The Unabomber

I am surprised at what you say about there being no evidence of a link between Logical Positivism and the Unabomber. A google, or msn, search on the terms "Unambomber Logical Positivism" yields pointers to several pages, all related to Alston Chase's recent book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. I have ordered it on amazon, and will wait to have read it before coming to a definite conclusion. However, accounts of it contain passages, such as those below, that seem to leave no doubt about Chase's opinion on the matter :

...he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there is no logical justification for morality."

Chase's description of the intellectual climate at Harvard begins on page 201 and it revolves around a philosophy called logical positivism, which developed during the 1920s. It claimed "ethical judgments, being empirically unverifiable, were meaningless" and merely expressed our emotions about "certain kinds of behavior.

The question now is whether Chase makes a convincing case of linking LP to the Unabomber. I will not pronounce myself on that until I have read the book. One thing is sure, however. It is that LP's influence at Harvard in the 1950s was great, as it was in all major western universities around the world at that time. And no one seems to doubt that Ted Kaczynski's formative years at Harvard played a role in his subsequent metamorphosis into the Unabomber.

An additional remark : it is not enough to prove that Kaczynski was crazy to write him off, because it may well be that it is LP (and other aspects of his experience at Harvard) that made him crazy. Psychology is not yet advanced enough to put forward conclusive accounts of how someone can become mentally ill. But there are reports (results of tests) that seem to establish beyond doubt that Kaczynski had no visible mental imbalance before going to Harvard. I believe that seeing how LP can undermine trust can provide us with a plausible account of how someone can lose his mental balance.