Tim Tebow, God, and Having it all Ways

So, for those of you who follow the NFL, or simply do not live in a cave, Tim Tebow and his upstart Denver Broncos have been dismantled by the perpetually badass New England Patriots 45-10. Tebow had been in the news, partly for turning around the Broncos' 1-4 start to the season after taking over as starting quarterback in week six, but mainly for his Bible-thumping fundamentalism and the concurrent fact that his supporters feel that his unlikely success (his football skills are limited and his statistics poor in key areas), including a wild card playoff victory against the favored Steelers, was the result of supernatural intervention.

For those of us in the skeptical and atheist communities, this is a stirring vindication of...nothing, really. A shitty quarterback and his .500 team were destroyed by a plainly superior squad. We assign no divine significance to the loss, just as  we assigned no divine significance to the previous wins, because we assigned no divine significance to Tebow and the Broncos' statistically unremarkable run of luck. Given enough games, an easy enough schedule, compensatory strengths elsewhere on the roster, and the sheer quirks of probability, a quarterback with lousy numbers will lead his team on a winning streak from time to time. Since we have all of those conditions in spades, the fact that Tebow is a fundie tool never really figured into the in-game analysis of anyone sane.

But the believers have a harder time of things, although you'd never know it based on the way that they silently move on after God gets his ass kicked. You see, Tebow's 316 (get it? 3:16) yards against the Steelers the week before were a sign directly sent from above, a message written in the Sunday biline (although one wonders why the Christian god was rewarding working on his holy day). A win for the Broncos was a win for the Almighty.

But a loss for the Broncos, mind you, is most emphatically not a loss for the Almighty. How does this work? It's easy. As the famed skeptic Michael Shermer has pointed out repeatedly, the garden variety of religious faith works on the same psychology as does victimization at the hands of cold-reading fortune tellers and spiritual mediums. People insufficiently trained or interested in skeptical thinking will invariably count the hits and discount the misses. When people pray for something (typically something scandalously ordinary like finding something lost) and it comes true--well, that's miracle central for you, even when those things happen all the time without any kind of a celestial assist. But whenever one prays for something and it doesn't happen, just as when the cold-reader makes a series of wrong guesses before stumbling upon a correct one, people dismiss it as uninteresting. It seems that we're wired for a particular kind of optimism that way, one that builds superstition faster than corn sugar builds cavities.

Sure, when pushed, the religious often lapse into a garden-variety theological sophism by which  God's plan becomes mysterious or incomprehensible the moment it effectively ceases working, but that simply makes one wonder why the plan is working when they are given what they ask. Could not, every time a prayer is answered, some demon be making them soft by staving off some character-building hardship that God had ticketed for them? Why is it that when people get what they want, simple explanations will suffice and only when they don't does the divine map become suddenly obscured? Really, if God giveth and taketh away irrespective of prayer, then what on Earth is the point of it in the first place?

So the question, then, for a certain flavor of believer is this: If God takes an active role in NFL games (while ignoring, in a curious distribution of priorities, widespread starvation in Africa), and the success of his Evangelical quarterback is evidence of his divine support, then how is the total failure of said player (and against a lousy pass defense, at that) and his team not the failure of God's intervention? One can't have it both ways.

Review of Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Oxford's Very Short Introductions series has always been rather hit-and-miss. A large part of this, I think, has to do with the wide latitude individual authors are given regarding their individual topics. As a general rule, I'm in favor of this, but I'm not so sure when it comes to treatments of a subject that are only 100-150 pages long. My gut tells me that there are some things that ought to be done and ought to be avoided when handling material so briefly. For example, I think that one ought to cover the cannon, while avoiding the standard Great Men version of history. One might mention a bit about a field's methodology, but certainly shouldn't devote a great deal of space to it when there are other pressing concerns.

As it happens, then, I think that the British classics scholar Catherine Osbourne's Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2004, Oxford UP, 143pp) is closer to a miss than to a hit. It does some things fairly well, such as deconstructing the linear narrative of cumulative metaphysics leading up to Plato and Aristotle, but in unraveling the conventional story, Osborne leaves nothing in its place. The reader is left at the end wondering just what it is he's been introduced to, and why it was terribly important in the first place.

