Category: Politics

Living in my adopted state of Florida, I have become accustomed to heat warnings and the local radio station providing advice on how to keep kids from being killed by the heat. Based on my own experience as a runner and doing work outside in the summer, I know that the Florida heat and humidity quickly take a toll. This is also backed up by science and anyone who doubts the effects of heat can do a proof by heat suicide test, which I recommend against for obvious moral and practical reasons.

Florida and other states are experiencing what was once considered unusual heat and a few years ago Miami-Dade County considered a rule that would require 10-minute shade and water breaks for outdoor workers on very hot days. Recognizing the danger, the state legislature leapt into action, passing House Bill (HB) 433 which forbids cities and counties from enacting local laws requiring employers to provide heat exposure protection to outdoor workers. As would be expected, the state legislature did not pass any statewide laws protecting workers and deferred to the federal OSHA regulations. Unfortunately for workers, OSHA currently lacks specific heat regulations and instead relies on the General Duty Clause. While one might argue that the generality of the clause suffices in providing heat protection for workers, in practice the vagueness makes enforcement difficult. For example, since the law does not define “excessive heat” or specify the exact number of minutes for rest a business can argue that the law is being applied unfairly if they are cited for violations. As would be suspected, industries with outdoor workers affected by heat generally oppose specific standards.

The main argument given in favor of HB 433 was that it would prevent a patchwork of local regulations that would hurt industry. This argument does have some appeal and a business that operates in multi jurisdictions would face difficulties in being aware of and complying with the various laws. That said, the Republican backers of this law profess to favor local control. As one would suspect, they favor local control when the locals are passing laws they like but oppose local control when they dislike the laws. One can say the same of Democrats. This is like the use of states’ rights arguments—people favor states’ rights when the states are doing what they like and the Federal government is not but oppose them when the opposite is true. The abortion and migration issues provide a good example of this as Republicans favor state rights for limiting abortion but oppose it when states oppose Trump’s migration policies and actions, such as when states complain about ICE agents killing people.

To be fair and balanced, the issue of local control is one that can be debated in good faith. As a general principle, I do favor local control based partially on my agreement with a principle of autonomy that provides a presumption of choice at the individual level and requires justifying each step up in imposition. But these step ups can be justified often because of what seems to be a paradox of liberty and rights: liberty and rights require placing limits on liberties and rights. While this might initially seem Orwellian, it makes sense when you consider examples. For example, your freedom of expression requires limiting the freedom of others to silence you. As another example, your right to life requires limiting the rights of others to keep you safe. To use a silly example, I support a general law against murdering people and not allowing individuals, cities or counties to pass laws allowing murder. For social policies and laws, I also usually operate using the principle of utility—judging these by the harm and benefit.

Getting back to the heat safety issue, one could argue that heat safety should not be left up to cities and counties because allowing such regulation would cause too much harm. This would certainly make sense if Florida had statewide heat laws or if the national law was effective. But this is not the case. As such, the effect of the law is to prevent local governments from protecting workers from the serious dangers of heat. It is thus not surprising that Florida is exceeded only by Texas in the number of workers killed by heat exposure. Does this mean that the state legislature is morally accountable for the injuries and deaths caused by the lack of regulations? The obvious answer would be that they bear some responsibility by failing to provide protection and preventing local governments from doing so. One might wonder why industry leaders oppose such regulations. Well, not much—I am sure everyone immediately thought “money.”

When I was younger and more naïve, I tended to think business leaders did evil things because they value profit more than the well-being of other people. This would at least make some sense; they were hurting people to get something they wanted. But the more I learned about business, the more it seemed that business leaders sometimes acted in ways that hurt people but also resulted in lost profits. This would seem to mean that these business geniuses were either ignorant and evil (doing harm, thinking it would profit them) or extra evil (doing harm despite knowing it would cost them profits). As a philosopher and not a politician, I cannot just make accusations without evidence, so let us work through the arguments.

While the arguments against safety regulations about heat do focus on heat, they also follow a standard template used to argue against regulations on general. One stock argument is to claim that regulation would impose a “one size fits all” standard that fails to consider important differences. While this does have some merit, this problem arises for almost any law, and the challenge is to write laws that address this concern. If this argument had merit, then it would also apply to almost any law—which is something that could be accepted (some anarchists, for example, might buy this).

A second argument is that regulation results in micromanagement that will waste time and money. As someone who just had to use my own money to complete four hours of continuing education training and engage in extensive record keeping complying with the new Florida laws regulating homeowners’ associations, I get this objection. I am an uncompensated volunteer HOA director for my neighborhood because the law also requires three officers and everyone else was sensible enough to avoid the headache, cost and annoyance of complying with hundreds of pages of laws.

As a professor who heads up the GENED committees at my university, I am compelled by the state to spend hours completing tasks to ensure that we are complying with all the new laws micromanaging education. So, I feel this objection and feel that it has merit every time I have do some paperwork that seems like imposed nonsense because of  the Republican culture war against “wokeness” and “DEI.”

