Intellectual Honesty I've always admired Camille Paglia. Though I disagree with her about many things, and even though some of her positions horrify me, as in the case below, she is intellectually honest.

From http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index.html.

Writing about abortion in the context of helping the Democrats improve their lot in upcoming elections, she writes:

"The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

"Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement — leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women — an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

"But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book,"Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

"Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship."

Whatever one makes of her argument (I think it is monstrous), she is being brutally honest about the philosophical moorings of her libertarian, atheist, pro-abortion position. Moreover, she treats those holding an opposing view as having a valid argument, even in some ways as superior(!), and treats it in good faith, while she also attempts to faithfully recapitulate it. She then refutes it without logical sleight-of-hand. Short of actually converting to the opposing idea, I don't see how one could ask more from an opponent arguing against an idea. Perhaps I'm overreacting, but I'm very, very, impressed by this excerpt. Would that all of our public intellectuals argued this way.

Cons: "nature's fascism" is tedious and meaningless to boot.

  ¶ 23:12