake citations - one of which has been withdrawn (albeit still visible for some readers), the other of which remains unacknowledged and uncorrected - one should, in my view, refrain from continuing to blacken Sanger's name because that creates the impression that one is persisting with a false accusation by excusing and justifying the original fakery. That's just my view; yours, you say, is different. 5. Preposterous. Dr King stated he received the award in Sanger's name with pride. This goes directly to the point that it is clearly unfair and inappropriate to denigrate Sanger as a racial bigot. Good day to you.CLAVDIVS
April 21, 2013
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Claudius: 1] Has it escaped you that you have a responsibility to respond with fairness and not persist in implied accusations? 2] I know that the mobile site has been under investigations towards correction if there is still a problem. Given the above plain explanation, retraction and apology, I would think that the obvious conclusion is that if the Mobile site is still incorrect, there is an underlying technical problem. 3] The "fake but accurate" talking point from 2004 was neither, there is no proper parallel or immoral equivalency. 4] It has evidently escaped your notice that there is warrant as summarised for the concern that there was indeed a problem of adherence to eugenics on Ms Sanger's part and that it is legitimate to point this out. 5] And yes, racism (and the implications of eugenics) were a widespread problem up to the 1960's and beyond, whatever Mr King may or may not have said. (Indeed, you just committed a fallacy of irrelevant appeal to authority -- here, to try to create a halo effect.) _______ The bottom-line is that you have some serious accusations and insinuations to acknowledge and withdraw, but plainly no intention to do so. We take due note of that sad fact, for future reference. Good day, sir. KFkairosfocus
April 21, 2013
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kairosfocus PS: Did it escape your notice, in a forum of this kind, that sometimes people respond intermittently because they have income to earn, children to raise, and family and community obligations to fulfil? Trying to make argumentative capital out of such appears to me like cheap rhetorical point-scoring at the level of a moustache-twirling pantomime villain. Briefly: 1. The offensive forgery still appears on the mobile Uncommon Descent site - 8.00PM 21 April 2013 Australian Eastern Standard Time. 2. The retraction claimed the original forgery accurately represented the "general views" of Sanger - relying on yet another false citation slurring Sanger as a racist, as noted @ 126, and implying that use of the original "fake but accurate" quote was okay. But using "fake but accurate" quotes is not okay, is it? 3. There followed numerous discursions about how Sanger really was a racial bigot based on her links to eugenics. Didn't anyone realise that this gives the appearance of justifying and excusing the use of the original "fake but accurate" quote? But using "fake but accurate" quotes is not okay, is it? 4. Yes, Sanger was as racist, I suppose, as most educated people were in those days. This did not prevent Martin Luther King Junior stating in 1966 "Words are inadequate for me to say how honored I was to be the recipient of the Margaret Sanger Award. This award will remain among my most cherished possessions." But this is irrelevant to my point, which is, and always was, that using "fake but accurate" quotes is not okay.CLAVDIVS
April 21, 2013
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LYO: You had me chuckling. First, we are primarily discussing the generic God of the philosophers, the one who is the necessary being and ground of existence in light of S5's possible-actual principle. Or, at least the concept of cause and dependence of being similar to a match stick, leading to the contrasted case of a candidate being without such dependence on enabling causal factors, which must therefore either be impossible or actual. By virtue of the essential properties of being God, such a being would both know the truth and be able to adequately communicate it (and back it up with enough warrant that we would be responsible to respond appropriately to the evidence). While onward we may want to discuss theological and religious traditions, that is another matter. One of further warrant, and on that, it is not a matter of cynical "sez who" or "what is truth." We are responsible to respond appropriately to the truth we do know or should know based on what is accessible to us. (In my tradition, that is spoken of as judgement based on light. And in case you are interested in the relevant evidence, there is a 101 here. Methinks the ghost of a certain Pontius Pilate may have somewhat to advise you on that matter, regarding "what is truth.") KF PS: I notice there seems to have been an almost cartoonish quiet "tippy-toeing" away -- I almost hear the tinkly piano music as that happens -- on the part of those who were so hot to accuse of slander, fraud and fakery etc. No one has even updated us on whether the oh so awful mobile site that was nefariously keeping the alleged fakery going has been fixed. It makes me wonder . . .kairosfocus
April 19, 2013
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Phinehas, I don't know why you're getting on my case. I agree with you: Since He's omnipotent and omniscient, what He says is true, because He says so. There's no good reason to second guess Him using our molecules. Kairosfocus, I agree with you too, except I'm not a Christian. So I know your God is false, because my omniscient and omnipotent God told me. And I don't use my random molecules to second guess him.lastyearon
April 19, 2013
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Kantian Naturalist
It should be obvious that a skeptic could no more be a naturalist than a theist.
