I have been meaning to write up some of my thoughts from the Revolution March and Rally and more generally on my evolving impression of the phenomenon that is the "Ron Paul Revolution," with which I have been involved to some small extent and fascinated to a larger extent.  I don't have the time or clarity for that just this moment.  But one of the things on my mind, spurred in part by Tom Woods's speech at the Rally and his new book, "Who Killed the Constitution?", is the tension that sometimes exists between "doing the right thing" and following the law as it was meant to be interpreted.

Reflecting on the constitutional transgressions of the executive and the judicial and the legislative branches, of the Democrats and the Republicans and the Whigs, I wonder what is the right action to take when the aims of justice are counter to those of moral rectitude.  Contrary to public opinion, the United States of America is not a democracy; we are a democratic federal republic, a constitutional republic, the operative word being "republic."  We ought not to bow to the whims of the masses, as in democracy — which, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, may be defined as "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch."  Rather, we are subject to the rule of law, and the Constitution is the supreme law of the United States.  Whereas the Declaration of Independence breathed life into the union, the Constitution (and Bill of Rights) provided its skeleton and its life-blood.

What recourse do we have, then, when the Constitution prevents legislators, the judiciary, and the executive from doing what they, or the masses, deem "the right thing?"  Does the end, some morally sound outcome, justify the means even when the means involves sidestepping constitutional restraints?

We have a number of philosophical frameworks available to us to evaluate this issue — various theories of rights, justice, and morality — and I flit from one to the next with regularity.  If nothing else, I hope it enables me to see the many sides and nuances of the argument.  For instance, I might think that ending slavery was a moral necessity, that Brown v. Board of Ed. was a net win, that putting an end to the Nazi regime and liberating the concentration camps was the right thing to do.

But I'm also uncomfortable with the federal government's repeated stepping on the Constitution, its disregard for states' rights, and increasingly activist roles in excessively powerful executive and judicial branches. There are numerous examples,  many of which are in Woods's book: Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's war against the secessionists, Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts, Truman's grab of the steel industry, the SCOTUS interpretation of the Equal Protection clause in favor of Brown v. Board, the examples go on and on.

When the framework for our very government is the Constitution, that which the government it was meant to restrain so openly flouts, I am taken to believe that we flirt with tyranny the more we side with rectitude over justice.  (I am playing a bit fast and loose as my time to write draws to a close by referring to the strict Constitutionalist perspective as that of "justice.")  I don't meant to hint here that the government ought not to have ended slavery, or kept the union together, and so forth, but that there were other, perhaps more difficult, ways of achieving these same ends within the bounds of the law as it was written.  When the government acts as though it is above the law, it establishes a very dangerous precedent.  The greater the amount of power in the government's hands, the less liberty in the people's — isn't this the tyranny our Constitution was supposed to protect us against?

It is often said that America is a grand social experiment, and I find myself agreeing.  Is the experiment predicated on America being a nation that strives to do right at all costs?  Or is it more about the lofty principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and codified in our Constitution, and how well our republic stands up to the natural progression towards empire, and towards tyranny?  I believe very strongly that the American Revolution is not bound in time but that it continues to this very day, and that the Constitution, and adherence thereto, is the very best chance we have to protect us from the base instincts of humanity and sustain a system of government that instead appeals to "the better angels of our nature," as Honest Abe would have put it.

I woke up this morning wanting to do something special, something patriotic. Until I come up with something better, I'm blogging. Yes, that might itself be a sad commentary, but there you go.

Amidst all the fireworks, barbecues, and (at times mechanical) flag-waving, I like to put the significance of today into perspective. How do I do that? I read the Declaration of Independence.

