Following on his nomination to direct the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins underwent the typical "omg a nomination happened!!1!" media treatment: a brief and pretty disinterested examination of his life, followed by some loud dissent and a little warm support, all apparently designed to make the rest of us care as little as possible now and then forget the whole thing. PZ Myers provides a reasonable summary of the "loud dissent" phase here, but for a more comprehensive summary I would suggest Lisa Miller's take. There is, however, just one quibble I have with Miller, and it has to do with the reason Myers et al find Collins so annoying.
In her article, Miller makes some salient points about Collins's professional history: he has "a stellar résumé" (including, and I did not know this, finding "the gene for cystic fibrosis"); according to some scientists "he is too much of a geneticist and biased in favor of Big Science"; his public commitment to religion may go "to serve [his] own professional ends" as much as to reflect any actual feelings he has on the matter. Okay, all well and good - she manages to keep up the dry indifference and artificial neutrality of opinion that afflicts our media, all while studiously avoiding anything that might upset the status quo. This last bit in particular is what bothers me.
Among the many, many names Miller could've picked to represent Collins's detractors, she went with Steven Pinker and Sam Harris - a fair enough choice, I guess. The thing they share, and probably the major point of agreement among the anti-Collins faction, is that they "say a religious world view is fundamentally incompatible with a rational one." The threat to normality here is pretty clear: in our current cultural narrative, religions aren't fundamentally incompatible with rationality, so if Pinker and Harris are right they represent a threat to that narrative. So Miller, doing her job as a spineless mainstream journalist, replies that "there is no evidence that Collins has ever shied from the pursuit of scientific truth." Trouble is, these are perfectly compatible statements.
When Pinker and Harris (and Myers and whoever else) say that religion and science don't mix, they aren't making a demographic prediction: nobody means to say that "scientific, religious person" is an oxymoron or a logical impossibility. What we skeptics object to is the continuing social pretense that the mere existence of religious scientists (or scientific religionists) somehow indicates that the truth-apt claims made by science don't conflict with the truth-apt claims made by religions. The fundamental level of conflict that Pinker and Harris refer to, then, is pretty obviously not the practical; in practice, people believe and act in all sorts of crazy, incomprehensible ways, and anybody would be a fool to deny this.
Far from countering Pinker and Harris, Miller exemplifies the reason for their irritation (and mine): when you praise someone for their ability to suspend their rationality at will, odds are you'll begin to lose your grip on rationality, too. The error in Miller's reasoning isn't a hard one to avoid, but it sure doesn't help if your first priority is to make things sound palatable rather than to report facts. I hope that Collins himself manages to stay out of this trap, of course, but this kind of thing doesn't exactly make me confident.
So two of you would like to see something about the layout of this blog changed - LIKE WHAT? I cannot know what to change or how to change it unless you BLOODY WELL TELL ME. This, in fact, is the reason that the "yes" option EXPLICITLY INSTRUCTS YOU to tell me.
Maybe you were just waiting for an obvious opportunity? Okay, then: here one is. Suggest away.
Of the many reasons why one might join the voluntary extinction movement, I can think of only one that's simultaneously interesting and not obviously crazy: the theory that reproduction itself is fundamentally morally wrong. Maybe this only attracts me because of its theological implications - if we're morally barred from ever having kids, that pretty much does it for all theistic religions - but, whatever my motivations, it bears looking into. Until I get my hands on a more fully-fleshed-out text (like maybe Better Never To Have Been), I'll have to settle for the account given in the comments to the bioethics article I discussed last week.
Begun in earnest by CM in this remark, the general idea is this: something about having kids is very, very bad in an intractable way. Obviously this clashes somewhat with the conventional wisdom, but in this case the conventional wisdom sucks. Do you, for instance, think that having children will make you happier? Bzzt. Maybe you trust that your memories of happiness accurately reflect the overall goodness of your life? Please. Even if you think the aggregate of humanity possesses value in a way that individual humans don't, you may well be wrong. The trick for CM and others, however, will be to show a negative, not just to undermine the positive that many of the rest of us attribute to human life.
For CM, this happens in two ways, one harm-based and one rights-based; I'll start with the former. Opting for the ever-popular argument from rhetorical questions, CM asks why we should not "prevent all children from experiencing hardships associated with the loss of parents (and all other hardships) by not bringing them into existence in the first place." Choosing to reproduce, CM says, is tantamount to "imposing a lifetime's worth of negative experiences on someone else." And while one might agree that "everybody has negative experiences," everybody capable of having negative experiences also has positive experiences: are these, too, "imposed"? If not, there's a bit of a double standard at play; if so, this account is not detailed enough to give a workable answer. In order for reproduction to be ethically unconscionable the expected value of a person's life would have to dip into the negative, but CM's argument gives us no way whatsoever to estimate (let alone calculate) this value. Saying that some bad and some good befall everyone leaves completely open the question of which, if either, happens more often or with greater intensity.*
Adopting CM's conclusion about the individual, moreover, still doesn't guarantee the conclusion that we all ought to stop reproducing. By focusing on the effect of conception on the one conceived, CM somehow managed to forget about, y'know, the rest of us. For this argument to work, the net evil we avoid by refusing to have kids would ultimately have to outpace the evil we ourselves would undergo by not having a younger generation to help us as we age. Since CM never stops to consider this, the harm-based argument presented can't suffice on its own.
(David Benatar, author of the above-linked book, seems to have addressed these concerns in his work, though I can't say whether he does so successfully until I read it.)