That said, the problem is not requiring people to comply with a law and provide some documentation. The problems are defective laws and excessive paperwork. In the case of heat regulations, the solutions to heat exposure are simple and well understood (shade breaks and hydration) and documentation could and should be minimal. So, saying that there are laws that impose too much work is a criticism of those laws, not law in general. Unless, once again, one is an anarchist.

A third argument is the “we’ll be good” argument. The strategy is to argue that regulation is not needed because businesses will act well on their own, perhaps because they allege to care about their workers. This can have some appeal in that if people will, in fact, behave well without laws, then laws are not needed. For example, when states pass bathroom bills alleging that transpeople will attack women in bathrooms, they are passing a law that is not needed because transpeople generally do not attack people in bathrooms and laws already exist to protect people from being attacked. But we know from history that enough businesses will do bad things that they need to be regulated, just like we know that sexual assault and theft are enough of a problem that we need laws against them.

A fourth argument is the classic appeal to small business. Big industries with big businesses often argue that a law will hurt a small business and then use this to argue that the law should not be passed. This can be a fair point. For example, I am a director for a tiny HOA with under 20 houses that barely has any money for expenses and yet I must comply with rules designed for larger operations. To be fair and balanced, the HOA law does divide HOAs into two main groups (three in some cases) that allows smaller HOAs to be less burdened by the law. While this example shows that someone can be annoyed by a law applying to a small business, it also shows that laws can be crafted to account for the difference (and usually are). So, if a heat regulation destroyed small businesses, one could argue for exemptions. But there is the obvious question of whether such laws would be harmful. I’ll address this in the next essay.

 

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While many culture wars raged in the 1980s, I fought in the Game Wars. In this war, computer/video games and Dungeons & Dragons were under attack, with the mildest criticism being that these activities were a waste of time. While modern culture wars usually involve claims of (typically made up) dire harm, it is still worth considering this criticism as culture war never ends and never changes.

Back in the 1980s, I was often accused of wasting my time playing games, be they computer games or tabletop games like AD&D or BattleTech. In some cases, these criticisms were benevolent—friends and relatives were concerned for my wellbeing (one of the greatest sins a New Englander could commit is wasting time). Some other folks were merely deriding my choices.

The criticism that an activity is a waste of time is a value claim. While people who make this criticism are usually not consciously applying a normative theory, they claim the activity does not have (or produce) enough value to be worth doing, usually relative to activities they see as valuable. For those who like normative theories, this could be presented in consequentialist terms: if a person is doing an activity that lacks value, they are not generating value. They should be generating value, so they should be doing something else. This criticism is based on what the critic thinks other people should (and should not) be doing. As people like to think of time as a currency, wasting time can also be presented as spending the currency of time unwisely, as one might waste money. During the 1980s (and beyond) I often faced such criticism.

When I was in college and started studying philosophy, I wondered why I was expected to defend the value of gaming to people who spent hours chugging beer and watching other people play sports. Laying aside my residue resentment, there is a philosophical question about where the burden of proof falls when someone claims an activity is a waste of time. There is the pragmatic answer, which is determined by imbalances of power. For minors, those with power can include their parents. For example, a child might need to convince a parent that playing D&D is not a waste of time, so they are allowed to play. For almost all of us, those with power include the politicians who can pass laws banning or restricting activities. As an example of this, I offer the philosophy major.

Every philosophy major has been asked what they will do with their degree and, as a professor at a public university in my adopted state of Florida I have been repeatedly compelled to defend the major. In this pragmatic case, the goal has been to persuade those compelling me to show that the major is not a waste of time by convincing them that it results in something they value (this always involved employment and income). As they have the power to end the major, they can simply put the burden of proof on me.

There is also the pragmatic context of social cost and annoyance—people who can impose that cost or annoy those doing the activity with their criticism can thus impose the burden of proof simply by demanding it as a condition to cease their criticism.

As this essay appears in a philosophical context, I infer that many readers are familiar with the claim that philosophy itself is useless (a waste of time). Bertrand Russell (1912) has perhaps the most famous reply to this criticism, although Frankfurt (2005) has the best titled response in his work Bullshit.  My experience defending gaming prepared me to defend philosophy and my experience in philosophy now enables me to discuss the waste of time criticism philosophically.

In the case of gaming in the 1980s, the challenge we gamers faced was to show that it has value. One could also frame this challenge in terms of establishing that gaming has meaning and can be part of a meaningful life. In terms of addressing the challenge, a key issue is whether the goal is to persuade the critics that gaming has value or if the goal is to prove that gaming has value. This would, of course, apply to any activity one is defending.

If the goal is to persuade the critics, victory is getting them to stop saying the activity is a waste of time or to even acknowledge that it has value. If the goal is to prove that an activity has value, then this is a matter of logic—what is needed are plausible premises and good logic. In the case of any culture war, the goal is always persuasion, and logic is not very effective in this role.

