Earth Day is Rousseau-Day April 22, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy.Tags: Earth Day, environmentalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, nature, State of Nature
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On this Earth Day 2009 I’d like to remind everybody of the immense influence Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) has had on our entire attitude toward nature, regardless of whether we think Earth Day is an obnoxious invention, based on bogus reports, and geared toward making our lives more difficult, or a wonderful incentive to appreciate and protect the planet we live on. Prior to Rousseau, the common attitude among intellectuals as well as those who worked the land was that nature either needed to be subdued—“developed”—or simply ignored. Nature was only worth contemplating if it had become useful to humans, and the (very real) dangers removed. Yes, I know this is a simplified version of a long story, but I need to get to Rousseau! So what did he do to change the minds of an entire culture? He upgraded the Social Contract concept of “the state of nature” from being a dangerous place where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” to a place, and time, of easy living and human compassion. A romantic notion, and wildly inaccurate. But with the upgrade of that concept came a reevaluation of indigenous peoples living close to nature (the “Noble Savage”) and the time of life when we are closest to nature, childhood, as well as the experience of being in nature itself, in the wild:
In his Confessions he writes,
“It is already clear what I mean by fine country. Never does a plain, however beautiful it may be, seem so in my eyes. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid.”
(If you want to read more about Rousseau’s influence, you can look it up in my paper, “Everyone Needs a Stone.“) Years later, toward the end of his life, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, he says,
Seeking refuge in mother nature, I sought in her arms to escape the attacks of her children. I have become solitary, or, as they say, unsociable and misanthropic, because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men which is nourished only in betrayals and hatred.
So every time we take a walk out in the canyon, the woods or the field just “to get away from it all,” or buy items with “all natural ingredients” and no additives, whenever we allow our kids to be kids without having adult expectations of them, whenever we (of the Western Civilization) feel that it is imperative to respect indigenous peoples, and what is most important for Earth Day, whenever we express the need to take better care of the Planet, we are in effect evoking Rousseau. And while the entire environmental debate is growing in divisiveness, in some cases becoming a contest between expert opinions, the appreciation for Rousseau need not be a point of contention, in this respect (we may disagree with his Social Contract, and the General Will, and a bunch of other troublesome concepts): Rousseau is not necessarily an “environmentalist,” because he sees no need to “preserve” or “save” nature—it’s just there for him, available for human use. And there is enough of him left, from the tradition, to have that little element of anthropocentrism in his appreciation for nature. However, it is the first time in Western history that a thinker thinks enough of wild nature to talk about how important it is for us to have that access—which of course also translates into the need to preserve nature. And for those among us who are more radical in their views, Rousseau has opened up the possibility of conferring intrinsic value on nature, as something that has its own value regardless of its usefulness for humans. So Earth Day is, in many ways, Rousseau-Day.
The Future of Conservatism April 21, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: conservatism party of no, conservative identity politics, future of conservatism, Reagan Revolution, reviving the left
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I posted recently on one of the emerging fault-lines of contemporary liberalism. So I guess, in the interests of being fair and balanced, I should write about the fault lines within conservatism as well.
Head on over to Reviving the Left for the post.
Carlin and Critical Thinking April 21, 2009
Posted by iduckles in Art and Music, Culture, Teaching.3 comments
This past Saturday KPBS aired the award ceremony for the Kennedy Center 2008 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.The winner was the great George Carlin who died last year on June 22. As I watched the show, which contained numerous clips from his many stand-up performances, I was struck by two things. (Beware the links that follow, they are NSFW)
First, they aired an excerpt from Carlin’s most famous routine “7 Words You Can’t Say on Television.” This routine is over 30 years old and when they play it on TV they still have to bleep the same 7 words! This was rather funny on the PBS special because when they got to the punchline of the routine they had a lengthy (20 or so seconds) bleep. I noticed the same thing when Carlin passed away last year. All the media tributes naturally had to show his most famous routine, but they all had to censor the punchline! I am amazed that in the 21st century we are still so afraid of certain words that we can’t even allow them to be uttered on PBS after 10 PM on a Saturday night.
The second thing I was struck by was how useful Carlin would be for a critical thinking course (since I am teaching three of these this semester they are naturally at the fore of my thoughts). In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one could develop an entire CT course structured around various Carlin routines (perhaps I should try this). This is because the central point of much of Carlin’s work was examining how language works and how language can be shaped and twisted to render the unthinkably awful mundane and commonplace. As an example check out this discussion of Euphemisms. I would say that this is, perhaps, the best discussion I have ever heard, not only of what a euphemism is, but how they can be developed and employed for particular rhetorical and political purposes. The fact that he makes you laugh while doing it is a testament to his genius.
