“Free Palestine” and the Inverse Is/Ought Problem

My fellow philosophy aficionados may be able to discern from the title that lately I have been reading David Hume—perhaps the greatest Scotsman in history (eat your heart out, William Wallace). Certainly his ideas have been monumentally influential; chief among them being the ‘Is/Ought Problem’ this article references. Hume observed a particularly harsh moral ‘guillotine’ as it’s known having to do with the trouble of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, which he elaborates very briefly in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III Part I Section I: “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with…I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not…For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it…this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.”

(Since Grandpa Hume uses comma splices, we all can.)

Essentially, what does this mean? Hume’s concern all throughout his Essay is to describe a system of metaphysics that actually makes sense of the ‘perversion’ of ideas, senses, and impressions his predecessor John Locke described. This throwaway paragraph of Hume’s turned out to be the most influential of all his writings, and he arrived at it due to his struggle to understand the relationship between ‘feelings’ as such and ‘ideas’ that exist in our mind. It may be said that the sense data we take in from the world constitutes what is, at least insofar as we can trust the senses; but that is a problem for another time. Whereas what ought to be appears moreso as an idea: in other words, there is nothing about the external physical world that can tell you how it ought to be. We must therefore arrive at these conclusions of how the world ought to be in some other way.

The chief concern of the present work is the application (or mis-) of the inverse problem: taking what “ought” to be and substituting it (however wrongly) for what is. This is the greatest of hobbies for those who proclaim themselves “pro-Palestine”, yet seek the destruction of the only Jewish state in order to make ‘Lebensraum’ for their ‘Palestine’. Take for example the latest defamatory accusation of ‘genocide’ against the Jewish nation and people, now endorsed by the bloated corpse of the United Nations. It is quite obvious to every legal scholar in existence that Israel is not committing the most grievous of crimes against humanity with its defensive wars against Iranian terror organizations. But Israel ought to be doing so (goes the reasoning), because the Jewish people ought to be the type of people to do so (reasoned from several thousand years of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes so heavily engrained in the culture that they are nearly inseparable from it.) And because there is no such thing as logical consistency where antisemitism is involved, Israel thus is committing “genocide”. “It’s just what Jews do”—though they’ll (almost) never say it like that.

It is clear that the UN needs to go the way of the dodo. There is no hope for such an autocrat’s playground as currently exists to falsely represent some sort of “world government”. They have now introduced what is in this 21st century a new ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. We can only hope that it will not lead us to the unspeakable atrocities that followed the past ‘Protocols’ within forty years.

I am not a subject matter expert on the legal foundations of the League of Nations or its failed successor. I don’t have a magic formula I can give that will actually unite the nations of the world and their constituent peoples in shared humanity. I do know that dictatorships and autocracies objectively stifle human flourishing. The fact that they control the narrative and the bulk of the UN has already doomed the enterprise. It cannot be recovered from the power-mad that as of yet still have their power. Yet, there is good work that comes from for example UNICEF. The great challenge for humanity in the next fifty years or so is to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’; that is, we must cut away the rot of dictators from the parts of our global society that actually contribute to human flourishing.

The shortsightedness of people who refuse to understand geopolitics is wholly responsible for the prolongation of this Simchat Torah War that began with Hamas’s genocidal slaughter of innocents on October 7th, 2023. If Khamenei had been kneecapped on October 8th, if the complicity of Qatar in the atrocities had been actually investigated and sanctioned and stopped, we wouldn’t hear any demands for ‘ceasefire now’ (which just equates to Israelis ceasing and Iran-sponsored global terrorism firing at them). The war would already be over. Without international support, Hamas dies in darkness.

O, Judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.

For the love of humanity, release the hostages.