As the waste of time criticism is based on the view that the activity does not produce adequate value, responding to it requires showing that it does. One way to do this is to operate within the concept of value used by the critic and show that the activity does produce what they value. As an anecdotal example, I was able to silence some people who said gaming was a waste of time by showing them I got paid to write gaming material. As another anecdotal example, I have defended the philosophy major by providing the latest employment and salary data for philosophy majors.

Another option, which is usually more difficult, is to convince the critic to accept a concept of value under which the activity does generate value. For example, people who defend philosophy often try to argue that the non-monetary value it produces is valuable. During the Game Wars both approaches were used. And we eventually won that war. But war never changes and never ends. So, how was that war won and how might similar wars be won in the future?

In pragmatic monetary terms, the culture war over video games was clearly won when gaming moved from a niche nerd activity to a billion-dollar marketplace ruled by corporations like Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubisoft and Valve. Of course, this path of “victory” might have come with a higher cost than if the war had been lost. But under capitalism an obvious way to persuade many people that an activity is worth doing is to show how it generates money.

In more artistic terms, the cultural elites signaled their acceptance of the value of gaming with the 2012 The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the MoMA exhibit the same year. Getting the cultural elites to accept something as valuable obviously helps in persuading some people that the activity is not a waste of time. In terms of mass acceptance, it makes sense to give the smart phone some credit here. As mobile games appeared, almost everyone with a smartphone became a casual gamer, thus making it harder for people to see gaming as a waste of time.

While tabletop role playing games are not as profitable as video games and are perhaps not seen as artistic as video games, Critical Role (and its animated series on Amazon Prime like The Legend of Vox Machina) and Netflix’s Stranger Things show that D&D is now a valued part of the culture. The victory parade for D&D was when Brennan Lee Mulligan ran a D&D game at the Hollywood Bowl on June 1, 2025. I remember, vividly, declaring to my D&D group that we had won the war. Anecdotally, it has been a long time since anyone accused me of wasting my time gaming. But I must admit it still feels a bit weird when people are impressed that I’ve published so much gaming stuff.

Some might think that there is more to the war over waste and worth than appeasing or persuading those with power and that there is also a philosophical issue here. As a veteran of the culture wars, I know that these pragmatic fights are won (or lost) with persuasion rather than logic. But, as a philosopher, I agree that there is obviously an important philosophical issue worth considering when we discuss whether something is a waste of time.

These discussions raise the question of value in terms of what is worth our time and what is not. As would be suspected, this discussion always runs hard into the subjective vs objective debate in value theory. Is the question of whether an activity a waste a matter of what it is worth to the person doing it or those with the power to stop them or is there an objective basis to such discussions? Or something else? This is obviously not going to be settled, so the rational approach is to consider arguments for and against an activity having worth within the context of arguments for a particular theory of value. So, the challenge is developing a theory of value and then assessing an activity within that theory. Obviously, one could embrace the pragmatic approach discussed above, which is how it plays out in practice and how I fight the culture wars. But I fight them in good faith—I only try to persuade people to believe what I can also support with (largely ineffective) logic.

 

 

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When discussing liberty in my ethics class, I use the example of the time the mayor of New York considered a ban on selling sweetened drinks larger than 16 ounces. When considering an imposition on liberty to protect people from harm, there are factual and moral issues that should be addressed. General factual issues include whether the harm is real and whether the imposition on liberty would address the harm effectively. As would be suspected, politicians often make up harms (often as part of the culture wars) or propose ineffective solutions to real harm.

In the case of the danger of “big sodas”, there are two key factual issues. The first is whether such large drinks are harmful (the harm is usually claimed to be obesity). The second is whether imposing a ban on big sodas would be effective. The same sort of reasoning would apply to other proposals to limit liberty to protect people from harm.

When the ban was proposed, the folks in businesses that profit from “big soda” claimed the drinks are not the cause of the problem. On the one hand, one could say they are wrong. After all, it makes sense that consuming large quantities of high calorie beverages (a 12 ounce soda has 124-189 calories) would contribute to people being overweight. On the other hand, it can be argued that these drinks are not the problem. After all, big drinks are not the only (or even main) source of calories for most people and hence they are just one contributory cause among many. One could also claim that people are not compelled to consume large beverages and people are often obese because of their choices. One could claim that these drinks make it easier to be obese, but they don’t seem to be the primary villains in the obesity epidemic, so to speak.

As a general principle, I hold that any imposition of liberty must be effective at addressing real harm if it is to have any reasonable chance of being justified. In the case of banning big drinks, the obvious flaw is that people can just get refills or buy multiple drinks. People buy multiple burgers or tacos and could adjust easily to getting multiple drinks. To be fair and balanced, an imposition need not be perfect but there is reasonable concern about whether the effectiveness of a proposed imposition adequately addresses the alleged harm. This is but one example and the same consideration would apply to other similar proposals, such as banning a food additive or other food product.

While the factual matters are of concern, what is of philosophical interest is whether the state has a right to impose such bans. As might be imagined, it is easy to argue for and against this right using the very same principles.