Osborne begins by telling us that "[t]his book is not a history" and that "we shall not focus on historical relationships." Perhaps, I suppose, that's just a more honest representation of the field than is usually presented: we don't have any original texts from, say, Empedocles or Heraclitus, and the few snippets that survive in quotation through other, later writers don't really provide anything resembling comprehensive works of philosophy on the scale of the later Athenians. In part, their historical importance is implicit as much as evident from the texts themselves: we have to suppose their importance based upon the fact that they were considered important by those that did the recording, rather than the overwhelming majority of what must have at one time been written that is now lost completely. It could be that all we have are a pile of isolated fragments, and that an attempt to put them in historical conversation with one another, as the traditional account has done, is pure revisionism.

But if that's the case, why write a book about it at all? If no real connections can be drawn between these diverse thinkers, then including them as a unit in philosophy of science, history of science, and intro to Western philosophy courses seems like a waste of time. But generations of writers and scholars, including Osborne herself, most emphatically think otherwise. So the tactic that she employs in the book of deliberately presenting the individual thinkers out of order and geographically all over the place seems designed to undermine the fact that their ideas did influence one another, directly or (more probably) indirectly, even if in ways less neat than we would like or that historians have portrayed. If this is not the case, if there were no common currents of regional thought among the Greeks that allowed thinkers from modern Turkey to modern Italy to attempt to systematize ideas in ways that were increasingly less dependent on traditional myth and theology, then there is simply no point to studying these people as a group.

That may, in fact, be Osborne's point: that we should look at these texts principally as individual documents, "diving in where the evidence is rich," as she puts it. But if that's the case, then she simply should have declined the publisher's invitation to write an introduction to what is normally considered a topic with identifiable boundaries and enough cohesion to teach it as a unit. What we are left with following her haphazard presentation of various figures ranging from Thales through the Sophists (although not presented in that order) and their poems (a frequent medium for the philosophy of the period) and arguments concerning the nature of matter, causation and ethics is a disorganized jumble that leaves the reader nothing to take away and no particular ground for reflection or impetus for further study. That's all fine if one is arguing against the idea of the topic in the first place. But one does that with people already assumed to be familiar with the material, not a group of novices looking to be walked through what is most generally agreed upon. Her book may succeed as an argument. It certainly does not succeed as an introduction.

What it Means to Be a Prefatory Footnote: Preliminary Notes on the Presocratics

What I typically post here resemble essays more than journals, usually with an argument that is, if brief, fairly complete. This, alternately, will be something of a "think out loud" piece, in which I speculate on the rhetorical implications and possible reasons behind referring to a group of Greek philosophers between the eighth and third centuries BC as "Presocratics." Since I don't know much about them, the entry is really more a way of describing my ignorance than in rectifying it. Hopefully, there will be a followup piece that binds some of the loose ends introduced in this one.

I think that it should be fairly self-evident that something goes on when we label something a precursor to something else: the precursor becomes last year's model, so to speak, and is immediately devalued. One need look no further than what Jesus did to Isaiah or, depending on where one lives, what Mohamed did to Jesus. In fact, both the latter two traditions speak specifically of their Messiahs/prophets as being the culmination of historical processes that had the end point specifically in mind. This creates the mental effect that prophets who had previously been a kind of a plateau are now merely steps on the way to a plateau.

Naturally, the idea of Presocratics carries much the same effect. The title itself implies that none of these thinkers should be troubled over too much for what they said or wrote, but that their significance instead lies in that they paved the road for the more complete philosophical synthesis that we see in Socrates and Plato (to whatever extent we can extricate the two).

So let's examine some possible reasons that this group of teachers/philosophers/mystics might be taught to modern students in this manner. A few forms spring to mind: first, a lack of material. It could simply be (and I suspect that this is the case) that we encounter few or no texts directly attributed to the Presocratics themselves. This would be unsurprising, and the standard course of events, given the length of time since the purported historical existence of these men, but itself doesn't explain much. We have, after all, no original texts of the Bible, Socrates, Plato, or virtually any works from the ancient world that weren't, literally, carved in stone.  (Conversely, we apparently have a painfully large, and mostly painfully dull, collection of written records from the Babylonians and other such cultures that recorded everything from poetry to grain requisitions on unwieldy-but-durable clay tablets.) Yet all of these latter works are still considered of major importance and discernible historical provenance.

