E.G.

Activists point at cases. Four illustrations:

(1) Black Lives Matter activists talk about Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and a number of other Black people who have been killed in recent years.

(2) MAGA activists and other anti-immigrant activists talk about the killing of Laken Riley, and a few other such cases.

(3) Effective Altruists talk about people (example) who have chosen to give away large fractions of their income and who report being happy about this choice.

(4) Calf 269.

Why do activists talk about cases? There are two obvious answers to that question, and at least one further answer that I think is interesting and not-so-obvious.

First obvious answer: Cases (especially unusual or dramatic cases) are attention-grabbing.

Second obvious answer: Cases support generalizations. If you want to argue that there is a general pattern of violence against Black people, or a general pattern of immigrants committing crimes, or a general pattern of people feeling fulfilled when they choose extreme altruism, or a general pattern of animals being treated as mere things—then you might assemble your argument from cases that exemplify the general pattern that you are arguing for.

Third answer: Through the mechanism of prototype ostension, cases proffered in the context of a social movement function to determine, influence, explain, and negotiate what the movement is about.

If you want to explain to a child what a squirrel is, you can point at squirrels. After you've pointed at sufficiently many squirrels, the child will have the idea of a squirrel, will be able to reliably distinguish squirrels from non-squirrels, etc. This is the mechanism of prototype ostension.

Through prototype ostension, you can communicate an idea to someone without stating the idea in abstract terms. You can communicate an idea to someone via prototype ostension even if you are unable to state the idea in abstract terms. I am unable to define 'squirrel' in abstract terms, but I can still give the idea to a child by pointing at squirrels.

In a similar manner, I think cases used in activist messaging have the function of creating and communicating an idea of what the movement is about.

Prototype ostension used to communicate the idea of a squirrel
Q1: What's a squirrel? A1: That's a squirrel, and that's a squirrel, and…

Prototype ostension used to communicate the idea of what BLM is about
Q2: What's BLM about? A2: That violent incident (pointing at the killing of Trayvon Martin), and that violent incident (pointing at the killing of George Floyd), and…

Proposal: Social movements often (not always) rely on prototype ostension to determine what they are about. And this is so even when, and perhaps especially when, it is difficult to say in abstract terms what the movement is about.

In the case of BLM, for instance, I suspect that (a) there is general agreement among people in the movement that the movement is about a general pattern exemplified in the killings of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and others.

But I also suspect that (b) there is no general agreement among people in the movement about precisely how that general pattern can or should be understood in abstract terms.

Of course I am not denying that there are pieces of language that we use to refer to the general pattern in question. I take it that systemic racism is one such piece of language. But my proposal is that there will be disagreement within BLM about what this general pattern precisely is. So, I'm suggesting, one of the functions of cases is to circumvent abstract formulation and to non-abstractly create and share an idea of the general pattern.

I suspect that social movements can be put on a spectrum: Some are more case-based than others, i.e., some rely more heavily than others on prototype ostension to determine what they are about.

Effective Altruism seems to be on the less-case-based end of the spectrum. EA messaging does involve cases (as mentioned above) but I don't think the movement relies on cases to determine what it is about. There are certain general statements (e.g., statements contained in the books written by prominent EA leaders) that determine what the movement is about. But other movements are on the more-case-based end of the spectrum.

By the way, it isn't bad for a movement to be heavily case-based. For example, if it is easy to give an idea of what systemic racism is via prototype ostension, but difficult to produce an abstract definition of systemic racism that will be fully satisfactory to everyone and uncontroversial, then it may be that BLM ought to be a case-based movement. When someone asks you what a squirrel is, it's generally fine to reply by pointing at squirrels.

Over time, metaethicists have shifted from

Definition 1: Moral realism is the view that moral facts are mind-independent

to 

Definition 2: Moral realism is the view that moral facts are stance-independent.

I believe that this shift was motivated by recognition that moral facts clearly aren't entirely mind-independent. For example, the painfulness of torture is part of what makes torture wrong. Realists are not and have never been committed to deny that moral facts depend on facts about pain. Yet pain is mental. So, Definition 1 was always wrong.

What Definition 1 got right (and perhaps also what made it seem good enough for government work) is that Definition 1 correctly implies that realism is at least in part a mental independence thesis. That is, realism says that there is some class of mental phenomena such that moral facts are independent of the items in that class. (That might not be all that realism says, but it is one of the things that realism says.) The problem was that Definition 1 defines that class far too inclusively.