In this day and age when Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal can go on national television and talk about how things would be so much better if we could all “keep walking” pass the recently released torture memos, and how “some of life has to be mysterious,” (that asinine comment probably deserves its own post) I feel the need for George Carlin’s critical voice more than ever.
Anyone else have any favorite Carlin clips that you use or would like to see used in a Critical Thinking course?
Why Are We Moral Hypocrites? April 20, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Science.Tags: consumer choice, hypocrisy, moral judgment
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Most of us have objections to a variety of products on the market—meat, factory-farmed meat, clothing made in sweat-shops, products made overseas by cheap labor that cost American’s jobs, products made by polluters, etc.
But most of us are quite willing to ignore these moral sensibilities at least some of the time and buy the products anyway. New research explains why.
We are apparently more likely to pay attention to ethical considerations when we are deciding to eliminate a choice, rather than sustaining a choice we’ve already made.
In four studies, the authors establish that how a product consideration set is formed, either by excluding possibilities (termed “exclusion”) or by including possibilities (termed “inclusion”), affects the ethics of the resulting consideration set. They show that exclusion results in greater weighting of ethical attributes in consideration set formation, even though normatively which task is used should not have any systematic influence on attribute weighting. They also demonstrate that consumers judge others’ behavior more negatively if they exclude ethical products (as opposed to not including ethical products).
Apparently, because we have to narrow down our choices before a decision can be made, we will bring in the ethical considerations to help us do that.
But if we already know what we want, we tend not to bring in the ethical considerations to complicate matters.
A New Fault Line Among Liberals April 19, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Political Philosophy, politics.Tags: defining liberalism, defining wealth, nature of happiness, Paul Krugman, revising the American Dream, Tim Geithner
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Cross-posted at Reviving the Left
As the various debates regarding economic recovery are unfolding, an emerging fault line is developing among liberals regarding the nature of reform.
I think the fault line can best be described as follows: Are we trying to return the United States to levels of growth and consumption patterns prior to the Bush debacle, i.e. during the Clinton era? Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner seems want something like that. Or do we need a more substantial restructuring of the economy, as someone like Paul Krugman would endorse? Should we preserve the goal of increasing levels of homeownership and robust consumerism through expanding credit and financial services, albeit with more effective regulation. Or is the idea of an economy based on easy credit, mass ownership of stocks, homes, and other investment vehicles, and dominated by the financial sector a bad idea?
Will an economy consumed with the pursuit of wealth always be subject to bubbles, gross inequality, and instability caused by excessive greed, regardless of the regulations we put in place?
On the surface these may appear to be purely economic questions. But in fact there is a moral dimension.
It is hard to see how a society based on wheeling and dealing could be anything but a society in which selfishness rules. Norms and virtues inevitably flow from our activity—we become what we do. When wealth acquisition is the measure of a person there is no natural limit to the temptation to acquire more. And because wealth begets wealth conferring a competitive advantage on the already wealthy, most people will in end be unable to compete and will fall by the wayside, like the bankrupt homeowners who window-shop at the malls today. Meanwhile, the wheeler dealers will always find a way to outwit regulators, who will be resented by everyone whose aspirations outstrip reality—most of us.
So I don’t think a return to Clinton era prosperity is quite the way to go. Getting more and more people into the middle and upper middle class is a worthy aspiration, but trying to expand the pie through cheap tricks won’t get us there.
The downside of more significant reforms, however, is less growth. And that is not a good thing. Maybe we should be willing to forgo the new wardrobe, hold on to a car for 5 years, and stick with last year’s cell phone technology. But what about the people who design, make, and sell clothes, cars, and cell phones? Slower growth means more unemployment, less opportunity, and these are moral issues as well because they entail suffering.
I don’t think we have to choose between growth and contraction. But we will have to re-describe the nature of wealth. The kind of wealth we have sought to create over the past 30 years was private wealth. And the excessive pursuit of private wealth inevitably leads to the greedy melee that we are still trying to disentangle.
But if we define wealth more broadly in term of social capital—better education, health care, transportation, a clean environment, higher levels of trust—we can pursue rampant growth and keep people well employed without creating lots of Bernie Madoffs in the process.
Media Misrepresenting Science April 18, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Ethics, Science.Tags: journalism, journalism ethics, Media
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Here is an interesting assessment by Ars Technica of two recent science stories that received lots of attention in the press but were seriously distorted by the press reports.
One study was about the alleged correlation between the use of Facebook and lower grades. The other study was about the effect of new communications technology on the emotional processing of moral behavior.
