by Misha Lepetic

When all is finished, the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
~ Tao Te Ching, Verse 17

What does philosophy in action look like? Casual thoughts about the discipline may be united by the cliché of the philosopher as a loner. From Archimedes berating a Roman soldier to not “disturb my circles” (which subsequently cost him his head), to Kant's famous provinciality, to Wittgenstein's plunging into the Norwegian winter to work on the Logik, the term “armchair philosopher” might seem to be a tautology. But philosophy – or at least the parts that occupy the intersection of the interesting and the accessible – still concerns itself with the world at large, and our place in it.

New Yorkers got to see a particularly odd example of philosophy in action over the summer when artist Thomas Hirschhorn installed his Gramsci Monument in the central courtyard of a Bronx public housing complex known as Forest Houses. I won't dwell much on Antonio Gramsci himself (see here for a start), but suffice to say he was a man of the people, who died in prison after founding the Italian Communist Party. What is more interesting is how Hirschhorn used Gramsci as a jumping-off point, and where he chose to do it. Completed in 1956, Forest Houses is part and parcel of what anyone would recognize as “the projects” – a scattering of 15 buildings in a towers-in-the-park configuration, populated by nearly 3400 residents, most of whom are minorities and low-income. However, Hirschhorn didn't so much choose the site as it chose him – after visiting 47 public housing projects in the city, Forest Houses was the only one that expressed any interest in his proposal.

The arrival of Hirschhorn and his motley architectural assemblage, which seemed to be made mostly of plywood and duct tape, was met with perplexity by both residents and art critics. As far as the critics go – and hey, someone's got to play the straw man to kick things off, right? – at least one was mightily displeased. Writing in the New York Times, Ken Johnson pooh-poohed Hirschhorn as a “canny conceptualist operator” and opined that the installation would ultimately “be preserved in memory mainly by the high-end art world as just a work by Mr. Hirschhorn, another monument to his monumental ego.”

It's difficult for me to comprehend that Johnson and I visited the same place. The first thing to note is the inappropriateness of the term “installation.” The Gramsci Monument is much more of an intervention. Of course, architects and urbanists are not immune to the charms of this term, either – any bland pop-up café seems to constitute an “intervention” of the street, the urban fabric or what have you, with “dramatic” being the accompanying adjective of choice. But what made Hirschhorn's work really an intervention was its sheer physicality, its uncompromising presence in the courtyard. The towers-in-the-park paradigm, one of the baleful legacies of modernism, was introduced to the US in large measure by Le Corbusier, whose reputation is currently the subject of a risible attempt at rehabilitation by MoMA. The result is an environment of hard vertical and horizontal masonry lines, scrawny trees and threadbare lawns. As a pedestrian, you walk among 12-story brick sentinels, and the absence of any place that can provide a moment of semi-privacy, one of the key signifiers of successful public space, is palpable. The point – which was much in keeping with Le Corbusier's design ideals – was to get you to where you were going, and as efficiently as possible. “No Loitering,” as the signs say.

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by Liam Heneghan

Click diagram to enlarge

Context: One of the newer biological conservation strategies, ecological restoration, attempts to reverse the degradation of lands set aside for conservation purposes by reinstating, as closely as possible, the species and environmental conditions that existed before recent and large scale disturbances by human activities. A newly emerging framework within restoration ecology – the novel ecosystem paradigm – points out that with global change we are moving into an era for which there is no historical analogue. As a consequence land must be managed without excessive regard for the past which can no longer serve as our guide. This has generated a lot of controversy within the field. I was asked by Irish journalist Paddy Woodworth to speak on a panel on “The historical reference system: critical appraisal of a cornerstone concept in restoration ecology” at a conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration held in Madison Oct 6 -11th 2013. In recent articles and in his new book “Our Once and Future Planet: Restoring the World in the Climate Change Century” Woodworth had been critical of the novel ecosystem paradigm wondering if it does not undermine the case for restoration. I had not realized how controversial the topic had become. Tensions at the conference were running high, and the room in which this panel convened was over capacity with dozens turned away. What follows is the outline of my remark at this session.

