Why I Make Such Good Pizzas

(The following is a parody of "Why I Write Such Good Books," which appears in Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo)

I am one thing, my pizzas are another matter. Before I discuss them, let me touch on the question of their being eaten or not eaten. I'll do this quickly and casually, for the time for this question certainly has not come yet. The time for me hasn't come yet: some pizzas are eaten posthumously.

Some day institutions will be needed in which men make and bake pizzas as I conceive of making and baking them. But that today one doesn't follow my recipes is not even understandable, it seems right to me.

When Chef Boyardee once complained that my pizzas were inedible, I told him that was expected--to really taste my pizza would raise one to a higher level of existence than "modern" men could attain.

My triumph is precisely the opposite of Dominos: I say "My pizzas are not eaten, my pizzas will not be eaten."

Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including pizzas, than he already knows. A pizza that contains nothing but flavors that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent experience--that is the first taste for a new series of experiences.

This has been all said for the benefit of Italians; for everywhere else I have eaters--nothing but first-rate palates. But to eat Italian, to taste Italian--I can do anything, but not that. I am the anti-Italian par excellence and thus a world-historical monster--I am, in Greek and not only in Greek, the Anti-Papa John.

Whoever is related to me in the height of his aspirations will experience veritable ecstacies of flavor; I pick from tomato plants that no bird ever reached in its flight, I use garlic from ground onto which no foot ever strayed. I have been told that it is impossible to put down one of my pizzas--that they even disturb nightly rest.

Before me, it was not known what could be done with mozzarella--what could be done with cheese in general. The art of pasteurizing and grating was discovered only by me. With my four cheese and garlic special, I soared a thousand miles beyond what was called pizza before.

May I here venture the surmise that I know tomatos? Ah, what a dangerous, creeping, subterranean fruit she is! And yet so agreeable!

And lest I leave any doubt about my very decent and strict views in these matters, let me cite the following proposition: "The preaching of thin-crusts amounts to a public incitement to antinature. Every kind of contempt for garlic, every impurification of it by means of the concept 'impure,' is the crime par excellence against pizza--is the real sin against the culinary spirit of pizza."

The Death Penalty

Much of the debate surrounding the death penalty focuses on the issues of deterrence and the fairness with which such punishment is meted out. However, I believe that most defenders of the death penalty do not really care about the deterrence issue, and though they might admit that the administration of the penalty is unfair, they would argue that in cases where the person executed is guilty of their crime, justice demands that such a person be executed. My question is, is this correct? To be specific, let us consider a case where a man has killed another person, and where the killer was of "sound mind" when he committed the crime (it was not a crime of passion or due to mental illness, and so forth). Let us further assume that the victim in no way "deserved" their death (e.g. the person was not a criminal or vile in any way). If the killer is not executed, will a breach of justice occurred?

Let us consider what I take to be the strongest argument for the claim that justice demands the killer be executed. The argument goes something like this: When the killer killed the innocent person, a loss of life occurred, a loss that should not have happened. Normally, I suppose, when people are unjustly deprived of something, we think that compensating the victim will restore the imbalance caused by the unjust loss (thus the "scales of justice"). For example, if I steal $5 dollars from you, returning that $5 dollars to you will make things "right" again.

However, this model for thinking about justice clearly will not work in the case of death. If I kill you, there is nothing I can do to bring you back to life, so the imbalance cannot be restored. Is there another way to restore the imbalance? Well, if the killer is executed, now his life has ended, too, and we might think that what this does is make the situation of killer and killed equal. Considering the stolen money case again, it would be the equivalent of taking $10 from the thief, even though the person it was stolen from never gets the $5 back (it needs to be $10 so that the thief is down $5 altogether).

A few points of clarification are in order to avoid possible confusions. The defender of capital punishment should perhaps not say that in executing the killer we are treating the killer the same way the killer treated his victim. As Kant famously pointed out (snooty name dropping, I know), how we describe an action makes a big difference to our moral assessment of the action. If the killer unjustly killed the victim, then the defender of capital punishment may be in the awkward position of saying that the killer should be unjustly killed, too. But of course the defender does not want to say that, since the defender wants to say that the execution is just! Notice, too, that the critic of capital punishment cannot simply say that executing the killer is as bad as killing the victim without begging the question against the defender of capital punishment. The defender will say that there is an asymmetry in the two killings: in the first, the death is unjust; in the second, it is just, and so they are not morally equivalent. That we make such distinctions all the time (unproblematically) surely counts in favor of the defender of capitol punishment. For example, if I grab you off the street and lock you up in a cell (and you are innocent), this is unjust. If the police catch me and as a result of what I've done lock me up in a cell, this is fair.