Whereas harm in the sense of suffering usually happens in a pretty obvious fashion, the metaphysical harm done by violating a person's rights is usually rather more subtle. For CM, no person has "interests prior to existing. Hence, biological children are always used as means to an end," which, together with "the fact that people are brought into existence without their consent," consists of a violation of the rights of...well, of who, exactly? The nonexistent humans, presumably, but if nonexistent humans are still human enough to have rights that only humans have - the right not to be born without their consent, the right not to be used as a means to an end - you'd think that they're also human enough to have interests that only humans have (such as, arguably, existing). We can see this pretty easily in the analogies that CM provides to illustrate the benefits of ending reproduction permanently:
"Imagine two people. One has the ability to recover from any illness very quickly, but the other doesn’t. Plus, the first one really enjoys the taste of her medicine, and while she would rather not get sick at all and just have the medicine, she only gets prescribed the medicine when she gets sick. The second person doesn't care for the taste of any medicine one way or the other. Which one would you rather be? It's a no-brainer, right? The first one, of course. Except the second person does not need this ability because she will never get sick. Now which one would you rather be?"
"...no one would try to defend forcible impregnation by saying 'But it's okay because most women want to reproduce and get pregnant at some point (which they do). Besides, a lot of women got pregnant unintentionally and are now happy that they did and carried the pregnancy to term, and their child is a little surprise miracle. If you don't like that you got forcibly impregnated, you could always get an abortion. I am happy that I got my BC sabotaged, and if you are not, you can fuck off.'"
The disanalogy in both cases, of course, is that existent people have both rights and interests: in the first case, it's in our interest to be healthy; in the second, it's in our interest (and we have the right) to control our own bodies. But this is precisely what CM claims is not the case for nonexistent humans - remember, "[b]eing conceived and gestated can never be in your child's interests since s/he does not have interests prior to existing." Worse yet, CM seems to have confused conception itself with various post-birth attitudes on the part of the parents. If parents only want "to preserve their genes, to give them a sense of purpose, to boost their social status or give them the illusion of immortality or...to play dress-up with" something cute, that's the fault of the parents and not something inherent to conception or reproduction at all. Far from attacking childbirth in general, then, this last series of claims only inveighs against parents being jerks.
Still and all, some hope remains: at least the structure of CM's argument can be salvaged. Rather than providing the real evidence that'd give this argument some punch, CM basically produced a series of untriggered hypotheticals - if nonexistent humans have rights but not interests; if existing isn't in the interest of humans; if the harm averted by refusing to reproduce exceeds the harm that would cause the rest of us. We'll have to see Benatar's argument, as I suspect that he at least tries to fill in these holes. Til then, though, I remain unconvinced.
*Or, for that matter, when we might expect this balance to switch. If we discover, for example, that things in the womb are great and that we only really start to suffer after birth, it sure seems like CM's position would not, in fact, proscribe reproduction: you'd just have to kill the kid at birth, is all.
I mean, come on - what team are they even building over there? It's one thing to experiment, but this is just silly. They'll be playing a four-forward lineup all year at this rate:
Dirk Nowitzki
Josh Howard
Tim Thomas
Shawn Marion
Drew Gooden
Quinton Ross
Kris Humphries
Pick four, put 'em on the floor with Kidd or Barea or Terry, play marginally improved Nellie ball. Way to make the Spurs look good, Mark. But hey, the law of large numbers says you'll win a title this way eventually, so keep it up...
I've been thinking recently: what's wrong with having things you like? And no, I'm not going through any kind of mid-life crisis, nor have I suddenly come upon a large sum of money. Nor do I want to get into a discussion about what it means, in a world with finite resources, to use time, money, and materials to make, say, a painting. I just want to know: are there any grievances to air regarding the having of nice things?
I think there are not, at which point it stands to reason that we ought to try to figure out which things are likable or nice (at least, having-wise). Figuring this out for humans in general is hard (indeed, figuring it out for individuals gets pretty difficult), but a good number of people think they know which kinds of things are nice for God to have: intricately designed universes, aesthetic prettiness, life, maybe some kind of interaction with that life. This comes up frequently in design discussions even now, usually with a skeptical eye towards the relative sterility and emptiness of the rest of the universe (as in, for somebody who supposedly loves life and pretty-looking planets and stuff, God sure didn't make too much of 'em). An analogous point - and perhaps even a stronger one - can be made regarding universes: if God is really into having a variety of life and of beauty and of intricacy, you'd figure that God would create enough universes to satisfy this desire. So why is there so much religious antipathy towards the idea of a multiverse? (This is only partially rhetorical - feel free to hypothesize about this in the comments.)
Because think about it: the major premise of the creationist movement, whatever form it takes, is that things could have been different. The universe's physical constants could've been different, evolutionary history could've been different, or whatever. So why shouldn't they be different? If intricately designed universes, aesthetic prettiness, and life in general are all valuable, why would God not create more worlds with those things in them? You could tweak the universal constants slightly and get aesthetic prettiness but not life (or so we are told), and certainly an all-powerful being could create a universe that contains life but nothing like humans. Even if we're in God's most favoritest universe, all of these other ones could still exist - couldn't they? After all, if God likes these things and if they don't pose any threat to God's moral perfection (which they don't), it's hard to think of a reason for them not to exist.
All well and good so far, yes? But how would it be possible even in theory to differentiate a theistic multiverse of this sort from an atheistic one? I wonder.
We skeptics hear over and over again how arguments from design - physical fine-tuning, guided evolution, etc. - do more than fill the gaps in our knowledge with the amorphous thing called "God." Organizations like Reasons To Believe and Access Research Network struggle to provide actual hypotheses about design just to rebut this claim. It's a bit surprising, then, when creationists like Jeff Zweerink say things like this:
"According to a research team of British physicists, the amount of CP-symmetry [charge-parity symmetry; see wiki] breaking arises naturally if the quark mass distribution is assumed. In other words, given the masses of quarks determined by physicists, the amount of symmetry violation required for a matter-dominated universe no longer appears fine-tuned. Thus, it seems that this research has eliminated some of the design detected by scientists."
