Monthly Archives: January 2009

Michael Huemer

I have been a moral realist for as long as I can remember. I think the reason is roughly this: it seems to me that certain things, such as pain and suffering to take the clearest example, are bad. I don’t think I’m just making that up, and I don’t think that is just an arbitrary personal preference of mine. If I put my finger in a flame, I have a certain experience, and I can directly see something about it (about the experience) that is bad. Furthermore, if it is bad when I experience pain, it seems that it must also be bad when someone else experiences pain. Therefore, I should not inflict such pain on others, any more than they should inflict it on me. So there is at least one example of a rational moral principle.

Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2005, p. 250

John Gray

Pre-Christian philosophers such as the Epicureans speculated about free will. But it only became a central issue in western philosophy with the rise of Christianity and has never been prominent in non-western philosophies that do not separate humans so radically from other animals. When secular thinkers ponder free will and consciousness they nearly always confine themselves to humans, but why assume these attributes are uniquely human? In taking for granted a categorical difference between humans and other animals these rationalists show their view of the world has been formed by faith. The comedy of militant unbelief is in the fact that the humanist creed it embodies is a by-product of Christianity.

John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, London, 2007, p. 266

Michael Lockwood

“[N]o-nonsense” materialism […] is characterized not so much by what it asserts, namely the identity of conscious states and processes with certain physiological states and processes, but by an accompanying failure to appreciate that there is anything philosophically problematic about such an identification.

Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain, and the Quantum: The Compound ‘I’, Oxford, 1989, p. 2

Yew-Kwang Ng

I am against the insistence on the purely ordinal measurability of happiness only. In fact, I am not only certain that I am happier now than when I was 30-something, I am also absolutely sure that I am now at least 3 times happier than then. It is difficult to be sure that my happiness now is exactly 3.5 or 4.3 times my happiness then. However, I am pretty sure that it is more than 3 times.

Yew-Kwang Ng, ‘Happiness Studies: Ways to Improve Comparability and Some Public Policy Implications’, The Economic Record, vol. 84, no. 265 (June, 2008), p. 256

Frank Tipler

[T]he death of Homo sapiens is an evil (beyond the death of the human individuals) only for a limited value system. What is humanly important is the fact that we think and feel, not the particular bodily form which clothes the human personality.

Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York, 1995, p. 218

Peter Singer

It is significant […] that whereas it is easy to find thinkers from different times and places to whom it is intuitively obvious that we have special obligations to those of our own religion, race, or ethnic affiliation, this does not seems so obvious to contemporary ethicists and political theorists. If the strength of intuitions favoring special obligations based on racial and religious affinity is not sufficient grounds for accepting them, then the strength of our intuitions about, say, special obligations based on fellow-citizenship, should also not be sufficient reason for accepting them. Instead, we need another test of whether they should be accepted.

Peter Singer, ‘Outsiders: Our Obligations to those beyond Our Borders’, in Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 13-14

David Schmidtz

Wherever I go, whether my audience consists of local students, congressional staffers, or post-Soviet professors, when I present the TROLLEY case and ask them whether they would switch tracks, most will say, “There has to be another way!” A philosophy professor’s first reaction to this is to say, “Please, stay on topic. I’m trying to illustrate a point here! To see the point, you need to decide what to do when there is no other way.” When I said this to my class of post-Soviet professors, though, they spoke briefly among themselves, then two of them quietly said (as others nodded in agreement), “Yes, we understand. We have heard this before. All our lives we were told the few must be sacrificed for the sake of many. We were told there is no other way. But what we were told was a lie. There was always another way.

David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 175-175

Chris Hardwick

My girlfriend informs me that there’s a black widow nesting in a drainpipe near our garage. I have now been on the GTD program for several days and am a next-action machine. I say out loud to myself in a robot voice, “Processing … dot dot dot …” I head outside, already planning my next action: “Pour water down drain to send spider on river rampage to Jesus.” On the way, however, I discover a dead squirrel. Protocol interrupted. How do you dispose of a dead squirrel?

