Harry

I see that David Benatar’s excellent book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence has just come out in paperback. It’s almost enough to make me regret that I am on sabbatical this coming year. In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I always teach abortion as the first topic, because it gets them to read two of my favourite pieces of applied philosophy, Thomson’s A Defence of Abortion, and Marquis’s Why Abortion is Immoral. I also take a bit of time to discuss conceptual space, and used to use the view that abortion is always obligatory as an example of conceptual space that no-one occupies. Now, however, I include chapter 5 of Benatar’s book (Abortion: the ‘Pro-Death’ View) in the course packet. Benatar is a terse, unfussy, and careful writer: the argument is complicated, but the writing is excellent, and it is an easy, and compelling, read. I was annoyed that it first came out in an expensive hardback which I could not, in good conscience, assign, and feared that it would not sell well enough to be paperbacked. So, now I’ll be happy to assign it.

The opening lines give the basic structure of the argument:

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.

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You might want to check out my colleague Lester Hunt’s excellent new edited collection on Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education, which is just out. It originated in a rather well-thought-out conference Lester organized back in 2004. My own contribution arose because he asked me to comment on Valen Johnson’s talk, based on his book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, and then sneakily inveigled me to contribute a self-standing chapter. The collection is great: genuinely diverse and thoughtful contributions from Clifford Adelman, David T. Beito, Mary Biggs, Richard Kamber, Alfie Kohn, Charles W. Nuckolls, Francis K. Schrag, John D. Wiley and Lester and me. Recommend it to your library, and to your Deans!

In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. Commenting on Johnson’s book, in other words, convinced me that his subtitle is entirely wrong (even though the book is, actually, terrifically good). It’s not the first time that I have changed my mind as the result of writing a paper, but it is the first that I’ve changed it quite so radically.

I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.. Finally, I became more and more irritated with Harvey Mansfield’s piece in the Chronicle. So, below the fold, here’s a taster of the book, adapted from my chapter, and arguing specifically against Mansfield:

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An old schoolfriend told me on the phone the other day that she had just been thinking of me. She had gone with her sons to Stowe to see Roger Hodgson (an old boy) perform Supertramp numbers (Supertramp were big when we were at secondary school together, which ages us both, I guess), and her thought was “Harry would hate this”. What a coincidence – my 11-year-old is on a year-long (so far) 70’s rock jag, and plays a lot of Supertramp (and Led Zeppelin – I knew things were getting bad when she told me not to tune away from the local classics station playing Immigrant Song because it’s one of her favourites). I like Supertramp, enough that I’ve bought this anthology for my daughter on my friend’s recommendation, and I didn’t even dislike them at the time. Despite everything.

So Laura made a mistake when she tagged me for the “what five songs in my iTunes are my guiltiest pleasures” meme. Unlike Laura, I do have an ipod, because my wife insisted, believing it would break me of my habit of taping radio shows and listening on my walkman. It didn’t, but I do, now, listen to more music. I don’t, though, have any guilty musical pleasures: I just don’t feel guilty about what I like. I used to feel vaguely embarrassed about slightly liking Steely Dan, but eventually decided this was ridiculous, and have since discovered that they are pretty good. I am still embarrassed that I used to think I liked John more than Paul, even though in fact I liked Paul more than John, but that’s a matter of not having had adequate self-knowledge. I know its uncool to like Cliff – him being a Christian and everything – but I suspect that in my generation at least the disdain for him is substantially motivated by envy that he still looks younger than most of us. Deep Purple? My unlikely schoolfriend Jon Corcoran foisted them on me (along with Ian Gillan Band, and Jesus Christ Superstar), and I can’t hear them without thinking of him, which is a great, but not guilty, pleasure.

What itune pleasures would I feel guilty about if I felt guilty? All but one of the following are on my itunes; the missing one will go on as soon as I get round to it, I just hadn’t thought of it till now:

1. Cliff Richard, Carrie (and just about everything else Cliff has done, apart from that Millennium Prayer)
2. Status Quo, Living on an Island
3. Dr. Feelgood, Milk and Alcohol
4. Pilot, Magic (beat that!)
5. Thin Lizzy, Waiting for an Alibi

Tagging: Lindsey, Chris Brooke, and Dina.

I believe that Peter Tatchell is planning to run for the Greens in Oxford East against Andrew Smith at the next election. What he ought to be, of course, is a rather dreary backbencher who held a minor position in Blair’s first and second governments, but quietly resigned in the lead up to the Iraq war. At least, that’s what he’d be if the Labour Party hadn’t decided to make him something else. Jonathan Derbyshire has a very fair and accurate account of Labour’s more minor but nevertheless spectacular own goals of the eighties.