So it is impossible for anyone to be both a skeptic and a naturalist at the same time? Notice how KN appeals to the same Laws of Identity and Non-Contradiction that he denies. Remarkable!StephenB
April 19, 2013
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What makes you think I’m a man?
If it makes you feel any better, I do not think that you are a man.Joe
April 19, 2013
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What makes you think I'm a man?Kantian Naturalist
April 19, 2013
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KN:
It should be obvious that a skeptic could no more be a naturalist than a theist.
Said the man who makes his case against the self-evident and necessary nature of the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-Contradiction. KN keeps using the the "dirt" (foundation) of the self-evident first principles of right reason to build upon and argue his case against them; as the punchline goes - "Get your own dirt."William J Murray
April 19, 2013
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SB: Well pointed out, as usual. I would add, that we start with and from common sense day to day reasoning, and on inquiring reflection are led to see the implicit first principles that underlie such as the foundation. We discover that they are undeniable on pain of immediate, patent absurdity, or are inescapable [as you showed just above]. We then have a choice, (a) to recognise what common sense tells us in no uncertain terms, or (b) to deny that and flee to the province of absurdity. That ever so many in our day would rather do (b) than (a) speaks utter volumes about where our civilisation has now reached and how deep and -- absent a miracle of restoration -- just how clearly mortal the wounds are. Let those of us who believe in miracles, pray for one. The alternative is a horror of barbarities beyond description; the shadows of which loom already out of the fog. (As just one example, the Gosnell case is a wake-up call, as here we have the implications of devaluation of life working out on the ground. remember how, a few months back, the proposition was put that to murder an innocent child was a self-evident case of that which is utterly wrong? This is the reality, live and direct, and so clear that too many of the media houses would have passed by in silence rather than headline and have to face where we have reached. The tendency in the ongoing case of the horror in Boston this Monday just past, to project preferred bogeymen and scapegoats, without any reasonable evidence, also points beyond to the likely fate of those who will try to stand against the tide, if the course is not turned around with the greatest urgency. As to the notion that anything could "justify" setting bombs to murder people going about the normal affairs of life, in order to grab headlines and frightening footage the better to spread a climate of fear [multiplied by rejoicing in the murder and in the reaction of horror, in certain parts of the world . . . ], that kind of sheer nihilism itself speaks volumes.) KFkairosfocus
April 19, 2013
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Phinehas Good points just above. I add, that one of the gifts by which God would lift us out of the epistemic morass, is the gift of accuracy of perception and capacity to reason accurately. Plantinga has said much the same. Where also, of course, one of the key deliverances of said senses and common sense reasoning in light of self-evident first principles, is that there is adequate evidence -- we know or can and should know -- that would show us that (a) the world has a divine author, and (b) that we are morally governed creatures under that author, thus owe duties of care to him and to one another. Of course, on the whole, we cannot have general absolute certainty resting on ourselves. But one of the very first common sense based self-evident truths is a surprising implication of the fact and undeniable reality of error. Namely, as Josiah Royce and Elton Trueblood would point out: Error exists. This is an uncontroversial fact, reinforced for all of us by those X-marks in school. However, symbolise it as E, and we see that E and NOT_E are exhaustive and deny each other. They are obviously not vacuous references, so one or the other MUST be in error. So, E is undeniably true. Truth exists as that which accurately refers to reality. It is knowable in at least some cases, and here to the point of being undeniably certain. Knowledge exists as warranted, credible truth. Indeed, I often call this WCT no 1. Onward, any scheme of thinking that denies or undermines such established points -- guide-star points of light in our firmament of knowledge -- will thus reveal itself to be fundamentally and irretrievably erroneous. Systems that deny objective and even certain truth and/or objective and even certain knowledge, therefore are rooted in fundamental error. Sadly, their name is legion, involving e.g. any species of radical relativism or subjectivism. I think John Locke, in sect. 5 of his intro to his essay on human understanding, had somewhat to say to us in our day that we ought to heed:
Men have reason to be well satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he hath given them (as St. Peter says [NB: i.e. 2 Pet 1:2 - 4]) pana pros zoen kaieusebeian, whatsoever is necessary for the conveniences of life and information of virtue; and has put within the reach of their discovery, the comfortable provision for this life, and the way that leads to a better. How short soever their knowledge may come of an universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is, it yet secures their great concernments [Prov 1: 1 - 7], that they have light enough to lead them to the knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own duties [cf Rom 1 - 2 & 13, Ac 17, Jn 3:19 - 21, Eph 4:17 - 24, Isaiah 5:18 & 20 - 21, Jer. 2:13, Titus 2:11 - 14 etc, etc]. Men may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ their hands with variety, delight, and satisfaction, if they will not boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough to grasp everything . . . It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward servant [Matt 24:42 - 51], who would not attend his business by candle light, to plead that he had not broad sunshine. The Candle that is set up in us [Prov 20:27] shines bright enough for all our purposes . . . If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do muchwhat as wisely as he who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly. [Text references added to document the sources of Locke's allusions and citations.]
