Plantinga’s ontological argument, take three

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 16, 2011 19 comments

Rather than respond directly to comments on my previous post, I’m rewriting it, taking the issue “from the top” so to speak. The last four paragraphs are what I’d most like people to read and comment on, but the earlier parts are changed quite a bit too by adding a discussion of William Lane Craig.

I’ll begin with what William Lane Craig says about Plantinga’s argument in the third edition of his book Reasonable Faith (just because I’m writing this with a view towards including it in the book, which will have a whole chapter on Craig):

Now in his version of the argument, Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is “maximally excellent” in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to entail such excellent-making properties as omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls “maximal greatness”…

1) It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2) If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3) If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4) If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5) If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6) Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

In my view, the jargon Plantinga uses in this argument is needlessly confusing. Instead of talking about “maximal excellence” and “maximal greatness,” he could just define God as “an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect, necessarily existent being.” Similarly, there’s no need to invoke possible world talk, we can state the argument talking just about possibility and necessity (where “necessary” just means “couldn’t possibly be otherwise”). That condenses the argument to:

1) It is possible that God exists. (Craig’s premise 1)
2) If it is possible that God exists, then it is necessary that God exists. (Craig’s premise 3)
3) If it is necessary that God exists, God exists. (Craig’s premise 4)
4) Therefore, God exists.

Working backwards: (3) is obvious once you know what “necessary” means. If God couldn’t possibly have not existed, then of course God exists. Premise (2) is supposed to come from a combination of two things: the definition of God as a being who exists necessarily, and the S5 axioms of modal logic.

Some people are going to object about simply defining God as a necessary being. However, among atheist philosophers, the attitude generally seems to be, “Oh, theists can define ‘God’ however they want. For example, if they want to define ‘God’ as ‘the greatest possible being,’ they can do that.”

Now, after granting theists their definition of God as a starting point, some atheist philosophers, Michael Martin for example, might argue that the concept of a greatest possible being is incoherent, or incompatible with other things commonly believed of God, but the point of that sort of attack isn’t to show that it’s wrong to define God that way, it’s to show that if we define God that way, then God can’t possibly exist.

In fact, in the philosophy world it seems to be generally regarded as OK to just announce that you’re going to use some word to mean such-and-such. As long as it isn’t needlessly confusing, and you don’t equivocate between two different meanings of a word, you can define words however you want. So I think most philosophers are going to give Plantinga the OK on the first piece of support for premise two.

Now the other piece: in a system of formal logic, axioms are things you’re allowed to just assume when working within the system. So for example, when I was in graduate school, the homework problems for my formal logic class generally involved proving some theorem or other. If we were working within a particular system of logic, we were allowed to have a step in our proofs be writing down an axiom with a note indicating “this is an axiom.”

The S5 axioms for modal logic–the logic of possibility and necessity–have the important consequence that if something is possibly necessarily true is necessarily true. This, when combined with the definition of God as necessarily existing, is where the otherwise bizarre-looking premise (2) of my restatement of Plantinga’s argument comes from. Philosophers have disagreed on which axioms are the right axioms to use when doing modal logic. And I don’t know of any decisive argument to show that the S5 axioms are the right axioms.

However, my understanding is that most philosophers nowadays accept the S5 axioms, and Plantinga’s key claim seems plausible enough to me. To say that what’s possibly necessarily true is necessarily true is to say that it makes no sense to think the following: “well, this could be false, but it could also be such that it couldn’t possibly be false.” And I don’t see how that makes any sense, if we’re talking about genuine possibility (what Plantinga calls “broadly logical possibility”) rather than possibility-for-all-I-know (often called “epistemic possibility,” from the Greek word for knowledge).

At this point, Plantinga’s argument may look pretty good. He’s got the first two key claims, and of course it’s at least possible that God exists, right? Not so fast. Once you accept the S5 axioms, it becomes completely crazy to think you can just assume things are possible. Or at least, it becomes completely crazy to assume things are possibly necessary. This is because S5 allows for Plantinga-style arguments for any purported necessary truth. The fact that the argument involves God isn’t actually an important feature of the argument.