John’s post below reminds me that I haven’t yet noted Margaret Drabble’s well-deserved elevation to Dame of the British Empire. I read The Waterfall in my late teens, just because it was on my parents’ bookshelves, and didn’t like it at all, presumably because I didn’t understand a word of it (my parents’ bookshelves provided a lot of my teen reading, including every single on of Shaw’s plays, and the very weighty Auld report on the William Tyndale affair – I was not very discriminating and even read The Concrete Boot which is, if I remember correctly, truly dreadful). I started reading Drabble’s novels as an adult only after hearing her talk about The Witch of Exmoor on Radio 4 and heard her talk about its foray into political philosophy (I assign chapter 1 in my upper division political philosophy class to be read after we play the original position game). But I liked them so much that I stopped about half way into her ouevre, on the principle that I want to have more available to read for the first time later in my life (the same reason that I stopped reading Trollope and Dostoevsky, and stopped watching the new series of Doctor Who half way through the second season; from which you can tell that have an iron will). Anyway, John’s post reminded me of Lady Drabble’s elevation because she is the author of one of my favourite passages from the whole of literature. It brilliantly the evokes the personality of a middle-aged man whom life has (so far) defeated. It’s on page 11 of The Needle’s Eye which is, I think, my favourite of her books so far. Dour and depressed Simon Camish, enduring an unsuccessful marriage, is about to go to a dinner party hosted by his friends Nick and Diana:

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A short appreciation by Phil Jupitus available for a short time here.

For newcomers, here are renditions of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Life on Mars (beautiful, actually), and, for the many Dick Barton fans out there, the Devil’s Gallop. I can’t find Anarchy in the UK, I’m afraid, you’ll have to see them live for that.

My dad called earlier today to say that he was about to attend, and speak at, the farewell do for my old school, which is about to be closed after being in special measures for a few years. It made me feel a bit sad – I wasn’t there long, and didn’t have an especially enjoyable time, but to know that somewhere you spent formative years is to be no more is a shame. And formative they were.

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They play a great game in the UK every summer (no, not cricket, that’s far more important than a mere game). In May and June 16 and 18 year-olds take externally and anonymously graded exams (A-levels for the 18 year olds, GCSE’s for the 16 year olds), and the results come out later in the summer. In June lots of journalists write about how much easier these exams are than they used to be. (This is an especially appealing hypothesis for those of us who took O-levels before they were abolished in favour of GCSEs, and struggled to get B’s and lower, but who see our friends’ children sailing through with lots of As). When the results come out in August, the same journalists look at whether average results have gone up or down. If they have gone up, this is proof that the exams are getting easier (grade inflation); if they go down this is proof that the students are stupider or the schools are worse. This happens every year, without fail, as if no-one has noticed that it happened last year and the year before. Hence this piece from Minnette Marin.

I’m going to ignore Marin’s curious attacks on my friend John White (curious, because she seems to agree with him pretty much exactly on all the issues, so I don’t understand why she feels the need to be so hostile to him) and focus on the other things she says.

First, grade inflation.

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Sarah Waldeck has some thoughtful responses at Concurring Opinions to some of the comments made in the previous post as well as Larry Solum’s post on her paper.

I was lucky enough to see Martha Nussbaum give a lecture in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, based on her new book Liberty of Conscience: In Defence of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (UK). I confess to having been a bit skeptical prior to the lecture. I always like reading Nussbaum’s work, and she’s a great speaker, but I’m not riveted by the topic, still less by historical investigations in philosophy, and am always put off by having the name of a country in the title (or subtitle) of a work of philosophy. The talk (and now the book) convinced me that I should be more open on all counts. She gave a fascinating account of the thought of Roger Williams, the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, and made a very convincing case that his arguments for freedom of religion anticipate, variously, two of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative, Rawls’s idea of the overlapping consensus, and Locke’s sharp claim (in the Letter) that the magistrate has responsibility for secular matters, but not for care of the soul. “Anticipation” must be the wrong word in at least Locke’s and Rawls’s cases, because she convincingly argued that Locke must have been aware of Williams’s arguments, and, although she did not argue this, it is reasonable to assume that Rawls was too. She also argued that Williams’s theory of religious equality is superior to Locke’s theory of toleration on several grounds, including that it does not depend on Protestant premises, that it is more extensive (Williams, weirdly enough, believed that not only pagans, but even atheists (whom he called “anti-Christians”) could be decent people), and that it is more demanding: his argument does not merely support a stricture against persecution (which Williams termed “soul rape”) as Locke’s does, but a stricture against establishment. All this, and the guy sailed back and forth between England and the colonies, learned numerous languages, including Indian languages, and spent months at a time living with Indians. Finally, in the book, she makes a strong case for that Williams’s principle of religious equality is not parochial, but has a great deal to say to other democratic cultures: it’s been enough to get me to examine (but not necessarily to reject) my casual antidisestablishmentarianism in the UK context. Despite having about a million things to do, I’m now half way through the book which is as good, and as interesting, as the lecture promised. Highly recommended.

Via Larry Solum, an interesting article by Sarah Waldeck on private university endowments in the US. She analyses the data, arguing that it is more informative to look at endowment:expense ratios than absolute endowment sizes (on the ratio ranking, Harvard is #9 and Grinnell #1, whereas on endowment size Harvard is #1 and Grinnell #25). Waldeck points out that taxpayers subsidize these endowments (by giving substantial tax deductions to donors) and suggests that one reason universities benefit from largesse is that they find it easy to absorb large amounts of money and so are attractive to donors. They also, unlike foundations for example, have no obligation to spend the money! She is pretty convincing that there is no good literature defending the accumulation of endowments. But, like Solum, I am a bit skeptical of some of her proposals for taxing and regulating endowments. In particular, in so far as her aim is to lower tuition across the board, that seems a regressive measure: regulating endowments so that they lower tuition ends up reducing the price of an elite education for children of the wealthy (most of these schools already have incredibly low true tuition for children from non-wealthy families). Solum:

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