A GOOD EXAMPLE OF HOW LEFTISM DESTROYS ACADEMIC AND INTELLECTUAL STANDARDS

It hugely degrades thinking and standards of argument even among those who should be most competent and careful. Post lifted from Keith Burgess-Jackson

John Deigh is a "professor" of law at the University of Texas at Austin. (I put the word "professor" in quotation marks, since Deigh has no legal credentials. His training is in philosophy.) Deigh is the editor of Ethics, a prominent philosophical periodical. In the most recent issue, dated October 2006, he editorializes about the fallacy of deriving an "is" statement from an "ought" statement (not to be confused with the fallacy-known as Hume's Law-of deriving an "ought" statement from an "is" statement). Deigh gives two illustrations of the fallacy. The first concerns "Stalin's efforts at falsifying the photographic record of Russia's October revolution and the early history of the Soviet Union" (page 2). The second concerns the war in Iraq. Let me reproduce the two paragraphs about the war in Iraq:

The Soviet Union was of course a totalitarian regime. Its rulers had vast power over their subjects. Nothing like this sort of propaganda campaign, it is easy to think, is imaginable in modern liberal democracies. Yet the propaganda campaign undertaken by President Bush and his administration in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and during the subsequent occupation of that country should make us think twice. It too was propelled by the fallacy of deriving `is' from `ought'. And it too used false and misleading representations of fact to gain support for its architects' ends. Thus Bush and the leading members of his administration loudly denounced the Iraqi government as an evil regime whose malignancy not only threatened to destabilize the Middle East but placed the Western world in grave peril as well. A regime this wicked ought to be in league with the most diabolical enemies of the West, plotting our destruction, and it ought to be amassing weapons of such destructive power as to give it a real chance of succeeding in these plots. So there followed from the Bush administration a steady stream of alarming, now discredited statements about the regime's ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, its active program for developing nuclear arms, and its stockpiling of huge stores of chemical and biological weapons. In the words of the head of British intelligence, reporting in the secret Downing Street memo of July 23, 2002, on the Bush administration's prewar strategy, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." One could not give a better description of the fallacy.

The result has been a major human disaster, whether one measures it by the common conservative estimate of nearly 50,000 civilian Iraqi deaths since the invasion or by the radical estimate published this month in the Lancet of over 600,000 civilian Iraqi deaths or by something in between. And while the death toll in any case is dwarfed by that of Stalin's tyranny, such comparisons will bring no comfort to the Iraqi people or to the many families of soldiers who have died in the war or have returned home horribly and permanently maimed. A human disaster of this magnitude calls for investigation into its causes. Has it been due to undemocratic features of America's political institutions? Was it by exploiting them at an opportune time that a determined clique of government officials was able to grab the levers of power and push through policies of unnecessary war and conquest? Or should we conclude that the institutions of liberal democracy themselves have become less reliable safeguards against such efforts than we thought? These are questions for political scientists and perhaps eventually historians. For philosophers the disaster does not appear to have generated new questions for study. Our discipline's research is not as responsive to current events. But we are not isolated from them. And one thing we can do is to acquaint our students with the fallacy of deriving `is' from `ought', to alert them to the ease with which it is committed, particularly in government propaganda. (pages 2-4; footnotes omitted)

My first reaction upon reading Deigh's editorial was that it's a paranoid rant that has no place in a serious philosophical publication. It might be fit for a blog, or even a newspaper op-ed column, but it's not appropriate for a scholarly organ. My second reaction was that my first reaction was uncharitable. So let's put the best spin on Deigh's editorial, even if he doesn't put the best spin on the Bush administration's reasoning, for he claims to be making a serious philosophical point. Did President Bush commit the fallacy of deriving an "is" statement from an "ought" statement?

I don't see it. Deigh refers to a "propaganda campaign" undertaken by the Bush administration. But he doesn't support this claim. He says the Bush administration used "false and misleading representations of fact to gain support for its architects' ends." The implication is that lies were told. But a lie is not merely a false statement; it is a false statement uttered with intent to deceive. If Deigh believes that President Bush lied, then, given the seriousness of the charge, he has an obligation to supply the false statement together with evidence that, at the time it was uttered, it was known by President Bush to be false. Furthermore, he must adduce evidence that President Bush uttered it with the intent to deceive. That one or more of President Bush's factual claims was false, or turned out to be false, doesn't make it a lie; nor does it make it propaganda. In short, Deigh makes a number of wild and unsupported assertions. We teach our students not to do that sort of thing. Indeed, we grade their term papers down when they do.

Deigh next complains that President Bush described the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein as an "evil regime." Was it not an evil regime, by any reasonable standard? How many thousands of people did Hussein have murdered, tortured, raped, and mutilated? How many people did he terrorize, and for how long? Does Deigh deny that it was an evil regime? If it was an evil regime, what is wrong with saying so and acting accordingly? And keep in mind that President Bush did not have to speculate about Hussein having evil intentions toward the United States. There was plenty of evidence that he did, including Hussein's own statements over a period of many years. As for President Bush's belief that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, this wasn't something that the president cooked up for propaganda purposes. Almost everyone in American government, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, believed it. Deigh has to show not that the belief was false, for there can be justified false beliefs, but that it was unjustified or unreasonable. He goes no way toward doing this. Deigh's discussion of President Bush's beliefs, decisions, arguments, and actions is uncharitable in the extreme-to the point where Deigh's honesty must be called into question. There is a lesson here for students of philosophy, but it's not the one Deigh supposes.