Got that? Whenever we learn something new about the laws of the universe, he says, it looks more self-sufficient - or, switched around a little, when a gap gets filled in, it does so by displacing design. Only, "when scientists make a discovery that seems to reduce the amount of fine-tuning in the universe, the just-right conditions often move to a different location in the model." The way Zweerink says this, it seems maddeningly unfair: at this rate, there'll always be evidence for design! But as they say in at least this one philosophy class that I took, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens: where Zweerink sees design, we can just as easily see not-design.
The way to do this might not be too clear at first, but remember what Zweerink himself said about symmetry violation: that is not where the design comes in. But if it's not where the design comes in now, then it was never where the design came in. Likewise for all the other discoveries we've made over the centuries, those were never where the design came in, either. But creationists have been using the same reasoning all along - Zweerink himself admits as much. And if that reasoning wasn't valid the last thousand times, we have exceedingly little reason to believe that it will be this time. Particularly since this failure is a direct result of Zweerink explicitly linking our ignorance with evidence for design, his argument works far better as a force against creationism than it does to "continue to enhance the case for a Designer."
Cause his Nation makes it seem an awful lot like he is (spoilers, but only minor ones):
"Mau realized that he had just been putting things off. He should have been listening to himself; if you didn't believe in prayer, then you had to believe in hard work." (120)
"Either the gods are powerful but didn't save my people, or they don't exist and all we're believing in is lights the sky and pictures in our heads. Isn't that the truth? Isn't that important?" (156)
"Even if you have no god at all, that was a sin. Some things are a sin all by themselves." (254)
"Men made the gods, too. Gods of cold stone, which we made so that we could hide from the dark in a shell of comfortable lies." (290)
How long will it be before people call him shrill, do you think? Or does that only happen to skeptics whose published works are nonfiction?
Today, two adventures in not walking the walk that you should go read at their sources. First, EJ Dionne:
"Isn't it time to dismantle the metal detectors, send the guards at the doors away and allow Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights by being free to carry their firearms into the nation's Capitol building?"
And then the Digital Cuttlefish:
"Turns out, the [Catholic] church has found that some of its cherished rituals may indeed contribute to the spread of swine flu, and they are taking measures (as they should) to address the issue and to limit the spread of the virus. ... Apparently, the Church recognizes the effectiveness of barrier methods of protection against viral infections."
You do have to wonder: if it's better to avoid the flu than to avoid God's punishments, doesn't that make God kind of a pushover?
If anybody asked me, at this point, what the hardest part of blogging was, I would say: coming up with headlines all the damn time. Case in point? "Gatesgate."
What, you ask, is Gatesgate? It's the way that Slog, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, and the Atlantic headlined their respective takes on Henry Gates's arrest - among, no joke, thousands of others. "Gates" is even a real word, so there's really no excuse: the punning opportunities are wide open. Not afraid of racial overtones? "White pickets Gates." Looking for something tamer? "Cambridge policeman now Gates-keeper." Trust your readers to get a Frost reference? "Bad Gates makes bad neighbor." Prefer something less highbrow? "Good heavens, Gates!" It has taken me, for the record, maybe 4 minutes to come up with these.
It's a bit sad, isn't it, that "Gatesgate" is the best people can come up with? Especially if you're writing a story about this a few days after the fact, do everybody a favor and google for the obvious title. If it's not there, congratulations: you might just be a genius. But if it's already been worn out, just don't use it. I promise nobody's going to stop reading you because you missed the "Gatesgate" memewagon.
Though I still support my original answer to the question, I may have been remiss to pass so quickly over the ways in which I agree with Stephen Law's analysis of literature. Law, for those who don't know and are too lazy to click that link, doesn't have much respect for literature as a learning tool - he says that life too frequently diverges from artistic forms, that stories often suffer from being the product of only a single perspective, and that the temptation to propagandize (or, perhaps, to moralize) often means that the most convincing works are the least factually accurate. Today I bear witness to the latter of these complaints.
American Sweetheart - which I pray is just her screenname and not her real name, because you never know - lives* in Pittsburgh, I regret to report, and has some very strange ideas about the role of kids' stories. During a viewing of a recent Winnie the Pooh movie, AS reports, she was struck by the political implications of the plot. Apparently she "saw so many parallels to current events" that she couldn't help but "engage [her] children" by using the movie "to teach basics civics and the value of freedom." That, to me, seems stupid: the real world is the real world, and Winnie the Pooh is a fantasy world created for children.
But oh, you readers say, this is just parenting: you use simplified, usually fictional situations to teach your children progressively more complex rules as they grow up. Rest assured, I understand how parenting works - or, at least, that part of how parenting works. Yet I must repeat: Winnie the Pooh is a fantasy world created for children. To compare such a world to the real world inhabited by adults is to make some very dangerous and rather dumb comparisons. Allow me to demonstrate.
One of the events that caught AS's eye was when Rabbit ruled that "Pooh must give up honey ([as] there is too much in his diet) in favor of more vegetables." That, she intimates, is an unconscionable assault on freedom and one of the many teachable moments the movie features. So the question naturally arises: what could this possibly parallel in the real world? The most obvious comparison would be the trans-fats bans in New York and California, as that's also a food (of sorts). Looking into the details, however, pretty readily shows that these cases are night-and-day different.
For starters, honey isn't anywhere near as bad for you as trans-fats are. I also want to question whether Rabbit was actually elected to an office with the power to ban foods, but that might take us too far afield. Minor quibbles aside, the larger differences enter when we stop to consider why those things might have been banned. On the cartoon side, the explanation seems pretty straightfoward: Rabbit, I'm guessing, is just a neurotic twerp, and that's all there is to it. But that can hardly be said of our elected officials, and, further, our society's concerns dwarf those of the Hundred Acre Wood. For instance: when people eat badly here they're more prone to illness, which, in addition to being an actual hindrance in their lives, drives up the cost of healthcare for the rest of us. Pooh's obesity, on the other hand, will never require heart surgery. And for those residents of Hundred Acre Wood who would voluntarily take up a healthier diet, honey's pretty easy to avoid - you just find the sticky yellow stuff and then make sure to not swallow any. But for us in the real world, nutrition labels on food are often misleading (if not plain wrong) and accurate information is hard to come by in restaurants...and that's all before you take into account the fact that many people might not be able to (easily) afford trans-fat-free food even if they know how to find it. The parallels are, at this point, dwindling rapidly in the distance.
