Harry

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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The Spencer Foundation has just announced a small grants program, specifically to encourage philosophers to work on issues in education. The grants are up to $40k and the application process is relatively easy. This is part of a larger long-term Intitiative to help build Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice. (Full disclosure: I’ve been working with the Spencer Foundation over the past couple of years to develop this intitiative, and am, with Mike McPherson, its co-director). One of the things I have noticed during my career is how many people who work in ethics or political philosophy start doing some medical ethics or bioethics, usually after being enticed, or invited, by medical schools to comment on various issues. Although there are numerous fascinating and difficult issues in the institutional world of education, it seems to me that far fewer normative philosophers get pulled into that arena, and the Initiative is an attempt to start to correct that. We’re especially hopeful that good philosophers who are nearing (and reasonably confident of getting), or have just gotten, tenure will explore this opportunity, even if they haven’t previously worked in this area.

One other comment. I kind of fell into working on educational issues, and did so before getting tenure. I probably would have done it anyway, but the strong encouragement of a couple of senior colleagues was a big help in assuring me that by taking up a neglected field I was not doing something that would be disapproved of. I suspect that some younger scholars worry, and usually wrongly, that philosophy of education and applied ethics generally might be frowned upon, so if you are a senior philosopher and have a junior colleague whom you think should take this up, it would be a good idea to tell them about it, approvingly, and directly.

Youtube is where BBC 4 documentaries go to live, I see. Two lovely documentaries: one on John Wyndham , and another on Nigel Kneale; two of the great creators of British science fiction united by their dependence on utterly sensible and reliable heroes (and in Wyndham’s case, heroines — as the documentary points out, the Midwich Cuckoos aside, he often seems to be a proto-feminist), unmarred by self-absorbed hang-ups and disorderly emotional lives. Kneale founded the British tradition of dark but humane television scinece fiction, with 1984, Quatermass, The Year of the Sex Olympics, and The Stone Tape (which scared me witless as a kid, and which I now realise my mother bought a colour television in order to watch). Many Dr. Who stories are just recycled Kneale stories; I have a special affection for the movie Quatermass and the Pit because I watched it on TV the night of my job interview at Madison.

Wyndham is especially hard to get good information on: he’s almost absent even on the web, so it is great to have an insight into his life, even though a bit too much time is spent on the novels and films. One mystery that is not solved is what happened to all his writings prior to The Day of the Triffids. I’ve managed to get hold of just one of the pre-Triffids books, The Secret People, which is derivative and slow-paced, if readable, but nothing like as good as his 50’s and 60’s novels. (Wyndham fans might want to put pressure on my erstwhile colleague Noel Carroll, who once proposed to write a book about Wyndham’s work, which would be lovely to read if only he’d write it).

This should be Kieran’s thread really, since he came up with the concept. But, having made that acknowledgment, I’ll jump in. His first nomination is the truly awful Chasing Amy: I watched 15 minutes before deciding that there was a perfectly good toilet to clean in the other room. henry (not the famous one) proposes You’ve Got Mail, which sounds plausible. But my nomination is more serious: The House of Sand and Fog. I rarely dislike a movie enough to warn people against it, but this is one of the worst, and most unpleasant, movies I’ve watched. (I see that someone has vandalised the wikipedia entry on this one, saying, hilariously, that it and some of its actors were nominated for awards!)

The premise is implausible. A woman has her house taken from her, by mistake, for failure to pay a business tax that she did not genuinely owe. She had 8 months to correct the mistake and did nothing. Now, the only possible explanation in the circumstances is that she was severely depressed. Whatever plausibility that explanation has is undermined by the fact that, on screen, the actress has no sign at all of being, or ever having been, depressed. She seems bratty, to be sure, but not ill. Now, an exiled Iranian general purchases the house at a steal at an auction from the County. He is, unfortunately, played by Ben Kingsley, who seems to be the only actor in the movie who can act, thus unwittingly preventing it from being hilarious (up to the point at which it turns gratuitously nasty). He is also, understandably given his own circumstances, unwilling to give up the house and the bounty that it represents, so a battle of wills ensues, in which Jennifer Connelly is assisted by the most wooden actor I’ve ever seen in a big movie (he makes Arnold, on a bad day, look like Olivier by comparison — Dolph Lundgren territory), a rogue cop who leaves his happy family for a depressed alcoholic (Connelly) – that part of the story seeming plausible only because Connelly is manifestly not a depressed alcoholic, but looks healthy, happy, and well-made up every time she appears onscreen.

Why did I watch to the end? Well, the box promised a surprising ending, and the only morally acceptable ending seemed to me to be one in which the general kept the house and Jennifer Connelly and her beau descended into the pits of daytime TV. Below the fold is a short spoiler that will save you from wasting your time:

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Here’s one of the few bits of parenting advice I offer my students: Do not allow your child to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian until they have seen Spartacus.