As for the Iraq war being a "disaster," that requires both elaboration and argumentation. Calling it a disaster several times does not make it a disaster. (Students, take note.) Yes, people have died in Iraq since the invasion. Lots of them, on both sides. But people die in every war. Does that make every war unjustified? How many people died fighting Hitler? If Deigh believes that the war in Iraq was unjustified, he must make his case. He must state his principle of just war and apply it to Iraq. He doesn't. He simply assumes that the war was unjustified and goes on to "explain" why it occurred. That's called begging the question. Students should take note. That Deigh's audience (professional philosophers) overwhelmingly believes that the war was unjustified is neither here nor there. Is he merely preaching to the choir? What would be the point of that? He should do what philosophers routinely do, or profess to do, which is to try to persuade those whose minds are not already made up. But this would require more than the three pages he devotes to the topic, and it would require a lot less manipulative rhetoric. Deigh's editorial is drive-by philosophy. No wonder philosophers get no respect!

Deigh compounds his problem by trying to explain how the "disaster" came about. Doesn't that have the cart before the horse? First he must establish that there has been a disaster (by what standard?); then he must explain (in a plausible way) how it occurred, so that similar disasters can be prevented or averted. Suppose we used Deigh's technique on Deigh's editorial. Suppose we assumed, without argument, that Deigh published a scurrilous, poorly reasoned editorial, and then set about to explain how it could have been published in a journal as prestigious as Ethics. We might say that since Deigh is its editor, nobody had the power or the courage to stand up to him, or to tell him that his editorial is nothing more than a paranoid rant. Or perhaps we would explain it in terms of the left-wing bias of the academy. Everyone to whom Deigh showed the editorial, we might speculate, shared his values, so he got no disinterested feedback. Or maybe it's just a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. And so on. I don't think Deigh would appreciate having his editorial dismissed in this way. So why does he dismiss the arguments of the Bush administration in this way? President Bush made a multi-pronged case for invading Iraq-before he invaded. Other people, including serious scholars, have made a case for war. Deigh ignores these arguments. This, I assure you, is not in keeping with philosophical practice. It is, in fact, a disgrace.

I've been teaching logic for almost a quarter of a century. Nothing in Deigh's editorial convinces me that President Bush committed the fallacy of deriving an "is" statement from an "ought" statement. If anyone has committed any fallacies, it is Deigh. He's lucky he's not my student. If I were grading his editorial, it would receive a D.





D.C.: Let the money follow the student

Mayor-elect Adrian M. Fenty has pledged to make education reform his administration's top priority. Unhappy with the progress of embattled DC Public Schools superintendent Clifford B. Janey, Fenty plans a New York-style mayoral takeover of the system. He may be popular enough to succeed, but unless he supports policies that fund students instead of failing schools, his coup cannot trigger an education revolution in the District.

Even without new ideas, a takeover may do some good: it would sideline a fractious and sluggish local school board and give the new mayor a chance to rid the DCPS of its most egregiously corrupt personnel and practices. But no managerial shake-up will rid the system of the honest but substandard teachers and techniques that keep District schools in the national-rankings basement year after year.

Only by empowering parents to choose their children's schools can Mayor-elect Fenty achieve his goal of a quality education for every child. He should increase public school choices, lift the arbitrary cap on the number of charter schools allowed in DC, and expand the district's nascent but promising school voucher program.

Poor teaching quality, one of the District's worst problems, is exacerbated by public school administrators who prefer to hire education majors instead math and science majors, even though the latter make better teachers in their subjects. Giving parents the ability to choose which public schools get their money discourages these and other counterproductive practices, as Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby has found.

Hoxby's work suggests that public schools that compete for funds and students are more likely to hire the most capable teachers available, improving results for students at all schools. But the DCPS still assigns students to schools largely by neighborhood. Fenty should recommend a city-wide open enrollment program for public schools to allow the most successful schools to expand their capacity and serve larger numbers of students.

Second, Fenty should unleash a new wave of Charter school entrepreneurship in the District. Charter schools have blossomed in recent years and now serve over 17,000 students in the District of Columbia. Although about three quarters of DC's charter school students come from low-income families, and virtually all are racial minorities, they routinely outperform DCPS students on math and reading tests, according to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute.

Despite good academic results and high rates of parental satisfaction, Washington's charter school movement is hobbled by an arbitrary cap of 20 new charters per year. Fenty should support lifting this cap. Equally important, he should smooth the way for charter schools to lease sought-after DCPS building space that is currently going to waste.

Finally, Fenty should rethink his former opposition to DC's promising new Opportunity Scholarship Program. The program offers scholarships of up to $7,500 to low and moderate income families who wish to enroll a child in a private or parochial school in the District. Both scholarships and places in participating schools are awarded on a lottery basis.

The program is too new to evaluate for educational results yet, but studies of similar programs elsewhere indicate that-while school choice benefits all students-African-American voucher recipients reap the largest academic gains. In a city with a painfully large academic achievement gap between white and minority students, the Opportunity Scholarship Program could be an important force for equity.

But only if it is expanded. While the program is probably priceless to many of the 1,802 students it serves, it is too small to provide meaningful competition for DC's public schools. A much larger program would not only benefit more scholarship recipients, it would also benefit the remaining DCPS students by forcing the public system to pull its socks up and improve the educational services it offers to local families.

Mayor-elect Fenty has promised to provide "qualified teachers for all children." If he is serious about that, he should put parents, not bureaucrats beholden to the American Federation of Teachers, in charge of choosing schools for them. To do so, he needs merely to embrace and expand existing programs that allow funding to follow students to the educational opportunities they deserve.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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