One reasonable principle is that the state has a legitimate role in preventing harm to the citizens and has a right to use its compulsive power in this capacity. The most obvious examples of this include the state’s role as a military protector and its role as the police (to the extent the police protect). Another reasonable principle, taken from John Stuart Mill, is that the state does not have a right to impose on the liberty of individuals except in cases in which the individual’s actions could cause unwarranted harm to others. For example, the state has a right to prevent citizens from murdering each other. Arguing that the state has the right to keep people from offending each other is a much heavier lift.

In the case of a drink ban, it could be argued that the state is acting to prevent harm to the citizens and is thus operating within its legitimate rights. After all, the easy accessibility of high calorie foods in high volume servings makes it easier for people to over-consume calories and this leads to increased obesity. Obesity presents a clear health threat to individuals as well as imposing significant costs on society (such as lost productivity and increased medical costs). As such, the state would be acting rightly in banning such sweet drinks. Or so one might argue. Again, this same reasoning could be applied to other alleged dangers, such as guns, same-sex marriage or video games.

One easy reply is to contend that such a ban would not be effective (as argued above) and hence would be an imposition on liberty that fails to achieve its stated goal. It seems reasonable enough to accept that the state should not restrict liberty when doing so would not achieve the stated goal of the imposition. This is because the justification for the imposition is that it will reduce or prevent harm.

Another reply, and the one I favor, is that even if such a ban was effective, it would be an illegitimate violation of liberty. The state does, of course, have a right to protect people from toxic ingredients, especially when the consumer does not know such ingredients are in their food. To use a specific example to illustrate this, the state would be acting legitimately by banning companies from surreptitiously using lead acetate in place of sugar as sweetener. This is because this substance is known to be toxic and most customers would not willingly consume “sweet lead.” In this case, the state would be protecting the customers from being harmed by the manufacturers. After all, companies should not have the liberty to poison ignorant customers. Unfortunately, in the US companies can easily sneak new chemicals into our food. One striking example was the use of Tara flour by Daily Harvest in one product. Tara flour was found to be a hepatoxin and the FDA now bans it.

In the case of sweet drinks, the customer knows what they are getting: a high calorie (typically low nutrient) drink. While it is unwise and unhealthy to consume large amounts of such drinks, if the consumer is freely making the choice to drink the beverage and is aware of its contents and effects, then the state has no right to impose on the individual’s liberty. As usual, John Stuart Mill’s arguments in favor of liberty apply here. Naturally enough, the state would be well within its rights to require companies to provide information about the beverages so that they can make informed choices. However, treating adults as if they were children in this regard is not acceptable nor within the legitimate rights of the state. After all, what is solely the business of the individual is not the business of the state and how much sweet drink a person consumes would seem to be solely his or her business. The choice is thus the right of the individual, be it a good choice (to avoid sweet drinks) or a bad choice (to consume mass quantities of sugar water).

The obvious reply to this is that the harm done by obesity is not limited to the individual. Obesity increases health care costs for everyone, impacts productivity, and has other consequences that extend beyond the individual. Given that the obesity of an individual harms others, then it would seem that the state would have the right to step in and impose restrictions to counter obesity. After all, while people have the liberty to be as obese as they can and want to be, they do not have the right to expect the rest of society to bear the consequences and costs of their poor choices. After all, that is the job of the companies that are “too big to fail.”

 To modify a stock line from the right in the US, why should the rest of us subsidize the cost of obesity–that would be a socialism of fat.  If this reasoning is plausible, then there seem to be two reasonable alternatives (and, of course, there might be others).

The first is that the state should act within its legitimate rights to endeavor to counter causal factors that significantly contribute to obesity (such as high-volume high calorie beverages). The second is that individuals who wish to enjoy the liberty to be as fat as they choose to be would need to take full responsibility for the consequences of their choices. They would, for example, need to opt out of state medical support in regard to any conditions caused by or aggravated by their obesity, perhaps by purchasing special insurance. Provided that an individual was willing to eliminate the harm their choices would impose on others, then they would have the right to do as they please. This is analogous to how certain states allow people to ride motorcycles without helmets if they have adequate insurance. Perhaps people could receive special ID cards proving they have obesity insurance and this would allow them to purchase large beverages (and other such things). Then again, this might just be silly.

A second reply to the liberty argument is that it could be argued that the sweeteners used to create sweet drinks is actually a toxic substance. Interestingly enough, lead acetate was once used as a sweetener until it was established that it is, in fact, toxic. As such, it is not wildly implausible that sweeteners in use are toxins that should be properly regulated. While it is easy enough to dismiss the idea that, for example, sugar could be toxic because it just sounds silly, it should be assessed based on scientific evidence. If sweeteners were not harmful, then an objective scientific investigation would show this. As such, those who think that it is silly to consider sugar and other sweeteners as toxic should insist on objective and extensive evaluation. After all, doing so would silence the rational critics of sweeteners and provide hard evidence to counter attempts to ban or restrict sweeteners and products that use them, such as sweet drinks.