Other nominations of films that must not be watched in the wrong order?

Apparently Hugh Laurie has the fourth-worst American accent among British actors in American TV series. I find this a little bit surprising, given the amount of time I spent during the first year of so of House trying to convince various friends that Hugh Laurie is English (in some cases I just gave up). I see that it was a poll of Radio Times readers: I suspect the readers of TV Guide would disagree (most of them probably think that his English accent in Jeeves and Wooster is really something, for an American).

No-one will be surprised to know that I admire Richard Rothstein, especially given how often I seem to parrot his arguments myself. Some readers may be more surprised that I also admire Frederick Hess (of the AEI no less); in fact one of my minor betes noir is the frequency with which NPR, when it wants a right winger to comment on an education policy issue, goes to Heritage or Cato, rather than to the AEI who have someone on staff who is a genuine expert, and smart with it. (If you want to understand why I like him, read Common Sense School Reform, which is typical of his work: lots of well-informed analysis and imaginative critique, peppered with just enough free-market ideology to signal that he’s firmly on the right but not enough to obscure the quality thinking). Both are somewhat skeptical of mainstream school improvement rhetoric, with Rothstein emphasizing out-of-school interventions, and Hess emphasizing the need for reforming school governance and organisational structures. If I had any power at all I’d force all public school officials ranked assistant principal or above, as well as all Education PhD students, to read Rothstein’s Class and Schools and Hess’s Common Sense School Reform. So I’ve always been curious what a Rothstein-Hess debate would be like and, to my delight, now I know: smart, sensible, and bereft of “invented artificial points of disagreement” (as Rothstein puts it). Cato Unbound commissioned Rothstein to write a 25th anniversary comment on A Nation At Risk, and recruited Hess as a critic. The other critics are not so interesting (partly because in order to criticize Rothstein they have to misinterpret him, which his critics frequently do, both from the right and the left). To help you out, the correct order of reading is Rothstein, Hess, Rothstein, Hess, Rothstein, Hess. Cato Unbound is often worth reading, and none more than this one.

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:

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Among the depressing pieces of news from London this week (depressing except for opponents of organised sport, who have, more or less, been guaranteed that the 2012 Olympics will be a lot of fun) — a BNP candidate, Mr Richard Barnbrook, was elected to the Greater London Assembly. So, how should he be treated?

One option is what you might call the Vidal Sassoon treatment. This involves gathering together large numbers of trained killers and street-fighters, physically busting up meetings, and brutalising fascists whenever one bumps into them. In this documentary (still online, and well worth a listen), one member of the 43 Group recalls encountering one of the ideologues of the British Fascists on a bus, holding onto the bars, and kicking him off with the full force of his body. (A TV documentary is on youtube here, here, and here).

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It’s beginning to look as if the voters of London have taken it upon themselves to abolish the post of Mayor land themselves with Boris Johnson. A remarkable move: reject a manifestly competent (if not especially likeable) incumbent, and a manifestly decent challenger (who, in addition to being gay, is related to Hugh Paddick!), for… well, Boris Johnson. (See Martin O’ Neill for invective — I’m too bemused and detached myself). If this comes to pass, I would say that it should be the one positive note of the day for Gordon Brown. Ken Livingstone’s mayoralty was too independent from Labour for them to get any credit for anything he did well; whereas David Cameron has tied his flag to Boris’s mast. The post of Mayor has far too little power really to do London a lot of good, but it has enough to do it a lot of harm, and there’s every chance that a Johnson mayoralty will oblige, and the Tories will suffer. If this comes to pass, Cameron, not Brown, should be disappointed.

The FLDS incident has stirred up plenty of discussion in the blogosphere. Laura got so annoyed in her first thread that she, sensibly, shut it down, and then, equally sensibly, opened up a more general thread about when the government is justified in terminating parental rights. (See also Russell, here and here). I am uneasy about commenting much on the FDLS issue, mainly because I have not been following it as obssessively as I’d have needed to to feel comfortable. But I do have some observations about parental rights. These are partly drawn from my paper with Adam Swift, Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family (pdf, but free, and no registration required, at least as of now), so in what follows the usual Brighouse/Swift rule for anything I say that draws on our work — whatever you agree with credit him, whatever you disagree with blame me — applies (for the final, published, paper, we get joint credit/blame).

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

For our many George Formby fans, the first of a two part bio of George Formbys Sr and Jr. Less mournful than the bio of Kenneth Williams, and more hard-hitting than the one on the SWP (though that’s not saying much!). Here’s George jr, with his greatest hit of all.