So for example, philosophers generally claim that mathematical truths are, if true, necessarily true. Two plus two not only equals four, it could not possibly equal anything other than four. Because of this, if you accept S5 and also are willing to just assume a given mathematical claim is possibly true, you can “prove” that mathematical claim through a Plantinga-style argument.

For example: the Goldbach conjecture is an oft-cited example of a mathematical claim that nobody has been able to prove or disprove. If you accept the S5 axioms, and also assume that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, you can reason like this: “Possibly the Goldbach conjecture is true. But it is if true, necessarily true. So possibly the Goldbach conjecture is necessarily true. Therefore, by S5, the Goldbach conjecture is true!” Obviously, it is absurd to think you can prove the Goldbach conjecture that way.

It’s important to be clear on where the absurdity comes from. It does not come from the S5 axioms alone, nor does it come solely from assuming that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. Rather, it comes from the combination of those two things. S5 and taking possible necessities for granted are two things that do not go well together. My inclination is to accept S5, but reject assuming such possibilities. (Note that you could claim that while it’s not okay to assume mathematical claims are possible, but is okay to assume God is possible. But why would you think that?)

It’s also important to emphasize the distinction between genuine (“broadly logical”) possibility and (“epistemic”) possibility-for-all-we-know. I suspect that’s where part of the appeal of just assuming possibilities comes from. The Goldbach conjecture might be true for all we know, but it might be false for all we know. In that sense, both are possibilities. But, according to the conventional wisdom about mathematics, if the Goldbach conjecture turns out to be true, there was never a genuine possibility of it being false. There was only “possibility for all we knew.”

Craig does not deal with the Goldbach Conjecture objection, but he does deal with the objection that you might use a Plantinga-style argument to prove the existence of “a necessarily existent lion.” In response, Craig argues that “does not seem even remotely incoherent,” which means we should think it is possible that God exists. In contrast:

The idea of something like a necessarily existent lion also seems incoherent. For as a necessary being, such a beast would have to exist in every possible world we can conceive. But any animal which could exist in a possible world in which the universe is composed wholly of a singularity of infinite spacetime curvature, density, and temperature just is not a lion.

But it makes just as much sense to argue that we can conceive of a world containing only physical objects is not a world with a god in it, therefore it is possible that God does not exist. This, incidentally, entails that if God is defined as existing necessarily, we have just proved that God does not exist. Incidentally, this makes me think that theists ought not define God as existing necessarily, because it makes the existence of God too easy to attack.

To see that this is a problem with the ontological argument, though, you do not have to agree with the argument that God is possibly nonexistent, and therefore nonexistent. You need only think we have no more business assuming a possibly necessarily existent God than we do assuming a possibly necessarily existent lion.

Now unlike Craig, Plantinga is not so crazy as to claim that his argument actually proves the existence of God, or to insist people must grant his assumption that God is possible. Instead, he says, of ontological arguments:

They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion. But since it is rational to accept their central premiss, they do show that it is rational to accept that conclusion.

But again, by analogy with mathematics, we can see that this is a silly way to argue.

Imagine two mathematicians, Alice and Bob, arguing over whether it’s reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture. Alice argues that the Goldbach conjecture is unproven, and we should not believe unproven mathematical claims. Bob concedes that it is unproven, but says the Goldbach conjecture seems true to him, and it’s reasonable for him to believe it on that basis.

Now, you may agree with Alice here, or you may agree with Bob, but imagine Bob tried to strengthen his position by saying, “Well, surely you agree that it’s at least reasonable for me to believe that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. But if I believe the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, S5 allows me to infer that it is true. So it’s reasonable for me to believe the Goldbach conjecture.” This is a silly argument. Even if you think Bob is reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture, this can’t be the reason why.

Once again, we need to be very clear on what the problem is. The problem is not necessarily that it is unreasonable to think that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. Maybe Bob is right about that. The problem, instead, is that Bob cannot expect Alice to agree. Given that Alice thinks it is unreasonable to accept the Goldbach conjecture, she probably will not think it is reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, especially if she accepts the S5 modal axioms. Bob’s argument is, if not quite circular, an example of an argument that would be bad even if it were deductively sound.