I've got nothing against parenting as such, and I get that some of it (maybe even most of it) is comprised of lying strategically in order to get a point across. But when you yourself start to believe those lies or to use them as the basis for one's reasoning process, you're taking it way too far. Until we all fall into two dimensions and never age, it will not work to use kids' media as political argumentation.
*Or claims to live, anyway: she also says she lives 2 miles from an airport, but go ahead and find me any place in the city of Pittsburgh that's 2 miles from an airport.
Mark Buehrle was not involved in a perfect game yesterday as was widely reported: the only perfect baseball game is the one you don't play because you realize it's an incredible waste of time.
As tempting as it is to blast Mona Charen today for her bizarre claim that "cancer survival rates [are] the best metric of health care quality," that would require research, and I am in a lazy kind of mood. Accordingly, I'll return to one of the more impressive stooges I've featured here, the irascibly sanctimonious David Klinghoffer.
When we last saw Klinghoffer, he was up in arms about how society-wide acceptance of gay marriage would slowly but surely steer most men into the arms of other men, thus leaving women high and (so to speak) dry. Yes, this argument suffers badly in several aspects; no, I'm not going to repeat them all here. Either way, the reasoning is crystal clear for Klinghoffer, who now says we may already be experiencing the first stages of his gay-people-hurt-women-indirectly theory.
After mulling over a story his friend told him - the conclusion of which is that, "where once females kept male animalism, as you put it, in check, now I think that the mainstream view is to join in the fun" - Klinghoffer concludes that his reasoning was "even more illuminating" than he initially realized. Just like "Lot's daughters [after having] escaping from the city with their father, show us the idea of modesty they learned too well from their residency in Sodom," he says, it must be the case that this modern increase in female animalism can be traced back "to male crudity -- represented in its most extreme form by a strain of gay culture." Aside from being a blatantly (even, I would hazard to guess, proudly) homophobic argument, this has "post hoc" written all over it, especially when you take it in context with his previous argument.
Like pretty much every other nostalgia-filled proponent of moral atavism, Klinghoffer posits that women just are more modest than men. Just as the male lack of modesty will, on his wacked-out theory, force men to gravitate towards homosexuality, it's the demure nature of women that'll prevent a similar drift and thereby ultimately doom them to live lonely, awful lives while all the men keep themselves busy with competitive bathhouse orgies. How modesty is supposed to have this effect, I have no bloody idea - just go with it for the moment. So, on his earlier argument, women would suffer because they would be too modest. But now that he has (unreliable) evidence that disagrees with this, he just reshapes his thesis: women are suffering right now, the updated version says, because they're too immodest.
Got that? If women are inherently paragons of virtue, the gays will be their downfall. Or, alternatively, if women are just crowd-followers who are just as capable of animalism as men, the gays will be their downfall. (One wonders if he can conceive of a third option.) Notice a pattern? No matter how he views women, Klinghoffer can't seem to conceptualize gay men as anything other than female kryptonite. Where most people wait until they have the data and then form a conclusion, Klinghoffer quite obviously has already formed his conclusion and will happily apply it to any data you care to present. One only hopes that he lives long enough to see the world grow into a functioning disproof of this bunkum - even if, as now, his inability to accept reality blinds him to it.
Before I launch into this, I want to say that I agree with Conor Friedersdorf's overall opinion as expressed here: it's pretty much a dick move to go after a girl's self-esteem to get her interested in you, and we really ought to have moved past this ridiculously immature "alpha male/beta male" understanding of human sexuality. Okay? I'm with you all the way on the "neg" thing, Conor.
But look, man, do some goddamn research. It's just not the case that "MIA [sic] justifies Third World robbery and murder" in her "Paper Planes." First and foremost, anybody who's listened to any of M.I.A.'s songs knows that she writes from the perspective of characters most of the time. She doesn't actually, for example, go around "shootin' up/and lootin' just to get by"; she isn't actually "dead from the waist down." If your strategy is to take her songs at their immediate face value, then, you are a moron.
Moreover, this is not exactly a new accusation. In fact, she basically answered the same accusation eleven months ago: "I don't support terrorism," she said at the time, "and never have." Friedersdorf is so fantastically wrong about his interpretation that he isn't even operating in the right geography. The motivation, M.I.A. said, was that "America is so obsessed with money" that "[p]eople don't really feel like immigrants or refugees contribute to culture in any way. That they're just leeches that suck from whatever," and that this leads to alienation and, eventually, violence (or other criminal behavior). If you want to reduce criminality among immigrants and refugees, she's saying, treat them like people. I don't really know how to transmute "immigrants and refugees often do bad things because you treat them like shit" into "I endorse Third World terrorism," but then again, I'm not a moron.
So, Conor, how about doing some basic internet searching before you go around making ridiculous accusations? Just because a brown person raps about violence doesn't mean they support violence, you moron.
Oh, Big Hollywood, have you no pride at all?
We know that you're all stuck in a 1940s understanding of gender roles, Big Hollywood editors, but that doesn't mean everybody else is, too. Here are some relevant excerpts from that Esquire article, with my emphasis added:
- "Americans are falling for a dynamic new class of leading man."
- "Somewhere recently along the line, we [i.e., the viewing public] stopped caring about the traditional Hollywood man."
- "And, yes, all of these hunk-less ticket-movers...were relatively inexpensive."
I'm pretty much over XKCD - like, today's strip? Totally mediocre, in my opinion - but I will forever have a soft spot for Microsoft-bashing. Thus:
HA.