I have purposely not talked about the actual criminal justice system of the United States up to this point, but if we consider it, things get even more complicated, not less. We simply do not think that, in general, justice requires that either victims be recompensated by their attackers or that attackers get treated the same way as their victims. For example, if I steal 1 million dollars in a bank heist and blow the money, I am required to go to jail, not pay the bank back. Or if a person commits a horrible rape, the rapist is not sentenced to be raped. In our system, we use jail time as a means of punishment, and use the length of sentence to reflect the severity of the crime committed. If this is true in general, why should murders be any different? Consider rape again. If we do not think the rapist should be raped in turn, and if we acknowledge that no amount of jail time will recompensate the victim for their suffering, why should we differ with respect to murder? Now, the defender of capital punishment might say that in the case of rape, executing the rapist would be too stern a penalty; that is, the penalty is not commensurate with the crime, whereas in the case of murder, execution is commensurate with the crime. But that still leaves the defender of execution in the position of explaining why raping rapists is not an acceptable method of punishment. Or is it? Maybe the defender of executions should say that such punishments are not only acceptable, but required. Does the logic of capital punishment mandate such a position? Another way to put the question may be this: if, in general, we are willing to abandon an "eye for an eye" approach to punishment, on what grounds, if any, can we make an exception for capital punishment?

Yes Virginia, They Do Conflict

Brights such as Richard Dawkins and Theists such as Francis Collins have both attacked Stephen Jay Gould's claim that science and religion constitute two, "nonoverlapping magisteria." And, of course, they are both right in making such an attack. Despite what theists who believe in evolution by natural selection say, natural selection is in deep tension with the specific and widely held doctrine of the immortal soul.

To make it clear why this is so, we need to acknowledge up front that, for theists, the immortal soul is supposed to explain something; it is not merely an idle and gratuitous feature of humans, but is supposed to account for something that is otherwise inexplicable. The problem arises when another, competing explanation of the same phenomena is offered, for both explanations cannot be right. This is exactly the position we are in (or will soon be in, I predict) with respect to the immortal soul.

What is the immortal soul supposed to explain? Francis Collins attributes his conversion to Christianity in large part to reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and I think it fair to say that what the immortal soul is supposed to provide is moral knowledge--that without the existence of an immortal soul, ethics makes no sense. So when people like Collins say they are committed Darwinians, they mean they are committed up to a point, for a committed Darwinian wants to say that everything about humans can be given a natural explanation in evolutionary terms, and the concept of an immortal soul is not a part of the Darwinian tool kit--it simply does no explanatory work. Thus, if we ever reach a point where a Darwinian theory of morality is fully articulated, people will need to make a choice: either accept the Darwinian story and reject the concept of an immortal soul, or reject the Darwinian story and accept immortal souls. But because these accounts will be in conflict, they cannot have it both ways.

This, by the way, is where the real action should be in this debate between religion and science. A lot of focus is given to the question of whether there could be a God that created the universe, set down a system of laws compatible with our evolution, and then let nature run its course. Brights like Dawkins get in trouble here because the issues involved can by rather esoteric and hard to think about for creatures whose psychology was tuned to deal with more "local" problems, like how to survive and reproduce. Because Dawkins is seen as taking a hard stand on such issues, he is accused of overreaching. I think there is something to this criticism, but I also think the debate obscures the conflicts between religion and science that are less inscrutable.

The Problem of Evil

A perennial problem in the philosophy of religion is the problem of evil: if God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, then how can he allow such atrocities as the Holocaust to occur? Surely he would intervene to stop them from happening. One defense often given for the presence of such evil is that God gave us free will, that by giving us free will he gave us the power to choose evil, but that the possession of free will is such an important and great gift from God that it is better, all things considered, for humans to have free will and sometimes choose evil than to never do evil but lack free will.

What should we make of this defense? First, I assume that Christians will accept the following three claims:

(1) God is all good
(2) God has free will
(3) God is all powerful

Because God has free will, he could have chosen not to create the universe, or could have chosen to create it differently.

