No fishing, please: a conservative Arizona Republic columnist challenges SB 1070

Here is that Robert Robb column from the Republic again. Again please note he's a conservative columnist who supports border enforcement, you will find that he thinks that so long as the "reasonable suspicion" arises in the course of ordinary police investigation of other crimes. That is what the law intends. However, he thinks the law doesn't provide adequate protection against what I would call "fishing expeditions," such as the ones Joe Arpaio has been engaging in.


Consider the following:

Case 1: An officer sees a car with a broken tail light. He stops the car, asks for a DL, notices that the people look Hispanic and don't speak English, and can't produce a license. The officer calls ICE.

Case 2: The officer sees a older-model car with a Spanish-language radio station bumper sticker. He notices the people look Hispanic. He THEN looks at the car closely for an onstensible violation and finds one, one that he would let pass if the people in the car looked like Anglos. He makes the stop, and if the DL is not produced, he calls ICE.


The trouble here is that, from the point of view of public record, these two stops are indistinguishable. The first officer is not fishing, but the second is.

Fishing expeditions are going to harm citizens and legal immigrants, because a group of people (and actually this could include Hispanic-looking people who aren't Hispanic at all, such as Bhutanese refugees). I consider that unacceptable.


Another set of cases I'm concerned about, which Robb doesn't talk about, are cases with pedestrians or passengers, not to mention cases where the police are called to a home but ordinarily ID is not required. If an officer comes to a home to tell them to turn their music down, he doesn't normally ask for a license. But if the music is in Spanish, and the people look like lower-class Hispanics, should he ask for papers? To me, that's fishing also.

Please notice that Robb makes a distinction between a disproportionate affect on Latinos, which he thinks is inevitable given any attempt to enforce immigration laws, and inividious enforcement, which he thinks the law either allows for or fails to effectively prevent.

One test of a law would be that if a law results in a group of law-abiding citizens being systematically treated differently by government and law enforcement as opposed to other groups of law-abiding citizens in virtue of the color of their skin, then something is wrong with the law. You should be able to go about your business, and if you obey the law, your should be treated just like everybody else.

Immigration, health care, and trusting the government

Joseph A. at Bill Vallicella's site wrote: Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials - he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately. But Victor also typically argues very much in favor of giving government far more authority and responsibility than it now has (see his views on health care, etc.) I just find it odd that he's very worried, deeply worried, about the actions of individual police officers operating at a local level - suggesting that they pose a problem/threat we're not going to be able to adequately address - but not nearly as worried about endowing federal bureaucrats with vastly more far-reaching powers.


Bill replied: That is just inconsistency on Reppert's part. As I said, skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism. The skepticism is shared by libertarians and paleo-liberals.


I reply: I don't trust the government in the area of health care. I only trust them more than I trust the insurance companies. Having to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea, I choose the deep blue sea.


I believe in sin, which means that I believe that we need to be protected from Leviathan monsters. Sometimes those monsters are governments. Sometimes they are corporations.

The big issue between me and opponents of any kind of health care reform is the fact that insurance companies do exclude on the basis of pre-existing conditions, and make it impossible for many people to get health insurance who can't get it through their employers. They engage in what I consider to be unethical cost-cutting measures to avoid paying claims, including rescinding medical insurance when people get sick. In the end, some people have to be trusted to make these health care decisions, but the market-driven health care economy needs, at the very least, regulation from either God or the government to prevent what I consider to be an injustice. You may not. You may think it's just free market economics, and inability to buy health insurance is no different and no more unjust than the inability to buy a starter home or a late-model car because you can't afford it. But I think it's an injustice, and I have to trust somebody to right that injustice. Unfortunately, it looks like it has to be the government, even though the government, like everything else, is run by sinners.


But, in the case of the immigration law, I think you have a problem if too much is left to "reasonable suspicion." This piece, by conservative Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb, (the attempt to attribute all opposition to measures like SB 1070 to "liberalism" is about on the same level as attributing all support for it to racism), makes the case that there is a systematic potential for the law to justify fishing expeditions of the sort that Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been doing for years.

Illegal immigration, grand theft auto, and racial profiling

Here is a comment from one of the comment box, which is something one typically hears in the 1070 debate.

Racial profiling is a red herring; if 99% of the illegal aliens in a state are hispanic, then hispanics are going to be targeted in any enforcement of immigration law.

I don't see that this follows. Suppose 70% of car stolen in the Phoenix area are stolen by Hispanics. It doesn't follow that the police, in tracking down car theives, need to consider ethnic status in their procedures for finding car theives. 70% percent of the car theives they catch them will be Hispanic. That doesn't mean that profiling or anything like profiling was involved.