...c'mon, people, quit it already with this:
"'I've experienced so many amazing things because of her,' Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. 'She has really changed my life.'That is seriously creepy even before you take into account that Nemu (the "tan" is a suffix of endearment) "is 10, maybe 12 years old." The jury's still out, though, on whether it's more or less creepy than calling your doll collection your "sons and daughters." On the one hand, animated characters have actual personalities and a canon and stuff, so if you think you're involved in their lives then you are not only crazy but also factually incorrect. But on the other hand, buying sexy doll clothes for your doll "children" so that you can ogle them is...worrying.
Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric."
Look, I don't want to be a jerk, so let's make a deal: I will do my best to get people to accept furryism ("ism"? Is that right?) if you do your best to stop this whole romanticize-things-that-resemble-people-but-are-not-people thing. Deal?
There's nothing like a good death story to get people riled up, so it's with high hopes that I relay to you the story of Maria del Carmen Brousada. Brousada, whose death is the one in question, "gave birth to twins at the age of 66" after undergoing in-vitro fertilization and then, in case you haven't caught on yet, died. Over at The Pursuit of Harpyness, BeckySharper* has some things to say about this, only some of which I feel is correct.
She starts off strong, criticizing one Allan Pacey for his annoyingly short-sighted views on the matter. Pacey argues against allowing situations like Brousada's for two kinds of reasons, one consequential and one not. In the latter category, he says that "nature didn’t design women to have assisted conception beyond the age of the natural menopause"; and in the former, that "to embark on pregnancy when you may not see your child go to university is potentially a very difficult situation." As we will see, it's this "but you might die!" argument that's the trickier of the two - I'll therefore leave it for last.
Happily, Sharper's response to Pacey's natural-design argument is spot-on: "nature," she says, "did not design the human reproductive system to do a lot of things it now routinely does. It didn’t design men to have erections on demand at 70. It didn’t design women–like me–to delay child-bearing for decades by taking hormones that stop ovulation. It didn’t design us to give birth by removing the baby through the abdominal wall. What nature designed us to do stopped troubling the medical community a long time ago." Much more strongly, practically the whole point of medicine is to fight against nature's basic design, so just citing the unnatural nature of this or that procedure can't possibly be argument enough to shut it down.
Sharper and I can get away with dismissing this first argument quickly because Pacey's major premise - that unnatural procedures are impermissible - is both easily identifiable and ridiculous. Neither of these, however, applies to Pacey's second argument, and this fact appears to have escaped Sharper's notice. Similarly to her first objection, Sharper reacts to the "but you might die!" argument by changing its subject in the hope that a different context will render it implausible. So, where Pacey worries only about old women, Sharper extends his argument to cover "men in their 60s," people with illnesses like MS and cancer, and anyone "who smokes or who is obese or diabetic or who carries the BRCA genetic mutation. Should we," she asks, "deny them fertility treatments too?" Again, the absurdity of this scenario is supposed to carry her through to her desired conclusion - and it very nearly does. As far as a refutation of Pacey, this pretty much works. But Sharper actually commits herself to a much stronger claim, namely that "we don't have the right to veto anyone's reproductive choices, no matter what their age." Here is where things begin to get a little out of control.
I am, it bears repeating, a fan of meaning what you say and saying what you mean, which is pretty much the opposite of what Sharper does here. I presume that she would not approve, for example, of an eight-year-old signing up for IVF, meaning we can narrow down her conclusion to: "we don't have the right to veto anyone's reproductive choices after they reach a certain age." This now seems much more plausible, but it's still missing a key qualifier. We have, after all, spent this whole time examining the why of the situation, the reasoning behind the decisions made. Sharper's conclusion, in contrast, deals only with the what, the actual decisions made and actions taken. This may not seem so problematic, but keep in mind that people often try to do really stupid stuff, not all of which we ought to support. I, for one, don't think it's at all troubling to deny IVF treatment to someone currently undergoing chemotherapy, say, or to someone who's addicted to crack-cocaine. While I'm unsure of Sharper's opinion on those kinds of restrictions, it's safe at least to say that she hasn't addressed them in this particular discourse.
So okay: now we must say something like, "after they reach a certain age, we don't have the right to veto anyone's reproductive choices just because they are (for some definition of the word) old." While this seems to have addressed Sharper's concerns, though, Pacey has dropped out of the picture altogether. Granted, his stated rationale is pretty dumb, but that doesn't mean his case can't be restructured to provide a little more punch. For instance, though he never says why the death of a parent would be "a very difficult situation," we can fill in the blank for him and then see whether or not Sharper has accounted for this in her argumentation. Along the same lines, we can look at Sharper's motivations and see whether they actually match this latest restatement of her conclusion. Neither of these, as it turns out, ends up well for her.
To try to resurrect Pacey, I can think of basically only one not-stupid reason for society to worry about dying parents: children need guardians of some sort. In cases where no living parents exist, then - cases, incidentally, like Brousada's - questions arise as to how to handle the kids. Sharper, I think, wouldn't be too impressed with this, as this worry applies equally to every parent ever, but for my part I don't see how it would be an outrageous burden to require IVF patients to name backup parents. Would this be unequal and therefore in some sense unfair? Absolutely. But can Sharper argue consistently that the moral benefits of having an established safety net are outweighed by the moral costs of being unfair? We have no idea.
On the other side of the conversation, Sharper's main concern is (or seems to be) that we avoid the moral hazards of discrimination. Again, though, this is a why and not a what, so we should check to see whether any other motivations exist that could lead to the same behavior that she denounces - that is, whether there are any reasons to refuse IVF to old people other than simple discrimination. While we can't say, along with Paley, that "they might die" is one such reason - everyone might die, so picking on old people specifically is discrimination - we could look to other kinds of contingencies. Legal ramifications in particular come to mind: given our current set of laws, it may well be the case that guaranteeing old people a legal right to fertility treatments entails forcing fertility doctors to put themselves at serious (and, perhaps, morally unacceptable) legal risk. Though it's easy to say in this case that we should just fix the laws (duh), it's much harder to say what should be done in the meantime. As above, Sharper never even brings this up, let alone addresses it in a satisfactory way. I personally don't think this would cripple her conclusion - probably my spin on Paley has a better chance of doing that - but that doesn't mean she can totally ignore it.
