In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.
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Samizdata quote of the day – The British elites have capitulated to Islamo-censorshipPerry de Havilland (Prague) · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Middle East & Islamic · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs May 9th, 2025 |
 30 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – The British elites have capitulated to Islamo-censorshipLeave a Reply |
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Apart from all the other malarkey such as the conflation of Islam and race (which should be considered to be actually “Islamaphobia” given Islam’s claims to be the One True path for everyone from Adam onwards) the simple truth is that this is cowardice. You mock Methodists and they might tut about it. They may even go so far as to write a “strongly worded” letter. You mock Islam and they get start killing people and exploding things. Quite frankly I’m sick of the fuckers. Not the Muslims – the appeasers. The Muslims are just the slaves of Admiral Ackbar (“It’s a trap!”) but “Queers for Palestine” is beyond made-up.
Perhaps the thing I hate most is Prime Minister Starmer going on (repeatedly) about how we have “Freedom of Speech” in this country – he has said this, with a straight face, over and over again. He said it in the Oval Office in Washington (and should have been kicked out of the Whitehouse – right then), and he has said it in press conference after conference – including yesterday. God damn this liar – God damn him to Hell.
According to Jeremy Bentham (and to Mr Hume and Mr Hobbes before him) the state can do anything it likes, anything it (the state) thinks will promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
So the state can (for example) disarm people, tax them into the ground, censor them, and then blatantly (and viciously) lie about what it is doing – as long as it thinks this promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
How about a gang rape – are we to measure the happiness of the rapists, and their general community, against the pain of the victim – and decide that gang rape is a “good thing” if the pleasure of the rapists and community (in the judgement of the state) is greater than the pain of the victim or victims?
Not an absurd example – as the British state (indeed the establishment generally – up to the highest person of all) clearly does think that pleasing “the community” is more important than the non aggression principle of the Common Law.
Not sure about that. My way of political thinking is mostly based on ruling-class theory (aka, improperly, as “elite theory”). As a consequence, i am constantly aware that every ruling class needs a principle of legitimacy, be it Divine Right, Social Contract, or General Will. In the case of xxi century Britain, the principle of legitimization is Wokeness, ie the principle that, if a group is less successful than average, that is due to discrimination. That is a sufficient explanation for what can also be explained by cowardice, but by Occam’s razor need not be.
But of course the tendency to violence of a group is relevant to the British ruling class: violent groups effectively act as the henchmen of the regime.
On this, i entirely agree.
This, i don’t get.
We all know that Paul Marks understands nothing of Hume, but having to defend Hobbes makes me uneasy. He is not someone i am keen to defend, but facts are facts, and one of them is that Hobbes wanted a nightwatchman State: for him, the sole purpose of government was the prevention of violence.
It is true, of course, that Hobbes wanted to grant absolute, unconstrained power to “the Sovereign” (not necessarily an individual) as the best check on violence, and in this sense he was as bad as Bentham, if not worse. But facts are facts, and one fact is that the principle of legitimacy invoked by Hobbes was not the same as that invoked by Bentham.
And neither of them is the same as that invoked by Starmer! You cannot easily blame Starmer on either of them.
Snorri – it is you who seems to know little about David Hume (as for “we” – so you are now consider yourself the monarch and use the Royal “we”).
For example, when I referred you to Mr Hume’s indifference to the “euthanasia of the Constitution” you just, falsely, denied that Mr Hume had written about the matter.
Nor have you ever produced a proper defense for Mr Hume’s absurd philosophical statements – although, YES, Mr Hume may not have meant them seriously – in which case they would NOT be absurd, being, rather, a clever inversion of what had been taught for thousands of years, Mr Hume deliberately making a case for things he knew NOT to be true – in order to show his cleverness, and to challenge others to uphold traditional wisdom.
Statements such as “you can not get an ought from an is” – which denies what sane people do every day, namely “this is wrong – so I ought not to do it”, and “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions” – which denies the very existence of moral reason (moral agency – free will, the very existence of the human person, the “I” as a being) and makes reason just an instrumental thing – basically “how do I indulge the passions – and use my reason to GET AWAY WITH IT” (robbery, rape, murder….).
As for Mr Hobbes – I was too kind to him, as his actual position was that the state (one man or a group) could do what it liked – whether the state things this will promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number or NOT.
