Crooked Timber

Way back in January I speculated about how Republicans would spin McCain as their candidate, given the violent opposition to him as ‘unconservative’, a maverick liberal. I proposed a few possibilities, of which the first has been more or less borne out: McCain as unconservative is down the memory hole. I think we all pretty much expected that, although it will be interesting to see whether, as McCain is forced to try to swing towards the middle in the general, any of that is dredged back up again. Will he be undermined by his own base? (I doubt it.)

But one thing I’ve noticed, in the months since, is that – in an electoral environment in which Republican stock could hardly be lower, and Democratic stock is looking good – there is a great deal of clutching at the brass ring of ‘conservatism’ on the right. No real urgency to claim the mantle of ‘liberalism’ on the left. Republicans are sure they want to be ‘conservative’, above all, even though many admit they aren’t sure what that would even mean at present. And even though they are standing behind a candidate who was, until recently, not a conservative, in their eyes. They have a meta-desire for there to be such a thing as conservatism. Continue reading “Prediction Markets in Republican Spin, continued and branched out from”

Cato Unbound is currently carrying an interesting contribution from Leif Wenar on how to combat the “resource curse”. Leif proposes a two-stage strategy for attacking the problem of kleptocrats who use the state monopoly of violence to extract resource revenues whilst their population lives in poverty. The first step is to prosecute (in American, and presumably also European courts) traders in goods stolen from peoples by their rulers. The second step is to go after stolen natural resources that get incorporated into manufactured goods elsewhere (say in China) and then imported into the US. Here Wenar advocates a tariff on those goods, the proceeds of which would be paid into a fund to be held for the benefit of the people whose resources have been stolen, with the fund to be disbursed to them when their government meets minimally acceptable standards.

Continue reading “Leif Wenar and the resource curse: a Frankenstein proposal?”

Leiter has linked already , but I guess that not everyone who reads CT also reads Leiter, and it would be a great pity if anyone were to miss Raymond Geuss’s reminiscences of Richard Rorty .

The BBC has a feature on my friend, the philosopher Havi Carel, and the way in which philosophy has helped her come to terms with the diagnosis of an incurable disease. Havi has a book Illness (US, UK) forthcoming in September, in which she draws on her own experience and tries to give a philosophical account of the meaning and significance of illness.

Dina has kindly posted a draft of a chapter that I wrote that is forthcoming in a volume on Philosophy in Schools. I wrote most of it a long time ago, when I was working at the Institute of Education, and involved in developing the Citizenship Education program there. Conversations with teachers, teacher educators, and researchers confirmed that a lot of teachers who would be leaned on to teach Citizenship Education lack the necessary confidence and resources to teach about controversial moral issues in a non-dogmatic way. This is not a criticism—it is what I heard from them, directly. It seemed to me that the experience of college-level philosophy teachers especially of service courses (such as my Contemporary Moral Issues course) might be useful for teachers to reflect on. What especially struck me at the time was that teachers did not have a lot of written material to read, either to prompt discussion in class or to help them prepare for managing such discussion. So the chapter linked to basically outlines the way that I tend to introduce my CMI course, and outlines a way of thinking about the values at stake in various debates, but then, at the end, gives very short (1500 words or so) accounts of some of the moral debates around two issues in bioethics—abortion, and designing children. I’ve copied the “designing children” section below the fold, but encourage teachers to read the whole thing.

A comment Dina made to me in an email—that she was preparing to use a thought experiment from my book Justice in class—prompted me to think it might be useful to collect a bunch of such precis in a single place, readily available on the web for any teacher who wanted to use them. I don’t mean to be prescriptive (though the chapter probably sounds that way)—I realise that the way I go about teaching these issues will work for some people, not for others—but it seems to me that if a teacher has an analytic turn of mind resources like these might be helpful. If I make any headway on developing such a resource I’ll let you know. Anyway, here’s the bit on designing children:

Continue reading “Teaching Controversial Issues to High Schoolers”

Many of his friends. colleagues and former students were present at a wonderful performance from Jerry Cohen (G.A. Cohen) yesterday. Jerry is retiring as Chichele Professor and gave his valedictory lecture. Here Jerry recreates Isaiah Berlin explaining the influence of the altogether neglected Samuel von Pooped on the totally forgotten Herman von Supine.