In both cases, the media sensationalized the results and drew conclusions not warranted by the data. The report is interesting in that it doesn’t point fingers at journalists only but at the whole system of science reporting that introduces perverse incentives.
Journalists are the most frequent targets of complaints about the state of science reporting, but it’s important to emphasize that all of these problems occur before they even get involved. In Karpinski’s case, most of the journalists that handled her story seem to have described it in ways that she was comfortable with. Even in the one case where she felt things went seriously off course, it appeared that the writers had done a good job in the initial draft she’d seen, suggesting problems arose later in the process.
In other words, editors and marketing experts are shaping the reporting in ways that mislead readers.
Incompetence and willful misrepresentation in the media, especially regarding science, are an important issue. As a society we are utterly dependent on science and on the public’s understanding of it. We routinely make personal decisions about what to buy and what activities to engage in based on science reported in the media.
We cannot afford a media that distorts science in order to sell newspapers.
Friday Food Blogging April 17, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: cuisine, Vancouver
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The weather was dreary and chilly. The cityscape is so new it seems to have little sense of its history. The nearby ski resort—host of the 2010 Winter Olympics—appears to have been designed by the Disney Corporation.
But I fell in love with Vancouver because of its food.
Maybe it was the public market that makes Whole Foods look like a 7-11.
Maybe it was the soft-shell crab wrapped in a delicate tempura at the neighborhood sushi bar; or the crisp, elegant veal tongue in a wine and bone-marrow reduction at Cibo Trattoria; or the Kobe beef and Bok Choy at Kingyo. Perhaps it was the surprisingly good local Chardonnay at Seasons.
The city is built around satisfying the palate.
It is worth the trip even coming from food friendly San Diego.
Oh. And the conference I attended was good too.
Tea Party Wrap Up April 16, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: liberalism, Obama, taxes, tea party
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It has been fun watching the teabaggers babbling incoherently about the commiefascist slave-master Obama.
But let’s get back to the facts. From economist Robert Reich:
- The tax rates in the U.S. are the lowest of all developed nations.
- The wealthy are not overtaxed. They pay more taxes than the rest of us because they have vastly higher incomes. In the 1950’s the marginal tax rate for the highest incomes was 91%. Today it is about 38%. Over the past 30 years, the after-tax earnings of highest income brackets rose more than 150%; the after tax earnings of families in the middle rose about 10%.
- Property, social security, and sales taxes take a far bigger bite out of lower income people than high income people.
- Obama’s tax proposals will cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, by about $400 per person a year. Only the top 2% will have a very modest tax increase.
- Government debt need not cause taxes to dramatically rise in the future. What matters is not total debt but the ratio of government debt to GDP. Reducing debt requires returning to growth.
If the Obama Administration had done what the “teabaggers” apparently want him to do—no bailout, spending freeze, and tax cuts for the wealthy—we would have millions of additional unemployed Americans, more cutbacks in government services, a longer recession, and larger budget deficits.
So why are there tax protests?
The so called “tea parties” were not a grassroots movement. The main impetus behind these protests was provided by Fox News and an organization called FreedomWorks led by former House Majority leader Dick Armey.
Our corporate masters are now hard at work keeping low-information voters focused on the big, bad “guvmint” hoping we won’t notice that they laid a big, fat egg and blocking any reform that helps average citizens.
Apparently, it’s not working. People are relatively satisfied with their income tax level—about 48% believe the amount they pay is “just about right,” and 61% regard the amount of tax they pay as fair.
Torture Doctors Don’t Care April 15, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, ethics of care.Tags: Ethics, ethics of care, ICRC, Philosophy, Red Cross, torture
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A leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concludes that medical personnel were involved in torturing terrorist suspects held overseas by the CIA, according to reports in the New York Times. The article highlights the fact that the medical personnel were violating codes of medical ethics.
Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”
This suggests that there is something especially egregious about medical personnel being involved. Torture is bad, but it is even worse when medics participate.
Dominic Wilkinson at Practical Ethics asks why:
But would it really make it better if the assistants were soldiers or CIA officers who had received some medical training? What if they were scientists or vets?
He goes on to argue:
Sometimes we hold doctors to higher standards than the rest of the community. We may, for example, feel particularly aggrieved if a doctor gossips about our health to another patient, but not be concerned (or as concerned) if this is done by our hairdresser. But the moral requirement not to torture or to assist in torture is not of this nature. It is something that should have equal force on a doctor or a CIA officer, a hairdresser or a vet…But the reason that it is wrong for doctors or other health professionals to assist in torture is because it is torture – not because they are doctors.
I am not convinced that the wrongness of the action is unaffected by the fact it is committed by medical professionals. And I think the ethics of care explains why.