On first glance the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German philosopher, might not seem especially helpful for restoration ecologists or indeed for anyone contemplating our relationship with the natural world. After all, his work supposedly challenges the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. Nietzsche’s famous locutions concerning the “death of God” and his extensive discussions of nihilism should, however, be seen as his diagnosis rather than his cure. For Nietzsche our real cultural task is to overcome the annihilation of traditional morality, replacing it with something more life-affirming. The failure of our traditional precepts of value stem from the fact these express what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal. This ideal measures the appropriateness of human actions against edicts coming from beyond our natural and earth-bound life. The highest human values, as we traditionally assess them, came from a denial of our natural selves. Nature, in turn, is regarded as having no intrinsic value.

Thus Nietzsche even when he wrote in areas seemingly distant from traditional environmental concerns has useful things to say to us environmentalists. At times, in fact, his aphorisms are those of a poetic naturalist. In The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880, collected in Human, All too Human) he wrote “One has still to be as close to flowers, the grass and the butterflies as is a child, who is not so very much bigger that they are. We adults, on the other hand, have grown up high above them and have to condescend to them; I believe the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.” This is not, of course, to claim that Nietzsche is a traditional naturalist. His concerns are primarily about the thriving of human life, though in this he seems less like a traditional wilderness defender and closer to a contemporary sustainability advocate who seeks to locate a promising future for humans while simultaneously solving environmental problems.

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by Quinn O'Neill

A warm wind blew over the African grassland and stirred the leaves of empty trees. A long time ago, the faint sounds of a nearby tourist lodge were carried on the breeze and the trees cradled sleeping baboons. These baboons were special. Studied by neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky in the 80s, they would sleep in the trees to gain easy access to garbage from the tourists – half eaten hamburgers and leftover drumsticks.¹

The practice proved lethal for the baboons, who met their demise when a TB outbreak contaminated the food. Those who frequented the garbage site happened to be the most aggressive and least socially affiliated in their troop. The more socially-oriented and peaceful members were spared, and a curious change occured in the dynamics of the troop, with the remaining baboons subsequently enjoying a persistent peaceful culture with relatively little agression and more grooming.

But that was a long time ago and much had changed. Faced with climate change, human pollution, and habitat loss, the baboon's numbers had dwindled dramatically and few places remained on the planet that could attract human tourists with their wild and natural beauty. Our own “alphas”, for too many decades, had put their own immediate interests above everything else, including collective human well being, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. Our tar ponds and nuclear waste sites were now too widespread to be hidden from our view and the few remaining old trees, still beautiful were too wise to be enjoyed. “There used to be more of us,” you could almost hear them saying. “We were surrounded by life once.”

Over the years, lots of people had objected to what was taking place even as they watched it unfold. Credible authorities like James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, and Canadian geneticist and journalist David Suzuki warned of the need to radically reduce CO2 emissions and make environmental issues a priority. Had they been part of the tiny percentage that wielded awesomely concentrated wealth and power, perhaps they could have done something to stop it sooner.

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Leaving

gust
air once here goes
to fill a vacuum there

dusk
the sun no more,
is behind mañana’s door

I can’t recall my last glimpse of you
you went
imagination is your wake

and here comes Go again blazing her trail of tears
while Gone is close behind
sweeping footprints with a green pine bough
from Going’s dust as I pine now
.

by Jim Culleny
9/12/13

by Namit Arora

A review of Unclaimed Terrain, a book of short stories translated from Hindi, and a conversation with its author, Ajay Navaria.

“Indian writing” is often equated in the West with its small subset: the work of a tiny class of Indians that thinks and writes in English. Salman Rushdie fueled this folly in his introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-97, declaring the work of such Indians a ‘more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the “16 official languages” of India’. He co-edited this anthology and of the 32 works of fiction and non-fiction that appear in it, 31 were written in English and one in Urdu, i.e., only one translation made the cut. Some of this lopsidedness can be explained by the paucity of translations into English, but is Rushdie’s judgment defensible in a country where, even today, less than one percent of Indians consider English their first language, less than ten percent their second, and 80 percent of all books are put out by hundreds of vernacular language publishers, including from authors with far greater Indian readership than most who write in English? Rushdie doesn’t even speak most of these languages. Isn’t his claim, then, an instance of linguistic prejudice? Aren’t the dynamics of class in India, and the power of English language publishing in the West, speaking through him?

Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain—a collection of seven short stories translated from Hindi to English by Laura Brueck—shows from its first page how different its world is from those imagined by the Indians in Rushdie’s anthology. Navaria, a faculty member in the Hindi department in Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, may well be the first Dalit to teach Hindu religious scriptures at a major university. He is also the author of a novel and two books of short stories. In Unclaimed Terrain the protagonists of most stories are Dalit men who have clawed their way into the urban middle-class through their wits and education, sometimes with the help of reservations. Many harbor episodic memories of social life in ancestral villages, memories in which bigotry and abuse overwhelm kindness and beauty. They love the anonymity of the big city, even as they live in fear of being “found out” and reminded—in the artful ways of the metropolis—of their “proper place”.

In the story Subcontinent, for instance, the protagonist, as a boy, has seen village men abuse and assault his groveling father and grandma—returning after a stint in the city—for breaking caste taboos. As a boy, he has seen a Dalit wedding party attacked by thugs because the groom has dared to ride a horse in the village, and later that day, a woman of the party being raped: ‘I saw, beneath the white dhoti-clad bottom of a pale pandit-god, the darkened soles of someone’s feet flailing and kicking’. Rather than file a complaint, the village policeman mocks them, ‘They say she was really tasty. Lucky bitch, now she’s become pure!’ In his middle-age, the protagonist, Siddhartha Nirmal, Marketing Manager in a government enterprise in the big city, exults at the distance he has traveled in the world: 3BR flat; car; eating out at Pizza Hut and Haldiram’s, where the counter-boys call him Sir. He can hire the services of a Brahmin doctor, keep a Garhwali Brahmin driver who bows at him, and employ a Bengali music teacher he found on the Internet for his daughter, who goes to an expensive convent school. But such welcome anonymity that the city affords him disappears in familiar spaces, such as his office, which has ‘the same snakes. The same whispers, the same poison-laden smiles. Our “quota is fixed”. I got promoted only because of the quota … that’s it. Otherwise … otherwise, maybe I’m still dirty. Still lowborn. Like Kishan, the office janitor. Like Kardam, the clerk. Because I am their caste.’

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VERACITY

Inspired by Rumi

“May I borrow your donkey?”
A neighbor asked Kavanagh

Who said, “I'm very sorry,
I loaned out my donkey yesterday.”

At that moment, the donkey brayed
In the barn. The neighbor, believing

The donkey made Kavanagh a liar,
Asked “Then what is that I hear?”

Kavanagh replied, “Friend, are you going
To believe me or a donkey?”

By Rafiq Kathwari, winner of the Patrick Kavangah 2013 Poetry Award.

by Paul Braterman

Professor Plantinga lecturing, 2009

Prof Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame University, is perhaps the most distinguished critic of current views on evolution. He claims that if our conceptual apparatus is simply the product of naturalistic Darwinian evolution, it will generally give rise to unreliable results. From this premise he argues that it is unreasonable to accept naturalistic evolution, since[1] if naturalistic evolution were true, our reasons for accepting it would be unreliable. There is nothing wrong with his logic, but his premise rests on a basic misunderstanding of how evolution works.

Disclosure: around the time of the Kitzmiller-Dover trial, Prof Plantinga and I had a long e-mail correspondence, now unfortunately lost during a University mail system upgrade. I remember, however, the final exchange. He said that Behe, Dembski, and Thaxton, advocates of three different versions of Intelligent Design, had produced arguments that required an answer. In reply, I said that I totally agreed; the answer was, in each case, that they were wrong. Prof Plantinga did not reply.

Disclaimer: I have no credentials when it comes to philosophy. But let me plead in mitigation that Prof Plantinga has no credentials when it comes to evolutionary biology.

According to Plantinga, a belief is warranted when it is produced by cognitive functions working properly, according to a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs. The design plan could be produced by an agent (God, or a super-scientist), or by evolution. This convoluted definition is necessary to bypass cases that puzzle philosophers, such as, is a belief warranted when it happens to be true but we hold it for bad reasons.[2] Plantinga's position is encapsulated in the title of his 1993 book, Warrant and Proper Function.

I have three problems here. One is the choice of words; design plan and aim have connotations of foresightful agency, and it would be better to use neutral terms such as adaptationand tendency to produce. The second is circularity; how do we define proper function, if not in terms of giving warrant to beliefs when appropriate? The third, which is really a consequence of the second, is that it is useless in real disagreements, because it begs the question. For example, Prof Plantinga tells us that he possesses a sense of the divine, which he regards as a warrant. But how can he know that this is a warrant, unless he already knows that this sense is leading him towards the truth? And what, then, of Darwin's objection (Part I); how can we have confidence in the beliefs that this sense induces, when those who claim to possess it differ so forcibly among themselves?