I will also a assume that, all things considered

(4) a world in which people that have free will but always choose to do good is better than a world in which people have free will but sometimes choose to do evil.

An important question then arises: could God have chosen to create a world where people have free will but always freely choose to do good? If so, then it would seem that God's failing to choose to create such a world shows that he does not always choose what is best (from (4)) and thus that either he is not all good or not all powerful or not free.

I want to argue that, indeed, God could have chosen to create a world where people have free will but always freely choose to do good. The argument for this is rather straightforward. First, let's consider God again and his attributes. What does God's perfect goodness imply? Among other things, it implies that he always chooses the good. A God that occassionally chooses to do evil cannot be a perfectly good God, since evil is a "privation." But God also has free will. So God himself, according to this view, is an actual being who both always does what is good and yet possesses free will. Since God, himself, is supposed to be a being that has free will but always chooses the good, could not God have created us in such a way that we always freely choose to do the good? Since it is not logically impossible for there to be such beings (since God himself is such a being), and since God can do whatever is logically possible (I take it that this is entailed by his being all powerful), God could have created beings that always freely choose to do what is good. And since a world where people always freely choose to do good is a better world than a world where people sometimes freely choose to do evil, God is either not all powerful, not all good, or lacks free will.

Ethical Egoism

Do ethical egoists really believe what they say? More to the point, should they? I must admit that there is a pretty powerful intuition driving ethical egoism--the doctrine that says that we should only pursue our own interests--but that egoists often go astray in pinning down why this should be so. Here's an incorrect way to argue for it: my interests count more than yours. Suppose for a moment that your interests do count. Could a reasonable person then go on to assert that any other person's interests counted less simply because their's were not yours? Could an interest being mine really make any difference to the value of those interests? To see why this is implausible, consider the following argument: though your new Honda Accord is qualitatively indistinguishable from my new Honda Accord, my Honda is worth more because it is mine. I have a hard time believing that you could convince a prospective buyer to pay more money for your car on those grounds! Notice, too, that if this argument really did work, the other person with the Honda Accord could make the very same argument for why her car was more valuable, which would make the egoist's argument self-defeating (remember, the argument was supposed to be for the conclusion that my car is worth more than another's car; if another can use the premises of the argument to support the conclusion that it is not, there is something faulty with the premises).

What the egoist should say is that, typically, the individual is in the best position to protect and promote their interests, and so when it comes to practical action, I should look after my own interests first because I am in the best position to achieve them. But such a view does not entail that other's interests are less important or valuable, nor does it imply that in all cases I should only pursue my interests (since there may be cases where I am better able to promote the interests of others than I am my own).

Bullshit and the Liberal Arts

(from part of a talk I gave at Knox College in Galesburg, Il)

Bullshit, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt tells us, is a worse enemy of truth than lies. To understand this claim, we must first make a distinction between bullshitting and lying. According to Frankfurt, the intention of the liar is to deceive, and to be successful in carrying out this intention the liar must concern herself with the truth (if only to conceal it from others). The bullshitter, on the other hand, has no regard for truth, and so the question of whether what the bullshitter says is true or false is irrelevant to the bullshitter.

Of course, there are many occasions when the goal of communication is not concerned with truth. Sometimes we say things because the words have a pleasing sound to them, or we are trying to elicit laughter from others. We do not call these occurrences of bullshit, however, because in most of these cases there is no pretension to truth. To bullshit, one must appear to be concerned with the truth, even when in reality one is not.

One of the problems with bullshit is that there seems to be so much of it these days. Indeed, the success of such shows as The Colbert Report depends on the prevalence of bullshit in the popular media. To satirize the kind of commentary that we sometimes find on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, Colbert must simultaneously confess his love of the truth while disavowing those methods that traditionally characterize the truth seeker. Instead of listening to his head, Colbert listens to his gut; he does not read books, because books are full of facts. The effect is to expose the bullshitting that passes for inquiry, and to make us laugh in the process. Thus we can see that bullshitting, as Frankfurt says, is as much about the activity and attitude of the bullshitter as it is about the bullshit produced.