So, not only does Plantinga’s argument fail to prove the existence of God, it fails even in Plantinga’s stated goal of showing that belief in God is reasonable. Nor, I think is it especially insightful in any other way. Plantinga did not invent the S5 axioms, he was not the first person to suggest they are the right modal axioms, and I do not think he provided any decisive argument for them (I don’t think such a decisive argument exists.)

The argument could work as a clever illustration of the S5 axioms–the sort of thing a professor might mention to his student while explaining modal logic, or that might end up on a whiteboard of a grad student lounge as a joke. But it does nothing whatsoever to establish the intellectual respectability of theism.

On a semi-related note: Anyone willing to buy me Plantinga’s new book so I can review it? Link to my Amazon wishlist here. Based on Michael Ruse’s review, I expect that the book will be terrible, but terrible in ways that I feel a need to be able to comment on first-hand. That means reading it, yet I don’t want to spend my own money on something I’m so sure will be terrible. So who’s willing to help me out?

Soundness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition being a good argument

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 15, 2011 11 comments

I had been meaning to write something about this, but I decided to bump it up my to-do list after seeing this comment from Ashtad:

If you aren’t denying its validity (and by your apparent admission in the comment I replied to above, you aren’t), then you’re admitting that it is, at least, “halfway good” (as is all Plantinga claims within that text) and you aren’t criticizing anything in the actual text of ‘The Ontological Argument’ at all.

This is going to be another exercise in explaining some slightly esoteric concepts which may end up in the new book, and I’m not sure if my explanation will end up being clear enough. So I’m hoping for lots of comments on this.

First, some definitions from Wikipedia:

A necessary condition of a statement must be satisfied for the statement to be true. In formal terms, a statement N is a necessary condition of a statement S if S implies N (S => N).

A sufficient condition is one that, if satisfied, assures the statement’s truth. In formal terms, a statement S is a sufficient condition of a statement N if S implies N (S => N).

In other words: if X is a necessary condition for Y, you can’t have Y without X. If X is a sufficient condition for Y, then if you have X, you have Y.

Now, validity and soundness. Here, I will be talking in these terms in the special sense used by philosophers, not their ordinary English meanings. Here are the definitions, again from Wikipedia:

“An argument is valid if and only if the truth of its premises entails the truth of its conclusion. It would be self-contradictory to affirm the premises and deny the conclusion.” Or, most importantly, if an argument is valid that means that if its premises–the assumptions the argument makes–are true, then the conclusion is true. And “An argument is sound if and only if (1) The argument is valid. (2) All of its premises are true.”

Philosophers define “valid” and “sound” this way because doing so is useful, but is also very confusing because it has no basis in how the words are ordinarily used. Because if this, if you are confused by these terms, I sympathize with you. When this happens, look back to the definitions of the “valid” and “sound” I’ve given. Don’t try to go on what they seem like they ought to mean.

What makes validity and soundness useful is just that if an argument is sound, then its conclusion must be true. Thus, if you can make a strong case that an argument is sound, you have made a strong case that the conclusion is true. However, it is important to emphasize that neither validity nor soundness, as defined by philosophers, mean an argument is a good argument. In fact, it is pretty uncontroversial soundness is not a sufficient condition for an argument’s being good. In other words, it takes more than being sound to make an argument good.

First, take a closer look at validity. Nothing in the definition of validity prevents the premises of an argument from being completely crazy. “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal” is a valid argument, but so is “All cups are green, Socrates is a cup, therefore Socrates is green.” If the premises of the second argument were true, the conclusion would have to be true, but in fact the premises are completely crazy. The argument is valid but not sound.

It may be tempting to think that if an argument is valid, this must at least count for something, that this must mean the argument is at least not terrible. But this is wrong. The argument that assumes Socrates is a cup is not even halfway good. Also, as one of my professors used to say, validity comes cheap. All it takes to turn an invalid argument into a valid one is to add a premises that says, “if all of the above premises are true…” followed by the argument’s intended conclusion. But obviously it takes more than that to make an argument even halfway good.

Though it is slightly less obvious, an argument can be sound and still not be any good. Imagine arguing with someone who believes that the Sun orbits the Earth rather than the other way around. Now imagine giving them the following argument: “Premise: the Earth orbits the Sun. Conclusion: the Earth orbits the Sun.” If the premise of this argument is true, the conclusion must be true, and the premise is true. Thus the argument is sound. Yet you couldn’t blame anyone for not being persuaded by that argument. The argument is circular, which is to say it assumes what it is trying to prove.