My own view on the matter is that people have a right to the liberty of self-abuse (even self-destruction). However, this liberty does not allow them to impose on others. As such, the freedom to be fat comes with the responsibility of ensuring that other people are not forced to bear the price that the individual alone should pay. As the hackneyed saying goes, freedom is not free-and this goes for fat freedom as well. But while we are following hackneyed sayings, we should also consider stopping the practice of repeatedly using tax dollars to save the ruling elites from their endlessly bad decisions. After all, freedom isn’t free.

 

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The American right’s war on trans rights began with the loss of its war against LGBQ rights. The battle that marked the end of that war (for the time being) was when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. As demonizing LGBQ Americans was no longer a very effective political game, the right needed a new vulnerable group to demonize, and they picked trans Americans as a new target.

In 2016 North Carolina passed the first “bathroom bill” and the Obama administration responded with a guidance letter stating that Title IX required public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. Under the first Trump regime, the Obama era guidance was rolled back, and Trump banned transgender soldiers from serving in 2017.

When it became clear that the fear mongering and demonizing used to push bathroom bills had no basis in reality, in 2020 the right turned to banning female transgender athletes from sports. After that, the right focused on targeting trans Americans in the context of medical care, education and legal recognition. Given that about 1% of Americans are transgender, the right’s obsession with passing laws hostile to trans Americans might strike rational people as odd. This is especially true of their focus on transgender women in sports. When the NCAA allowed transgender athletes to compete, there were fewer than 10 such athletes in the United States. It is estimated that there are about 300,000 transgender youth (age 13-17) and about 13% of them participate in sports, compared to 50% of the general population. The Olympics saw hardly any transgender athletes and the professional sports leagues currently have none. While some might see this as a triumph for the anti-trans laws, the low numbers predate the bans. The war on trans is a manufactured fight targeting a minute fraction of the population, especially the moral panic over trans athletes. While some on the left have decided it would be expedient to throw trans Americans under the political bus (sacrificing a tiny minority in the hopes of political gains), I support trans rights and feel that it is somehow worse to abandon such a small minority.

As a philosopher, my usual essays are argumentative: I advance logical arguments in rational support of my view and consider opposing arguments.  In some cases, I have succeeded in changing minds about trans rights with facts and logic. These have been situations involving running friends who worried, in good faith, that they would be robbed of their places by transwomen. Since their concerns were held in good faith, learning the truth changed their view—they knew they had nothing to worry about.

From the standpoint of facts and logic, the right’s war on trans is without a foundation—it is built on lies, fear, and bad logic. But this approach can be very persuasive, since the goal of persuasion is to get people to believe a claim whether it is true or not. In contrast, good reasoning is burdened by the need to have plausible premises and strong (or valid) logic. As our good dead friend Aristotle noted, logic is the weakest form of persuasion.

In this essay I will do something different. I will tell you the story of why I support trans rights not as a logical argument but to move you to reflect on your feelings about trans rights as well. I’m also writing this to explore why I think what I think. As a philosopher, I must point out that my motivations are irrelevant to the truth of my claims; but the goal here is not proof but to sort out feelings and motivations. It’s good to know why we think what we do. If we do not reflect, we won’t know what we really believe and we won’t know whether we are being played and manipulated by others.

I’m a straight guy who has never had any doubts about being male. I do not understand what it is like to be transgender, yet I support transgender rights. On reflection, I find that some of the reasons go back to my youth.

When I was a kid, I was infamously skinny and had the weird habit of keeping my belt very tight. Like all kids, I know I had a great reason for doing my weird thing but have no idea why now. I was, of course, mocked for being so skinny and one of my mother’s friends nicknamed me “cinch belt”, which stuck. This helped me understand being mocked and subject to cruelty simply because of who I was. Something similar has probably happened to many other people. I was also misgendered once, which stuck with me.

When I was a young boy my parents would let me get shaggy between haircuts—they were both public school teachers and we did many things to save money (like how I would get one pair of sneakers a year). One time at a store, the woman behind the register identified me as a girl (I’m not sure if she was mocking me for my hair length or thought I was a girl). As a boy, I was horrified and upset by this. I insisted on getting my hair cut and it is probably one of the reasons I have wicked short hair today. But I will never forget how it felt to be misgendered, even in such a minuscule way. I can extrapolate to how trans people feel when people misgender them and recognize how much it must hurt when this is backed by cruel laws.

I usually go by “Mike” as “Michael” was reserved for use when I was in trouble. Naturally, people liked to mess with me by calling me “Mikey” as an insult and provocation. I would politely tell people not to call me that but, as would be expected, some people would persist in trying to insult and provoke me. This is a tiny thing, but it helps me understand how people feel when others refuse to use their preferred pronouns. I can imagine how I would feel if a law was passed that made people to call me “Mikey” and forbid me from using my name. If you have a nickname you hate, imagine a law being passed that mandated that people call you that.

When I was 13, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. In the 1980s D&D was caught up in the Satanic Panic and I was accused by people of being in league with Satan (or at least being corrupted by him). This moral panic was, of course, unfounded and it taught me how moral panics are created and inflicted on people. Because of my experience with being the target of this moral panic, I have sympathy for other targets, and this obviously includes trans people. My last story is about running and, of course, the Supreme Court just upheld laws banning transgender athletes.