I think we would do well to ponder such counsels. KFkairosfocus
April 19, 2013
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Kantian Naturalist
The problem with appealing to “self-evident principles” or “self-justifying beliefs” is this: here one would still need to show that they are warranted by some set of criteria, and those criteria would themselves need to be established.
A self-evident principle is warranted precisely because it is self-evident. That Jupiter cannot exist and not exist at the same time is a practical application of the self-evident truth that nothing at all can exist and not exist at the same time. You have it exactly backwards. We do not reason our way TO first principles, we reason our way FROM them. Rationality is a choice. You reject reason’s rues because you choose to be irrational.
So the Trilemma, fully spelled out is: either (1) infinite regress or (2) vicious circle or (3) arbitrariness. Now, of course, the Trilemma was intended to be an argument for skepticism — it’s supposed to show that justification is impossible, hence knowledge is impossible.
Agrippa’s Trilemma is total nonsense. It assumes the very same rules of reason that it denies. Notice the “either-or” formulation, which presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction. --- "Thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason."
I wouldn’t say that morality has “a source”. I wouldn’t even say that we can talk intelligently about a single unitary phenomena, “morality.” I think we would have to talk about the various different origins of various different ethical practices, principles, and capacities.
In 1998, a man married his horse with which he had maintained a long-term emotional and sexual relationship. Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or a morally neutral thing?StephenB
April 18, 2013
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StephenB and Dr. Torley, I think you guys may appreciate this: Pro-Life Ethics MP3 Audio by Scott Klusendorf http://www.apologetics315.com/2013/04/pro-life-ethics-mp3-audio-by-scott.html In this audio, bio-ethicist Scott Klusendorf presents a talk at a Gordon College convocation, receiving a standing ovation for his pro-life case. For more pro-life resources, go here.bornagain77
April 18, 2013
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LYO: A revelation from God would be true not because of a say-so, but because the character of God and his ability to communicate same. One would come to trust a candidate to be such in the context of experience and evidence providing warrant; in particular, one's view of the trustworthiness of God is dramatically boosted by live answers to prayer . . . and if t were not for a miracle of guidance, I literally would not be here to type this. In the case of the Christian faith (likely the relevant case) you can have a look here. KFkairosfocus
April 18, 2013
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KN: actually, principles implicitly embedded in a domain of praxis are just as real and effective as those same principles articulated in explicit statements. Knowing the hard way that 7 + 7 . . . + 7 nine times over is 63, is just as real as knowing that 7 * 9 = 63. KFkairosfocus
April 18, 2013
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LYO: Not quite. If there is an omniscient God, then by definition, He knows what is true. If this same God is omnipotent, it seems plausible to me that He would have the ability to communicate what is true in a reliable enough fashion. In this manner, He could lift even fallible human beings from an epistemic swamp that they could never escape on their own, no matter how hard they pull on their own philosophical bootstraps. In saying this, I am not making a claim that any particular revelation is true (whether supported internally or externally). Instead, I am pointing out the unavoidable futility of philosophical bootstrapping apart from some kind of external, transcendent revelation. Even so, you seem blissfully unaware that, "my philosophy is true because I say it is true," is precisely the crumbling foundation on which you stand in order to make your objections about revelation. (I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but sometimes I just can't help myself.)Phinehas
April 18, 2013
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Lastyearon, when you put it that way, I must admit that you have a very good point!Kantian Naturalist
April 18, 2013
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Apart from God and some form(s) of Revelation, I see no real way to escape an epistemic morass, no matter how much bubble gum and baling wire you employ to try to hold your particular -ism together.
