Saturday, May 22, 2010

John Stossel: "right to be racist"



Full Transcript

KELLY: But that's not what Rand Paul said. Rand Paul agreed that if it's run by the government, yes intervention is fine. He took issue with the public accommodations, with private businesses being forced to pony up under the discrimination laws.

STOSSEL: And I would go further than he was willing to go, as he just issued the statement, and say it's time now to repeal that part of the law

KELLY: What?

STOSSEL: because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won't won't ever go to a place that's racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.

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Megyn Kelly is a fucking moron. This is unfortunate, given that were an intelligent person participating in this segment with Stossel, something interesting could have happened.

Let's grant Stossel's premise: It ought to be your right, as a private business owner, to be racist and so enact racist business practices. Or, to take it further, "In a free country, we consenting adults should be able to do whatever we want with our bodies as long as we don’t hurt anyone else."

You ought to be free to do drugs, to rent your body for sex, to sell your organs, to be a racist. In a free country, in a free society, one ought to have the freedom to do whatever one wants, so long as no one hurts anyone else.

Which is fine, until we think about what "hurt" means...and the fact that we are social, societal creatures reliant upon others for our survival. Given that we all exist within a communal causal nexus what you do impacts me, what I do impacts you.

So, I'll agree with John Stossel that in a free society anyone ought to be able to do anything they want so long as they do not hurt anyone else. The problem being, of course, that as social beings living in a communal causal nexus?

Anything anyone ever does hurts someone else.

Stossel's argument participates in the problem shared by all arguments for freedom and liberty: Freedom and Liberty make sense, until you realize there is causality. Once there is causality no longer is there freedom, and liberty is an impossibility.

So, since we are societal, communally-reliant beings existing within a mutually-shared causal nexus? Whence the problem with passing laws which make it illegal for persons to be fucking assholes? The problem cannot be that such laws limit or stifle freedom, because we never fucking had freedom.

Because causality.

Or, you know, there is no causality...so we have freedom...but we do not have will or volition and rather are naught be random, haphazard randomness randomly randoming unconnectedly from one isolated time point to the next isolated, uncaused time point. And since we don't have will we can't have liberty, either.

Basically, John Stuart Mill was an idiot and a drunk. And John Stossel doesn't understand the meanings of the words he uses.

Thank Christ for Leibniz's solution to the problem.

17 comments:

SM said...

Instead of writing your thesis, you're equivocating in an argument against John Stossel?

Sad day, _J_.

SM said...

That is, political as opposed to physical or causal freedom. Goodness.

_J_ said...

How can there be political freedom absent metaphysical or ontological freedom?

Political Freedom: "Political freedom is the absence of interference with the sovereignty of an individual by the use of coercion or aggression."

In order for an individual to have political freedom that individual need have sovereignty over its self; the individual must have the freedom to do as it wills.

But without freedom or will, how could there be political freedom? The social abstraction of a political freedom is reliant upon a metaphysical state of being free, of having an actual, real, existing ontological freedom which can then be actualized within the political abstraction.

Billiard Ball B's movement resulting from its being struck by Billiard Ball A is causality, not freedom. As Billiard Balls cannot have political freedom, given their lack of actual, real, metaphysical, ontological freedom so too can persons not have political freedom absent a genuine, real, actual, metaphysical, ontological freedom.

The nonsense political abstraction is reliant upon metaphysics; metaphysics is not reliant upon nonsense political abstractions.

SM said...

Yeah, this is similar to the argument you sometimes (used to) make about not having any knowledge unless we could shore up our deductive foundations. You're presenting the positions in too-stark exclusive disjunctions: sovereignty over one's self does not mean limitless, unbounded possibility. 'Freedom' isn't a bivalent on-off switch; there are gradations. While being outside the causal order, immune from physical forces, and infinite in potential is a kind of freedom, so too is the sort Stossel supports. It's just a different kind than what you've mentioned.

And, in a move you certainly hate, I'd argue that metaphysical freedom is in fact the abstraction: we see examples of limited freedom (prison to emancipation, for instance) in experience; we never get the kind you're claiming is primary except by a priori reification.

_J_ said...

We could argue that, in a politically free society, one is "free" to vote for whomever one wants even though one's voting is the result of a causal determinacy of action since there were no political forces controlling whether one votes for A or B.

So, I vote for "that one" due to but I am said to be free, politically, since I had the appearance of an option to vote for McCain or "that one"; I was not controlled by political forces.

But we wouldn't make that argument, as it is moronic.

_J_ said...

"'Freedom' isn't a bivalent on-off switch; there are gradations."

There are no gradations of freedom; a billiard ball cannot be 50% caused or 75% caused; a billiard ball is either caused or uncaused. We can't have a metaphysical causal nexus within which there is some minute crevasse of wiggle room; that's just silly.

"Gradations of freedom", I think, tries to not talk about causation but rather influence...but how is "influence" a sensible term outside a vocabulary of causation? Influence makes no sense absent causation. So, since "influence" and "gradation" are terms reliant upon a vocabulary of causality let's just stick to the causality - freedom argument.

Either everything is caused, or nothing is caused. Pick.

_J_ said...

"While being outside the causal order, immune from physical forces, and infinite in potential is a kind of freedom, so too is the sort Stossel supports."