Secondly, we can look at the reliability of the accounts that we do have from the earliest extant sources. This probably helps some, as the earliest texts of Plato are, as I understand, from his students at the Academy, but one would imagine that the tradition by which the Presocratics reach us is probably similar. So maybe that's not much help, either, although the continuity of the Platonic tradition for centuries after Plato probably lends an authenticity that the Presocratic texts lack.

On a conceptual level, one could suppose that Socrates represents an interesting synthesis of ideas that had existed separately, much in the way that Newton created what we consider the first usably comprehensive theory of gravity, or how Darwin took the various evolutionary ideas roaming the 18th century and turned them into something elegant and parsimonious. But that only works so well, as we nevertheless view, on the one hand, Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo as worthy objects of study in their own right. (Although Lamarck, Robert Chambers,  and Erasmus Darwin fare only slightly better than do the Presocratics; perhaps we should call them the Predarwinians.)

Finally, this form of grouping could simply be a historical convention, something we approach this way because some influential scholar or group of scholars once imagined it to be the "natural" progression of the material. In any case, it's helpful to think sometimes of the categories into which we group material, and the ways that they can influence and constrain the ways that we approach learning.  As such, "Presocratics" belongs to a tradition containing such terms as "local historian," "minor battle," and "regional writer" that, perhaps intentionally, limit the amount of attention any given individual or event receives from a student of the relevant discipline.

There Are No Experts: Why Theologians Are Full of Hot Air

Stephen Hawking recently started what I shall oh-so-cleverly term a "nontroversy" with the exceptionally innocuous statement from his recent book, The Grand Design, declaring, "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."  Naturally enough, this has enraged theologians, who have dusted off the familiar saw that they have used intermittently for years against the British biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins: Hawking is a freelancing amateur, they say, offering an opinion on a subject in which he has no expertise.  He's a fine physicist but at best an inept metaphysician.  Best leave this God stuff to the philosophers and theologians, to whom it rightfully belongs, they say, for they are the real experts on the topic.

Now, the following argument breaks no new philosophical ground, and so it is assiduously frustrating that it requires continuous popularization.  But nevertheless, clearly it does, so here we go: there are some very clear, distinct, and simple requirements to be considered an expert in a field of knowledge.  Theologians satisfy none of them.  We are left with probably only two possibilities: either theologians are talking about nothing, because their object of study is imaginary, or what they are talking about is real, and so impossibly difficult to comprehend that nothing about it can be known.  In either case, they all need to get real jobs.

Let us think about any other area of inquiry: it is not strictly relevant whether we choose an academic field such as history, a field that has applications within and without the academy, such as computer science or architecture, or a professional field that is mainly practical, such as plumbing or carpentry.  The requirements for expertise vary somewhat between the first and last, but this simply multiplies the number of standards that theologians cannot meet.  All of the fields listed above share several important aspects that overshadow all of their differences: first, in order to be acknowledged as an expert, one must have command of at least a tentative and generally agreed-upon set of facts.

For instance, if we interviewed a panel of ten purportedly expert historians about the key dates, figures, and locations of events in the American Revolution, and were given ten widely divergent and mutually exclusive sets of answers, we would be forced to conclude that either: a) they were all mistaken; or, b) all but one of them was mistaken.  If we were thoroughly convinced that these were the best historians available, we would additionally be led toward the conclusion that either: a) no one or almost no one, in fact, knows anything about this particular period of history; or, if contrasted with other, well-established episodes in history, b) the American Revolution may never have happened at all.  This is much like when a police investigator asks a suspect for an alibi and is given answers regarding whereabouts that are neither internally consistent nor consistent with other witness accounts: she would suspect, charitably, that the suspect is confused, or, less charitably, that the suspect is lying.

But these are, of course, exactly the kinds of answers that we get when posing questions about God.  Christian thinkers cannot agree whether God wrote, influenced, or merely witnessed the book attributed to him; whether he is essentially nice, as the Methodists maintain, or merely mighty, as the Calvinists would have it; whether he reveals himself through miracles or operates within the laws of physics; whether his plan is apparent or inscrutable; whether he consigns most people to eternal damnation or whether eternal damnation even exists; whether dimensions such as Limbo and Purgatory are real; when the soul enters the body; if said souls preexist the humans they occupy or not; what it means to have the omnipotence or omniscience attributed to him, if attributed at all; whether lesser spirits such as angels and devils exist and can influence human affairs; whether we are saved by reading the Bible or building houses for the poor.  The list could get very long, indeed, before we even left the major issues and started into lesser ones such as those of proper ritual or prayer, at which point the list would become nearly infinite.