We expect medical professionals to be at least in part motivated by care. Doctoring or nursing is a helping profession in which having the motive to help others is essential to being successful.
Medical professionals who assist with torture not only violate their medical code of ethics. They also are acting on a motive which is diabolical when it moves a medical professional, thereby amplifying the wrongness of their actions.
CIA officers (or hairdressers) need not have any special caring motive. Thus, although they violate a code of ethics by torturing prisoners, their motives are not in substantial conflict with the motives required to do their job.
Of course, all human beings ought to be motivated to some degree by care (on my view of an ethic of care). The act of torture by anyone (in most circumstances) is wrong because it (usually) lacks a caring motive. But for persons who are not medical professionals, that wrongness is not amplified by a motive utterly out of line with professional requirements.
There is more on torture of a different sort at Reviving the Left.
Some Thoughts on Evolution and Intelligent Design April 14, 2009
Posted by iduckles in Culture, Philosophy, Science.Tags: Evolution, Intelligent Design
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In the “debate” between proponents of the theory of evolution and the proponents of intelligent design (ID) I have always had difficulty understanding why the major attacks on the theory of evolution come from religious individuals. That is, why is it that religious individuals see such a conflict between religion and evolution? The short answer is these individuals perceive an incompatibility between the God of Abraham and evolution, an incompatibility that does not exist (so they seem to think) between belief in the Abrahamic God and Intelligent Design. In what follow, I will argue that just the opposite is true and that a commitment to the theory of evolution is more compatible with a belief in God than ID.
First, what are the major characteristics of the God of Abraham? Following the mainstream tradition, this God is omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and eternal. Though seemingly simple, these are notoriously difficult concepts to actually articulate in a coherent and consistent manner. I claim no expertise in theology, but I find Anselm’s analysis of these issues in the Proslogion to be quite illuminating. In section 7 Anselm discusses God’s omnipotence and concludes, “Therefore, O Lord, our God, the more truly are you omnipotent, since you are capable of nothing through impotence, and nothing has power against you.” In section 13 Anselm discusses God’s eternality and concludes, “But everything that is in any way bounded by place or time is less than that which no law of place or time limits. Since, then, nothing is greater than you, no place or time contains you; but you are everywhere and always.” Again, I claim no deep insight into the nature of religion, but it would appear that if one does not believe at least these characteristics of God, one does not believe in the Abrahamic God but in something else.
So, let’s take this conception of the Abrahamic God and see how it relates to evolution and ID. ID is, very simply, the view that at certain points in the history of the universe, after its creation, some intelligent agent intervened to create new species or to modify existing creatures in various ways. The theory suggests that there are certain structures in nature that could not have come into existence without direct intervention in the universe by God (In reading some of the material on ID, it is difficult to ascertain when in the history of the universe this intervention is supposed to have occurred. The Discovery Institute website seems to suggest that at least some of this intervention by the intelligent designer occurs after the creation of the universe. In particular, it appears that ID proponents believe the designer was active during the Cambrian “explosion” 530 million years ago.) By contrast, the theory of evolution argues (and demonstrates and proves in the scientific sense) that everything that exists can be accounted for entirely by natural processes. At this point it is worth noting that the evolutionist (like any good scientist) does not claim that the theory can currently account for everything we observe in nature. There are many open and unanswered questions within the theory of evolution and it is these open and unanswered questions that drive the theory forward and which has led it to develop and, yes, evolve over time. Nevertheless, the evolutionist operates under the assumption that every question about the natural world is, in principle, answerable without resorting to supernatural means.
Now, to my final point. Which theory is more consistent with the Abrahamic God as described above? A theory which holds that God has to constantly intervene into the natural world to make adjustments to how species develop or a theory which holds that God is able to create the world in such a way that it develops in exactly the way He wants without requiring further interference? Or analogously, who is the better watchmaker? The one who makes a watch that requires constant tinkering and intervention by the watchmaker to tell the correct time, or the one who makes a watch that tells perfect time without any external interference or tinkering? For both questions it seems like the second option is the better answer. If God really is omniscient and omnipotent, wouldn’t he know how to create the world such that it would develop in exactly the fashion he wants without any external interference? Similarly, if God had to enter into time to make adjustments to the development of the universe wouldn’t this imply that he is not, as Anselm argues such that, “no place or time contains you?” If God had to enter into time to make adjustments to the natural order, this would seem to suggest that he is limited and bound by time. In either case, it seems clear that a God who uses evolution to achieve his ends is a more powerful, more omniscient and more clearly eternal God than one who only has recourse to the methods of Intelligent Design. For this reason it seems that anyone who truly is committed to a belief in the God of Abraham should be a proponent of evolution rather than an opponent.