When I was in 7^th grade my father decided I needed to play football, so I had to join the team. As mentioned above, I was a skinny kid. Football did not go well, and I knew that it was not what I wanted to do. I walked away from practice and ended up quitting. As would be expected, I was mocked endlessly for this. My grandfather would bring it up every time I saw him, until one fateful day. But after that I had no interest in sports. Until one fateful day.

My parents were divorced when I was 15, which messed me up. In those days, we just suffered through things without support and I spiraled downward. My school performance was so bad I was dropped down a division and things were not going well. Fortunately, I recovered enough to want to do better and decided to turn my life around. Part of this involved a desire to be on a sports team. I played basketball as a young kid and even attended basketball camp, so I tried that. After the first tryout, the coach said they had an important position, that of manager. I said, “coach, I have to do a sport.” He replied, “Winter track has to take everyone.” So, I joined the track team. In those days, running was looked down on. But it was still a sport.

The track coach tested new team members to see what they could do, starting out with prestigious events like hurdles, sprints and jumping. Those who were not strong enough to throw the shot put and were good at nothing became distance runners. So, I ended up running the 880, mile and 2 mile. I was okay. When I went to college, I was on the Junior Varsity team but my lack of a sense of direction caused me to get lost and run many extra miles during practice.  This made me into a good runner—I ended up being All Conference two years in cross country, which is good for a kid who walked away from football practice. Perhaps most importantly, I won the Peter Ott’s 10K in Camden, Maine—where my grandparents lived. I never heard a thing about football after that, especially since I was mentioned in the town newspaper as their grandson. If you are wondering about how this story relates to trans rights, the idea is this. Other people wanted me to be a football player, but I was not a football player but a runner. Football made me miserable and running makes me happy. Because of this experience, I think that people should have the right to be who they are—otherwise they will be miserable. At this point someone on the right will probably say that I must also defend pedophiles—this always comes up when talking about trans rights as it did with LBG rights. But I obviously do not defend pedophiles, and my view on this is stolen from J.S. Mill’s essay on liberty: people should be free to be what they are, if they do not harm others. Pedophiles obviously hurt other people.

I do not understand what it is to be transgender but, to use a silly example, I also do not understand what it is to be a devoted sports fan. As a kid I found being a sports fan boring and as an athlete I see watching sports as on par with watching other people eat. I see the value in sports and eating, but not in being a fan. I don’t get fanatical sports fans or fans of celebrities when that is a central part of their life. It seems weird and irrational to me. In my younger days, I must confess, I was a bit of an elitist about this—mostly because I still had resentment about people calling me “gay” for not wanting to watch football. But I learned to accept that just as I was a runner, other people were sports fans. Or fans of some celebrity. I learned to accept them and at least tolerate their way of being. If they do not hurt other people, they should be free to be who they are. I feel the same way for transgender people—I don’t understand what it is to be them, but they have as much right to be themselves as I do. Obviously, the right claims that transpeople are a danger—but this takes us to facts and logic, which prove the right is wrong. As it usually is.

 

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As I am writing this, same sex marriage is legal in the United States and in 2025 the supreme court declined to revisit the gay marriage decision. But as Roe v Wade was overturned, it is wise to consider that there is no such thing as settled law. While I am a divorced straight man, I am a staunch defender of same-sex marriage on the grounds that everyone should have the right to make bad decisions that cost them half their stuff.

As opponents of same-sex marriage tend to reuse the same fallacious arguments, I’ll do a brief recap of them here in anticipation of future fights. The first stock argument is that marriage between a single man and woman is a tradition. This is a fallacious appeal to tradition. The mere fact that something is a tradition does not show that it is right or correct. To use the usual counterexample, slavery was (and is in some places) a well-established tradition, yet this does not justify it. But as some opponents of same sex-marriage might like slavery, there is also the example of murder, which is something humans have been doing a long time.  

A second fallacious argument is that marriage between a man and a woman is what most people do, thus it is correct. In other words, it is a common practice and thus is right. Obviously enough, this is a fallacious appeal to common practice. There are, obviously enough, many bad practices that are common (like lying), but being common does not make them good.

A third common fallacious argument is that most people believe that marriage should be between a man and woman. Even if it is assumed this is true, this would still seem to be a fallacious appeal to belief. After all, the mere fact that most people believe something (like the earth being believed to be the center of the solar system) does not prove that it is true.

Now that the easy to dismiss fallacious arguments are out of the way, I can look at some of the other arguments that have been presented against same-sex marriage.

One common argument is an appeal to religion, specifically Christianity (at least the versions that forbid polygamy). The argument typically goes that since God married Adam to Eve; this defines marriage in the biblical sense. Those with clever wits often put it more rhetorically by saying that it was “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Since marriage is defined by the Christian faith as between one man and one woman that is what the law should be. As might be imagined, there are many problems with this.