According to Mr Hobbes unless the state comes after you personally, you should not resist injustice. A person has, according to Mr Hobbes, no moral duty to come to the aid of SOMEONE ELSE persecuted by the state – I would say this was the philosophy of a dog (rather than a human being), but to say that would be unfair (very unfair) to dogs.
To be fair….
If the view of what humans are, held by Mr Hobbes, Mr Hume and Mr Bentham, is correct, namely that humans are NOT beings (not free will moral agents) – but are, rather, just some sort of “thing”, just an object, rather than a subject – a person, is correct, than their politics does indeed logically follow.
As it would not matter if these non beings (these human shaped objects, rather than human beings, who have no souls in either the religious or Aristotelian sense) were subjected to tyranny – or indeed exterminated, it would be a matter of moral indifference.
Much like water…. Water is not sentient (it is not a person – it does not have free will, moral personhood), so (for example) damming a river does NOT deny a river its moral freedom – as it did not have moral agency in the first place.
To be denied moral liberty, someone must first have moral liberty – i.e. must be someone, not just something.
This view of what humans are, namely that humans are NOT human beings (moral agents), does seem to be the view of the modern establishment – hence their position on the law.
OK, this goes into the rubric of sarcasm.
Meaning, i write this without thinking it worth putting much serious thought into it.
I did nothing of the sort. (NB: this is not yet sarcasm.)
Why should I? what should i defend Hume from? Quixotic charges at windmills?
Which is pretty much what i wrote. You are stealing my ideas.
Both Gladstone and Winston Churchill claimed that Islam held this determinist (fatalistic – as described in Mr Churchill’s “The River War” – the first edition) view of what humans are (that humans are non-beings) – from which it may (perhaps – perhaps) have influenced Martin Luther and John Calvin. In the case of Dr Luther his theological predestinationism does indeed topple over into full blown philosophical determinism (see Dr Luther’s “The Bondage of the Will” and his war-of-words with Erasmus). By this interpretation “here I stand, I can do no other” would not be a statement of moral choice (moral conscience), but rather the denial of the possibility of it – with “I can do no other” being meant literally (the statement of a pre programmed flesh robot – rather a human being) – but that supposes that Dr Luther already was a determinist when he said “here I stand, I can do no other” – and he may NOT have been when he said those words (in German). He may still have believed the “I” (the free will human person) existed – when he said those words. And Dr Luther’s philosophy, on this particular matter, does seem to have influenced Mr Hobbes and, indirectly, Mr Hume and Mr Bentham.
Leaving the subject of Dr Luther aside…. This (the view of Gladstone and Winston Churchill of Islam) is a rather limited view of Islam – it may (perhaps) describe the orthodox Sunni position, but it does not describe, for example, the Shia philosophical position or that of the Sufi orders.
Yes you did Snorri – you denied that Mr Hume had shown indifference to the possibility of the “euthanasia of the constitution” (specifically of Britain – the unwritten constitution that existed at-that-time) into absolutism.
And you insult me, rather than defend what Mr Hume said on the other philosophical matters at hand, because you have no defense.
It is a well known trick – if someone has no argument against what someone else is saying, simply switch to insulting the person themselves.
Well said.
The decline of Britain into absolutism is, tragically, what has happened – over time.
Firstly by Blackstone’s doctrine that Parliament could do whatever it liked (a doctrine that horrified the Founding Fathers of the United States – and rightly so). Blackstone claimed to believe in the principles of Natural Law – but held that Parliament could overrule them (which is like Roman lawyers admitting that slavery was against Natural Law, which they DID admit, but then claiming that slavery was just fine – because the laws of Rome upheld it), and Blackstone claimed to revere such things as the Great Charter of 1215 and the Bill of Rights of 1689 – but held that Parliament could overrule them, in part or whole.
Later it was held that Parliament could hand over this power to do anything it liked (a power that was denied by such people as Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, the case of Dr Bonham 1610, and Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt – several cases) to OTHER PEOPLE.
For example, Parliament does not get together to decide what, specifically, is censored – “Ofcom” makes these decisions.
This sort of rule by officials is what Lord Chief Justice Hewart warned against in his “The New Despotism” (all the way back in 1929).
Today even foreign bodies, such as the World Health Organisation, are to be allowed despotic power over the British people.
The British constitution, as it was understood even as late as the Constitutional Club network and National Rifle Association (which was larger than the American one) – up to the First World War, is dead.