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by Dave Maier

As you all know, not that long ago Steven Pinker wrote a piece defending “scientism” as a general approach to intellectual matters, including those usually thought to be beyond the scope of science (e.g. the humanities). Leon Wieseltier responded, restating the standard view that the humanities are indeed beyond the scope of science, except around the edges, so to speak, and reaffirming the common use of “scientism” as a term of abuse, referring for example to a tendency to regard the method of the natural sciences as setting the standard for human inquiry generally, a view Wieseltier considers arrogant.

I'm going to try not to get into the back and forth of this today, as my interest is in Daniel Dennett's brief, testy defense of Pinker against Wieseltier in HuffPo a few weeks ago (and besides, I'm still reading the same book of Dennett's I wrote about last time). Dennett is usually secure enough in his views to avoid the scorched-earth rhetoric of (for example) the other “new atheists”, but Wieseltier seems to have gotten his goat this time. I myself didn't see that much wrong with Wieseltier's essay. Most of the sentences were true, for example, but on the other hand a bunch of true sentences need not a good essay make. After all, there were a lot of true sentences in Pinker's essay too.

Dennett takes offense at what he sees as Wieseltier's blunt, ignorant rejection of Pinker's sincere offer of a friendly hand across the disciplinary divide. Thus he tells us that “Name-calling and sarcasm are typically the last refuge of somebody who can't think of anything else to say to fend off a challenge he doesn't understand and can't abide.” Indeed, in Intuition Pumps Dennett lists and endorses (psychologist Anatol) Rapoport's Rules of successful criticism. I really like Dennett's version:

1) You should attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says “Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way”.

2) You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3) You should mention anything you learned from your target.

4) Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Dennett admits to some difficulty in following these rules himself, even as in his piece he scolds Wieseltier for his lamentable lack of charity. Nor will I follow them here, as I wouldn't be able to finish (2) or (3), let alone (1) in this short space. But I certainly was struck by Dennett's claim, a mere seven sentences after the bit about “name-calling,” that

Postmodernism, the school of “thought” that proclaimed “There are no truths, only interpretations” has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for “conversations” in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

Yikes! So much for charity!
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by Elatia Harris

All photos courtesy of Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan is the prize-winning author of The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage, and a co-editor of the Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. In this interview, Rachel and I talk about her new book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, and her transition from historian and philosopher of science to historian of food.

Elatia Harris: I can remember when there was no such academic discipline as food history, Rachel. What was involved in getting there from being a historian of science and technology?

Rachel Laudan: I can remember when there was no such discipline as history of science! In fact, moving to history of food was a breeze. After all, the making of food from plant and animal raw materials is one of our oldest technologies, quite likely the oldest, and it continues to be one of the most important. The astonishing transformations that occur when, for example, a grain becomes bread or beer, or (later) perishable sugar cane juice becomes seemingly-eternal sugar have always intrigued thinkers from the earliest philosophers to the alchemists to modern chemists. And the making of cuisines is shaped by philosophical ideas about the state, about virtue, and about growth, life, and death.

A lot of food writing is about how we feel about food, particularly about the good feelings that food induces. I'm more interested in how we think about food. In fact, I put culinary philosophy at the center of my book. Our culinary philosophy is the bridge between food and culture, between what we eat and how we relate to the natural world, including our bodies, to the social world, and to the gods, or to morality.

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Making a Home
.

What I think over and over
eventually I do

I’ve been training body all along
to dance the cantos of my thoughts,
how can it not do what it learns?

Innocence seeps away
through the interstices of neglect—

if I have not built a room
to house a pure idea
it will move on to a better man
and leave my vacant skull to host
what loathes a vacuum
.

by Jim Culleny
9/2713

by Maniza Naqvi

Here, down in the valley, when the news broke, people were, as was to be expected, up in arms. A contract had been awarded to XNexst. It was for a system for monitoring citizens and to create a unified registry system for the identification and targeting of deviants: threats to society—those who do not belong to civil groups –those who refuse to belong to communities–those-who refuse to get jobs like the rest of us—those who refuse to play by the norms that were so clearly laid out for our collective good—you know— groups representing low proclivity to consume. These deviants, of course, are also those who do not belong to the clearly defined civil groups and minorities defined around allergies and who do not perform well on our happiness indexes—The system was meant to identify these deviants and dispose of them. Everyone must belong to a minority. And everyone must demonstrate that they are happy. Otherwise, the system cannot assign a value to them.