(Edit: so the moral of circularity is that an argument’s being sound is not enough if you, or the person that you’re trying to persuade with the argument, can’t see that the argument is sound.)

Thus, the reason it is useful to ask whether an argument whether an argument is sound is not because all sound arguments are good arguments. Rather, the reason is that if an argument can be shown to be sound, then you have shown the conclusion of the argument to be correct.

Everything I’ve said so far is, to the best of my knowledge, uncontroversial, rare as that is in philosophy. But now I’m am going to say something more controversial: soundness is not a necessary condition for being a good argument. That is to say, there are good arguments which are not sound in the special sense of “sound” that philosophers have defined.

Here’s why: Arguments that aim at being sound are known as deductive arguments. However, some arguments do not even try to be sound, for example, the argument, “The sun has risen every day for all of recorded history, therefore the sun will rise tomorrow.” This argument is invalid, because there’s no contradiction in imagining that the sun does not rise tomorrow, even though it has always risen in the past. Arguments like this argument about the sun are known as inductive arguments. (There is some disagreement about how broadly or narrowly to define “inductive argument,” though that won’t matter for my purposes.)

The argument about the sun seems to me to be a good argument, even though it is not valid. Some philosophers disagree. The usual way to frame the issue is in terms of “solving the problem of induction,” but this is a bad approach because it assumes from the start there is a problem with induction. This problem is helped only a little by clarifying what is meant by “the problem of induction.” For example, defining “the problem of induction” as the question of “can induction be justified?” encourages us to skip over questions like “does induction need justification?” and “does it even make sense to talk of justifying induction?”

The real question, in my view, is whether we have any reason to doubt that the argument about the sun, and arguments like it, are good arguments. And philosophers don’t often try to give such a reason. David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding–usually cited as the source for the problem of induction–does try to do something like that, though his actual conclusion is not about which arguments are good, but rather that, “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.”

Hume’s argument for this conclusion, though, is unclear. One thing he says is that “all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past,” and from there he argues that there is no way to prove this without circularity. But it’s not clear why he thinks that all inferences from experience suppose this. Maybe what he thinks is that reasoning, to be reasoning at all, must be deductive reasoning, so the only way an inductive argument can count as “reasoning” is if it has a hidden premise that turns it into a deductive argument.

But why think that? It seems to me that some inductive arguments are perfectly good as-is. Because of that, I think soundness is not necessary for being a good argument. That is to say, there are good arguments that are not sound in the special philosopher’s sense of “sound.”

And now I’m blanking on how to end this post, because I feel there must be something more to be said about induction, but I can’t think of what. I say this as someone who used to accept the common line on the “problem of induction,” but who upon re-reading the books I got this idea from, can’t see why I thought them so persuasive. But as I said at the beginning: does all of this make sense to people?

And incidentally, does anyone know of an example of a philosopher who thinks soundness is sufficient for being a good argument?

It gets better, but sometimes it gets worse first

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 12, 2011 1 comment

For several years now, I’ve been wondering if the United States could one day transform into, well, a totalitarian hellhole. But when I’ve had such thoughts, I usually tell myself, “It’s unlikely. When you look at history, the general trend is towards things getting better. That includes governments becoming more free. In the history of the United States in particular, things like Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and the internment of the Japanese during WWII have only ever been temporary setbacks for the cause of liberty, quickly reversed. We have every reason to think in the future, things will get even better.”

Recently, my sunny optimism has gotten a boost from Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s an excellent book, possibly topping Pinker’s previous book How the Mind Works, and marshals an incredible amount of evidence to show that violence–including violence by states against their own citizens–has been declining throughout history. When I first read it, my reaction was, “wow, now I feel pretty silly about my occasional flashes of pessimism.”

But Pinker’s defense of optimism comes with an important caveat: in the long run, things get better, but in the short run they sometimes get worse. And I now think that in the United States, there’s a significant chance that things will get much worse before they get better. Exhibit A is the fact that Congress is trying to pass a bill requiring indefinite detention for terror suspects, and the fact that Obama’s main objection to the bill appears to be that it would limit his power. Seriously, the debate is over whether the government should have to detain people forever without trial, or whether that should be up to the president. This is how fucking insane the political situation in the United States is right now.