By the way, I’ve noticed that among a lot of even classical liberals a veneration of David Hume. In fairness, he had important things to say about trade and commerce (unsurprisingly as he was friends with Adam Smith), politics and other issues. I’ve a collection of his essays: they make great reading. He was deadly about religion.
But… as you say, the claim that one can’t derive “ought” from “is”, that induction is impossible, that objective knowledge is impossible to ever attain , arguably meant the end of the Enlightenment. The best that can be said about his scepticism is that it is a check on hubris among ideologues.
Hume’s arguments – such as on the how we know what we know – tormented Kant, but Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology were, as Ayn Rand noted, a mess. He reintroduced ideas of revealed knowledge in secular garb. (His idea that the is a higher realm of knowledge and and a lower one for mortal beings.)
And this sort of thinking goes back to Plato and his image of men seeing shadows on the walls of a cave, requiring superior intellectual leaders, religious and secular, to guide them to the Truth.
Examples include forms of religion, and Marxism.
Paul:
I could not possibly have made that denial, because i had no idea — and i still have no idea — of where Hume has shown such indifference. You kindly gave me the name of the relevant essay, which i had already read, but did not make any sense to me. After re-reading, it still did not make any sense to me.
(I have no idea why people think that Hume is easy reading — for a philosopher.)
Is saying that you understand nothing of Hume an insult?
If so, i am not the only one to insult you on this site.
I told you to study Huemer’s explanation of the is/ought dichotomy. You didn’t.
I asked you to address Hume’s TWO specific arguments against the incompatibility of “”liberty”” and “”necessity””. You didn’t. Neither of them.
As for J.Pearce: I can no longer take seriously anybody who takes Ayn Rand seriously.
As a postscript:
I must stress once more that Hume, like Popper, is important for me for the most fundamental issues:
meta-logic;
epistemology;
meta-ethics.
Neither Hume nor Popper are important to me wrt political philosophy — nor the philosophy of mind/agency/’liberum arbitrium’/””free will””.
That is not to deny that Paul Marks has shown no understanding of Hume’s TWO arguments about the nature of agency.
Aw.
Did you mean, anyone who enjoys the prescience of her fiction? Or Objectivism as a whole?
I read Ayn Rand’s We The Living, Fountainhead and Anthem in my early 30s. I liked them as novels but have never taken her seriously as a philosopher. I can see why 16 year olds may get entranced by the novels but I was glad to be reading them at an age where I was more able to read them critically. I actually liked We the Living the most, maybe because I liked the Victor Hugo novel (Ninety-Three) that influenced Rand. Maybe one day I’ll give Atlas Shrugged a go.
When I read that Rand developed an addiction to amphetamines, the cult like behaviour she displayed in her later years became very comprehensible. There’s something grimly amusing how she surrounded herself with sycophants who all imagined they were radical individualists, although the way she treated her husband was appalling.
Bobby: indeed! Her fictional portrayal of villains in her novels holds up remarkably well in light of events since she died. She got the rot of western education absolutely spot on, and the environmentalist madness, to give two of many examples.
Snorri: I’ve read some Michael Huemer. He is, I understand, an ethical intuitionist. With that approach he seems to regard ethics as a given that can’t be deduced from something else, such as Rand’s fundamental question that all humans face: life and flourishing vs death and decay. Rand posed the question: what is morality for and why do we need the virtues? The meta-ethical question.
Rand’s treatment of Frank O’Connor is one of those things that reminds me that living out a philosophy isn’t a great place to be if you lack a lot of common sense. As for Frank, he could of course walked away, and should have done so to protect his own self respect.
I never really saw a new philosophy in her work. What I saw was a great and logical laying-out of the consequences of various existing philosophies.
But she really shines as a caricaturist. She could invent outrageous characters that you love or hate, but that are so correct in their essence. To this day, I still see various members of her casts clearly within current-day events.
Our global condition is summarily well-laid-out by the combination of Rand and Orwell.
Obviously, if someone destroys something of cultural significance to a particular group, whether or not it can be replaced, they should be hung, drawn, and quartered. It’s absolutely outrageous that they can upset people, and therefore the punishment should fit the crime. In this case, I think they should face the full-force of the law –not because they’ve destroyed property, but because that object is culturally significant, and this is very important because it changes everything about how I feel about it and therefore the punishment should be much, much harsher
Ah, crap, I posted this on the wrong thread. I meant to post this on the tree-chopping thread.