Vagueness, Lawsuits, and SB 1070

I was asked whether I thought that bills like Arizona SB 1070 are motivate entirely or even mostly by racism.

The answer is no. I do not think that people who support bills like 1070 are motivated by racism, and, interestingly enough, neither does Attorney General Holder. There are certainly non-racial reasons for wanting to control illegal immigration.


However, sometimes people slide from resentment against illegal immigration to resentment against Hispanics, and people sometimes presume that people are here illegally because they are Hispanic, they speak Spanish, they are lower-class, etc. Resentments about illegal immigration can be a mask for racism, and those who have those resentments sometimes can attach those resentments towards Hispanics as a whole, as opposed to illegal immigrants. The movie 9500 Liberty shows just how these distinctions can end up getting blurred, and when they are blurred, you can get a slide into racism.

Perhaps the most efficient way to fight illegal immigration is to develop some kind of DNA-matched ID card for all citizens to have. You can't get a job if you don't have one. However, a lot of people will think this is too big-brotherish or even mark-of-the-beastish to be acceptable. You can also increase security along the border and prevent entry that way. I would support either measure if done in a feasible way.

When she signed the law Governor Brewer said that racial profiling was against the law and that she would enforce the law in such a way as to be in compliance with the prohibitions against profiling. Is she wrong about that? Should she just not worry about profiling?

My question is whether you have a workable law if you are trying to enforce the law and abide by the profiling laws at the same time.

I would have thought conservatives would object to the law for exactly the reason that they support tort reform. Whether a immigration inquiry is initiated is a matter of somebody's "reasonable suspicion????" The subjectivity of the law's terminology means that all sorts of things have to be settled in court, and that is not where conservatives, last I checked, like to see things settled.

If you are going to use state and local law enforcement to make immigration inquiries, you need a set of procedures as fixed as the procedure whereby you and I are asked for our DL, registration, and proof of insurance when we are pulled over by the police. As it stands, police departments are climbing the walls on this law, because they know they can be sued for profiling, but 1070 also says they can be sued for not enforcing the law.

Something that Vallicella, in his responses to this issue, has not covered is this. There are cases where the police come out but don't ordinarily ask for identification, such as when an officer comes to a house on a complaint about loud music late at night. I would argue, in such a case, that if the people in the house appear to be lower-class Mexicans, if they are playing Spanish-language music, that is not a reason for an officer to initiate an immigration investigation. Vallicella mainly talks about the kinds of police stops that involve the showing of identification in any event, but I wonder what he thinks of these other kinds of cases.

I am also concerned about police enforcing "tickytack" violations such as a cracked windshield or driving less than 10 miles over the speed limit, which they would let slide if the person were white, because of a desire to go on a fishing expedition for illegal immigrants. I can imagine the Mark Fuhrmans on our police forces jumping at the opportunity to do that.

It seems to me that there are two replies which have to be kept separate. One is "this is not profiling" and the other is "what's wrong with profiling?" But if it really isn't profiling, why do people then argue that profiling isn't wrong? You can take this position. You can say that illegal immigration is a huge problem, that most illegals are Mexicans, at least in these parts, and that law-abiding legal aliens and citizens who happen to look like Mexicans are simply going to have to suck it up and deal with a certain amount of profiling if we are to have a society safe from the menace of illegal immigration. But, if you take that position, then you have to say SB 1070 doesn't go far enough, and that Brewer effective emasculated the law by insisting that it be enforced in accordance with laws prohibiting racial profiling. Does anybody want to go there?

Legalize illegal immigration yes or no?

There's only one problem. It's logically impossible. You can't make it legal to enter the country illegally.

Suns vs. Spurs again?

Well, it's war time. The Suns have won two home games, and now it's time for them to take the show on the road. The Spurs have been the team to knock the Suns out in 05, 07, and 08. 07 was the controversial series involving the suspension of Stoudemire and Diaw which effectively decided the NBA title for that year, since the Dallas Mavericks, who had won 67 games in the regular season, mysteriously disappeared against the Golden State Warriors and were replaced by zombies.

Unfortunately, although some misfortunes followed the Suns in each of those defeats, the problem largely had to do with the fact that their teams were coached in a way that works for the regular season but not for the playoffs. Mike D'Antoni used a short bench, emphasized offense over defense, and didn't rebound well. But they could simply outrun and outscore most teams.The Spurs could and did beat them in bench strength, defense, and rebounding. Time and again some role player who spent most of the game on the bench would come in and make a critical play. Steve Nash had to play with pretty much no backup. So if the Suns had to play without someone, such as when they were missing Joe Johnson in 05 or when Stoudemire was suspended in 07, there wasn't enough of a bench to take up the slack. Gregg Popovich exploited these weaknesses, and therefore consistently outcoached D'Antoni at playoff time. D'Antoni is a very good coach, but his methods left the team something of a playoff underachiever.