I began this talk with a discussion of bullshit because I think it brings into stark relief what we are doing here at Knox. The possibility of the liberal arts rests on the spirit of inquiry, on the searching for truth in all its forms. To take the liberal arts seriously is to see that the truth matters, that there is something at stake in reading and analyzing literature, in making explicit an argument, in conducting a laboratory experiment. It also requires that there are real standards of engagement, that some ways of inquiring are better than others, and that we are not merely playing with the instruments of the liberal arts, whether they are words, clay, or microscopes.

Here, I would like to talk about what unites the various disciplines you will encounter at Knox, for I believe that whether you are analyzing a painting, reading an ethnography, or writing a lab report, you are engaged in a process that is geared towards the truth. What does that process look like?

In its most general form, we can say that the process involves an attempt to construct models or interpretations of experience that reflect who we are as people, the world we live in, and our relation to that world. We want to know why certain chemicals react the way they do when mixed with other chemicals. We proceed by devising and testing models of the structure and behavior of those chemicals until we are convinced that the chemicals are as we represent them to be. These representations reflect our capacity to categorize and interpret what we see, capacities that lie at the basis of all human thought. Another example: we want to know why a particular political movement arose and disappeared in America in the 1800s. We are looking for the material and social causes of that movement, and we frame hypotheses and test them against the historical evidence that we possess. Our goal is not merely to construct some interpretation, but one that survives close scrutiny of the traces left behind. A final example: we hear a dirge at a funeral and we want to know what this song tells us about the way the people performing it think about life and death. Again, it is not enough to tell a story about the significance of the dirge that is pleasing or clever; our goal is to examine the musical forms used and the meanings of those forms to the community in question. This is no simple task, but requires close analysis of the historical and cultural context of the forms, as well as scrutiny of the specific arrangement and choice of notes in the song. The picture here is of the archaeologist unearthing systems of significance and value of a group of people, not of the fashionable critic looking for a provocative story.

At this point some of you may be thinking, “OK, when it comes to science, I can buy that there is truth to be had. But aren’t art, literature, and philosophy, at bottom, bullshit?” I am a philosopher by trade, and unfortunately my students occasionally have this attitude towards philosophy. That they use the term ‘bullshit’ to talk about it is also revealing, for I think they are using that term in much the way that Frankfurt interprets it. What are my students getting at when they say philosophy is bullshit? Though I cannot speak for them, I will venture to guess that they think that there are no truths to be arrived at by doing philosophy, and thus there could be no genuine inquiry to be done in this field. But since philosophers act as if they are trying to discover the truth, they are just bullshitting.

As you can probably imagine, I do not share this perspective on the business of philosophy, and while I may not be able to convince you that it is false, I would like to offer some considerations that would cast doubt on it. Let us begin by pointing out something that is so obvious that we rarely even consider it: that our language and the concepts that get expressed by our words and sentences are not the private property of single individuals, but the common currency of a community of speakers. Think about your uses of language today: you talked to your roommate in the dorm; you text-messaged a friend with your mobile phone; you posted a note on someone’s wall on Facebook. The goals and possibility of communication would be ruled out if our language was not, at root, a public phenomenon whose meanings were constrained by certain conventions. When Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that a word means exactly what he wants it to mean, no more or no less, Alice wonders whether this is possible. Her skepticism of Humpty’s position is justified, for in making this assertion, Humpty is overlooking what the primary function of language is: to communicate with others. And because communication would be impossible on Humpty’s model of language, Humpty’s claim is revealed to be false.

What does this have to do with philosophical discourse, however, or any other kinds of conversations you can expect to have at Knox? The implication is that built into the very structure and function of language are the resources for criticism, a kind of criticism that moves the terms of dispute into the public arena, making them the legitimate targets of criticism by others. You cannot say whatever you want and get away with it, because your language will not let you. And the point generalizes. You cannot say whatever you want and get way with it in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, either, and for the reasons lately scouted: the systems of interpretation employed in all of these areas presuppose something shared and something public.

What they do not presuppose, however, is something fixed. We humans display an enormous creativity and flexible when it comes to the concepts we devise to understand our world. New modes of expression are devised by writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists in response to the changing circumstances of life that happen to us and that we create. But these innovations reflect changes that occur in communities, and though these innovations at any one time may be prompted by the few, rather than the many, their constancy can be guaranteed only by their ability to measure up to the tribunal of human experience, experience that is shaped by the institutions, history, and environment of a community of interpreters.