Naturally, every discipline has serious disputes about its details, and it would be arrogant and foolish to pretend otherwise.  Resolving these disputes is, in the world of academe anyway, one of the principal reasons that these disciplines continue to exist.  But God's general nature, plan, system of revelation, and system of salvation are not questions of detail: they are foundational questions.  The fact that theologians have formed no consensus on them means that, again, they are either questions about imaginary things, or they are questions that simply have no reliable answers at this point.  In either situation, there is simply no expertise to be found anywhere in the sense that we use the term regarding any other subject.  If we accept even general and tentative agreement as a qualification for expertise, those claiming theological expertise are either lying or mistaken.

The other basic requirement for expertise in a discipline is the existence of a generally accepted method of study.  Here, we'll set academia aside and look at a mainly applied field of knowledge such as plumbing.  Imagine that you called a plumber to address a leak beneath your kitchen sink.  There are certain things that you will expect every single plumber that you would call to do.  You would expect him or her to look underneath your sink and in the surrounding area to determine the precise location and cause of the leak; to inspect the materials from which your plumbing is constructed; to make a determination whether the problem can be rectified with the existing hardware or whether additional replacement components will be required; to possess and be able to employ a set of hand tools common to all plumbers; and so on.

If instead, in an alternate world in which you knew nothing yourself about plumbing, you called ten plumbers and each took a radically different approach to your problem, you might well wonder if this plumbing thing was worth what you were spending on it.  If one read tea leaves to diagnose the problem, and another did a dance, and a third recited poetry, and each was dead certain that he was right and the others wrong, you would conclude that at least most of them, and possibly all of them, had no idea how to properly investigate leaking pipes.  And this is before we even ask the question of whether the problem was addressed satisfactorily; theologians fail that criteria as well, but that is a topic for another day.

And so again, let us apply this criterion for expertise to theology: some theologians maintain that study of the Bible is the essential technique for knowledge of God, although even within this method the answers are widely divergent and often mutually exclusive; others insist that deference to the authority of clergy is the key; still others feel that personal prayer is the way to go; others service; others philosophy.  In each instance (except, perhaps, the second one), the answers rendered will, once again, be widely divergent and frequently mutually exclusive.  In any other field, we would assume that there is likely no expertise to be had, or that at least no one had yet acquired it.  Someone might be right by sheer luck or intuition, it is true, but the lack of consensus would make it nearly impossible to know who that person was.  We would certainly not consider anyone an expert, anymore than we have experts about specific plant life on a particular planet millions of light years away.  We might concede that there might, in fact, be such a planet with such organisms, but at the same time we would, if we were honest, have to confess our total ignorance about anything other than its bare possibility.  Without some system of verification, we would quickly recognize all pronouncements on the topic to be talk of nothing or wild speculations.

So when pious and learned fellows like the Catholic theologian Robert Spitzer set themselves up as experts on the question of God's necessity, with the implicit or explicit suggestion that Stephen Hawking is out of his depth, we should realize that they are half right: if we are kind enough to assume that theologians are not simply frauds, which is a kind assumption indeed, then they are all in the same boat with Dr. Hawking.  Based upon the practical and scholarly output from the last 20 centuries, we can confidently conclude that no one knows much of anything at all about this God fellow.

Total Honesty and the Confessional Genre, or, Why You Would Like Me Less if You Knew Me Better

For the last post on this blog, I'm going to try what I will call an art of living experiment--a test of an idea. The idea is that people should be more honest with one another than they currently are. Almost everyone espouses this principle in some form or another, it's enshrined in many of the world's popular religions, and yet few of us seem to follow it. The standard interpretation of this is that the ideal is worthy, yet we as individuals are too constitutionally weak/poorly socialized/debased by some ancestral sin to live up to it. But what if that's all wrong? What if the many deceptions that we participate in as individuals are actually necessary to our interpersonal relations? I suspect, strongly, that they are, and that a world in which we expressed ourselves openly and frankly, particularly about how we feel toward our fellow creatures, would be a coarse, nasty world in which there are more hurt feelings and grudges than already exist.