To answer bobby’s question:
I meant Objectivism as a whole. And that is not even to deny that Objectivism is good in parts: I understand that Rand was the first to formulate NAP explicitly. If that is correct, it is quite an achievement.
I seem also to remember that Rand was taken quite seriously at the Mont Pelerin Society. I do take Popper, Hayek, and Friedman (any of them related to Milton) seriously.
I watched the movie version of The Fountainhead and it was quite good, although i must question Gary Cooper’s opinion that it was his best movie, considering High Noon.
I got started on Atlas Shrugged but, while i was not bored, i was not sufficiently enticed to keep reading — especially when feeling the sheer weight of the book in my hands!
I’d add at least Brave New World to the list. Although the sci-fi elements in it look bizarrely far-fetched by now.
Johnathan:
Please note that i was referring specifically Why I Am Not an Objectivist, which i recommended to Paul years ago, specifically subsection 3.3, which includes this snippet:
But the entire essay is very much worth studying as a general introduction to philosophy — except for epistemology, about which Huemer says nothing in this essay.
As for the section on “”free will””: It starts from what, on reflection, i find very dubious, possibly pernicious premises. But Huemer is fair in the sense that those are widely-accepted premises. He lays out the problem as fair-minded people see it. It is not his fault if many fair-minded people are wrong!
Bobby, this is candidate for SQOTD: Our global condition is summarily well-laid-out by the combination of Rand and Orwell.
I would add Aldous Huxley and Robert Heinlein, and we have a quartet!
snorri: I think Rand reformulated virtue ethics from a sort of Aristotelian base, and significantly took it forward. The whole “life as a standard of value” is not specific or peculiar to her. She was not a blazingly original thinker, but she did have the ability to focus, laser-like, on certain topics. I got into Aristotelian ideas in part from her influence; in the same way – perhaps like Martin on this thread – I got into Victor Hugo and the Romantic school of art.
Rand was not perfect, and her personal foibles and failings aren’t attractive. On the flipside, she was an extraordinarily brave character, given her success in leaving Russia, in understanding and framing the evils of collectivism, in drawing together from different sources to frame a new way of defending rights, autonomy, and free will, in pushing for a return towards the possibility of objective knowledge, and much more. She built a career as a screenwriter and novelist, and entered fields that were still not accommodating to women, and particularly if they happened to be Jewish with a heavy Russian accent.
I find the way that some people dismiss or sneer at her out of proportion with how many other supposedly clever people, with letters after their names, haven’t had anything like her impact for the good. Take her work in concept formation, just for one. She wrote in plain, emphatic English (she was not even a native speaker), which is more than far too many professional philosophers seem able to do.
Back to the Huemer essay: I’d say that he does not succeed in refuting the idea that one cannot derive moral “oughts” from factual “is”. Take this from Don Watkins: “It’s true that any particular moral theory positing a universally shared ultimate end can be refuted by showing that (some) people don’t desire its ultimate end, or desire it above all else. But there will always be something that a person desires more than anything else. Morality may not be universal—but that doesn’t make morality subjective in the sense of being a matter of taste or opinion. There will always be some fact about what a person desires most of all and there will always be some fact about how that ultimate end can be achieved. And so it’s inescapably true that everyone falls under the authority of some fact-based morality.” (Emphasis mine).
I recommend Tara Smith, among others, on this area.
Apologies to the author of the OP for skiing off the side of the main piste!
Johnathan: I am sorry, but Don Watkins seems to offer the sort of trashy philosophy that i have come to associate with Objectivism.
Huemer tries the gentle approach to cajoling objectivists to think more deeply. Apart from the fact that this approach goes against my natural inclination, the problem is that it does not work with people like you or Paul Marks, who look to philosophy in search of a justification for your pre-conceived notions. Huemer tries to challenge our pre-conceived notions, ever so gently.
Still, Huemer’s explanation of the is/ought dichotomy (Hume’s Law) is the best that i am aware of. As long as you study it, not just read it; which neither you nor Paul seem willing to do.
Most people can tell moral right from moral wrong – to do so is the function of moral reason.
Although, YES, being brought up in a good society (family and so on) can make this easier, and being brought up in an evil society (family and so on) can make this harder. Evil can become a habit – especially if everyone around us keeps saying that evil is good.
One must also try and avoid the temptation to think that moral right and moral wrong are really different – depending on geography, race or “historical period”. As Tolkien put it in the Lord of the Rings – moral good and evil are not really one thing among men and another among “elves and dwarves”, and it is the moral duty of a sentient being (a free will moral agent – a person) to discern moral right and moral wrong – and to do the former, resisting the temptation to do the latter “as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house”.