So, Definition 2, I believe, was brought in to correct the error of Definition 1 by naming the relevant class of mental phenomena. That is, stances are supposed to comprise the class of mental phenomena that (according to realism) moral facts are independent of.

But what are stances? 

I may be mistaken about this but I believe that Russ Shafer-Landau is the person who caused metaethicists to shift from Definition 1 to Definition 2. So, if we want to understand the notion of stance, we might start by looking at what Shafer-Landau and his coauthors Terence Cuneo and John Bengson say about stances in their recent agenda-setting book, The Moral Universe.

B, C, and S-L say that one of the theses of realism is

Stance-­Independence: A range of moral truths and facts are stance-independent.

Clarifying this, they say:

The Stance-­Independence thesis is intended to convey the idea that a range of moral truths or facts are not of our own devising; unlike the norms, say, of badminton and bowling, they do not depend in any way on our (even idealized) say-­so.

And they say we can

think of a truth or fact as being stance-­independent just if there is a full metaphysical story about it that is stance-­free—­where a stance is an attitudinal state or activity (or pattern thereof), whether actual or counterfactual, borne by an agent. So understood, stances include states such as approval or disapproval, and explain phenomena such as speech acts, intentional behaviors, and social arrangements.

I doubt that 'stance' should be understood in the above way if we are going to hold on to Definition 2.

Suppose you disapprove of my using your lawnmower, but I do it anyway. Here one might say that it is morally wrong for me to use your lawnmower because you disapprove of my doing so. In saying this, one does not commit oneself to anti-realism. But saying this would come with a commitment to anti-realism if disapproval is a type of stance and if Definition 2 is correct. So, we should either not say that disapproval is a type of stance or shift away from Definition 2. My hunch is that we should keep Definition 2, at least for now, and work on refining the notion of stance.

It seems to me possible that we should understand realism as a vague cluster of separable independence theses. Perhaps we should start with something like this: According to realism, if p is a true moral proposition, then the fact that p is independent of any and all beliefs about whether p. Some independence thesis like this is, perhaps, at the center of the cluster. And then perhaps there are other independence theses that are clearly in the cluster, while other independence theses are closer to the edge, and still others clearly beyond the edge.

All traditional religions should be abandoned, but if we are going to participate in any traditional religions at all, it seems to me that Quakerism is a pretty good choice for a typical American person.

What I find most enjoyable is the way that meetings are conducted. Here is how it works in what are called "unprogrammed" meetings (which are the only kinds of Quaker meetings that I've attended; I suspect I would not appreciate the other kinds). On Sunday morning, you show up to the location where the meeting is scheduled to occur. You take a seat, sit down, and be quiet. Everyone else does the same. Then you and the others just sit there quietly. Minutes pass with no one saying anything. During this time, anyone is free to speak, but most choose not to say anything at all. Occasionally, someone does stand up and say something, e.g., a small prayer. But for the most part, everyone is quiet. All that there is to hear, for most of the service, is people shifting in their seats, road noise outside, etc.

I am not sure why I like these silent gatherings so much, but I do feel that there is something very good about the practice.

There are many other situations where you can sit silently with other people, of course. For example, in a doctor's waiting room, it is often the case that no one is saying anything, but that has none of the magic of a Quaker meeting. I think what's special about a Quaker meeting is not just that everyone is being quiet but that the people have come together deliberately in order to sit silently together.

Maybe the idea is something like this: The purpose of a religious gathering, any religious gathering, is for people to come together and find a way to respond to the world, I mean the whole world, with all of its horrors. And Quakerism, in practice, is the religion according to which silence is an appropriate response to the world.

As I said, Quaker meetings are not normally completely silent, because everyone is free to speak, and usually a few people choose to speak. These little disruptions are sometimes jarring to me, but I don't experience them as unwelcome. Almost always, the things that people choose to say are at least somewhat interesting. And a rule against speaking would be bad, because it would mean that the silence that mostly prevails is less than voluntary. The occurrence of these little speeches helps to make it really true that, as Quakers say: "We didn't abolish the clergy. We abolished the laity."

In addition to the silence that is Quakerism's speciality, there are several further features of Quakerism that make it recommendable as a good alternative to standard-issue American Christianity:

(1) Pacifism is built into Quakerism.