So, without further ado, here are a few words of total honesty. These are things that I really, actually think and do, sometimes often:

If you have ever found yourself in some misfortune of your own making and come to me looking for sympathy, I probably felt burdened by the inconvenience. I also probably thought that you deserved what you got, and really ought to take it as a lesson and move on with your life. When people lose loved ones, I am more sympathetic (that's not their fault, after all), but nevertheless instinctively shrink from engaging with their sorrow too deeply. In short, I am cruel, impatient, narcissistic, and emotionally shallow. I have to force myself at great effort to offer compassion to others.

If you have ever enforced any kind of structure that involves me, I have probably despised you for it and thought terrible things of you. I am a borderline anarchist in terms of everyday organization and I hate rules like poison. I grant them the right to exist solely for their effects and view all deadlines as arbitrary when they are applied to me. To make matters worse, I do not grant you this same standard, and will act petulant and annoyed if you are late for anything. Rather than reform my time management skills to be more productive, I will blame others for imposing constraints upon what I may do and when. I am fully aware that this is childish, petulant, and hypocritical, but that doesn't seem to stop me from acting in this manner.

If you have ever made me angry, I may likely have plotted some sort of wicked, vengeful, possibly elaborate retaliation. When I was no longer angry, I looked back on it as the most curious species of lunacy, and yet next time I lose my temper I will again concoct an idea as bizarre as all of the previous ones.

I like company in controlled doses, but too much time around people makes me exceptionally grouchy, and I find myself being short and rude to people for no good reason. I then convince myself that there was something wrong with the person to whom I was unkind, to excuse myself from the ethical implications of spreading ill-will in the population. When I am rested and recharged, I usually feel bad about this, but then also usually forget to apologize.

I've found that the practice of meditation makes me less like everything that I've already described: less impatient, less capricious, less unkind and generally more friendly. And then I don't make time to do it, because I clearly don't prioritize these qualities enough to seek them out.

If there are dates or other commemorative events which you find meaningful, I will forget them as easily as if you had reminded me in another language. I cannot possibly be bothered to think about anyone other than myself to the extent that I would record and observe such things, and my adherence to schedules ends precisely where and when my notion of perceived gain does. Moreover, if you take me to task for it, I will attack you for being a rote slave to tradition, as a sort of preemptive strike to make you leave me be. In fact, I will start all manner of argument at any given time to deflect attention from any failings of obligation that I may have performed.

In short, I am a bad person on good days, and an atrocious one if I am exhausted or harried. If you knew what I thought, you would probably find me contemptible. I am sometimes genuinely surprised that anyone wants to be my friend and shocked that there is a woman who puts up with all of this on a daily basis. She must be the other kind of person.

Now, if I were to openly express these sentiments in conversation, no one would want to talk to me more than once. And so I don't, because, at the end of the day, I like having people to talk to. And as bad as all of this is, I have a creeping suspicion that I may not be worse than most other people. There are, of course, the ones with the sunny dispositions that are naturally gifted with kindness and optimism, but they are relatively few and exceptionally lucky. Now, assuming that I am not alone in refraining from speaking the nastier concoctions of my imagination, I must ask: is the world a better or worse place because of this? It is implicit, of course, in the idea that if we can't say anything nice, that we shouldn't say anything, that plenty of us are thinking things that aren't nice all the time. And I think we should leave it that way. How about you?

Homebrewing and Thoreau: How We Really Only Love What We Make

As a part of my own art of living, I have recently begun to make my own beer. Although I would like to claim that Henry David Thoreau inspired me to do this, that would be a lie. I have home-brewed intermittently in the past, and my decision to take it back up had more to do with reacquiring the necessary equipment and ingredients than with any philosophical epiphany. Thoreau did, however, make me think a good deal about home brewing and why I enjoy it, and that, I suppose, is the next best thing. I think of this when he suggests in "Economy," the opening and longest essay of Walden that , "[students] should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end."  What he seems to contrast here are lives (typically associated with students, but in reality, typical of almost everyone) in which we learn by authority rather than experience.  This is how most of us know nearly everything we claim to know, of course, and to an extent there is good reason for this: there simply isn't time in the world, given the relative brevity and certain end of human life, for us all to learn every trade, fact, or hobby by hand.  We can reject the germ theory of disease, of course, and act as if all manner of contamination and filth were our dear companions, all as an intellectual experiment, or we can read any history of the European Middle Ages and conclude that living like that might be better experienced at some remove.

