Current Reading

Unfortunately, I don’t really have too many interesting new thoughts these days. Instead, I am reading a bunch of stuff hopefully to inspire some thoughts. Here it is:

• Just finished The Legalization of Drugs (For and Against) by Husak and de Marneffe. The position I generally do not favor was actually very strong, making for an even match between the two authors. (Might get into this in a separate post later).
• I’m two thirds of the way through The Moral Problem by Michael Smith. The first chapters of the book are a great critical introduction to metaethics. I would recommend it to anyone simply in that regard. Hopefully, Smith’s positive view doesn’t disappoint in the two chapters remaining.
• Philosophy of Education by Nel Noddings is one of the texts for a course I’m taking this semester, Philosophical Foundations of Education. It’s actually offered within the school of education and so I’m the only philosophy student in the class. This makes for an interesting mix of opinions and perspectives when we have class discussions. Philosophical issues surrounding education, especially moral education/character education, have quickly become my main interest over the past few months. In this vein, I am also reading Thomas Lickona’s seminal Educating for Character and browsing various other books concerning both practical and theoretical aspects of character education.
• I had wanted to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins for quite some time, and I recently found out that he is coming to ASU in two weeks to give a lecture. So, I decided to get through it before then. Might start this weekend.
• I have been quite taken with the first few chapters of Moral Understandings by Margaret Urban Walker. Although decidedly “feminist” in content, I find the tone and methods of this text serious and comprehensible even within the “analytic” tradition of philosophy. I’m looking forward to reading more of Dr. Walker’s work, especially Moral Repair.
• This doesn’t quite count as reading in the same way as the others, but lately I have been quite attached to my Cresswell and Hughes book, A New Introduction to Modal Logic. Someone remind me how fun and useful modal logic can be??

After I’ve gotten through some more reading and allowed it all to percolate a bit, I plan to begin blogging with some regularity for the purpose of preventing myself from falling into a kind of academic rut.

Ron Paul

So, Ron Paul’s campaign has finally drawn enough supporters and attention that I finally browsed around his website to see what the commotion is about. One thing in particular struck me as a bit odd. Ron Paul is pro-life, but believes that we ought not legislate social issues and therefore matters of abortion are best left up to the states. If this were the case, it seems overwhelmingly likely that some jurisdictions would continue allowing abortion and some would not. For people who live in abortion-free areas but who wish to have an abortion, doesn’t this mean less freedom, not more? If abortions in general are at all permissible (constitutionally, morally, etc. ), everyone should have an equal opportunity to have one performed. Objectors have the freedom not to choose abortion, and everyone else has the freedom to choose abortion if necessary. I agree with Ron Paul that allowing localities to self-govern on many issues is highly beneficial, especially in regards to education. “One size fits all” education spending packages seem to work for no one instead of everyone. And Ron Paul is right that this is the spirit of federalism. But we also have that pesky little Bill of Rights and, should abortion be somehow construed as protected by it (penumbra of privacy, perhaps?) then it cannot be left to the states.

One other thing - Ron Paul says there shouldn’t be taxes on tips going to workers in the service industry: ” When you give someone a tip, you should not have to simultaneously tip the federal government.” Cute line, R.P. This stuck me as a bit odd, too. Paul has at least one valid point - maybe we should change the tax system so that service workers are taxed on actual - rather than estimated or average - tip amounts. That way, they are only taxed on income that actually, well, came in. However, at least in states where servers make a ridiculously low hourly wage, not levying taxes on tips amounts to ignoring the bulk of a worker’s income for tax purposes, and this is unfair to people in non-service jobs. Ron mentions that many servers are students or parents, and that’s why we should cut them some slack. But many students and parents work in a variety of industries, and they will be taxed on their hourly wages in full. For instance, I believe that servers in Georgia made something like $2 per hour, and let’s say fast food workers make about $7 per hour. Single parent A, a waitress, is good at her job and grosses $10 per hour ($2.13 base + $7.87 tips). Single parent B, a cashier in a fast food restaurant, is just as good at her job, but grosses $7 per hour. Single parent A pays taxes on $2.13 per hour while single parent B pays taxes on $7 per hour, even though A has a much higher total income than B. Ron Paul has got the right idea here, but not taxing tips is the wrong way of alleviating the problem. Because minimum wage requirements are waived for some service industry jobs, the tips therein do amount to wages and ought to be eligible for taxation. Tax breaks with equitable eligibility requirements are a much better idea if we want to get serious about making life easier for the working poor.