We have seen these words a million times before, but I read them closely trying to avoid the clichéd meanings that soundbite culture has ascribed to them. It helps to put the document into context; I think about the courage and vision of those who wrote these words. I think about the thousands who embraced the upstart revolution and forsook the old order to take up arms against old allies. I think about the millions who have sacrificed their lives and livelihood throughout the history of our nation, despite any feelings about the justifications and conditions of the wars and conflicts we have fought. I think about the American Revolution which continues to this very day as we struggle against our own weaknesses and challenges from abroad to keep the dream alive. This paragraph, perhaps more than any, encapsulates that dream:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

It's a powerful document and though it is not legally binding, it is the very spirit of our nation, this grand social experiment. It is also a beautiful piece of prose and a landmark exposition of the principles of classical liberalism. It's as close to a Bible as I have, and I revere it.

Happy Independence Day, folks. (And enjoy the fireworks, barbecues, and flag-waving.)

P.S. Cat macro representations of feeds should not be this funny. My favorites: Yawn, Want to work at Princeton?, and RESTful Fedora?

I have idly been considering the ontologies proposed by Gottlob Frege in The Thought, and revisited in Karl Popper's Objective Knowledge, in which there are three distinct realms of existence. Moreover, I wonder how envisioning such ontologies from an object-oriented perspective might provide a structured way of thinking about existence without need of dualistic theories.

A good question to raise is "what particular reason might you have for thinking that an object-oriented perspective is at all relevant here?" I have no answer for that other than "if we can mash-up web services, why not theoretical frameworks?" A glib and dorky answer, I admit, but I challenge the reader to name but one discipline where this sort of haphazard duct-taping of theory does not occur. But I digress.

In both of these ontologies, the first realm is that of physical objects: things one can see, smell, taste, touch, or hear. (This is an oversimplification, of course. One risk is suggesting that subjective perceptions, such as hallucinations, are objective phenomena perceptible by others. If I see a flying pink elephant and no one else does, is it "real?" I also run the risk of hinting that imperceptible, physical entities do not exist.)

The second realm consists of mental entities, though Popper and Frege diverge at this point. Whereas Popper thinks all non-physical entities live in the second realm, Frege confines the second realm to only those non-physical entities which consist in private or subjective ideas. Take the example of the concept of pi and my belief that "beer is good." Popper would say that both of these entities belong in the second realm of his ontology: Frege would say that only the second is a second-realm entity.

The latter notion makes more sense in light of Frege's third realm, that of objective, non-physical entities. A good example is the Pythagorean Theorem which exists independently of the mind of Pythagoras; although Pythagoras discovered the Theorem, it was not a private or subjective idea of his invention; it was merely his expression of an otherwise objective property of the physical world (i.e., first realm), which anyone of a certain intellect might have discovered upon due thought and experimentation.

Popper lumps the Pythagorean Theorem, which Frege considers to be an objective entity, in with other subjective entities such as my idea that beer is a tasty beverage. Popper sees the third realm as "the totality of all human thought embodied in human artefacts," a realm of objective knowledge. However, does he mean to suggest that a subjective, second-realm idea committed to a physical, first-realm object becomes something ontologically different upon their combination? Do these entities warrant their own realm of existence? Popper's vision of third realm sounds more like an interface between the first and second realms than like a realm all its own. An example of such an interface is human perception, which allows us to form second-realm ideas about first-realm entities by virtue of our innate sensory and cognitive abilities.

Frege's and Popper's views may be simplified by thinking about ontological realms in terms of object orientation as this perspective defines clear and structured relationships that are applicable to such thought. Issues such as the nature and number of interfaces between the realms and the consumption and immensity of space in the realms, for instance, may be addressed with conceptual apparatus that already exist in the object-oriented perspective. An ontology consisting of one object-oriented realm, rather than a number of realms, also has the benefit of emerging from the murky depths of dualism, for those who are inclined to reject dualistic theories.

An object-oriented ontology based on Frege's conceptual divisions, summarized very briefly, would view: the physical realm as the main container object, that which contains all other objects, consisting of electro-magnetic radiation, matter, and physical forces; mental realms as distinct member objects of the physical realm, particular and distinct configurations of energy and matter resulting in concepts that are physically imperceptible; a "realm" of public, objective, non-physical entities as properties of first-realm objects, which are perceptible in the first realm and deducible (a la Pythagoras) in the second realm.

For a better thought out alternative object-oriented ontology, see Object Orientation Redefined.