I could go on, but by now I hope I've made my point: bioethics is some complicated shit. And if you think things are bad now, just wait until I get to my article where I discuss the comments on Sharper's original piece, some of which argue explicitly that people shouldn't reproduce at all.
As promised, here are the official results of my most recent poll:
The notion of the final, everlasting death of a beloved human | 0 (0%) |
The notion of the final, everlasting death of a beloved non-human animal | 0 (0%) |
The notion of a loved one suffering eternally | 8 (100%) |
The notion of a despised person spending eternity in heaven | 0 (0%) |
The actual existence of Carlos Mencia | 0 (0%) |
Somewhat more seriously, things went pretty much as expected: the vast majority selected what I would've guessed, and nobody chose the option that best supports Pruss's stance. Just to reiterate my position on this, I don't think these results prove any specific philosophical result: this isn't in any sense suitable for an argument in favor of or against God, or hell, or any specific moral framework, or even Carlos Mencia, and that would be true even if this poll had been at all scientific in its methodology. But if you're going to do bad philosophy, you might as well go all-out.
In the parlance of our times, "like Europe" has become a weird code phrase for "socialist," to the detriment of both us and Europe (and, some might argue, socialism). So, when someone says, "Obama is gonna make America like Europe!" what they mean is, "Obama is gonna make America socialist!" This may, in fact, have become so commonplace already that you don't know why I bother to make a point of it - what else would it mean, you may be asking. Well, to be my typically pedantic self, it could mean any number of things: from a political standpoint, Europe (broadly speaking and among other things) has more government surveillance of their citizens than we do, less government support of religion, and more political factions. It's this last one in particular that John Hawkins would be wise to take note of.
As a response to the "Libertarians, members of the Constitution Party, Reform Party members, angry independents, [and] tea partiers who don't feel either party is serving their interests," Hawkins devotes his most recent column to investigating the prospects for "a third party in America." Problem is, he doesn't actually understand what "third party" means. His basic premise is "that the Republican Party folds and a newer, purer, more conservative party rises in its wake," even going so far as to compare this hypothetical party's rise to the time "when the Republican Party replaced the Whigs." Hawkins's gold-star-worthy historical acumen aside, that scenario wouldn't produce a third major party. It would, in point of fact, only generate a different second party. By definition, a third party can't exist without two other major parties; the "third" in "third party," in other words, is not just some generic descriptor meaning "lesser" or "smaller" but actually an implicit statement about the current political landscape (i.e., that it contains at least three parties).
This fantastically stupid error leads Hawkins to conclue, regarding his magical third party, that "the exact same people who are ruining the Republican Party would move over to the third party and ruin it, too." Well, yes, if by "third party" you mean "Republican party with a different name": if instead the third party is actually a third party, those "people who are ruining the Republican Party" - or, as I like to call them, "Republicans" - would still be kept busy ruining the Republican party, because in order for a third party to exist in our system the Republican party would have to still exist as well.
As much as I'd love to keep harping on Hawkins's moronic attempt to talk about the success of a third party in a system with only two parties, it actually gets worse from there. So as to avoid having his conservative-writer credentials revoked, Hawkins warns his readers that, until his third party succeeds (i.e., becomes the new second party), "you'd see a lot of results that look like this: Democrat 46%, Republican 28%, Third Party 24%." Right - because registered Democrats would neeeeeever vote for a third party candidate, and we all know that the right wing is currently capable of pulling 52% of the popular vote.
But let's humor the poor idiot. What would happen, exactly, if those percentages held up for the five election cycles that Hawkins predicts it'd take "for the GOP to fold"? Well, according to him, we'd have "300 Democrats in the House, 75 in the Senate, and a Democratic President for 10-12 years." Now, maybe I'm the one doing the math wrong - though I doubt it, given that Hawkins can't even count to three - but wouldn't five presidential election cycles be more like 20 years? Or, if he's using the Congressional elections as his guide, I'm pretty sure that five times two equals ten, not some nebulous figure between ten and twelve. Oh, and as for Hawkins's speculation that Sarah Palin "would probably be thrilled to declare that [third-party backers] are blockheads who are leading [her] party into the wilderness in an effort to peel off [her] supporters"? She quit politics, you dumb bastard - there is no party to which Palin belongs, therefore there's no party to which she belongs that she can claim is being led into the wilderness.
Look, I don't think we need to emulate Europe in every aspect of our governance. Moreover, that idea doesn't even make sense - Europe is a continent with lots and lots of different governments, not some monolithic glob of entirely homogenous regimes. But if we're going to whine and cry about every little thing that might in any sense make us more like some European countries, can we at least do it without spending the whole discussion in a made-up world where you can have a third party without having a second party and in which five times two might equal twelve? I really hope that's not too much to ask.
If you never in your wildest dreams thought that piss would become a candidate for an image makeover in order to gain commercial viability, congratulations - you are apparently a short-sighted dullard:
"One of hydrogen’s biggest stumbling blocks to use as an alternative fuel is the amount of energy needed to produce it. And then there’s the matter of distributing it. [Ohio University researcher Garadine] Botte says her gadget eliminates such problems because it’s small enough to integrate into an automobile."That gadget, in case you haven't already guessed, "uses a nickel-based electrode to extract hydrogen from urea (NH2)2CO, the main component in urine." Or, without all the science jargon, it opens up the possibility of "pee-powered cars capable of 60 miles per gallon."