After the arrivals and departures of Shaquille O'Neal and Terry Porter, the Suns put Alvin Gentry in charge, who has the Suns playing up-tempo like before, has his team playing better defense than its predecessors, and has 10 players who see action every game. He's not afraid to hand the keys over to backup point guard Goran Dragic. He likes to make sure Nash doesn't go back in until 6 minutes are left in the fourth quarter, when he can play at a 100% energy level to close out games.

Now the Suns have nothing in the bag, and  the three best players on the Spurs don't look as if they have lost anything. Popovich and the Spurs have already whacked the no. 2 seed Dallas Mavericks in six games, although the Mavericks are, for the most part, even worse playoff underachievers than the Suns. I think the Suns have the best chance ever to beat the Spurs, but one cannot underestimate a team which is one of the greatest playoff basketball teams in the history of the NBA.

Do we perceive physical objects directly? Maybe not

A redated post (with a spelling correction in the title). 

Do we perceive physical objects directly, or are the immediate objects of our experience our own sense-data, which may be caused by some state of the physical world? Given that we can certainly have non-veridical experiences, what are we aware of in those cases? What is the direct object of our awareness?

Lewis wrote: “It is clear that everything we know, beyond our immediate sensations, is inferred from those sensations.” He goes on to say

“I do not mean to say that we begin, as children, by regarding our sensations as “evidence” and then arguing consciously to the existence of space, time, matter, and other people. I mean that, if we are old enough to understand the question, our confidence in the existence of anything else is challenged, our argument in defence of it will have to take the form of inferences from our immediate sensations. Put in its most general form the inference would run “Since I am presented with colours, sounds, shapes pleasures, and pains which I cannot perfectly predict and control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behaviour appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic.”

In my study of this passage, and contrary to John Beversluis, I have supposed that this passage is compatible with what is called the direct realist position on perception. We could perceive physical objects directly, nevertheless perhaps when we are challenged about those perceptions we perform inferences in defense of the veridicality of those perceptions.

Nonetheless, we might ask whether direct realism is correct. Edward Feser, in his book Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (Oneworld, 2005), suggests that there is a powerful argument for the indirect realist view of perception:

1. By stimulating the brain so as artificially to produce a neural process that is normally associated with a certain veridical experience, it is possible in principle to bring about a hallucination that is subjectively indistinguishable from that experience.
2. But if the immediate causes of veridical perceptual experiences and their hallucinatory counterparts are of the same sort, then these effects must be of the same sort as well.
3. In the case of hallucinations, the effect is obviously direct awareness not of any external physical object, but rather of a subjective mental, perceptual, representation of an external object.
4. So in the case of veridical perceptual experiences too, what one is directly aware of must be a subjective perceptual representation.

So, do we perceive physical objects directly? And, if we don’t, does this have any effect on the debate between materialists and their opponents?

A Conservative Argument against Immigration Restriction

Very often discussion on Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona implies that it is liberals who oppose this kind of measure, and conservatives who support it. The linked essay, which criticizes Democrats for pushing for a national ID, suggests that there is a case to be made from conservatism to a more open border policy.

This also is a good time to question the entire idea of the national government trying to “seal the borders,” pick winners and losers among immigrants, decide who gets all the welfare benefits of being a legal immigrant and who is not even allowed into our golden door. Invariably, when the federal government imposes its way on immigration, we get some immigrants who come in with legal sanction and quickly become dependents of the U.S. government—whereas illegals are probably not net beneficiaries of the welfare state, legal immigrants might very well be. What’s worse, plenty of people are denied peaceful and legal entry when all they want is to enter the job market, improve their situation and that of their families, and join in the American dream. Of course, despite the state’s distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, most illegal aliens are de facto invited by the American people—by those who employ them, rent to them and associate with them as part of the community and in the glorious network of voluntary exchange known as the market economy. Since conservatives often say our rights come not from the government but from God and the nature of man, it is not for the government to decide whether someone should have the right to live here or not—it is up to individuals and communities, which obviously are able to sustain a fair number of illegals. Moreover, constitutionalists in particular should question the very notion that the feds have legal authority to crack down on the border, since immigration is not an Article I, Section 8 authority of Congress. Conservatives especially should follow Reagan’s example and embrace immigration amnesty.