Exhibit B is the rise of Newt Gingrich, who has labeled Wikileaks leader Julian Assange an “enemy combatant,” which in current parlance means “someone we should be able to imprison and kill without trial.” This is disturbing, because what Wikileaks’ actions were not a crime in the US, and are in fact an important part of investigative journalism. Let me say that again: in a couple years, the United States may have a president who thinks it is okay to imprison and kill someone without trial for doing investigative journalism.

Seriously, when Wikileaks was big in the news, I thought the people making the craziest statements about it had no shot at the presidency. This is no longer clear. Newt may stumble before making it to the Republican nomination, just as Bachmann, Perry, and Cain have, but Newt only has to hang on for a few more weeks before he can start winning states and build momentum that way. And while it’s true that polls say most people would currently vote for Obama over Gingrich, a bad economy could still sink Obama. (I stress that my fear is not that Obama will lose, but that he will lose to someone ever worse than himself.)

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Why Alvin Plantinga’s ontological argument isn’t even halfway good

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 12, 2011 24 comments

Someone asked me to write about Alvin Plantinga, so I’ve decided to write another explanation of who his ontological argument isn’t any good, due to not being satisfied with what I’ve previously written on this. Please tell me if the following is clear enough. If people understand it, it will appear more or less as written in the book I’m currently working on. (Current word count: 25,005 words. Yes Virginia, I am making progress on it.)

Here’s my view of the argument: Plantinga’s argument uses some esoteric ideas, and I don’t expect anyone unfamiliar with these ideas to understand what is wrong with the argument. However, I do claim that once you understand the underlying ideas, it becomes totally obvious that the argument is not a good one. Plantinga’s ontological argument does not reflect well on Plantinga as a thinker, nor does it something people should be pointing to to say “look, theism isn’t so crazy, there are sophisticated arguments for it!”

Plantinga’s ontological argument makes three key moves: (1) defining God as a necessary being, that is to say, a being who if he exists exists necessarily (2) using the S5 axioms for modal logic , which have the consequence that if something is possibly necessarily true is necessarily true and (3) assuming that it is possible that God exists.

Two key pieces of jargon here: First “necessary,” which means, “cannot possibly be otherwise.” A necessary truth is something that could not possibly be false; for God to exist necessarily is for it to be impossible that he not exist. Second, “modal,” which means “having to do with possibility and necessity.” Modal logic is the logic of possibility. In both cases, the “possibility” is supposed to be genuine possibility, not merely “possibility for all I know.”

Now, some people are going to object about simply defining God as a necessary being. However, among atheist philosophers, the attitude generally seems to be, “Oh, theists can define ‘God’ however they want. For example, if they want to define ‘God’ as ‘the greatest possible being,’ they can do that.”

Now, after granting theists their definition of God as a starting point, some atheist philosophers, Michael Martin for example, might argue that the concept of a greatest possible being is incoherent, or incompatible with other things commonly believed of God, but I don’t that sort of attack actually depends on granting theists their definition of “God.”

In fact, in the philosophy world it seems to be generally regarded as OK to just announce that you’re going to use some word to mean such-and-such. As long as it isn’t needlessly confusing, and you don’t equivocate between two different meanings of a word, you can define words however you want. So I think most philosophers are going to give Plantinga the OK on his first step.

For the second step, in a system of formal logic, axioms are things you’re allowed to just assume when working within the system. So for example, when I was in graduate school, the homework problems for my formal logic class generally involved proving some theorem or other. And if we were working within a particular system, we were allowed to have a step in our proofs be writing down an axiom with a note indicating “this is an axiom.”

Historically, philosophers have disagreed on which axioms are the right axioms to use when doing modal logic. And I don’t know of any decisive argument to show that the S5 axioms are the right axioms. However, my understanding is that most philosophers nowadays accept the S5 axioms, and Plantinga’s key claim seems plausible enough to me. To say that what’s possibly necessarily true is necessarily true is to say that it makes no sense to think the following: “well, this could be false, but it could also be such that it couldn’t possibly be false.” And I don’t see how that makes any sense. (Remember, we’re supposed to be talking about genuine possibility here.)