But at the same time, only enjoying the fruits of the learning and labors of others rather smacks of cherry-picking the fruits of life--freeloading, really.  And, to return to the topic at hand, that is perhaps why I like making beer.  It is not receiving it on authority.  It is not practice or play life, or at least not as ersatz as just buying the stuff, anyway.  It requires getting in touch with, oddly, life, because life makes beer.

What am I on about?  Most people don't know.  Most people have no idea that the alcohol, be it beer, wine, or spirits, that they consume is the result of omnipresent microorganisms infesting objects high in the sugars that the latter feed upon.  And you'd never know until you watch it happen: until you sprinkle a packet of brewer's yeast atop a cooling vat of water, malt, and hops, and then close it up and watch as a frothing, boiling scum appears at the top and gradually subsides over the course of several days--you would never know that alcohol and carbon dioxide are waste products of a controlled bacterial infestation, that when you drink beer you are, to be truly indelicate, consuming yeast shit.

But I know; I've watched it, in all of its sublime, if entirely localized, grandeur.  And I don't like beer any less as a result of it (in fact, and returning to Thoreau, making beer is inexpensive and rewarding, perhaps like building your own house in miniature).  Making beer is realizing where something comes from; it is seeing a tiny piece of how life works.  It is a trip to the the forge or foundry, the farm or the slaughterhouse, or at least a bit more authentic than a trip to Harris-Teeter to pick up a case of canned, artificially carbonated lager.

But above all, homemade beer, done right, is delicious.  Perhaps I comfort myself by thinking that it is a gesture to nature and simplicity, when in fact I simply like to drink it.  Perhaps so.  But I know that, like the foods we cook in our kitchen here and the peppers that grow on the porch, that there is something, to combine two unforgivable cliches, sweeter tasting in labors of love.  If that is an illusion, as it probably is, it is one that, in my always-evolving negotiation with truth, I am happy to accept.

Bioethics and the Problem of Deliberation

Plato's philosophical mentor/literary protagonist Socrates (we know of him mainly through Plato's dialogues) spends his hours and days taking every man's ideas to task, asking each to examine his (sadly, no "her") beliefs through the technique of dialectic—examining statements by subjecting them to all manner of contradictory propositions to see if they hold up. The idea is inherently familiar to us, as, not coincidentally, it is the foundation of our legal trials in most of the West. It bears note that the same process is used whether we start from the assumption of innocence or guilt.

So why is the concept of deliberation to arrive at the truth problematic? Because philosophical deliberation, which, on some level, is meant to be a tool to arrive at ethical decisions in the practical world of events and consequences, can also serve as a paralyzing force that problematizes every course of action until it seems of specious application to actual situations. Put more plainly, we just don't have the time in the complex world of human affairs to seek philosophically untroubling solutions to the constant demand for ethical action in the world; the world doesn't stop to wait for us to make up our minds on ethical questions requiring prompt (and critical) decisions.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of bioethics: whether we speak of abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, stem-cell research, human cloning, "conscientious objection" to vaccination, blood transfusion, hospital care, what have you—we face situations in which the lives and life qualities of countless humans are contingent upon the construction and implementation of actual policies; the kind of policies that have legal, economic, and other material considerations that simply do not wait for philosophical consensus. Nor, really, should we desire that they do: anyone who believes that consensus need always precede policy would have to live in a world in which each new technology were innocent until proven guilty, in which we gave a long enough ethical rope to each technology to morally hang itself.

I am reminded of a law school joke (it isn’t the funny kind): three judges go duck hunting and see a duck fly overhead.  The Supreme Court justice begins to lecture on the jurisprudence of biodiversity and the rights in principal of ducks; the circuit court justice considers the ethics of hunting and the appropriate use of firearms; the third, a district court judge, levels his rifle and takes a shot at the duck.  Ultimately, all of us are all three of these judges; we must have theories and theories of theories, but, unless we plan to retire to lives of ascetic contemplation, we all must make practical and hard decisions in the world—we all have to shoot at the duck.