I return to the house with my bucket of water to ask the Internet. A state of California Web site informs me that I have to call the West Nile Virus Hotline. WTF?! I open a new tab and Google “West Nile deaths human California.” Only one this year. Next action: Let air out of lungs. Back to west nile.ca.gov. From the photos, I identify the decedent as a Fox squirrel. While scrolling through, I notice that its cousin the Douglas squirrel is adorable! I throw it—the words, not the squirrel—at Wikipedia. Pine squirrel located in the Pacific coastal states. Huh. I jot down “pine squirrel” for use in as-yet-unwritten funny sentence. Back to the ‘pedia. Naturalist John Muir described the Douglas squirrel as “by far the most interesting and influential of the California sciuridae.” … Sciuridae? How has that term managed to elude me for more than three decades? I click the link and learn that it’s a family of large rodents—squirrels, chipmunks, marmots, and, uh, spermophiles. I wonder how you pronounce it. sky-yer-EE-dye? SURE-i-day? Goto: Merriam-Webster Online. Damn—it’s a premium-account word. I’ll have to slum it on Dictionary.com. Aha! sigh-YUR-i-day. I say it aloud several times, nodding with a false sense of accomplishment. The black widow is still alive. The Fox squirrel is still dead. And so are 35 minutes of my life.

Chris Hardwick, ‘Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek’, Wired, vol. 17, no. 1 (January, 2009)

Joseph Epstein

After thirty years teaching in a university, I came to have a certain measured suspicion, sometimes edging onto contempt, for what I called (only to myself) “the good student.” This good student always got the highest grades, because he approached all his classes with a single question in mind: “What does this teacher want?” And once the good student decides, he gives it to him—he delivers the goods. The good student is thus able to deliver very different goods to the feminist teacher at 9:00 am, to the Marxist teacher at 10:00 am, to the conservative teacher at 11:00 am, and just after lunch to the teacher who prides himself on being without any ideology or political tendency whatsoever.

Joseph Epstein, ‘A Literary Education’, The New Criterion, vol. 26, no. 10 (June, 2008), p. 11

Carlos Santiago Nino

[L]a mera gratuidad negativa—el no tener que pagar aranceles—es insuficiente y hasta hipócrita: todos sabemos que el mayor costo de la enseñanza universitaria no está dado por el eventual pago de aranceles, sino por el pago de libros y otros materiales y, principalmente, por el lucro cesante para estudiantes que no tienen medios de vida propios para atender sus gastos de subsistencia y los de su familia durante el período de estudios, que cada vez exigen una concentración más plena e intensa.

La gratuidad debe ser positiva y debe necesariamente incluir becas y otros medios de ayuda efectiva para facilitar una igualdad de condiciones reales en la necesaria dedicación a los estudios. Si tales becas sólo pueden subvecionarse con el pago de aranceles por parte de los estudiantes pudientes, únicamente un prejuicio, fruto del pensamiento “blando” […] puede oponerse a ello.

Carlos Santiago Nino, ‘El discurso blando sobre la Universidad’, Propuesta y control, vol. 12 (July-August, 1990), pp. 130-131

Peter Suber

The infinite has been a perennial source of mathematical and philosophical wonder, in part because of its enormity—anything that large is grand, and provokes awe and contemplation—and in part because of the paradoxes like Galileo’s. Infinity seems impossible to tame intellectually, and to bring within the confines of human understanding. I will argue, however, that Cantor has tamed it. The good news is that Cantor’s mathematics makes infinity clear and consistent but does nothing to reduce the awe-inspiring grandeur of it.

Peter Suber, ‘Infinite Reflections’, St. John’s Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (1998)

C. D. Broad

It appears to me that the best preparation for original work on any philosophic problem is to study the solutions which have been proposed for it by men of genius whose views differ from each other as much as possible. The clash of their opinions may strike a light which will enable us to avoid the mistakes into which they have fallen; and by noticing the strong and weak points of each theory we may discover the direction in which further progress can be made.