Now, I'm no scientist, so the actual costs and benefits of this system are lost on me. The 60 mpg thing sounds good, but you never know with these alternative fuels - this person, for instance, is worried about its effect on pollution (or, at least, not thrilled about its effect on pollution). So I'd rather not focus on the various potential environmental impacts of this technology; when an actual scientist does a study, then maybe I'll go down that road.
But what I do know is people, and people will not be happy with this idea. We as a population identify too closely with our cars to fill them with something so ill-regarded as urine, and that's not even mentioning how unhappy people would be to use a pump filled with random people's (or worse, animals') piss. It's just not going to happen. I could, however, see this taking off in industrial settings, where the bottom line almost always trumps squeamishness and other quaint sentimentality. I think this could be a sustainable market, too: while vehicle fuel efficiency may have captured our attention for now, large-scale production machinery occupies a much more basic (and, unless I'm mistaken, much more prevalent) role in our economy. So I'm not writing this off entirely, but seriously, don't expect "pee-powered cars" any time soon.
Either way, I eagerly anticipate the day when I read about the first-ever for-profit urine provider. Wouldn't you love to be the marketing company hired to create a mascot for P Solutions, Inc.?
I figure I'll need it the next time I go to Baltimore and want to take any kind of public transportation. Even though their transit authority changed its mind about a program to include "audio surveillance equipment on its buses and trains to record conversations of passengers and employees," I have a hard time believing the idea will stay dead for long. And, what with the wiretapping the feds are already doing, I figure it can't hurt to learn a dead language or two - you know, to really throw them off my trail.
They seem to have cast this aborted plan as a simple addition to the video cameras already in place on their vehicles - a mere continuance, supposedly, of an already-ongoing effort. I'm not automatically against surveillance, and in fact I guess having videos on public transportation isn't a terrible idea, so if their stance were believable this would be a totally different story. But, um - which crimes, exactly, can we better prevent or prosecute with hidden mics?
For sure somebody's out there yammering about how this will help us catch terrorists because surely they all discuss their plans on the bus, but aside from the crazies, does anybody have any ideas? I certainly don't. Or, if anyone out there has criminal tendencies, here's another question: would the presence of a microphone really deter you at all? I was under the impression that most crimes could be committed pretty quietly. Or, if anyone is familiar with the Baltimore area, maybe this is it: do all Baltimorians compulsively narrate their own lives? Because that would probably help, prosecution-wise.
But yeah - if the answer to those questions is "no," as I strongly suspect it is, I'll have to go with Cory Doctorow's explanation: the people behind this idea are "totally, completely, creepily nuts."
To enliven what is unquestionably the most boring time of the year sports-wise, ESPN recently released what's evidently the seventh yearly ranking of every major sports franchise by various measures. (How I missed the first six I do not know.) I hesitate to honor their name, as I hardly think that they're the "Ultimate Team Rankings" - affordability "of tickets, parking and concessions," for instance, just doesn't seem relevant to the question. And though there are 122 franchises included - way too many for me to write about in any depth here - I did notice a few patterns.
The Clippers, for one, come in for a good deal of abuse. Their players and coaches are both ranked dead last - and, specifically for the players, they're also ranked as the laziest and least likable group of major-sport pro athletes in the country. Surprisingly, though, they're only 119th in the number of "[c]hampionships already won or expected in the lifetime of current fans," from which I can only conclude that ESPN expects three franchises to win a negative number of titles (with harder-working players and better coaches, no less!). The Clips can't be that bad, can they? Surely this is at least partially due to the unfortunate comparison with the Lakers.
ESPN seems to think that having go-getters as players helps more than having good coaching. (I think - again, there are 122 entries, I didn't exactly perform a deep statistical analysis.) I find this a bit odd, because part of coaching is getting your players to work for you. The Detroit Pistons, for instance, are now ranked 107th in effort, but they won a title back in '04 basically on pure hustle alone. Their roster hasn't seen that much turnover, so something else must've changed - maybe, I dunno, the coaching?
Unless my sense of size is way off, it's hard to satisfy big markets. Of the overall top 10 franchises, only one operates in a major city - the other 9 are in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, D.C., Milwaukee, San Antonio, St. Louis, and Raleigh. New York's first team? The 45th-ranked New York Giants, and they don't even play there. Boston has the Patriots at 19 - though, again, they don't play there; Chicago's best team comes in at 21; Philly's at 24; and so on. I'm not too surprised by this, actually, but it's still worth pointing out: if you want to lead a happy sports life, find a well-built small-city franchise to follow.
And finally, if you are a fan of the Golden State Warriors, give it up. According to the rankings, the Warriors have a worse outlook than even the Detroit Lions. For those of you who don't know, the Lions went all last year without winning a game. The percentage of games won by the Detroit Lions, in other words, was zero. I won as many games as the Detroit Lions did last year by myself. (And, in fact, so did you!) So if ESPN thinks that the Warriors have it worse than the Lions, they must have it really bad. Unless you are a serious emotional masochist, then, I strongly suggest you find another team.
Making his contribution to perhaps the philosophically truest of all philosopher's traditions, John Stuart Mill wrote, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Translated into normal-person English, that roughly means, "No matter how happy you bastards may think you are, I have it better still because I am a philosopher." One wonders if Mill wore stupid hair and too much eyeliner - ah, but I digress. The point is, philosophers (sort of by definition) are know-it-alls, often of the arrogant blowhard variety. Insofar as this attitude remains confined to the ivory tower I don't much mind it, but when movie critics start with this crap I have to put my foot down.
David Cox demonstrates my point rather aptly, as well as serving as a case in point of the saying that familiarity breeds contempt. Clearly familiar with the Harry Potter franchise, Cox's opinion of it probably exceeds even contempt: he calls the sixth movie "drivel," "woefully feeble," "crude," and "tepid," and accuses it of contributing "to the infantilisation of the world." Peering through his copious abuse, it turns out that Cox's argument is somewhat on the thin side. There are, if I read him correctly, two main claims, both expressed in the same statement.