One obvious legal problem is that to the degree those using this argument claims that it is based on a specific faith, they are in danger of violating the first amendment of the United State constitution, namely the bit that “congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” While I am not a constitutional lawyer, I would suspect that a plausible case could be made that creating a law explicitly based on a religion does involve the establishment of a religion. But the Supreme Court might see things otherwise.

 In addition to the possible legal problems, there is also the moral concern about imposing a specific faith’s values upon the population. This would seem to be a clear and direct violation of religious liberty and thus would seem to be morally unacceptable.

A second obvious problem is that basing the law on a religious view would seem to require that this view be established as correct. After all, if it is claimed that marriage is such that it can only between a man and a woman because of what God wants, then it needs to be established that God exists and that this is what God, in fact, wants. Otherwise, the law would have no established foundation and would be as sensible as basing a law on a myth or fictional tale. That said, law is all make-believe anyway, so perhaps this would be fine.

Naturally, if it can be shown that marriage is between one man and one woman as a matter of metaphysical necessity, then that would nicely establish the foundation of a law banning same-sex marriage. In fact, it would show that no such law would be needed since no one else could, in fact, be married. To use analogy, we do not need laws that ban people from driving their cars faster than the speed of light—they simply cannot do this because of the nature of reality.

There are, of course, non-religious arguments for eliminating same sex-marriage. A common argument is that this must be done to protect the sanctity of marriage. The idea seems to be that allowing same-sex marriage is harmful to marriage (and presumably  to the married) and thus, on the principle of preventing harm, same-sex marriage should be outlawed.

One obvious point of concern is whether allowing same sex-marriage harms marriage and heterosexual couples. While, of course, it might upset them that people are doing something they do not like (getting married), that is not sufficient justification. What would be needed would be objective evidence that same sex-marriage does enough harm to marriage and married couples to warrant forbidding same sex-marriage. The evidence for this seems to be, obviously enough, sorely lacking and the burden of proof rests on those who would make an imposition on the liberty of others to show that such an imposition is warranted. We have had same-sex marriage for quite some time and all the dire predictions have failed to come to pass. This will, obviously, not stop opponents of same-sex marriage from simply lying or making up new harms.

Intuitively, same-sex marriage did not harm marriage or married couples. After all, it is difficult to imagine what sort of damage could be inflicted. Did married couples love each other less? Were there be more cases of domestic violence or adultery? Were married parents be suddenly more inclined to abuse their children? None of this seems to have arisen from the legalization of same sex marriage.

But suppose it is assumed that marriage simply must be protected. If this is taken seriously, then it would certainly seem to follow that it would need to be legally protected from whatever might damage its sanctity. By analogy, laws to protect people from murder are not just limited to, for example, making it illegal to murder someone with aluminum baseball bat. Rather, it is the murder that matters. The same should apply to marriage: if marriage must be protected by making it between one man and one woman, then surely it must also be protected against whatever would damage its sanctity. As such, it would seem equally reasonable to ban marriages involving any sort of person whose actions or nature might do damage to the sanctity of a marriage.

Intuitively, allowing immoral people to marry would seem to damage the sanctity of marriage. As such, people would need to establish their moral goodness before marriage and presumably any straying from the path of virtue (such as by having an affair or otherwise failing in their vows) would result in the marriage being suspended or even nullified. Naturally enough, people who intend to get married in the hopes of financial gain, from lust, or for any reason that would sully the sanctity of marriage would need to be prevented from doing so. If the self-proclaimed defenders of the sanctity of marriage were content to merely undo same-sex marriage, one might suspect that they were acting from mere prejudice against same sex couples rather than by a sincere desire to protect marriage. There is little difference between telling same-sex couples that they should not marry because marriage must be protected and telling anyone who would allegedly violate the sanctity of marriage that they cannot marry. As such, more general restrictions on who can get married (such as people who are not morally good or who are not marrying purely from love) would seem no more (or less) unjust that preventing same sex marriage.

Naturally, being a person with a social conscience and a professional ethicist, I would be willing to accept the position of Marriage Czar and head up the Sanctity Defense Agency to ensure that marriage remains eternally pure and unsullied. No doubt I would have to spend most of my time dissolving existing pseudo-marriages (starting with, one assumes, Donald Trump), but I am sure people would thank me in the end.

 

 

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The death of a good person saddens me, for their passing is a loss to the world. But I do not rejoice when a wicked person dies, for their death is also a loss, albeit one of potential. They could have been good or at least attempted redemption.

It is accepted wisdom that even the best of us are flawed beings, so no one is perfectly good. But our flawed nature, ironically, also entails that none of us are perfectly evil. One might even say that it is the defect of the wicked to have some good within them. As has often been claimed, “Hitler loved dogs.”  On a completely unrelated note, Lindsey Graham died recently.

Graham was, as many politicians are today, a polarizing figure. Some praised him for his servitude to President Trump while others damned him for this. In reading the various narratives of his life, everyone agrees that he spoke out against Trump at times.

