Immoral reasoning

Left-wingers who are not backward at expressing their contempt for the anti-war movement are often - so often - accused of operating by caricature and smear. I have done my best to point out that the attitudes Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and Norman Geras find outrageous are not, in fact, fringe opinions. Those views are an unexceptional, and highly exceptionable, part of the conversation that our wing of politics has conducted since 9/11. When Amnesty International, purportedly not a partisan organisation at all, famously compared Guantanamo to the Gulag, Christopher remarked:

[I]f an organization that ostensibly protects the rights of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and arbitrary detention—replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal execution—then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair. This is not even neutrality between the fireman and the fire. It surely expresses a covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless and sinister, hatred of the United States. If only this were the only symptom of that tendency.

Indeed; if only. I have read this week a new book called Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony. It's a collection of original essays by twenty leading philosophers in the UK and US, all of whom reject religious faith, expounding their own intellectual journeys on that subject.

One essay, by Kenneth Taylor of Stanford University, concerns the achievement of moral order in the absence of religious faith. The essay is not felicitously written, but I did take notice when Professor Taylor said this (p. 163):

If all-encompassing normative community is neither historically inevitable nor rationally mandatory, with what right do we seek to impose that vision on a reluctant world? Down the path of forceful imposition lie Stalin's gulag, Mao's Cultural Revolution, George Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq, and the dark dreams of al-Qaeda.

I will not insult my readers' intelligence by challenging you to spot the odd one out. Professor Taylor's inability to distinguish an "invasion of Iraq" - as if a state's legitimate sovereignty had been violated by the removal of a bestial and kleptocratic regime - from an intervention in Iraq is merely the least of the many components in the evidence of his stupidity. According to Professor Taylor's biography, "his main areas of research are the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind". I could already tell that those main areas of research incorporated no expertise in politics, but I'm relieved to find that they do not appear to include ethics either.