I gave a couple of lectures on Hobbes last week, having volunteered a long time ago when doing so seemed like a breeze, then remembering rather late in the day that I hadn’t taught Hobbes for a while. Anyway, it all seemed to go pretty well but then a smart first-year student asked me a question that I’ve been puzzling about ever since. No doubt real Hobbes scholars have the answer all sorted (and if so, please tell me) but I wasn’t quite sure what to say. The problem is below the fold.

Continue reading “Puzzling about Hobbes and obligation”

Simon Blackburn is clearly doing his best to give philosophers a bad name through his own “popular” writings, but his latest effort —part of “a series in which academics range beyond their area of expertise”—is spectacularly awful. Norman Geras, with whom I often disagree, takes issue with him in a series of posts here . My own hackles weren’t especially raised—I was just in “yeah, whatever” mode—until I got to his eighth “myth”, “the myth of equal respect” where Blackburn writes:

The belief that everyone deserves equal respect and that anything else is discriminatory and elitist. The truth is the exact opposite: discrimination is a virtuous activity and elites are to be admired. The very few human beings who are good at anything [emphasis added], whether football or playing the violin or writing or painting, form an elite and deserve respect for their excellence. Other people either deserve sympathy for trying and failing, or should be ignored if they have not even tried.

Aside from the obvious fact (which Geras points out) that the claim that everyone deserves respect in the rights and human dignity sense doesn’t entail the hostility to discriminations of achievement that Blackburn claims, his statement that “very few human beings … are good at anything” is simply crap.

Many many human beings are talented cooks or gardeners, accomplished dancers, considerate colleagues, good mothers or good fathers. Many many human beings are empathetic, or courageous, or patient. And no, I don’t think those who are (for example) rated good cooks by those they know and cook for “deserve our sympathy” for failing to be Escoffier, nor should they be ignored for not even trying to be Escoffier. Blackburn, on the other hand, probably ought to have our sympathy: not for trying and failing to make it to the level of, say, David Hume, but for falling victim to the delusion that the less that superb doesn’t amount to good. What a failure he must imagine himself to be!

During this week’s guest stint I’ve managed to touch on Palestine-Israel, the New Deal, and Michel Foucault. Steering clear of the real killer tripwires—i.e., sex roles, the Democratic primaries, or emacs/vi—that leaves a final frontier of Internet mischief….

On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)¹

This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.

One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
Continue reading “Godwin this.”

Apparently. Not the CP, I’m afraid. Just a CP.

I am responsible for the Ayn Rand/charity beat at Crooked Timber and here’s another story on the subject. This really doesn’t look like it’s going to end up well. A large charitable foundation attached to a bank has given the University of North Carolina Charlotte, among others a donation in return for making “Atlas Shrugged” compulsory reading. Most tragic rationalisation:

BB&T donated $500,000 last year to Johnson C. Smith University to help endow a professorship on capitalism and free markets, with lessons including “Atlas Shrugged.’’ It’s the fourth endowed chair at the historically black college in Charlotte.

“I don’t believe I have to advocate that people accept Ayn Rand’s philosophy,’’ said Patricia Roberson-Saunders, who holds the chair. Roberson-Saunders, who will present Rand with other texts, said students will benefit from reading about a world view held by “people with whom they will have to work and for whom they will have to work.’’

Continue reading “I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and Jesus.”

Jeremy Waldron has a great piece in the latest LRB reviewing a recent book by Cass Sunstein. He has a nice discussion of the Cheney doctrine that even a one-percent probability of a catastrophic event should be treated as a certainty for policy purposes, where the class of catastrophic events is limited to those with a military, security or terrorist dimension. Reasoning like this interacts neatly with “ticking-bomb” scenarios: now a 1 per cent chance that the there’s a ticking bomb the terrorist knows about is sufficient in to justify waterboarding or worse. Of course other potentially catastrophic developments—such as climate change—haven’t generated a “treat as if certain” policy response from the US government, even thought even the most determined denialists must evaluate the probability that anthropogenic global warming is happening at greater than one in a hundred.

Waldron is also pretty acid about Sunstein’s treatment of global warming and distributive justice, noting some of the shortcomings of the idea that poor people’s lives should be valued according to what they’re prepared to pay to avoid the risk of death. But read the whole thing, as they say.