At this point, Plantinga’s argument may look pretty good. He’s got the first two key claims, and of course it’s at least possible that God exists, right? Not so fast. Once you accept the S5 axioms, it becomes completely crazy to think you can just assume things are possible. Or at least, it becomes completely crazy to assume things are possibly necessary. This is because S5 allows for Plantinga-style arguments for any purported necessary truth. The fact that the argument involves God isn’t actually an important feature of the argument.

So for example, philosophers generally claim that mathematical truths are, if true, necessarily true. Two plus two not only equals four, it could not possibly equal anything other than four. Because of this, if you assume S5 and also are willing to just assume a given mathematical claim is possibly true, you can “prove” that mathematical claim through a Plantinga-style argument. But obviously it’s absurd to think you can prove anything in mathematics that way. Thus, if we accept S5, we have to refrain from assuming possibly necessities to avoid such absurdities.

Where some people might go wrong here is thinking of possibility as “possibility for all we know.” There are many claims in mathematics which we have yet to either prove or disprove. The Goldbach conjecture is an often-mentioned example (look it up on Wikipedia if you’re curious about what the Goldbach conjecture is, but the details don’t matter here). The Goldbach conjecture might be true for all we know, but it might be false for all we know. But, according to the conventional wisdom, if the Goldbach conjecture turns out to be true, there was never a genuine possibility of it being false, there was only “possibility for all we knew.”

Now Plantinga is not so crazy as to claim that his argument actually proves the existence of God, or to insist people must grant his assumption that God is possible. Instead, he says that it’s reasonable to believe that it’s possible that God exists, and therefore it’s reasonable to think that God exists. But again, by analogy with mathematics, we can see that this is a silly way to argue.

Imagine two mathematicians, Alice and Bob, arguing over whether it’s reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture. Alice argues that the Goldbach conjecture is unproven, and we should not believe unproven mathematical claims. Bob concedes that it is unproven, but says the Goldbach conjecture seems true to him, and it’s reasonable for him to believe it on that basis.

Now, you may agree with Alice here, or you may agree with Bob, but imagine Bob tried to strengthen his position by saying, “Well, surely you agree that it’s at least reasonable for me to believe that the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true. But if I believe the Goldbach conjecture is possibly true, S5 allows me to infer that it is true. So it’s reasonable for me to believe the Goldbach conjecture.” This is a silly argument. Even if you think Bob is reasonable to believe the Goldbach conjecture, this can’t be the reason why.

So, not only does Plantinga’s argument fail to prove the existence of God, it fails even in Plantinga’s stated goal of showing that belief in God is reasonable. Both of those points are totally obvious once you realize that you could give a Plantinga-style argument for any purported necessary truth, in particular truths of mathematics. If Plantinga’s argument had been something tacked to a bulletin board on a graduate student lounge as a joke, it wouldn’t have been bad as academic in-jokes go. But as a serious argument it’s worthless.

Rick Perry thinks pandering to bigotry > preventing innocent people from getting beaten and killed

Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 9, 2011 Comments Off

Obama has decided that the United States is going to use foreign aid to promote gay rights abroad:

“I am deeply concerned by the violence and discrimination targeting L.G.B.T. persons around the world,” Mr. Obama said in the memorandum, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, “whether it is passing laws that criminalize L.G.B.T. status, beating citizens simply for joining peaceful L.G.B.T. pride celebrations, or killing men, women and children for their perceived sexual orientation.”

Some people are unhappy about this:

The initiative also invites attacks from Republicans trying to appeal to a conservative base in the primary and caucus states.

One Republican candidate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, said: “President Obama has again mistaken America’s tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles. I will not make that mistake.”

It could also irritate some American allies, including countries like Turkey, where there have been reports of harassment, and Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is banned and sex between people of the same sex is punishable by death or flogging.

I *almost* left this one to Ed Brayton, but a lot of what people are saying on Perry and gay rights fails to capture how loathsome his position is.

I’m starting to think the following is a law in American politics: no matter how bad the Democrats are, the Republicans will find a way to be worse. Given that, the Democrats may as well try to behave like decent people, political expediency be damned, because even if they lose they at least might drag the Republicans towards being halfway decent.