Tag Archives: Personal Responsibility

Polemics

We need to be able to tell women right and wrong

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Disclaimer: in this post, when I refer to women, I mean young, unmarried women influenced by feminism.

I want to give several cases of women behaving badly and then make a general point about whether we are doing the right thing when we decline to criticize women for fear of offending them, and instead point the finger of blame at men, however ridiculous it is to do that.

First case – wife threatens divorce unless husband agrees to abort Down’s syndrome baby:

“When I walked into the room they all turned to me and said ‘Leo has Down syndrome,” he told ABC News. “I had a few moments of shock.”

[…]”They took me in see him and I looked at this guy and I said, he’s beautiful — he’s perfect and I’m absolutely keeping him.”

Soon Forrest walked into his wife’s hospital room with Leo in his arms.

Her reaction was unlike one he ever expected.

“I got the ultimatum right then,” he said. “She told me if I kept him then we would get a divorce.”

[…]One week after his birth, Leo’s mom filed for divorce.

Second case – woman abandons her 5-month old baby to go on a two-week partying binge:

Alena Itapova, 19, who has been nicknamed ‘Monster Mum’ in Russian media for letting baby Veronika die, tried to blame her parents during appeals but ultimately was found guilty. Russian judges refused her appeal and instead increased her sentence. Itapova claimed the baby’s death was her parents’ fault for not teaching her how to properly raise a baby.

During a trial last year, Itapova admitted to leaving her baby alone in her apartment while she disappeared for two weeks. She found her daughter dead when she returned.

Third case – a woman writing for Think Progress bemoans Republican efforts to ban dismemberment abortions:

“Immediately, when I heard the title of these bills, I had to take a deep breath and calm down,” Dr. Anne Davis, the consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB-GYN who provides abortions, told ThinkProgress. “This is a familiar tactic, similar to the other types of bans we’ve seen. It seems the strategy is to take language that provokes emotional responses and then to argue that, because there’s an emotional reaction to something, it should be illegal.”

Fourth case – Cathy Young interviews a man accused of rape and finds evidence that contradicts the accuser’s story:

Sulkowicz has said in interviews that she was too embarrassed and ashamed to talk to anyone about the rape, let alone report it; an account of her mattress protest by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith says that she “suffered in silence” in the aftermath of the assault. Yet Nungesser says that for weeks after that night, he and Sulkowicz maintained a cordial relationship, and says she seemingly never indicated that anything was amiss.

Nungesser provided The Daily Beast with Facebook messages with Sulkowicz from August, September, and October 2012. (In an email to The Daily Beast, Sulkowicz confirmed that these records were authentic and not redacted in any way; while she initially offered to provide “annotations” explaining the context on the messages, she then emailed again to say that she would not be sending them.) On Aug. 29, two days after the alleged rape, Nungesser messaged Sulkowicz on Facebook to say, “Small shindig in our room tonight—bring cool freshmen.”

Despite not being able to present the friendly Facebook messages from two days after the rape at the university trial, he was exonerated. She declined to press criminal charges. Making a false charge to the police is a crime. But she can make a false charge and carry a mattress around on campus, and get her victimhood celebrated by United States senators.

And finally fifth case, false rape accusation investigated by the police, charges dismissed because sex proven consensual.

So what’s the point of all this?

The point of all this is that I think that we are letting women getting away with too much. Instead of standing up to their poor decision-making and outright lying (in the rape cases that have been in the news lately), we coddle them and make them out to be victims, and blame the bad men they freely choose to have relationships with when they mess up their lives. They have to take responsibility for their own poor decisions, and make different decisions going forward. There isn’t enough money in the world to give them to make up for all the mistakes they are making.

When a women makes decisions in her life to drink, move away from parents, shack up with bad men, take drugs, contract STDs, vote for higher taxes and bigger government, run up student loan debts, drop out of school, get pregnant before marriage, have abortions, go on welfare, choose younger unemployed boyfriends, choosing violent boyfriends, move in with men before marriage, get frivolous divorces for “unhappiness”, put kids in non-family daycare when they are under two years old, make fake domestic violence charges, make false rape accusations, deprive children of their father, withhold sex from their husbands all the time for no good reason, disrespecting men, disrespecting masculine traits, etc. then we ought to be confident enough to tell them NO and IT’S WRONG.

We should not let them direct the conversation away from their own mistakes so they can blame others and justify continued irresponsible, selfish behavior because it “feels right” to them. Women are making really bad decisions these days, and it seems like men have lost all confidence to be able to tell them NO and IT’S WRONG. It’s so easy for a woman who is behaving badly to just find people who will agree with her and give her sympathy for her bad decisions. Men and women both seem to love to agree with women who are wrecking their lives and causing problems for everyone else around them.