Well said, Phinehas. Revelation is true because revelation says it's true. There's obviously no epistemic morass there. Only those who use their random molecules to try to figure out why or if something is true are mired in epistemic morass.lastyearon
April 18, 2013
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It seems just as obvious to me that a naturalist would be a skeptic. Of course, I'm not opposed to the notion that being a naturalist is self-referentially incoherent. :)Phinehas
April 18, 2013
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It should be obvious that a skeptic could no more be a naturalist than a theist.Kantian Naturalist
April 18, 2013
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I agree with the letter but not with the spirit. :) Even us pragmatic naturalists, reprobates though we may be, acknowledge the reality of the space of reasons -- that we are rational animals, able to engage in practices of reflection and revision of our beliefs and behaviors, able to discern both cognitive errors and affective blockages, and so on. Where we really disagree, though, is about how to conceive of the relation between norm-governed practices and principles. On your view, I take it, the principles have some sort of priority, and the practices are justified (or not) in light of those principles. On my view, the principles are just explications of what is already implicitly at work within the epistemic and moral practices themselves. So we can appeal to various principles as tools for articulating what it is that we are committed to, and hence they are valuable tools for critically reflecting on and revising those practices, but they cannot endow our practices with any more authority than those practices already and implicitly have, nor can the principles explain just why it is that the practices have any implicit authority. In other words, we agree on the 'givenness' of the space of reasons, but the game of giving and asking for reasons is not underpinned by any principles. The principles just allow us to say what it is that we are doing when we reason.Kantian Naturalist
April 18, 2013
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If all we have to rely on is ourselves with all of our limitations (especially if purely random causes are ultimately responsible for our very being) then skepticism would seem an entirely reasonable position to adopt. I suspect most naturalists who reject skepticism do so because they don't particularly like its implications more so than because they find it logically untenable. Apart from God and some form(s) of Revelation, I see no real way to escape an epistemic morass, no matter how much bubble gum and baling wire you employ to try to hold your particular -ism together.Phinehas
April 18, 2013
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KN: While you have provided a summary of a fairly common view that would dismiss such first principles, it dismisses the context that shows us why they are indeed just that. We do not come upon reasoning as something new, strange, alien, dubious and never before seen and suspect, we routinely reason as a basic part of our existence, and do so as a basis for living thinking and communicating. That is a given, a reality of existence that we seek to understand. The issue is, what underpins reasoning as the core first plausibles by which it works, the primitives so to speak. When we look at that we see there are indeed principles that we find undeniable or find the denial lands in immediate absurdity that undermines the project of reason. Without which, we literally cannot live. So, we find such principles self evident: either we accept them or else we abandon that without which we cannot live. "Self-evident" is just a label, but the reality is there before the label. And any philosophy that rejects such is in the position that it is expressed by reasoned communication, and implies the principles it would deny. It is incoherent. Fancy-dress folly in short. KFkairosfocus
April 18, 2013
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This will serve double-duty as a response to both Kairosfocus and StephenB, on why I don't think foundationalism works as a response to Agrippa's Trilemma. Briefly, the Trilemma states that there are three approaches to justification: either (1) our beliefs are justified by other beliefs, in an infinite regress ("infinitism") or (2) our beliefs are justified by being part of a vast, self-supporting network of beliefs ("coherentism") or (3) our beliefs are justified by a privileged class of self-evident beliefs ("foundationalism"). Kairosofocus and StephenB both acknowledge that coherentism is open to the vicious-circle objection, and that infinitism is open to the infinite regress objection. (Historically, no one has defended infinitism, though I just learned earlier today that there is one person, a professor at Rutgers, who has taken up the gauntlet.) Coherentism has its able-bodied defenders, both past and present, but there are serious problems in making it work. I'll bypass both of those and move on to foundationalism. The foundationalist claims that both the infinite regress and the vicious circle can be avoided by appealing to self-evident beliefs -- beliefs that don't derive their warrant from any other beliefs, because they are intrinsically warranted. But I don't think this works as well as KF and SB believe it does. The problem with appealing to "self-evident principles" or "self-justifying beliefs" is this: here one would still need to show that they are warranted by some set of criteria, and those criteria would themselves need to be established. (This pushes the foundationalist onto one of the other two horns of the Trilemma.) In order for the stopping-point to be reasonable and not merely arbitrary, there need to be some criteria already up and running for making that assessment -- how else are we to tell whether our stopping-point is arbitrary or not? It is this threat -- that our stopping-point might be arbitrary, for all we know -- that constitutes the third horn of the Trilemma. So the Trilemma, fully spelled out is: either (1) infinite regress or (2) vicious circle or (3) arbitrariness. Now, of course, the Trilemma was intended to be an argument for skepticism -- it's supposed to show that justification is impossible, hence knowledge is impossible. And it should be evident to all concerned that I am not a skeptic. But I also think that the Trilemma cannot be evaded by taking hold of any one of the horns. Skepticism cannot be avoided by coherentism or by foundationalism. (It might, just possibly, be successfully avoided by a nuanced synthesis of the two, what Susan Haack calls "foundherentism". I'm intrigued by what little I know of her view, but I don't know it well enough to defend it here.)