We were outraged. The proposal was to monitor all internet activity, perform a deviant survey based on deviant activities score card and then based on the score— link each of the eyes on screen or EoS and the deviant score to a national identification card for easy targeting and for initiating logging out and cancelation. Disposal was to be done through mobile disposal units—much like the garbage trucks that prowl through cities every night. In this case—after the deviating EoSs log out—yes—die as a result of a deep sensation of depression which would cause either a stroke or a hemorrhage—or both, after this, disposal teams would move in—unlock the codes on the computerized lock systems on buildings apartment doors, and houses—since now every single home conforms to code and this building standard —the disposal teams would pick up the bodies and throw them into the garbage truck to be taken to a disposal site for instant incineration.

Our people were horrified when this news broke. No attention to detail at all! In comparison, our entire proposal was so much better! Much more effective and cost efficient. Of course it was. We were the ones who had designed and implemented the happiness index monitoring system. Hello! An efficient measure of success as linked to each bank account: Happiness. So of course just as elegantly and relevantly, for this, for our proposal for XNexst we had proposed a much more sure fire way of logging out—without any risk of failure—It had a two-step approach if step one which resembled XNexst's approach failed, step two would kick in—in this phase an added doze of subliminal messaging would persuade the EoS to click on the fire arm and body bag facsimile option and then walk out of their dwellings to a point of pick up, PoP. Then on the sighting of the approaching disposal truck the EoS would get into the body bag and shoot himself.

Plus our proposal used garbage trucks which had built in functions for separating bones, blood and flesh. We had pilot tested the process in several locations when the opportunity had presented itself. And another one was coming up. Soft drinks are not the only product testing that follow our troops! In our proposal our system not only took the waste product and immediately disposed of it by incineration, creating fuel for heating while the rest of the waste product was turned to compost for organic farms. In addition to contributing to a green economy we had also noted in our proposal that our firm was one hundred percent minority owned and minority run. Our happiness index was well off the charts: in the top one percent of the top quintile. It was an air tight case. So for this to have gone to someone else—was a travesty. We are planning a strong protest. Such injustice has to be resisted.

by Sarah Firisen

My topic today, online dating
Is this really the best way for mating?
Is it worth all the pain?
The interest I feign
In the men who on my nerves are grating?

Was the bar scene so great in its day?
Does venue change the games that we play?
Is this way really worse?
Are the men more perverse?
Am I seen more as their sexual prey?

From boys barely out of high school
Who think that a cougar is cool
And try to pretend
That sex alone’s not the end
All these years doesn’t make me a fool

Then there’s each man who’s age is just right
But who want abs and butt that are tight
Or think they have one last bid
To get them a kid
Interest from that demographic is slight

And so often when a man sounds just great
I know that I just have to wait
Then the truth comes along
He’s really so wrong
And enthusiasm starts to deflate

I sigh as it starts to emerge
That he’s really relieving an urge
I try to heap scorn
I’m not here as his porn
Clearly our interests diverge

Each day I think, “Should this be the end?
And the best use of time I expend?”
But what else to do
If this I eschew?
And my profile I decide to suspend?

The problem isn’t really the way
That I find all these men who dismay
I’d forgotten the scene
Was bound to demean
Is there no better game I can play?

by James McGirk

I live surrounded by retirees in rural Oklahoma. They are spry. They own arsenals of gardening equipment: lawnmower-tractor hybrids that grind through the fibrous local flora with cruel efficiency; they wield wicked contraptions, whirling motorized blades that allow withered men to sculpt hedges into forms of sublime and delectable complexity. Their lawns are soft to touch and inviting and deep emerald green. They host garden parties. They know the mysteries of mulch and sod, their vegetables bulge with vitality and nutritious color, their compost heaps are not heaps at all, they are tarry and primordial, oozing and glowing with health. Their flowers glow. Their insects are harmless flutterers, not the stinging biting buzzing slithering demonic horde that inhabits my yard.

