Harry

What a relief. December 1st show here.

Via Lindsey, I see that Christianity Today has an interesting interview with Philip Pullman; the extended interview is at Peter Chattaway’s blog here. Well worth reading. My favourite quote is the same as Lindsey’s (no doubt because I can identify with it pretty well, and it helps explain why I liked HDM so much; though my atheism is more of the low-CofE-veering-on-Methodism kind):

My answer to that would be that I was brought up in the Church of England, and whereas I’m an atheist, I’m certainly a Church of England atheist, and for the matter of that a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist. The Church of England is so deeply embedded in my personality and my way of thinking that to remove it would take a surgical operation so radical that I would probably not survive it.

Until Brian’s posts about cloning, I hadn’t thought much about the various technologies available for choosing how children will turn out, and insofar as I had my instincts were conservative, but my assumptions libertarian. That is, my own reaction to such technologies was that they should not be used, but I didn’t have any real reasons for thinking that, so I assumed that some general presumption in favour of liberty decided in favour of permitting them. My views have changed, or perhaps just solidified, since then, to a point that I am comfortably perfectionist in Raz’s sense and conservative in Cohen’s sense, and by the time I read The Case Against Perfection (UK) I was already predisposed to agree with Michael Sandel’s skepticism. I’ve now used the book in a couple of classes, and it works brilliantly with students; Sandel can be a terrific writer, as he is here, and he covers a lot of ground accessibly. There’s even a chapter offering a theory of the value of sport which may or may not be correct but explains, to my satisfaction, why I find 20-20 so dreary. (This last thing is a bit difficult to explain to students without a 2-hour session explaining how cricket works, lucky things).

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G.A. Cohen’s paper, A Truth in Conservatism: rescuing conservatism from the conservatives, is well worth a read, both for the substance and the humour. I heartily endorse the basic message of the paper, and recommend it to you for Thanksgiving table discussion (I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t made the tabloids actually: “Marxist philosopher endorses conservatism without abandoning socialism”). But there is one thing he says, as a preliminary, that I partly disagree with (pp 4-5):

Please do not expect me to say to what extent our practice should honour the truth I hope to expose, in comparison with other truths the honouring of which may sometimes conflict with honouring this particular conservative truth. Philosophers like me are not primarily, as philosophers, interested in what should be done in practice, all things considered. We are interested, instead, in what distinct things are worth considering. We care more about what ingredients should go into the cake than about the proportions in which they are to be combined.

Cohen is right that, qua philosophers, we are not concerned with what is what should be done in practice all things considered. People concerned with that must draw on philosophical claims, but must draw also on much that philosophy cannot supply. But I think he’s wrong that we are not concerned with the “proportions in which [relevant value considerations] are to be combined”. Surely it is a philosophical question how valuable one value is relative to another both in the abstract and in contingent circumstances — this is exactly the kind of philosophical result on which agents will want to draw when determining how to act.

Pajamas Media is hosting a debate between Laura at 11D and Megan McArdle on school vouchers. Laura is first up, and might welcome some friendly faces.

I’m teaching a course for freshmen this semester called “Childhood and the Family” covering topics such as children’s rights, parents rights, equality of opportunity, and the justifications of marriage. I’m planning to show movies a couple of evenings for them to watch as a kind of community building activity (the administration clearly wants us to use these small courses for this purpose, and I have a budget to provide food). But what movies to show? You can help. Here are the constraints: the suggestions should be about family life in some interesting way, not too slow-moving (I ruled Etre et Avoir on that ground, even though it is otherwise fantastic), readily available on DVD, and should have quite limited amounts of sex and violence (none, ideally; this is partly because I would like to bring my kids, and partly because I don’t want the students to be embarrassed watching the film with me, or vice versa).