Meanwhile, my earlier question persists: What, in your judgment, is the source of morality? If not from God, then what?
I wouldn't say that morality has "a source". I wouldn't even say that we can talk intelligently about a single unitary phenomena, "morality." I think we would have to talk about the various different origins of various different ethical practices, principles, and capacities.Kantian Naturalist
April 18, 2013
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Kantian Naturalist
This is as good a time as any to rehearse my objections to the idea of “first principles of right reason”.
I realize that you don't accept the rules of logic and reason as valid standards for apprehending reality, analyzing data, or interpreting evidence. What I want to know is this: What standard or standards you would you put in the place of logic and reason? Meanwhile, my earlier question persists: What, in your judgment, is the source of morality? If not from God, then what?StephenB
April 18, 2013
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KN: Nope, we are simply using common sense and seeking a credible worldview foundation, not a regress of proofs. If one rejects common sense as a basis for discussion, he rejects the life of reason, so he is a late non-starter. That is also why warrant is used and not "proof" in the discussion. And, you will see that the worldviews foundation is addressed on comparative difficulties, which escapes question-begging. That is in fact why there are three alternatives, not two; the Agrippa "trilemma" as stated fails because it tries to reduce the third to the second, and in so doing misrepresents what is going on: inference to best explanation as warrant as opposed to proof. An arbitrary stop-point [as opposed to one maintained in part on self-evident first principles of right reason and in part on comparative difficulties] is an obvious case of question-begging. KFkairosfocus
April 18, 2013
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This is as good a time as any to rehearse my objections to the idea of "first principles of right reason". These principles are defined as:
in the end we face the proverbial "turtles all the way down" forever; or else circularity; or else, if we are to be logically coherent and rational, we must stop at "first plausibles" that are reasonable (see here)
I think that Agrippa's Trilemma is not so easily avoided. What the above does is this: it grants Agrippa's argument for the first two horns of the Trilemma (circularity and infinite regress) but seeks to avoid the third horn. I think that the third horn is not so easily avoided. The problem here can be seen quite clearly in the alternative to the first two horns: the appeal to "first plausibles' that are reasonable". But in appealing to the reasonability of the first principles, you're appealing to something that hasn't yet been established: the criteria of reasonability. For if the criteria have not been established, how can one determine whether or not the "first plausibles" are reasonable? The question has just been pushed back one more step, and we must again face one of the other two horns. The only way to avoid those horns -- and this is indeed the step taken above -- is to identify the first principles as a "faith-point". But this is a much larger concession than seems to be recognized here, for it basically accepts that one cannot show that the first principles are not mere dogmatisms imposed by an arbitrary act of will. Hence the third horn of the Trilemma undermines reasonability just as much as the first two.Kantian Naturalist
April 18, 2013
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PS: I suggest that you look here on, on what the first principles of right reason -- as SB and I have championed in and around UD -- are about.kairosfocus
April 18, 2013
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Claudius: Did you take time to read the updated OP? You will have seen that BA made an error which he admitted and corrected, with an apology:
Update: When I saw the quote originally posted here, I researched it and found an attribution to a source. (The Birth Control Review of 1933-34). It turns out that attribution was mistaken. For posting an inaccurate quotation I apologize. That said, the general views expressed in the quotation were in fact held by Margaret Sanger. I replace the original post with this from Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”