We need to stop condoning and rationalizing their poor decisions. The harm that women cause is very real, and the costs for “fixing” their mistakes through government programs and charity are ballooning. In the UK, we are now seeing taxpayer-funded breast implants and IVF, in some provinces in Canada, taxpayer-funded IVF, and here at home – free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. We cannot keep paying for lives that are ruined by decision-making dominated by emotions, cultural standards and peer-pressure.

Just because a woman is pretty and sounds nice, that doesn’t make her exempt from the moral law. It’s not even good for a woman, in the long run, to surround herself with people (men and women) who tell her to “follow her heart” – I can guarantee that that her yes-men and yes-women won’t want to deal with the mess she creates by following her heart, when it all blows up in her face. The biggest problem I see is apparently moral Christian men being so desperate for attention and/or sex that they give up the role of being the moral leader so that the woman will prefer them to men who would hold them accountable.

Commentary

Arthur Brooks: earning your own success through work makes you happy

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In the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life’s “profit” however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.

The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel “very successful” or “completely successful” in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel “somewhat successful.” It doesn’t matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.

The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.

During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”

Learned helplessness was what my wife and I observed then, and still do today, in social-democratic Spain. The recession, rigid labor markets, and excessive welfare spending have pushed unemployment to 24.4%, with youth joblessness over 50%. Nearly half of adults under 35 live with their parents. Unable to earn their success, Spaniards fight to keep unearned government benefits.

Meanwhile, their collective happiness—already relatively low—has withered. According to the nonprofit World Values Survey, 20% of Spaniards said they were “very happy” about their lives in 1981. This fell to 14% by 2007, even before the economic downturn.

That trajectory should be a cautionary tale to Americans who are watching the U.S. government careen toward a system that is every bit as socially democratic as Spain’s.

Government spending as a percentage of GDP in America is about 36%—roughly the same as in Spain. The Congressional Budget Office tells us it will reach 50% by 2038. The Tax Foundation reports that almost 70% of Americans take more out of the tax system than they pay into it. Meanwhile, politicians foment social division on the basis of income inequality, instead of attempting to improve mobility and opportunity through education reform, pro-growth policies, and an entrepreneur-friendly economy.

These trends do not mean we are doomed to repeat Spain’s unhappy fate. But our system of earned success will not defend itself.

What I find most interesting is that the people who vote for Obama don’t even realize how they are making themselves more and more unhappy by being more and more dependent on government. It’s the bluest states that have seen the lowest income growth, the lowest job growth, lower home prices, and the highest unemployment. All of this talk about taxing the rich and spreading the wealth around through bigger and more intrusive government hasn’t worked.

More government means less prosperity, and less prosperity means fewer jobs, and fewer jobs means less happiness. Punishing your successful neighbor and borrowing huge amounts of money from the next generation of Americans does not create jobs. And without a job, you’re not going to be happy.

We need to have a public policy that recognizes that human beings are spiritual creatures, and we aren’t happy unless we chart our own course and earn our own success instead of depending on government to take it from someone else and hand it to us.

News

Satire: The end of moral duties

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New Zealand philosopher Matt Flannagan wrote a satirical piece on moral duties from a naturalistic perspective: (H/T Michael’s Theology)

Some people claim we have a duty to not rape women, or that religious people have a duty to not engage in wars or acts of terrorism, conduct inquisitions and so on. I think this is nonsense as it assumes there is such a thing as a moral duty and this is false and here’s why:

First, the burden of proof is on he who makes a claim, as an amoralist I am not making a claim I am simply not affirming that moral duties exist, so I don’t have to justify my non-belief in duties. Instead those who believe in duties have to come up with compelling proof they exist.

Second, one cannot empirically verify the claim duties exist so it’s meaningless incoherent nonsense until such verification is given.

Third, no one has yet to provide a proof that duties of any sort exist. Such things if they can be decided at all must be shown to exist by the methods of natural science and to date no one has shown that belief in moral duties is necessary to any scientific theory. Neither physics or chemistry or biology has need of that hypothesis to explain the world.

Fourth, think of all the evil done in the name of duties, almost every war fought through out history has been justified by those who did it claiming they were doing the right thing. Inquisitions, crusades and the suppression of science were all done in the name of doing the right thing and avoiding the wrong thing.