More on Sodom and Sodomy

Genesis does not mention consensual gay sex. If one is entitled to assume that the only people who would try to force themselves on an outsider were people who enjoyed consensual gay sex amongst themselves, then one could make an inference that consensal homosexuality was rampant in Sodom, but I don't think we are entitled to make that assumption.




Ezekiel is consistent with homosexuality, in and of itself, being part of the problem, but it clearly implies that other types of problems existed. So, any attempt to say that homosexuality is the one sin that makes God so angry that he zaps people for it (as opposed to all the other deadly sins), collapses on the basis of Ezekiel.



Jude is probably the best passage for the anti-gay case, but are we entitled to identify perversion with homosexuality? The Sodomites may well have been motivated by sadism, and were intending rape. I consider rape and sadism to be sexual perversions in and of themselves, whether directed toward the same sex or the opposite sex. Sadism and rape also fit better with the passages suggesting that the sin of Sodom was related to arrogance.



Hypothesis: The sin of Sodom was the sin of arrogance on the part of the rich and powerful toward the poor and powerless, which expressed itself in sexual terms through acts of sexual domination, even toward sojourners. Such acts could well have been both homosexual and heterosexual, but the defining feature of this perversion of Sodom was domination, not homosexuality.



Can this hypothesis be refuted?

Bible Lesson Time

Q: What was the sin of Sodom?

A: Ezekiel 16: 48-49. "This is the sin of Sodom; she and her suburbs had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not help or encourage the poor and needy. They were arrogant and this was abominable in God's eyes."

What did you think it was?

Bees, used car salesmen, and misrepresentation

Now if we are working on the level of simple representation, the perhaps some solution to the problem of misrepresentation can be generated. Let us consider, for example the case of bee dances. Bees perform dances which “represent” the positions of flowers in a garden. The bees, based on this information, go out to the garden only to find no flowers, because in the intervening time between the bees’ discovery of the flowers and the time when the bees performed the dance, a child had picked all the flowers and taken them indoors. We might be able to cash out this fact of misrepresentation in causal terms: there is a normal casual relationship between the bees’ dance and the location of pollinated flowers, so the bees represented flowers in that location, but the representation was incorrect, because the flowers had been picked in the meantime.


But other kinds of misrepresentation seem more difficult to deal with at the level of simple representation. Let’s consider the kind of misrepresentation that goes on in, say, a used car dealership. Can we really imagine a bee from a competing hive going “sneaking in,” giving a dance which would send the swarm of bees to a place where there are no pollinated flowers, in order to secure the real flowers for its own hive? This kind of misrepresentation seems to require that the fifth-columnist bee, like the used car dealer, know that the dance was misleading, in other words, understand what it is that their own dance and know that it was a misrepresentation. This seems to be beyond the capabilities of bees, and requires a radically different set of abilities. Can we account for the difference between being sincerely mistaken an lying in terms of causal relationships? I rather doubt it.

There have, certainly, been causal theories of reference which have been advanced. But these do not suggest that causal relationships alone are sufficient to fix reference. Consider the following standard description of causal theories of reference.

This is the wikipedia account of the causal theory of reference

A name's referent is fixed by an original act of naming (also called a "dubbing" or, by Saul Kripke, an "initial baptism"), whereupon the name becomes a rigid designator of that object. later uses of the name succeed in referring to the referent by being linked to that original act via a causal chain.



In other words, what causation explains, according to this theory, is how references is transmitted once an initial act of naming, an intentional (both in the sense of being intended and in the sense of possessing “aboutness”) is performed. How such actions could be performed in the first place is accounted for in causal terms. It is true, that some have attempted to provide more radical accounts of reference which attempt to stay within the constraints imposed by physicalism; Devitt’s theories are a good example of this. However, I think this attempt has been shown to be a failure in Martin Rice’s essay “Why Devitt Can’t Name His Cat.”

A question for neutral monism

Here is a kind of monism that was mentioned:

The world is composed of just one kind of substance, and its essence has both physical and phenomenal or protophenomenal attributes (alternatively: the one kind of substance is neither physical nor mental, but but the physical and mental are composed of it).

If this is the case, why does this stuff start behaving differently once brains show up? The AFR is supposed to show that the mental qua mental causes things to happen that wouldn't happen otherwise if matter simply obeyed the laws of matter. Because of the reasons that I have for acting, the protons, neutrons, and electrons in my body and elsewhere go to different places than they otherwise would go. Starting from the Big Bang through the formation of stars and planets, is there any evidence that the "one kind of stuff" has any mental characteristics? It looks pretty mechanistic to me before life emerges.

If theism is true, we can see a stable physical world as a backdrop for the creation of intelligent life. If neutral monism is true, why is everything so darn physical before life emerges?