Your sustained accusation of using faked evidence directed to me, joined to the insinuation of thinking such justified suggests willful and malicious intent on my part as well as that of the wider UD contributors, and this sustained accusation was made by you considerably after the error had been checked up and corrected. I do not think that is fair (especially given the easily accessible record; just scroll up . . . ), and you need to take it back. As to the mobile version, which I was not even aware of previously, the answer is obvious given the above: there is a technical problem. If it is not a refresh problem on the part of a proxy, it means there is a disconnect between the versions that does not automatically update the mobile version. If the latter is the case, it is yet another instance of a "bug/feature." I know for a fact that the matter is being looked into and given what you can see in the updated OP, is clearly inadvertent. Had you simply notified that in the mobile version, there is a problem, that would have been one thing. But that is not what you did, and it is not what you did in an exchange with me, where I am not the thread owner and have never used the relevant cite. Remember, when you do something like picking up a characteristic phrase "first principles of right reason" that I used above and then try to cast it in my teeth as though I am responsible for a SMEAR, that is a very serious personally directed false accusation indeed. That is not right, it is not fair, it is not just, it is telling. You are speaking above as though you can freely suggest or ascribe the worst motives to any and anyone associated with UD; which suggests a degree of polarisation and well poisoning that I think you need to do something about. It has led you into slander. PLEASE, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. As matters stand, there is abundant and decisive evidence that the elites of the world were swept up in a tide of eugenics thinking, then "the consensus" of big-S Science. This system of thought was rooted in Darwinism, and was a major manifestation of social darwinism. It was conceived as "the self-direction of human evolution," with intent to prune the species of inferior varieties, indeed it directly compared us to the breeding of domestic animals. Which BTW, is directly traceable to Origin. The racism and class-based elitism are blatant and inherent. That was thought to be objectively justified, almost self-evident, by those caught up in the tide. It was only broken by the revelation of the horrors of the holocaust -- and the implications and moral hazards implied by the notions had been on the table since Chs 5 - 7 of Darwin's Descent of Man, c 1870. H G wells warned of it in two very popular novels, at the turn of C20, War of the Worlds and Time Machine. The first deals with slaughter of alleged inferiors, right in the opening words, the latter is about eugenics on steroids, with the descendants of the upper classes reduced to being sheep bred for slaughter by descendants of the lower classes. Chesterton stood up and roundly denounced it. Only to be derided and dismissed. The massacres in Namibia, in Zaire and the rape of Belgium etc warned by example. None of that was enough to wake up the world's elites' slumbering consciences. It took the undeniable shock of the holocaust. Subsequently, instead of being utterly rooted out, renounced and reformed from by returning the world of thought and morality to a sounder foundation, and consigning eugenics and its fellow travellers to the ash heap of history, eugenics largely went underground, switching labels and arguments. Its influence is still at work, and crops up from time to time. Ms Sanger was caught up in this tide, and this is deeply embedded in her work and the associated documentation. That I have pointed out. It was challenged, and adequate, direct documentation was provided. There was only evasion in reply. Multiplied by sustained accusations. That is not good enough, by a very long shot. And it should be utterly obvious from a scroll-up (due diligence before making strongly adverse comments . . . ) that I and others involved with UD checked up on the cite which BA had used, and on checking original references, concluded that it was not an accurate cite, on the balance of evidence. Thus the corrective update and apology by the blog owner. However, it is equally the case that the suggestion in PP's rebuttal [a SECONDARY SOURCE], is not so. Sanger was clearly caught up in eugenics, which was inherently racist. That needs to be frankly faced and dealt with. We need to face the broader issue of such institutionalised scientific consensuses that have been so disastrously erroneous and destructive, and we need to seriously adjust our attitude to dissent in science as a result. Being against the Big S Science of a given day does not automatically translate into being against genuine scientific progress, and is not inevitably driven by "ignorance, stupidity, insanity, or wickedness." (Indeed, if there was less of hagiography and myth making on Galileo and others, many of the same lessons would come out.) I hope this lesson is taken to heart, and it needs to be embedded into school curricula as an important facet of science in society education. We also need to look at the implications of evolutionary materialism and linked agendas that are rampant in our day. In that context, I think that we also need to revisit a lot of the way that the inference to design has been marginalised, denigrated and demonised in the name of defending Big-S Science from alleged threats to the consensus. KFkairosfocus
April 18, 2013
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