The Party of indefensible causal assertions
By Like Scott, Roy, Kevin, Ezra, and countless others, I have no plans to read or take seriously Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest, for any number of reasons so obvious they hardly need to be stated. I’ve recently managed to discover another one, however. At The American Scene, where Harvard man Ross Douthat regularly performs the thesis of his book, I’ve been engaging in a series of arguments with one Bradford Short in the comments section of this post. This rather obviously unhinged fellow was apparently Ponnuru’s research assistant. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that Short asserts that the publishers and editors of a major philosophy journal have a pro-infanticide agenda, and it goes downhill from there.
It’s the utter lack of any sense of causal logic that lies behind the various imagined connections that never ceases to amaze me, and this discussion has produced some gems in this vein. Short has repeatedly suggested that a handful of articles published in a Philosophy and Public Affairs on abortion and infanticide (actually, only one on the latter topic, but never mind…) are connected in some meaningful way to the Groningen Protocol and the practice of infanticide in cases of extreme and terminal illness in the Netherlands. This is his response:
In the end, Keynes had a point. What starts with philosophers no one has herd of trickles down into the society at large and sometimes changes everything. In conferencing with Ramesh on the book, I even was able to give him a video tape (he never used it) of a John Edwards for Senate (1998) rally I had bought from C-Span long ago, where the homespun people’s lawyer talked to a bunch of blue collar workers in N.C. about…*John Rawls*. That’s right, he talked to them about the rightness of the thoery/thought expiriment of the *original position.* There was a time when few had heard of Rawls. One would be a fool to call him obscure, or that his theory would not/did not move minds.
Staggering. An american politician once invoked an idea in a stump speech. Therefore, ideas matter. Therefore, and obscure 1972 article from an american philosophy journal is responsible for Dutch policy regarding terminally ill infants. This is the sort of causal logic the whole “culture of life, party of death” rhetoric is built on. It’s a fundamentally unserious approach to understanding the world.