A long strand about the hypocrisy of parents who use school-quality considerations when buying a house opposing vouchers has annoyed Megan McArdle. (Laura replies here). I don’t entirely understand why. In the thread Megan is so incensed by, both voucher opponents and voucher supporters seemed to be arguing in good faith and with good humor. Laura is a bit mischievous, to be sure, but her readers expect that, and there’s nothing on the thread that justifies Megan’s tone.

Before elaborating, here’s a plug for my friend Adam Swift’s excellent book How Not to be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed which treats this topic in great detail and should be much more widely read (Swift is interested in the parents who use private schools while believing that private schools should be prohibited, but the structure of thinking of voucher opponent who uses school quality considerations in house buying is very much the same, I think).

Are people who buy houses on school-quality grounds necessarily hypocritical if they also oppose vouchers?

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Tintin is apparently set to appear in a movie at some time in the unspecified future. I’m indifferent to this myself — the black and white cartoon from the 60’s was good enough for me, and the BBC radio drama adaptations are unsurpassable. But it should not be a matter of indifference to school librarians, for whom it is will create some major headaches.

Why? Tintin will suddenly be popular in America, and there’ll be lots of enthusiasm about the books. Librarians will buy them in job lots, without looking at them carefully, and will be especially attracted by the title Tintin in America. When it arrives, they’ll see the cover, and have to figure out what to do.

Now, having got into trouble myself for giving Tintin books to the child of right-wing Republican gun-toting conservatives, who accused me of being politically incorrect (me? I ask you), I’m aware both that I have a tin-ear with respect to certain cultural values, and that a cover like this might cause offense across the board.

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The News Quiz tribute to Alan Coren will be here for the rest of this week. That unpleasant (and unfair) joke about the Beatles dying in the wrong order rears its head with respect to former editors of humourous magazines.

Telegraph obituary here. No consolation at all, but if, despite my unbelief, there’s a heaven and hell, I just hope he and Linda Smith got to the same place.

UPDATE: a delicious memoir from Michael Bywater here. From it here is Coren on adultery:

“I would never have an affair,” he said, “because I wouldn’t want my children to have for their mother the sort of woman who would be married to a man who would cheat on her.”

From the improbable Kansas Cricket Association, here is a remarkable 4 minute explanation of the British Empire’s world’s greatest sport. (My Contemporary Moral Issues students might want to note that there will not be a question about this video on the midterm).

I’m absurdly pleased to see that Polish translation of my book Justice is now available (in Poland, that is). Of all the languages I would want my work to be translated into, Polish tops the list (Welsh is a close second). Half the kids in the school where I took my “O”-level got an extra “O”-level in Polish for free (because it was their home language) and that’s always made it seem exciting and important.

But I can’t speak or read a word of it. So there are two requests. Is this an excerpt? It looks like one to me, but I have no way of being sure. And, from the picture, it looks as if Zygmunt Bauman has provided an endorsement on the cover. That seems extremely unlikely; can anyone enlighten me?

I’d never noticed. Larry Solum has a long passage explaining why they are. Worth reading in full. Me, I’m never scruffy any more, because I always wear a tie to work (because of something James Tooley once said, and Geoff Whitty donating the first tie). And, as everyone knows, its impossible to be scruffy wearing a tie.

About a month before their wedding my friends told me they have a region-free DVD player, so I lent them Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? I hope they understood that it was not an attempt to get the wedding cancelled, but rather an expression of confidence that they were doing the right thing. It is hard for me to believe that my parents allowed me to see Whatever Happened when it was first on TV, but they did, and it provided a vision of adult life and, eventually, marriage, that only dissipated when I finally decided to marry myself. The writing and acting are both pitch-perfect in the first series, which narrates the lead up to Bob and Thelma’s wedding. Bob is torn between Thelma, his upwardly gazing (but not necessarily upwardly-mobile) fiancee, and Terry, his laddish, feckless and determinedly working-class (apart from the working bit) childhood friend.

Two things that struck me watching it again, recently, were confirmed by the one member of the couple who watched it religiously (and didn’t, I should add, call off the wedding, which was absolutely lovely!)

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