We proceed from this “is” (this is wrong) to the “ought” (“so I ought not to do it”) – and we use our moral agency (free will – human personhood, the “I”) to resist the passions – the desire to rob, rape, murder and so on. We may not always succeed – but we have a moral duty to try, and we are punished by the just criminal law (if the criminal law is on just principles – which it sometimes is not) because we had the ability, with effort, to resist the passions – to-do-other-than-we-did when we committed a crime, a violation of the body or goods of another person.
I suspect that David Hume knew all of the above very well – and, falsely, argued the opposite in order to show how clever he was.
After all takes no great ability to say “1+1=2” – but to say, and-to-get-a-lot-of-other-people-to-believe, that 1+1=78 takes cleverness.
To be fair to Mr Hume, he did not propound “laws” of philosophy – he was a critic, rather than a system-builder. He wanted to challenge people to justify what they believed – and to point out (like some latter day Socrates) that people often did not have clearly thought out philosophical positions.
Far from being the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment (as modern books often claim) Mr Hume was the arch critic of the Scottish Enlightenment – both philosophically and politically. For example, Mr Hume’s false claim that all government is really based on consent (even if a government appears to be a tyranny) is really a hit against Buchanan (the very start, in the 16th century, of what later became the Scottish Enlightenment) who had argued that people have a right, indeed a moral duty, to come to he aid of other people who are unjustly treated by governments – even to the extent of overthrowing a government that insists on behaving in a manner that is against natural justice. Mr Hume was not really staking out a formal position – he was writing a clever mockery of Buchanan and other mainstream thinkers.
When modern books say that the Founding Fathers of the United States were influenced by Mr Hume, I am reminded of the claim in the same modern books that they (the Founding Fathers) were influenced by the legal theories of Sir William Blackstone.
They were indeed “influenced” by Blackstone – as they regarded his central doctrine, that Parliament can do whatever it likes – that any whim of Parliament is law, which takes precedence over natural law – natural justice, with horror-and-disgust, and that is a form of being “influenced by”.
To most of the Founding Fathers the moral personhood of humans (their moral agency – their ability to resist the passions, and, with moral effort, do other than they do) was central.
So they were “influenced by” Mr Hume, on this matter, in much the same way that they were “influenced by” Sir William Blackstone on the powers of Parliament.
Sometimes taking Mr Hume literally could have fatal consequences.
For example, in his History of England, Mr Hume claimed (or seemed-to-claim) that King Charles the First was killed not because he lost the war against his enemies (the common belief), but because he resisted his enemies – had he not resisted, he would not have been killed – or so some people interpreted Mr Hume to be saying.
I doubt that Mr Hume really believed that, he was being clever again (producing a counter factual). After all he knew that Kings who choose not to face their enemies in battle, such as Edward II and Richard II, had still been killed by their enemies.
However, Louis XVI of France took Mr Hume literally – as long as he (Louis) did not resist, he and his family would be safe – so Louis thought, taking this from Mr Hume’s “History of England” (or rather his literal interpretation of it) which, I am told, was one of his favorite books. Louis even ordered other people (such as the Swiss Guard – who were massacred because of his terrible order) not to resist.
Louis was brutally murdered, as was his wife, and as were hundreds-of-thousands of other people (mostly quite ordinary people in the Provinces – see William Doyle’s history of the French Revolution published in 1989) – but Mr Hume should NOT be held to blame, after all he was writing clever counter-factuals, he did not expect people to take him literally.
The same may well be true about his philosophical statements – challenges to people (challenges to what ordinary people believe) transformed (not by Mr Hume himself – but by others after his death) into laws of a false philosophy.
Oddly enough when Mr Hume is clearly writing literally – is NOT writing clever counter factuals, but, rather, is stating as clearly as he can what-he-actually-believed, the modern world IGNORES him on these matters.
For example, Mr Hume’s attack in Credit Money, Credit Bubble Banking, and government linked Corporations – Mr Hume clearly means what he says about these things, and a lot of what he says is good sense – but the modern world ignores it.
Much as if a man who is famous for arguing (very cleverly) that black-is-white, or that 1+1=78, will be ignored if he starts telling the truth.
Because truth is so “boring” – it takes no great cleverness to tell the truth.