Moral Education

I have recently stumbled across a new interest: moral education. Fascinating yet life-relevant material, it is.

In the 1970-80s, most moral education in public schools was process-oriented, rather than directive. Children were encouraged to figure out moral issues for themselves, and teachers facilitated critical thinking rather than dictating the “right” answer. Also popular was the “self-esteem” curriculum, wherein students were encouraged to think highly of themselves quite apart of any hard work or achievement on their part. This strategy doesn’t seem to have worked any wonders in terms of improving the behavior of young people. There is some psychological evidence suggesting that it has actually encouraged inflated self-image or even narcissism, while increasing unhappiness due to the discrepancy between expectations/entitlement and reality.

In my limited research, the backlash seems to be fiercely Aristotelian. The tripartite model of moral knowledge/moral feeling/moral action is taking hold. Teachers have been returned to their role of imparting specific directives regarding moral issues. Some pedagogues are proclaiming that the question as to whose values we ought to teach has been solved - we teach classic pro-social values, duh, and that is that.

I have reservations about the return of virtue education. The tripartite model does not seem psychologically realistic. Viewing virtue as the mean between two extremes is highly simplistic and not obviously action-guiding in the way some take it to be. At least some of the motivation for a return to Aristotelian virtue seems to come from Christian educators who see it as a neat way of repackaging Christian values within a secular exterior. And, in my humble opinion, the question of whose values we ought to teach has never been more pressing or serious than in our liberal, multicultural, globalized community.

These are issues worth investigating. I plan to investigate them. Stay tuned!

Is there U.S.-funded torture training?

On Tuesday night, I attended a presentation and lecture here at Arizona State conducted by a few students and a guest, Carlos Mauricio. This was the description of the event:

Carlos Mauricio was a professor at the University of El Salvador in 1983, when he was kidnapped from his classroom, forced into an unmarked van, and tortured at National Police headquarters. Two decades later, Mauricio and two others convinced a U.S. jury that former Salvadoran Ministers of Defense were responsible for their detention and torture. This lawsuit is one of the first in U.S. history in which military commanders were found guilty for the abuses of their subordinates. The significance of this victory cannot be overstated at a moment when human rights advocates are struggling to establish responsibility for torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In this talk, Mauricio will recount his experiences in clandestine prison cells in El Salvador, and the parallels between his experience and that of other prisoners, including those tortured in Abu Ghraib. He will discuss the growing popular movement to close the School of the Americas (SOA), the U.S. Army facility that has trained 60,000+ Latin American soldiers in interrogation and counterinsurgency. Graduates of the SOA are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in the hemisphere. Carlos will also share his recent experiences traveling to Burma and witnessing the atrocities committed by the military junta there, and ways to support the Burmese people in their call for justice.

Hearing this story was especially sobering because, as it turns out, the School of the Americas (now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”) is located in my home state of Georgia, where I lived until less than three months ago. It is appalling to think that our tax dollars are being used to bring Latin American paramilitary forces to American soil and then train them to return to their home countries to rape, torture and execute their own countrymen in the name of social control. The facts on this issue seem to check out, and they are really bad.

