Refining The Theory

So: the responses to my deduction of Ms. Malkin's views are coming in fast and furious [note: as much as we like getting e-mail, we really live for comments--ed.]. One question that recurred among my correspondents was something like (quoting verbatim from an e-mail):

Do you intend to prove that Ms. Malkin actually does support internment or, less ambitiously, that she should support it, given her other beliefs and the inferences you draw from them?

I chose to cite this particular phrasing of the question because the framing is interesting.

On the one hand, I certainly would not claim to have privileged access to Michelle Malkin's internal mental states, and I'm perfectly accepting of the fact that beliefs can be held inconsistently, irrationally, or ad hoc---or all three, as I think must be the case for Malkin if she supports the Japanese internment for the reasons she gives, and also genuinely believes (I'm agnostic about this) that American Muslims should not be interned.

On the other hand, the e-mailer is asking me to make a normative judgement about what Michelle Malkin should believe. I hope this answer won't be considered evasive: I hope Michelle Malkin is sincere when she claims not to support an internment of Muslims. Better, I think (and this is only an intuitive claim), to hold ad hoc beliefs than to compound the vileness of one's beliefs for the sake of consistency [what was that Emerson line again?--ed.].

So my argument concerning Malkin's beliefs is entirely conditional. I claim, in effect, that if Malkin is saying what she seems to be saying, what her book overtly claims to be arguing, and what proposition she has invested so much of her reputation in defending (i.e., the A4 premise in my schema), then the entailments of those beliefs are not opaque, but are in fact discernable and analyzable. So my argument has nothing to do with a clairvoyant access to Malkin's internal, Cartesian theater [any bets on what's playing there? I say film of puppies being strangled--ed.]. I take as my givens only the premises that Malkin affirms, premises laid out in communicable agent-neutral common language, over which Malkin has no special epistemic privilege. And I work from there.

The purpose of my post was to show just what the A4 premise necessarily entails, if modal space is restricted to perfect resemblance to the actual world with respect to all non-normative features of the world. Here's the same argument, condensed a lot and without some of the technical thorniness of the original post:

Describe for me the possible world in which:

A) All non-normative features of Japanese settlement in America in the 1930s and 1940s, and all non-normative features of Muslim settlement in America in the 1990s and 2000s, perfectly resembles the facts of the matter in the actual world

B) The Japanese internment was morally justified.

C) The potential Muslim internment would not be morally justified.

Good luck! The entailment is a necessary, inescapable one. That it is not of a purely logical nature, that it involves propositions that are formed synthetically and known a posteriori, are the properties that have allowed Malkin (thus-far) to get away with a whitewash of the necessary consequences of her argument. Just because something is a logically intelligible possibility does not mean that it is a real possibility, that it is the fact of the matter in any possible world (this originally Kantian distinction is the inspiration for the title of my post, btw).