(2) Quakers throughout history have often been on the right side of many moral issues. For example, Quakers opposed slavery in America.

(3) Quakers are activists and, unlike all of the most popular forms of American Christianity, are largely on the right side of most of the big issues of our day.

(4) Quakers freely speak of moral obligation.

(5) Quakers believe that each of us has an "Inner Light," and that we should be listening to it and should use our own best judgment in interpreting it. It is reasonable to understand this talk as talk of conscience. And it is very good, in general, for people to be encouraged to pay attention to their own conscience (rather than to listen to authorities).

(6) It is not clear that Quakerism is a form of Christianity. I suspect that most Quakers will say that they are Christians but there are non-Christian and non-theistic Quakers, and care is often taken in Quaker messaging to avoid presupposing Christian perspectives. I think it is best to understand Quakerism as "Christ-haunted" and, as others have recognized and have said, it is also the case that American society as a whole is not exactly Christian but is "Christ-haunted." This is one of the reasons why I suspect that Quakerism or something like it might be a viable alternative to the main forms of Christianity that still dominate and cause tremendous havoc in American culture. I suspect it would be easier to get American people to embrace something like Quakerism than to get them to embrace a tradition further removed from the Christianity of their upbringing.

I doubt that the movement known variously as wokeism / identity politics / political correctness deserves much of the blame for Trump's victory. But in any case here are some of my current opinions about that movement, which I'll just call "wokeism":
(1) Etiquette is about the regulation of language and meaningful gestures.
(2) Violation of etiquette is what we call rudeness. Adherence to etiquette is what we call politeness.
(3) Etiquette is important. Our sense of what is rude and what is polite makes a major difference to what we say, do, and think. You can make life significantly better for people by making the right sorts of improvements to your society's system of etiquette.
(4) Wokeism as a social movement is about etiquette. That might not be all that it's about, but I do think that that is what it is mainly about.
(5) The core methodological idea of wokeism is that if we treat certain things (e.g., failure to use someone's preferred pronouns) as rude, then this will bring it about that those things actually are rude. This method has a long track record of success. For example, we treat people who pick their nose in public as if they are being rude, and this is what makes it the case that it is actually rude to pick your nose in public.
(6) Wokeism has been extremely successful. I don't have any statistics to back up this contention, but it seems to me that wokeism has had huge uptake across all levels of society, including among many conservatives and even many Trumpists (example: JD Vance complies with pronoun rules here), and has achieved this in a very short period of time.
(7) Wokeism is good. The adjustments to our system of etiquette that wokeism urges us to make are right, and I don't know of any wokeist rules that seem clearly wrong or harmful. In general, the things that wokeism regards as rude are things that should be regarded as rude.
(8) Unsurprisingly, wokeism annoys people. People don't like to be regarded as rude and don't like to submit to new rules, and wokeism forces people to have to choose to do one or the other of those two things.
(9) People experience wokeism in roughly the same way you might experience a fancy dinner party where the expectations are unfamiliar and strange to you. Eventually, once you've got the rules figured out, you can relax, but you're going to feel on edge for a while. You might have to attend multiple dinner parties before you are fully comfortable.
(10) Wokeism is itself rude, because it is rude to treat someone as if they are being rude, and treating people as if they are being rude is precisely how wokeism effects change in people's sense of what is rude. Wokeism is in that way a confrontational movement.
(11) Unavoidably, etiquette is about status and class. Being rude and being polite reveal something about how you have been raised and educated: where you're "from." People make inferences about you by observing your manners or lack thereof. This is true of rules about forks at fancy dinner parties, and is equally true of wokeism's rules. And so it has to be granted, I believe, that wokeism as a social movement is in the business of making people feel bad about facts about themselves that result from their upbringing, where they went to school, etc.
(12) So there is a class aspect of all of this, with one side being associated with what might be called, broadly, "university culture" (a culture that, it needs to be acknowledged, not everyone has the means to participate in) and with the other side positioning themselves as opponents of the universities.
(13) Universities, it should be remembered, have always been in significant part about instilling good manners. One hundred years ago, first-generation college kids would come home with new ways of speaking and being, some of which their parents would have found off-putting and foreign. So it is today with wokeism.
(14) Even if (as I doubt) Harris lost the election because of wokeism, the movement should still just keep going. Its goals are good, its methods are reasonable, and it has already been very successful in such a short period of time. The hard part is probably over now.