This presentation caused me to think about torture a bit. It’s pretty easy to imagine scenarios in which it’s hard to deny that torture might be ok, like if a terrorist knows where a bomb is and the bomb can kill a million people and it’s going to detonate in one hour. But the factors that might, might make torture permissible do not even come close to obtaining in sorts of cases like Mr. Mauricio’s. He was a college professor teaching in a classroom and there was no credible information suggesting that posed a threat to anyone at any time. Torture is a tough subject, and many people are hesitant to categorically reject it, for not unreasonable considerations. But it is definitely possible to maintain both that torture is sometimes permissible and that the sorts of human rights offenses committed by graduates of SOA/WHINSEC are totally unacceptable. You can visit the website of School of the Americas Watch for more information.

Lack of Character (I goofed)

[I accidentally deleted this post, so I am re-creating it using copied and pasted text from Google and my email. WHUPS!]

 

I just started reading “Lack of Character” by John Doris this weekend [October 14] . It is very good so far, and will probably turn out to be my favorite text from the moral psych course (Velleman’s “Self to Self” will probably turn out to be my least favorite… glad we’re done with that. Freudian Kantianism is not my style). Interestingly enough, Doris mentions the Kitty Genovese case, which I briefly discussed here not so long ago. Fortunately, Doris uses the questioned data merely in passing, and his thesis does not at all depend on the facts being correct. I hope that something in this book strikes a chord with me, as I am in increasingly dire need of a term paper topic!

Doris’ comment:

Hi! Doris’ thesis does depeend on his rendering of the facts being (more or less) correct.

LoC does have a chapter devoted to leading contemporary theories in personality psych; Trevor’s question is a good one.

Cheers!

[Then I commented, but it is lost forever. Argh.]

Trevor again:

Thanks for the info Pam. In the book, does he mention whether there has ever been any situational research which looks at within-participant differences across multiple tasks? In all of the situational research there is a significant minority who “do the right thing” in the situation (there are people who help the woman pick up her papers even when they didn’t find a dime/ won’t shock past a certain threshhold in the Milgram studies/etc.). Does he mention any research which looks at whether the people who do the right thing in one task also do the right thing in other situational tasks? I’m guessing the answer is that if there is research on this then there isn’t a significant correlation.
[Trevor, I had written you a very long and intelligent reply just before I accidentally deleted the post. I'm now mad at this blog, so I only have it in me to recreate a small part of the reply.]

Trevor - No, I don’t recall any mention of studies of that nature, although I could be forgetting something. If there are/were such studies, I too suspect that the correlations for right behavior between types of tasks would be low. Doris does mention work that seems to show people aren’t, for example, “honest” in general; they may be honest in some way but dishonest in others. Similarly, if those people were tested for, say, altruistic behavior, it seems likely that they would be altruistic in some narrowly-defined respects but not in others.

Although, now that I think about it some more, there was a section on aggregation and how it is supposed to improve correlations. I honestly can’t remember if the aggregation people studied across tasks within individuals, or just correlation between two instances of the same type of task or what. I am confusing myself… I’ll revisit that part of the book & report back.

[Oh, and re Doris comment above - I just meant his thesis doesn't depend on the specific Kitty Genovese facts being correct, as there are lots of other examples which do the job. It does, of course, depend upon facts in general.]

Bystander effect

So, it seems that the Kitty Genovese story might not be entirely correct (CNN article). This case has served for decades as a caricature of the bystander effect. However, it seems that the social psychology textbooks have at very least exaggerated what actually occurred. One contributor to the article suggests that the Genovese legend has caused research psychologists largely to ignore studying the potential positive effects group dynamics might have on providing aid to others.

This is relevant to one ethical issue that has been in my mind lately: does the number of people who are present or able to right a moral wrong diffuse the responsibility of each one to take action? Or is each person somehow fully responsible for taking action, insofar as they are equally capable of doing so? This is particularly crucial in discussions of redistributive justice. Does the failure of some people to contribute to charitable causes increase the burden on those who do make contributions? This is counterintuitive because it seems that those who donate with a good will shouldn’t incur additional obligations in virute of their compliance with moral principles. If the bystander effect is smaller than previously thought, individuals might be less justified in failing to provide aid just because others aren’t doing it. I need to think about this more. Will report back later.