Fifth, if you claim you believe we have duties such as a duty to not rape, I’ll ask you to explain “which duty” do you follow. There are so many different “duties” appealed to. Some people claim there is one fundamental duty, but those who do disagree as to what it is or exactly how to conceive of it. Others claim there are many duties and a small number of people claim there are none. Everyone rejects some concept or account of duty; us ‘adutyists’ just deny one more duty than everyone else.

Sixth – Think of how degrading and contrary to human autonomy the belief in duties is, duties are things we are supposed to live our lives in allegiance to. Rational people can figure out what to do for themselves using reason, we don’t need moral duties to tell us what to do, it stifles human autonomy and is childish to believe in duties.

Seventh – Evolutionary psychology shows us that small children from a very young age have evolved a disposition to believe certain things are right and wrong. The fact we can explain this belief entirely in evolutionary terms shows duties don’t exist.

Eight – What duties you believe is determined largely by your family and cultural background. If you were raised in Iran you would believe you had a duty to execute homosexuals. If you were raised in secular western Europe you would believe you had a duty to support same sex marriage. Clearly therefore, belief in duties is the result of parental and cultural brainwashing and up bringing.

Ninth – We should treat all our beliefs from the perspective of a sceptical outsider, hence we should treat our belief in moral duties from the perspective of moral skeptics.

Tenth – Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim there are moral duties is extraordinary. It claims that there are things that tell us what to do and that we have to do it and this trumps every other reason or desire we have in favour of the action and that failure to do it makes us guilty or blameworthy. No other thing in reality has these features, hence those who believe in duties must provide us with extraordinary evidence.

Eleventh – No-one has ever seen a duty. Duties have no colour, shape or smell, or sound hence they are invisible to sensory perception.

Michael’s blog post on this added two more to the list:

12. Duties were developed by bronze age, desert dwelling peoples and we should grow out of such myths.

13. Those who argue for moral duties use metaethical reasoning and metaethics is not an academic subject.

I think that it’s possible – but not rational – for naturalists to treat moral duties as objective. And that’s good, because otherwise you couldn’t trust them further than you could throw them for even little things. However, I wouldn’t put naturalists into situations of extreme temptation where they felt were not being monitored. I don’t think that they have what it takes in their worldview to do the right thing when no one is watching, especially when it goes against their own self-interest. It’s just not rational for them to care about moral duties, on their worldview – they think that they are just accidents and they think that moral duties are just arbitrary conventions that vary arbitrarily in different places at different times. They are really up front about this view, and I think that we should take them at their word and understand that there are limits to their “moral” behavior. Certainly you don’t want to be in a cloe relationship like a business partnership or a marriage with someone who thinks there is no free will, and therefore no moral duties and no moral responsibility. You might get lucky with them for a while, but eventually, they are going to break down.

For a more detailed look on what a typical non-theist might mean by “morality”, take a look at this post on Uncommon Descent about the famous progressive lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Excerpt:

In 1912, in Los Angeles, for example, Darrow himself went through two trials where he was both the defense lawyer and the defendant – on two counts of attempting to bribe jurors in the union-related murder casein which he had been, as usual, counsel for the defense. In response to the first charge Darrow told the jury:

“I have committed one crime: I have stood for the weak and the poor.”

And at that first trial the verdict was in Darrow’s favour, though it is now generally accepted – even by Darrowphiles – that he was in fact guilty on both counts, plus other similar activities that he was never charged with. At the second trial Darrow proved less able to “soft soap” his way out of trouble, and the proceedings ended with a hung jury. But although Darrow escaped being convicted, he certainly didn’t escape the consequences of his actions.

Firstly he was made to leave California after undertaking never to practice law again in that state.

Secondly he was dropped by the unions as one of their regular attorneys – which is why he spent the last part of his career practising criminal law.

And thirdly, he reportedly suffered what would nowadays be described as a “nervous breakdown” and became, if it were possible, even more pessimistic and morose than had previously been the case.

Clarence Darrow is a hero for atheists like Jerry Coyne, and it’s interesting to see what this Darrow’s “morality” amounted to in practice. When a person denies free will, as Coyne and Darrow do, you can be sure of one thing – nothing evil that they do will be viewed by them as their responsibility. It was the fault of their genes, they’ll say. They will never admit that they are wrong, and their resistance to temptation will be lower than someone who believes in free will – and personal responsibility. I think that at the very core of atheism is this desperate, overarching desire to dispense with moral obligations – or at least to make them optional so that they are only binding if they don’t require any self-sacrifice. That’s why atheists are always celebrating each fresh assault on traditional morality, like gay marriage. They celebrate the breakdown of morality even for things they themselves don’t do, because they just want to be rid of moral duties and accountability entirely. I think there are some exceptions to this, but definitely it’s true of the rank-and-file atheist.