Added Nov. 22: Steven Teles is making some really interesting related points about etiquette in today's episode of Ezra Klein show.

1 2 2.

1 2 3.

You might think that people who support marginal politicians like Ralph Nader or Ron Paul have different values than people who support mainstream politicians like John McCain or Barack Obama, but that doesn't have to be the case.  Suppose I support Ralph Nader because I think he would make the best president.  And suppose you agree that Ralph Nader would make the best president — but you support Barack Obama, your second choice, because you think Nader has no chance to win.  In that case, it could well be that you and I have the same values, and rank the available candidates in the same order.  What we disagree about is how a candidate's viability ought to be taken into account.

I think it is actually very common for people to differ in this way.  How can we explain this phenomenon?  Maybe the root of it is that you and I follow different procedures for allocating limited energy and motivation for politics.  When I go out and (say) make phone calls for Nader rather than Obama, I'm raising the already-low odds of an outcome which we both agree is highly desirable; when you make phone calls for Obama rather than Nader, you're raising the already-high odds of an outcome which we both agree is middlingly desirable.  So maybe it's just that I'm more of a high-risk, high-reward kind of political activist than you are.

But I don't think this kind of explanation will work, at least not in all cases.  For one thing, almost no one is capable of appreciably affecting the odds of any given electoral outcome, and most people know this.  When you volunteer for a candidate, you might think, in a vague way, that you are helping him or her to be elected; but you probably do not deceive yourself into thinking your candidate's odds are really any different than they would have been if you'd just stayed home and watched TV.  For another thing, this phenomenon occurs even in cases where no one is under any illusions about affecting the outcome.  It occurs in sports, for instance: When the odds that the Cardinals will win the World Series diminishes, some fans switch to rooting for a more successful team, while others remain loyal.  Given this, we need to be able to explain why some people support an unlikely best outcome, whereas others support a more likely second- (or third-, or 200,000th-) best outcome, even when supporting that outcome does not involve affecting its odds.

Maybe you support Obama because you tend to become very emotionally invested in the person you're supporting, and you want to cut the chances that you'll be disappointed.  And maybe I support Nader because I don't mind much if my candidate loses.  Maybe I even like it when my candidate loses, because it gives me something to complain about.  In fact, I think this might be a satisfactory explanation in many cases.  But how upset do you really get when your candidate loses?  There are a lot of people who support Obama even though they would prefer other, more marginal candidates.  It is hard to believe that all those people have chosen to support Obama just because they're afraid, consciously or unconsciously, of having to endure the pain of supporting the loser.  So I think that, for those who are exceptions, we need a different story.

The herd mentality may be a further factor, but such explanations don't really get to the point that interests me here.  What I'm most interested in is this question: Is there any good reason to shift allegiance from your top choice to a lower-tier, more likely choice, in cases where (a) you are not in a position to affect the odds in any way, and (b) shifting allegiances won't make the loss of your top choice any more endurable?

Here's one possibility.  Perhaps when you support a given candidate, you are saying the candidate ought to win.  But if the candidate is very unlikely to win, perhaps that means that she cannot win.  In that case (if you believe that "ought" implies "can"), you should not support candidates whose chances fall below a certain cut-off.  Then we just need to decide how poor the chances can be before they fall below that cut-off.  Maybe this is the judgment-call about which the Nader supporter and the Obama supporter disagree. 

But what is really the connection between improbable and cannot?  Whether I can clean up the dishes has little to do with whether it is probable that I will clean up the dishes.  Certainly, if it is improbable that I will clean up the dishes because (say) I'm handcuffed to the couch, then that is a reason to think I cannot clean up the dishes.  But if it is improbable that I will clean up the dishes just because I'm very lazy and have never bothered to clean up the dishes before, then there has not yet been given any reason to think I cannot clean up the dishes.

However, with regard to entities like societies, cities, countries, and so on, the situation might be a little different.  Societies can be lazy, I think.  And I suppose that if a society is too lazy to do something, e.g. curb global warming, then that it is a reason to think that global warming cannot be curbed.  For example, if 99% of the electorate opposes reform just because reform will make people uncomfortable in the near-term, I think that shows laziness.  It also shows that it is very improbable for a reform-minded candidate to win an election.  And if the probability of a reform-minded candidate winning is low enough, that seems like sufficient reason to say that a reform-minded candidate cannot win.