Ok, people - I am back!

Grad school: so far, so good.

• I read “Unprincipled Virtue” by Nomy Arpaly (this) for Moral Psych, and it was good. She presents an interesting quality of the will-based account of moral worth; it has interesting implications for praise & blame.
• I wish I had been exposed to more ancient philosophy in the past, then maybe I’d like it more. In my Jurisprudence course, Plato went pretty slowly. It just doesn’t grab me…. at ALL. Hopefully things will get a little better as we move into the early legal positivists.
• I’m currently reading “The Legalization of Drugs (For and Against)” by Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe (here). I previously had some rather uninformed intuitions regarding drug legalization, but the distinctions drawn in this book have really illuminated the debate. The authors contrast nicely. I look forward to discussing the book with Prof de Marneffe (who is at ASU and for whom I am currently a TA).
• Epistemology is boggling my brain. Stewart Cohen is a really bright guy, and I am glad to be in his class. However, this whole perception debate kind of eludes me. When I read about sense data theory, I agree with it. Then I read about adverbial theory, and decide to agree with that instead. Criticism, support and opinions just don’t present themselves to my mind the way they do when I read ethics stuff. Oh well, yay for fulfilling my M&E requirement!

I will be back to posting with some regularity beginning this week. Thanks for visiting!

Back-to-school madness

Dear readers,

I am currently taking a break from this blog because I’m really busy getting ready to start grad school next week. Please come back later - I’ll be posting again ASAP.

Pam

Breaking the Bottled Water Habit

Today, I did something different at work. Instead of filling my glass from the water cooler, I went for the tap. The water wasn’t very cold and it had a bit of a taste, but I survived. It was my first opportunity to decline bottled water since I decided to give it up last week.

Until I read this article, I hadn’t really ever thought much about bottled water. Sure, it seemed a little wasteful, particularly high-end designer waters in containers that could have come out the Museum of Modern Art. I also knew that many bottled waters were essentially repackaged tap water, with minuscule labels betraying their “municipal source” origins.

Wrongful birth

I saw this article today: “Couple awarded $21 million in Florida ‘wrongful birth’ case“

Daniel and Amara Estrada took their first child to a doctor, who failed to diagnose the boy with a severe genetic disorder. As a result, the Estradas conceived a second child and didn’t have the fetus tested in vitro for genetic abnormalities (if they had known the second child had the genetic disorder, they would have decided to abort the pregnancy). The Estradas successfully sued the doctor and were awarded more than $21 million for the second child’s “wrongful birth,” to cover the medical expenses they will incur over the child’s lifetime.

The concept of “wrongful birth” treads on largely uncharted legal territory, especially in light of the advent of technologies like genetic testing. In this case, I can’t tell whether the Estradas themselves sued for wrongful birth or whether they sued on behalf of their minor child. Shouldn’t the person whose life was “wrongful” be the one who collects damages in a situation like this? The parents could serve as guardians of the fund, using it to pay medical expenses until the child is of legal age. I’m not sure if any “wrongful birth” cases have been settled including such a provision, but I think that’s probably the right thing to do. I’m also wondering about the scope of these sorts of cases. I have in mind the following scenario: a woman is raped and goes to the drugstore for emergency contraception. The pharmacist refuses to give it to her, citing personal moral and/or religious reasons. Because of the delay, the woman becomes pregnant and gives birth. So, can the woman sue the pharmacist for wrongful birth? After all, the pharmacist is a medical professional just like the doctor in the Estradas’ case. Can the woman sue the rapist for wrongful birth? He’s not a medical professional, but he violated the woman’s rights and caused her to have a child that would have otherwise never existed. The courts will surely have to clarify who can be held responsible for “wrongful births,” and when a “wrongful birth” has even occurred. It will, no doubt, be a long and arduous process.