Before Trump became president, Graham correctly described him as a “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and a demagogue. He also predicted, correctly, that nominating Trump would destroy the Republican party. But once Trump was elected, Graham served him well until a moment of dissent in response to January 6, 2021. But Graham quickly returned to serving Trump.

Graham was obviously not unique in correctly condemning Trump before becoming one of his servants. J.D. Vance once correctly compared Trump to Hitler and now he is his Vice President and dancing monkey. Trump attacked Ted Cruz’s father and wife, but Cruz also became a little dancing monkey for Trump. I suspect that this is part of Trump’s appeal to his MAGA base: he can make powerful people, including billionaires, become his little dancing monkeys. For people who are sick of the ruling elites, this humiliation can be enjoyed as a form of vengeance against people who are otherwise untouchable and unaccountable.

Trump is indisputably a terrible person, which everyone knew when he first ran for office. He said racist things, bragged about sexual assault, mocked people with disabilities and so on. These would have all been career ending incidents for almost any other politician but seemed to increase Trump’s appeal to what became his MAGA base. When he attacked John McCain, I briefly thought this might alienate some people. After all, only a wicked and petty bastard would mock someone who suffered so much for his country. While Trump did face some pushback in his first term, people still served his will. He, or those running him, learned their lesson and ensured that only the incompetent, ignorant and servile serve in the Trump II sequel. But some might wonder about people like Graham, Vance and Cruz who once opposed and attacked Trump. What happened to them? Did Trump corrupt them or did Trump merely reveal the evil that had always been there?

There is the old saying that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But Robert Caro made the excellent point that power always reveals, noting that people often need to hide their true nature while climbing the ladder but are free to be themselves when they reach the top. From a philosophical standpoint, the question of whether power corrupts or reveals is an interesting one and has been indirectly addressed by thinkers over the centuries.

Plato’s brother Glaucon took the view in the Republic, at least to make a case for Socrates to argue against, that by nature people want to be unjust but are usually too weak to act upon this desire. He claims that someone with power would not be constrained by justice and would simply do as they wished within the limit of their power. Given this view, Glaucon would surely agree that power reveals rather than corrupts. Thomas Hobbes would probably take a similar view.  

Thinkers like Mencius and Rousseau would probably take the view that power can corrupt, as they seemed to think that people are basically good but can be made worse.  Aristotle seemed to think that people were born neutral (albeit with some tendencies) but could become corrupt or virtuous through habituation. One could also take the view that some people become corrupted by power and that some have their badness revealed by power.

From the standpoint of people hurt by the evil deeds of those in power, whether they became corrupted or were bad all along does not really matter. For example, if ICE agent Sam was always eager to hurt people and seized an opportunity to murder Joe, knowing he could just claim that he was “afraid for his life” and get away with it, then Joe is dead. If ICE agent Saul was a tolerant young man who grew up in church believing thou shall not kill but became corrupted by years of MAGA and seized the seized the opportunity to murder Joe because he became corrupted by power, then Joe is still dead. Even if a residue of the man he once was made Saul feel a bit bad for a second as he saw Joe’s blood spilling onto the ground as Joe’s wife and young daughter screamed in horror and anguish.

Likewise, if Senator Sam was always eager to make a profit and inflict pain while in office, the people he hurt are hurt. If Senator Sally was once idealistic and wanted to help people but became corrupted so she now only cares about her power and profit, then the people she hurt were also hurt. That said whether someone’s evil resulted from corruption or was merely revealed does matter.

If we are asking whether a person was always evil or became corrupted, then that means we are unsure. After all, the behavior can be the same whether someone was cautious to conceal their evil or was not evil until they were corrupted. But from a moral standpoint, there is a difference. After all, an evil person revealing their evil because they now have power is bad mostly because of the harm they do. But a person who becomes corrupted and does evil is also a victim of whatever corrupted them and they might even be a tragic figure. While this does not excuse their evil, corruption might mitigate their moral accountability in some ways. After all, they had to be transformed before they did evil. Then again, one might argue that the corrupted are worse, because they should have done better. Once again, whether someone became corrupted or was always evil matters little or not at all to the people they hurt. But in terms of preventing evil, whether people are “born bad” or must be corrupted does matter, even if this varies between individuals.

If, as Glaucon and Hobbes thought, people are basically bad, then power just reveals their badness by giving them the means to exercise it without consequences. This means that if we do not want people in power doing bad things, then we need to have the means and the will to stop them. Otherwise, like Trump, they will just do bad things because they are bad people and power frees them to act on their evil.

If people are not bad but can be corrupted by power, then we need to find ways to recognize such people and keep them away from power. But we must also find ways to modify power so that it would be less likely to corrupt people, in case we are unable or unwilling to keep corruptible people out of power. This assumes that we want to do this, after all Trump either revealed the pre-existing evil of millions of Americans or corrupted them into his MAGA base. America might decide it loves corruption.

But what about Lindsey Graham? Well, he is dead and I am a kind soul that tries not to speak ill of the dead, unless it is a dead philosopher I disagree with, like the slave owner George Berkeley.  

 

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