So maybe what's going on here is something like this.  All agree that marginal candidates are unlikely to win.  Some people think that marginal candidates are so unlikely to win that they cannot win, so they decide not to support such candidates (on the implicit or explicit assumption that "ought" implies "can," and "support" implies "ought").  Others set the bar lower: they think the same marginal candidates are not so unlikely to win that they cannot win, which frees them to support such candidates without falling afoul of the ought-implies-can principle.  If that is right, then the open questions are: (1) How unlikely does an electoral (or more generally, societal) outcome really have to be before it is fair to say that it cannot happen? and (2) Does "ought," in the sense in which that word is used when we say things like "Nader ought to win," really imply "can"? 

It's not easy to give an exact, non-controverisal description of the rights that libertarians say we have.  The phrase "individual rights" evokes a picture that is very rough, but is adequate for the present purpose.  But there's a further issue: although it is clear that libertarians like individual rights, it's less clear what that means.  Consider a familiar type of case: Suppose you could raise a bunch of taxes, fund a large army, invade Burma, and replace its current government with one that is more friendly to individual rights.  If you're a typical libertarian, you think raising those taxes would violate some individual rights.  But (assume that) overthrowing the government of Burma would prevent many more (and more egregious) violations of individual rights.  Does that positive trade-off make it OK to invade Burma on your citizens' dime?

No, according to (what we can call) dirty-hands libertarianism.  Dirty-hands libertarianism says that one must never violate individual rights, even if doing so will prevent a very large number of rights-violations from occurring.  As many have noticed, it's not obvious that we can make such a view respectable.  It seems as though the dirty-hands libertarian doesn't really care about whether individual rights are violated; what she really cares about is whether she herself violates any individual rights.  This kind of self-centeredness seems objectionable — it seems to involve an undue emphasis on keeping one's own hands clean of rights-violations.

There's more to say about this objection and I think there are interesting replies to it.  But if the libertarian is moved by it, she might switch to another view, which we can call rights-promotion libertarianism.  On this view, one should simply try to make the overall number of individual rights-violations as small as possible.  Sometimes that means refraining from violating individual rights oneself; but sometimes, e.g. in the Burma case, rights-promotion libertarianism calls for violating rights in order to prevent a larger number of rights-violations.

At minimum, rights-promotion libertarianism needs some tweaking.  For example, it seems as though a good rights-promotion libertarian shouldn't reproduce, since your kids' rights are bound to be violated now and then, and you can prevent all that simply by not having them in the first place.  This is probably an unwelcome implication; and there are other similar issues that come up.  But maybe these sorts of problems aren't huge — maybe they can be avoided by fiddling with the view, e.g. by saying that the rights of merely potential persons don't count (or count in a different way than the rights of actual persons), or whatever.

But I think the view has some deeper problems.  Rights-promotion libertarianism looks like a version of maximizing consequentialism.  But to produce a version of maximizing consequentialism equivalent to rights-promotion libertarianism, you'd have to think that (a) violation of individual rights is the only thing that is non-instrumentally bad, and (b) nothing whatsoever is non-instrumentally good.  This is a weird and improbable view.  You could get around this by abandoning the maximizing-consequentialist framework, and say that there is an obligation to minimize rights-violations even when doing so fails to maximize overall value.  But then I think you'll have a hard time making sense of the view.  On this view, you may violate others' rights in order to do one type of good (i.e. prevent rights-violations) but not in order to do any other type of good (e.g. feed the poor).  This seems arbitrary.

So I suspect that if you think it's permissible to violate rights in order to ensure that fewer rights are violated, you're going to have trouble explaining why it's not permissible to violate rights in order to, say, bring about lots of pleasure, or satisfy intense desires, etc.  But I think all genuine libertarians must be able to say (and explain why) it's not permissible to violate rights just to secure those sorts of values.  So it seems to me that if you want to be a genuine libertarian, you probably have to be a dirty-hands libertarian, and just do your best to handle the problems facing that view.

I’ve decided to start blogging here again (though we’ll see how long this resolution lasts).  And as I see it, there is no better way to start again than by providing the internets with something they seem to lack (based on 5 minutes’ worth of googling): An irrefutable defense of Alanis Morissette’s widely criticized usage of the word "ironic" in the (aptly-named, as I will show) 90’s hit song, "Ironic."  This will also provide me with motivation to continue blogging, since I will not want this ridiculous post to be associated with my name in google searches forever.