C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, London, 1930, pp. 1-2

Keith Stanovich

The lavish attention devoted to intelligence (raising it, praising it, worrying when it is low, etc.) seems wasteful in light of the fact that we choose to virtually ignore another set of mental skills with just as much social consequence—rational thinking mindware and procedures. Popular books tell parents how to raise more intelligent children, educational psychology textbooks discuss the raising of students’ intelligence, and we feel reassured when hearing that a particular disability does not impair intelligence. There is no corresponding concern on the part of parents that their children grow into rational beings, no corresponding concern on the part of schools that their students reason judiciously, and no corresponding recognition that intelligence is useless to a child unable to adapt to the world.

Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, New Haven, 2009, p. 197

Alan Hájek

[T]here is a connection between the supervaluational approach to vague probability […] and Pascal’s own argument. For Pascal was doing something analogous to supervaluating: the conclusion that one should believe that God exists is supposed to come out true for every probability function (except of course the strict atheistic ones that assign zero to God’s existence) It is presumably in the spirit of Pascal to think of these as different sharp probability functions belonging to different people; but we might equally think of them as different precisifications of the vague opinion of a single person. And just as the strict atheistic probability functions pose a problem for Pascal, so too do the strict atheistic precisifications of a vague opinion concerning God.

Alan Hájek, ‘Objecting Vaguely to Pascal’s Wager’, Philosophical Studies, vol. 98, no. 1 (March, 2000), p. 12

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin

[T]he human mind is used to thinking in terms of decades or perhaps generations, not the hundreds of millions of years that is the time frame for life on Earth. Coming to grips with humanity in this context reveals at once our significance in Earth history, and our insignificance. There is a certainty about the future of humanity that cheats our mind’s comprehension: one day our species will be no more.

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind, New York, 1995, p. 224

Ed Mirvish

Parking may be the best business in the world. I can’t think of a better one. You employ one person to simply sit there and take in cash. You provide no service, no goods, no nothing–except expensive space! I know all about it, since I’ve got enough lots of my own—which the city has always insisted I provide. So I know why businessmen love to own them. The lots make lots of money! But, much as I like to make a buck, I hate them.

Today, thank God, you can no longer by law put another street-level parking lot on King Street. But I firmly believe no parking lot should be allowed in any downtown area, period! They add nothing to any city but congestion, exhaust fumes, pollution, and smog.

Parking is a hugely profitable but ugly business.

Ed Mirvish, How to Build an Empire on an Orange Crate; or, 121 Lessons I Never Learned in School, Toronto, 1993, p. 192

Keith Stanovich

[D]eification of intelligence can have a truly perverse moral consequence that we often fail to recognize—the denigration of those low in mental abilities measured in intelligence tests. Such denigration goes back to the very beginnings of psychometrics as an enterprise. Sir Francis Galton would hardly concede that those low in IQ could feel pain: The discriminative facility of idiots is curiously low; they hardly distinguish between heat and cold, and their sense of pain is so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is. In their dull lives, such pain as can be excited in them may literally be accepted with a welcome surprise.
Milder and subtler version so f this denigration continue down to the modern day. In 2004 author Michael D’Antonio published a book titled The State Boys Rebellion about the ill treatment of boys in the Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded and how a group of boys residing at the school rebelled against this treatment. Disturbingly, however, reviews of the book tended to focus on the stories of those boys who later were found to have normal IQs. The The York Times Book Review (June 27, 2004) titled its review “A Ledger of Broken Arms: Misdiagnosis and Abuse at a School for the ‘Feebleminded’ in the 1950s.” We might ask what in the world does “misdiagnosis” have to do with the issue of highlighting the ill treatment in these institutions? The implication here is that somehow it was less tragic for those “properly diagnosed”—whatever that may mean in this context. Shades of Galton, and of the dark side of the deification of intelligence, are revealed in the reactions to this book.

Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, New Haven, 2009, p. 53