The Argument from Reason: Its Scope and Limits (One More Time)

Again, I go back to Lewis on this. Lewis accepted the AFR against naturalism, and then accepted Absolute Idealism, which was extremely popular in his time. Then he found fault with Idealism and became a theist, and then finally a Christian. His argument against naturalism was a step on the way to theism, eliminating one of the major options. But he didn't take step into theism until later.




I am primarily concerned with what I would call the "great divide" between world-views for whom the mental is a basic cause, and world-views in which the mental is not a basic cause. If the AFR shows problems for the latter type of position, then I think the epistemic likelihood of theism becomes enhanced, as do all other "mentalistic" options.



I understand "naturalism" to encompass those world-views that are, at bottom, anti-mentalistic.



So we can distinguish two propositions:



A) The basic causes of the universe are mental in nature. They are inheretly perspectival, having a subject. They are inherently normative. Something being good or bad, or thought good or bad, has something to do with what goes on. They are intentional. What something is about makes a basic difference as to what happens in the world. They are also purposive. Purposes in human thought and action are not "skyhooks" that have to be analyzed out in favor of cranes. They are ground-level reasons why things happen.



b) What is fundamentally real is not inherently perspectival, is not inherently intentional, is not inherently normative, and is not inherently purposive. The appearance that these mental realities are operative in our world is a byproduct of biological evolution, and at the end of the day the skyhooks have to be replaced by cranes.



I have never said that you get theism automatically if the AFR is an effective argument for preferring A to B. When people point out non-theistic alternatives that are compatible with A, as if that were an answer to me, I have to say, with C. S. Lewis, "How many times does a man have to say something before he is safe from the accusation of having said exactly the opposite?"

Menuge's Dennett Denied

Dennett on original intentionality

A redated post. This was the closest I could come up with to AMC's request. Though he may be thinking of a Menuge paper.

This is a well-known Dennett paper on the issue of original intentionality. He seems to be arguing:

1. If naturalism is true, then humans cannot possess original intentionality.
2. Naturalism is true.
3. Therefore human beings cannot possess original intentionality.

It wasn't me, but an atheist fellow graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana who suggested that the argument could be turned around into an argument for theism against naturalism.

1. If naturalism is true, then humans cannot possess original intentionality.
2. Human beings do possess original intentionality.
3. Therefore, naturalism is false.

If intentionality is irreducible, then materialism is false

"If intentionality is irreducible, then materialism is false. For such an irreducible characteristic has no place in physics as we now perceive physics. The materialist is committed to giving some reductive account of intentionality of the mental. Such an account is not all that easy to give.”




David Armstrong, "Naturalism, Materialism, and First Philosophy," in

Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, ed . Paul K. Moser and J. D. Trout (New York:

Routledge, 1995), p. 57.

HT: Pat Parks

9500 Liberty comes to Arizona

Unfortunately, the theater was almost empty when I saw it at Gateway Pavilions today. The film shows that many people supporting anti-immigrant legislation are indeed motivated by racism, and that the economic impact of this sort of legislation can be devastating. Everyone who thinks that SB 1070 and bills like it are a good idea should watch this film. I have a link to the youtube video of it here.

Philosophy looks at chess

This looks interesting. But I'm going to wait for Dennis Monokroussos to review it before I decide whether to buy it or not.

The Flip Side of 2 Thess: 3:10

Paul said, "For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat."." (2 Thess 3:10) But is the flip side of this statement true? Do you think that those who either work, are attempting the best they can to work, or people who are unable to work should eat? In particular, should we make sure that children are taken care of?




It doesn't seem to fit well with the New Testament to think that, for example there is no problem with someone putting in a 40-hour work week and then sleeping on the streets or in their car. So a Christian can't very well oppose the goal of seeing to it that workers, or would-be workers, be able to make a living working. What they might oppose, however, is deputize the government and making use of taxpayer money to accomplish this goal. But how else could it be accomplished?

Relativism and Inalienable Human Rights

If you believe in inalienable human rights, you can't be a moral relativist. A moral relativist holds that all moral obligations are derived from the norms of a society. But a right is a special kind of moral obligation, an obligation not to deprive you of something (life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness). Jefferson said that these come from our creator, which means that a society can't take them away just because it doesn't recognize them.

Of course if there is no creator, you have to rethink where those rights come from. Putting evolution in place of the creator creates this howler, which I gave in one of my first posts to this blog five years ago:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men have evolved equally, and that they are endowed by Evolution with certain Inalienable Rights, that among these are Life , Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Though this may be a special case of the issue of atheism and objective moral values.