The Wikipedia page on this issue says that in response to her critics, Alanis has granted that her song contains no genuine irony, but claims that this is precisely what makes the song ironic.  This strategy is cheating and I will not use it.  Instead, I want to show that Alanis should have stuck to her guns.  I think the scenarios in her song are ironic in several widely accepted senses of the word.

In the song, Alanis suggests that

(1) You have 10,000 spoons and all you need is a knife.

is ironic.  This guy suggests that (1) is not ironic, but

(2) You have 10,000 spoons and all you need is a knife, and you’re in the break room of a cutlery factory.

is ironic.  How’s that?  Presumably, (2) is ironic because it’s the opposite of what you’d expect: you’d expect the break room of a cutlery factory to contain at least one knife.  But (1) is also the opposite of what you’d expect: you’d expect anyone who has 10,000 spoons to have at least one knife.  So it seems to me that if (2) succeeds in being ironic, (1) does, too.

A complaint about a different line is suggested by a parody, here.  On Alanis’s view,

(3) An 88-year-old man wins the lottery, then dies the next day.

is ironic.  The author of the parody seems to think that (3) isn’t ironic, but

(4) An 88-year-old man wins the lottery, then dies the next day "of chronic emphysema from inhalation of the latex particles scratched off decades’ worth of lottery tickets."

is ironic.  Well, if we suppose unexpectedness is the criterion, then (4) might actually be less ironic than (3) (since, ceteris paribus, people who have chronic emphysema are more likely to die than those who don’t).  Of course, there is something odd, and perhaps unexpected, about being killed by the very activity that provides you with vast riches, and that’s not what happens in (3).  But there is also something odd and unexpected about dying the day after acquiring vast riches. 

In light of these considerations, I suppose charity requires us to assume that the above critics of Alanis don’t take unexpectedness to be the criterion of irony.  What else might they mean?  Dictionary.com defines irony:

1.	containing or exemplifying irony: an ironic novel; an ironic remark.

2.

ironical.

3.	coincidental; unexpected: It was ironic that I was seated next to my ex-husband at the dinner.

3 is the only immediately helpful part, and I’m not going to bother with anything that isn’t immediately helpful.  3, we have seen, is a count in Alanis’s favor.  But the usage note on the same page seems to be at odds with Dictionary.com’s own definition:

The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly.

OK; so maybe Alanis’s critics are taking it as required that a genuinely ironic scenario must contain a "lesson about human vanity or folly."  The critics might rightly point out, for example, that there is no obvious vanity-folly lesson in (1).  And I’m inclined to agree to this.  But there’s no obvious such lesson in (2), either.  Further, the situation with (3) and (4) is reversed: Perhaps there’s a vanity-folly lesson in (4), but it seems to me there might also be such a lesson in (3).

Anyway, I think that if critics are faulting Alanis for calling her scenarios ironic even though they contain no vanity-folly lessons, then their case against her is likely to be very weak.  Arguably, there are lessons about human vanity and folly in just about everything that happens.  In any case, it’s certainly never obvious that any given event contains no such lesson.  (Exception: events that involve inanimate matter.  But no such events are described in "Ironic.")  Of course, I’ll grant that any lessons contained in Alanis’s song aren’t obvious, and probably aren’t interesting if they are there; but there is no requirement that one needs obvious or interesting vanity-folly lessons in order to be ironic.

So, by two different accepted criteria for irony — unexpectedness and vanity-folly lessons — I think Alanis’s attribution of irony to scenarios (1) and (3) are defensible.  What about the other scenarios in the song?  A few of them seem especially suspect.  For example, Alanis thinks this is ironic:

(5) Alanis meets the man of her dreams, and then she meets his beautiful wife.

But for all we know, this happens to Alanis all the time.  Anyway, there’s nothing in general unusual about someone being attracted to a married person.  Similarly,

(6) You’re in a traffic jam, and you’re already late.

is the sort of thing that happens all the time.

Is there any hope for Alanis’s view that these scenarios are ironic?  I think that these scenarios may be considered unexpected if one assumes a very optimistic view of life in which we normally get what we want.  I think a lot of people hold this sort of view; a lucky few are even justified in holding it.  For them, when any of their desires are frustrated, as in (5) and (6), it comes as unexpected.  So I think (5) and (6) are, after all, unexpected: they are unexpected by extremely optimistic people. 