In the spring I chose a manual mower to help maintain my garden. I am no environmentalist nut, but as an ostensible elite urbanite, I wrinkled my nose at the fumes belched by my neighbors’ devices. This was a grave error. My man-powered motor leaves bald patches when I hoist the thing through a rough patch uphill and it accidentally sheers too close, and leaves miniature Mohawks when the sturdier weeds simply dip beneath my blades and spring up behind me unscathed. But I cannot blame the device. This is an operator error. I chose the thing, and I vowed to live with the consequences.

For months I huffed and puffed, hauling the bright orange plastic and metal contraption through the thickets in my yard. I felt close to the land. Its contours became familiar to me: the mysterious dead patch, which I fantasized came from natural gas seeping up from the Cherokee Shelf, five fathoms below; or the pits dug by the previous tenants where I once found a black snake tangled in my spinning blades (coward that I am, I let him crawl away instead of dispatching a merciful death: and lo the next afternoon my elderly neighbor came over to apologize for the shriek I might have heard because the poor thing had taken shelter in her kitchen before her husband—an octogenarian—beheaded it with a rake) and the plunging predator birds and the mysterious mushrooms and the owl feathers and squawking fledglings and tiny tragedies: the robin’s nest spilled on the ground after a titanic storm, her pale blue eggs still intact, the nest like a spun basket, and the mother’s frayed carcass a few feet away. I watched it slowly decay.

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at one ment
—Yom Kippur, 2013

To find the means to a mend
To try a new take to forsake a mistake
To unfold the past and straighten its bend
To un-muddy a pool and make it clear
To lift the flat rock of our self and let the sun do its work
To yank the inside out and give it some air
To build a whole man of the parts of a jerk
To morph a long fall into a hairpin turn
To lance a boil and do what's best for us
To kindle the badly done and watch it burn
To unbury the past and make its corpse a Lazarus
To sew a split in one cloth now two
To impossibly do what the humble do
To end a grudge to make us whole again:
…..atonement then

by Jim Culleny
9/13/13

by Gerald Dworkin

In this country 58% of male infants are operated upon shortly after birth. A part of the body is cut off and the operation usually does not use an anaesthetic. There are three relevant features which prompt ethical reflection. The infants cannot consent to the operation. There is no convincing evidence that the operation promotes the health of the infant. The operation is usually motivated by cultural reasons–usually of a religious nature. The operation, of course, is circumcision.

Very recently the operation has come in for legal scrutiny by courts and legislatures in Germany. In 2010 a young Tunisian immigrant brought her four year old son to Cologne University Hospital. He was suffering from a postoperative hemorrhage after a circumcision had been performed by a surgeon two days before. Surgeons stopped the bleeding. The mother who appeared to be in shock mentioned a circumcision but was confusing about who performed it, and whether it was her decision or her husband's. The staff called the police who took testimony from the ER personnel. This lead to a trial charging the surgeon with criminal bodily harm.

The District Court judge acquitted on the grounds that there was no evidence of malpractice and circumcision was protected by parental consent and the parents religious freedom. A Court of Appeals overruled the District Court arguing that parental rights are limited by the best interests of the child, and rights of the child to bodily integrity. Nevertheless the court accepted the acquittal of the surgeon on the grounds that he had good reason to believe that what he was doing was legal.

The decision stirred up an enormous controversy in the media and the public. Clearly, the decision to make illegal a Jewish religious obligation by a German court was considered outrageous. Chancellor Merkel petitioned the Bundestag to take immediate action, and in an emergency session voted to draft legislation that would ensure the legality of circumcision.

( For more–much more– on the history and the nitty-gritty legal details see H. Pekarek, “Germany's Circumcision Indecision– Anti-Semitism or Legalism?“)

I

I am interested in the legal issues only as a special case of what the limits of the criminal law ought to be. The issue I want to discuss is does the state have the right to limit circumcision, and, if so, ought it to do so? Note that these are distinct issues. Not everything that one might think is within the legitimate scope of state interference ought to be legislated. One might think that many lies are both wrong and harmful, and so something that a state has the right to consider making illegal, without thinking that it would be a good idea to make all lying a criminal offense. This might be because one thought that it would be impractical to do so, or that it would be destructive of many relationships to do so, or that it would over-burden the court system, or that the effects on personal relationships would be worse than leaving people free to lie. But all of these reasons for not legislating are consistent with believing that the state would not be over-stepping its legitimate powers were it to make lying a crime.

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