But his freedom makes no sense within a narrative in which we are social beings reliant upon and affecting one another.

The "you can do X so long as X does not harm anyone" position is nonsense given that X always, necessarily, harms someone given reality.

Unless there is no causality, in which case we have much bigger problems to deal with.

SM said...

How do you understand 'cause'? Moving consistently to billiard balls returns the conversation to efficient causation, and in these instances 'influence' is reducible to one more efficient cause. If we take seriously humans as ends-creating, goal-directed loci of action, then this process of ends-evaluation and creation is where the "wiggle room" comes in.

I'm fine with saying it's possible to read a determinately causal narrative onto any element of history, but this does not mean that this narrative is anything other than a posterior judgment and account. That is, we shouldn't mistake our interpretation of the world for the world (fallacy of misplaced concreteness or the philosopher's fallacy or however you'd like to call it).

Ultimately, I do not believe that our present vocabulary has the tools for solving the free will question, so I happily embrace the Jamesian "will to believe" story and say that you're welcome to accept whatever position you'd like, provided there's nothing you take to be convincing evidence against it. If you cannot find resources that make you question determinism in your own experience, I do not think we live similar lives.

I also think that a position such as yours is radically unconvincing to an intelligent man in the street like Stossel. If all philosophy has to combat such dangerous political positions is questioning metaphysical suppositions, I'm afraid something has gone terribly wrong. For while one insists that 'freedom' of any sort is an impossibility, the political process modifies our experienced freedom. One may either deny such amelioration to be possible, or do one's best to make it possible.

(No more replies from me tonight. As you can probably tell, I'm falling asleep ... but I got in my nice little Marxian engine of history line.)

SM said...

"But his freedom makes no sense within a narrative in which we are social beings reliant upon and affecting one another.

The 'you can do X so long as X does not harm anyone' position is nonsense given that X always, necessarily, harms someone given reality.
"

Yes, of course his position is wrong-headed, dangerous, and driven by an economically atomized account of the self. But my point is that one cannot argue against a position like this by squawking about billiard balls and determinacy.

Roscoe said...

.... On the one hand? I'm so glad J found folks he can hold THESE kinds of arguments with.

On the other? You seem to have hit it on the head in the beginning AND missed the point, in recognizing he's tilting at Stossel.. and indirectly, Ms. Kelly.

These folks don't deserve rational thought, they deserve tangential rant, and then pleasing, ego-stoking fury.

Andrew said...

Like so many people Stossel fails to understand racism and discrimination. Read a book Stossel.

What about a private hospital? or grocery store? there are many small towns which only have one option when it comes to essentials. Should they be allowed to force people to leave their community? Lets say a business association in a small town decides to refuse to serve all minority customers. The minority groups are then forced to leave. How is that not harmful, and how could that be their right to do so?
Stossel and Paul are living in a fantasy land where the economy can fix everything. We do not live in a fucking free society. Never have, never will. Any group that comes together to live as a society must create laws to protect the enfranchised peoples from being discriminated against.

Stossel and Paul are just upset they have losing their power and privilege in society and see this as a way to get it back.

_J_ said...

"The minority groups are then forced to leave. How is that not harmful, and how could that be their right to do so?"

My guess is that, for Stossel, his argument for why persons could have the right to discriminate is "Freedom", and he has no argument for why "freedom is good" or why "persons have a right to freedom" other than to simply state it. It's this sort of shit:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If you can't argue for X, just declare X to be self-evident.


I really don't know what sort of cognitive dissonance he's engaging to not think discrimination harmful, though. That would be an interesting question...

I wonder if he has an e-mail address...

_J_ said...

"If we take seriously humans as ends-creating, goal-directed loci of action..."

Why in god's name would one think that?

"That is, we shouldn't mistake our interpretation of the world for the world"

Which is why we don't articulate the problem to be such that we are engaging with interpretations of the world.

"Yes, of course his position is wrong-headed, dangerous, and driven by an economically atomized account of the self. But my point is that one cannot argue against a position like this by squawking about billiard balls and determinacy."

I think that since his arguments are founded upon notions of freedom and an atomized self, ultimately the conversation will get to discussions regarding freedom and self.

He has to have some conception of metaphysics and ontology to maintain these positions. He does not seem to be saying random shit but rather thinks himself to have articulated a coherent narrative. Eventually we'll have to get to the foundations of that narrative, his primary assumptions out of which his argument is constructed.

We'll have to talk about billiard balls and determinacy eventually, as they are foundational notions for him. So instead of spending pages and pages dealing with the political argument why not just go for his primary assumptions right from the start?

If we're arguing about Stossel we don't have to talk about civil rights or private ownership. We can just argue about the misconception of an atomized self and determinacy to undermine his entire project.

_J_ said...

"For while one insists that 'freedom' of any sort is an impossibility, the political process modifies our experienced freedom."

I don't know what this means.

Caleb said...

"But, obviously, I've read history, and I know that there is something wrong when a person of color can't get from state to state without stopping at a public restroom or public lunchroom to have a sandwich."

_J_ said...

My hope is that she did not mean what that quote says.

Andrew said...

It occurs to me that stossel and paul seem to be stuck in a ideological fantasy land.
This is also a problem many academics seem to have.