Further note that (5) and (6) arguably contain vanity-folly lessons.  (Again, I’m not claiming that the lessons are good lessons, and my case doesn’t require them to be.)

So, I think Alanis succeeds in providing irony of at least two types.  But perhaps the critics have in mind some other sense(s) of irony.  And there are plenty of alternatives out there.  Many are listed in Wikipedia, which says that

There is some argument about what is or is not ironic, but all the different senses of irony revolve around the perceived notion of an incongruity between (i) what is said and what is meant; or (ii) between an understanding of reality, or an expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.  [my numbering]

I think my argument above strongly supports thinking Alanis’s scenarios are ironic in the (ii) senses.  But perhaps Alanis’s critics are assuming that all genuine forms irony are along the lines of (i).  And it does seem fair to say Alanis has failed to be (i)-style ironic.  So it seems everything hinges on whether (ii)-style irony is a genuine form of irony.  But it seems to me to be generally accepted that it is.  QED.

There are features of things which make moral judgments about them true.  For instance, in a certain case it may be that the fact that a given act is an act of killing-for-fun is the feature of it which makes it wrong.  It might be thought that there are some types of things which never have these sorts of features.  For instance, it might be thought that the motions of inanimate objects never have these features.  If so, then whereas any given human action might be wrong, or right, or permissible, or obligatory, or supererogatory, or whatever, the motion of any given inanimate object is never any of these things; such motions are "outside the moral domain," as it were, and no moral judgment is ever true of them.  So for instance, on this view, while there are true moral judgments about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, there are no true moral judgments about the motions of Mars, since there are no features of that motion which would make any such judgment true.

A short argument against this view can be written as follows:

1. Either (a) the motion of Mars is morally permissible, or (b) the motion of Mars is not morally permissible.
2. (a) is a moral judgment.
3. (b) is a moral judgment.
4. Thus, there is at least one true moral judgment about the motion of Mars.

We can obviously extend this argument into any "domain" we please, and therefore we can show that there is no kind of thing about which there are no true moral judgments. 

If we want to avoid the conclusion, what should we do?  1 has got to be true.  2 seems true enough; if I say something is morally permissible, I have certainly made a moral judgment (even though in the present case I’ve clearly made a false one).  So 3 seems to me to be the premise we’ll need to attack if we want to avoid 4.  To deny 3 is to say that (b) (i.e. the claim "the motion of Mars is not morally permissible") is not a moral judgment.  But there seem to be genuine moral judgments which take this form; for instance, it seems clear that (c) "Killing innocent children is not morally permissible" is a moral judgment.  So we should want to say that (c) is a moral judgment, even if (b) isn’t one.  But there seems to be no principled way to get away with this.  That is, there seems to be nothing about (b) which would keep it from being a moral judgment without keeping (c) from being one, too.  It seems to me that if any sentence of the form "______ is not morally permissible" is not a moral judgment, then none of them are.  If so, then a principled 4-denier should say that sentences of the form "_______ is not morally permissible" are never moral judgments.  But that is an unpleasant thing to have to say.

A similar set of problems may obtain in other areas.  We may be tempted to say, for instance, that while there are some sorts of things about which there are true "color judgments" (e.g. there are true color judgments about ketchup, such as the judgment "Ketchup is red"), there are other sorts of things about which there are no true color judgments.  For instance, molecules are colorless, "outside the domain of color," so we might be tempted to say that any "color judgment" about a molecule has to be false.  Similarly, no number has a color, so we may want to say that all judgments about the color of, say, 7, are false.  But any molecule, and any number, is either green or not, and in either case it seems to follow that there is at least one true color judgment.  So we’ll be faced with the same pair of options: either (1) "X is not green" is not a color judgment, or (2) there are true color judgments about molecules and numbers.   

I expect that, with regard to color judgments, it will not matter very much which of the two options we choose.  Nothing much hangs on whether "X is not green" is classified as a color judgment or not.  I am not sure, however, whether anything important hangs on the corresponding question about moral judgments.  If we say that there are true moral judgments about dogs and planets and so on, it will follow that the sorts of features which make moral judgments true are features had by every type of thing.  This might be an interesting result.  Or, if we say that there aren’t any true moral judgments about dogs, planets, etc., then we may be committed to say that "negative" judgments of the form "____ is not [permissible, obligatory, right, wrong, etc.]" are not genuine moral judgments.  This again may be an interesting result.