"Cinema," he thinks, "has fed the process" of infantilization by leaving out "the most urgent drama, enlightening ideas and fulfilling entertainment." Having given it some thought, I think I agree that HP6 falls somewhat short of film genius, so for the moment I'll operate on the premise that it really does lack urgent drama and all that stuff. I don't, however, agree that this alone makes for immature or childish cinema: Quentin Tarantino, for example, consistently makes movies that are totally devoid of urgent drama, enlightening ideas, and fulfilling entertainment, but I have real trouble labeling him an infantile filmmaker. "Fun," in other words, needn't be a synonym "immature," so Cox still has some work to do to show that HP6 is really as dumbed-down as he says.
In addition, there still is the question of whether the movie actually wants for those three things. Particularly given that he qualifies all of the nouns involved, it's tempting to ask who, exactly, is not being enlightened or fulfilled by the movie. I have to imagine that, contra Cox (and, again, Stephen Law), at least some person was enlightened and fulfilled after watching HP6. He can disagree and say that the movie, at its absolute best, only seems enlightening and fulfilling, but that's nothing more than the no-true-Scotsman argument. Obviously he wasn't satisfied with the movie's urgency, ideology, and entertainment, but that hardly suffices to prove that it's objectively deficient in those things.* He can, in other words, go on for as long as he likes about how HP fans are the proverbial satisfied pigs, but then he runs into the problematic truth that even pigs can be satisfied - or, as the case may be here, enlightened or fulfilled.
As a concluding note, it's interesting to recall that, in the end, the Harry Potter series turns into another Jesus story. Does Cox really want to say that the Jesus mythology is an infantilizing force in the same way that he says HP is? Because I'm not sure that he can escape this, which would almost certainly spell trouble for him - not that I disagree with that prognosis, necessarily, but that seems like a statement that Cox would probably like to avoid making.
*Indeed, this may not even be the right standard. Assuming that art progresses in some way or other - questionable, but not totally implausible - you could, I guess, argue that infantile art is any art that falls too far behind the curve. But since Cox doesn't make any comparisons of HP6 relative to other "mature" artworks, I sincerely doubt that this would be a fair representation of his view.
You tell me:
"The bride pose"?? Seriously? Because either that is total crap or the married women I know have been seriously shirking their duties.
Uh...thanks, but I'll pass on the organ massage.
Assuming that this does indeed induce sleep - and not, say, asphyxiation or horrific muscle cramps - wouldn't that be a reason not to do it? The last thing I need is to shift in my sleep and break my spine because I conked out with all my body weight resting on the base of my neck. (Which, incidentally, is what the fellow in the picture on the right appears to have already done.)
I mean, not that I don't want to "de-stress [my] mind," "improve [my] flexibility," and, I guess, achieve "a greater awareness [of my] hip joints." But there must be some way to do those things without turning into some kind of jabbering lunatic, right?
And, in the case of print, read what you've written before you publish it - this goes double if you're a professional writer for a major newspaper. So, to whoever wrote this little intro for The Guardian, you suck at your job. Nobody is keeping anybody "in darknesss" (unless maybe you count Gollum), and it would be your right to be wrong, not "you're." And then, of course, there are the logical errors.
Ophelia Benson finds the easy one when she says that "[o]rganizing beliefs are one thing, and myths are another." Yes, it's stupid to reason that without "their organising beliefs about their purpose in the world and both individuals and societies disintegrate" and that therefore "societies do need myths, as indeed do individual" - besides the conflation Benson identifies, it's far from obvious that this is even true: do societies and people really fall apart without organizing beliefs? Before you answer, can you even provide a definition of "organizing beliefs"? Because I'm not sure that that phrase makes any sense, or, if it does, that it can be used in this way.
Anyway, though, I said that that was the easy part - I move now to the slightly more complicated error. According to the anonymous author of this exceedingly brief piece, "the belief that societies can function without myths [that is, "organizing beliefs"], or rather that they should and will in the enlightened future, is itself a myth, and not a very helpful one." But...so what? They lay this out as a criticism of the Dennettian position that atheists should quit coddling the religious, but their own standards preclude such criticism. After all, if Dennett's wrong to attack certain false, not-very-helpful organizing beliefs ("myths") just because of what they are, then presumably it's also wrong to attack his false, not-very-helpful organizing beliefs ("myths") just because of what they are.
This, in a very real sense, is the reason why Dennett and others prefer not to protect falsehoods: once you start, it becomes very hard to stop. I appreciate that it can't be fun to have someone like him breathing down your neck all the time, but the only way to get him to stop is to prove him wrong, not rude - dancing around the issue, especially in a patently illogical way, will only make things worse.
Or, in the words of Jeff Mirus, the problem with people comparing their gut feelings about a child to their gut feelings about a dog is "that the dog has no value but that their minds" whereas children (read: fetuses) have some other kind of value. See, for Mirus, the world "cannot be interpreted morally without a great respect for the concept of personhood." Having this respect in hand, he says, we will understand - and I'm sure you already know where this is going - "that all non-personal being is [sic] at man's disposal" in precisely the same sense that "no personal being," including a fetus, "is at man’s disposal." How reasonable this all is will depend on what Mirus means by "personal being."
Thankfully, he actually gives us this definition: "every person has both intellect and will and so is at least potentially capable of entering into relationships of love." As for "relationships of love," those happen through "an act of the will based on a proper intellectual valuation of the other, a valuation through which the intellect instructs us to love, that is, to will the other's good." Got it? People have intellect and will and are capable of properly intellectually evaluating others and choosing to act in their benefit. If any of this sounds familiar, you've been paying attention: we've been here before.
When I went through this whole thing with Joel last month, I was never able to get him to see the whole picture at once. At first he used the definition that "any human being...is one that has 'potential for growth and full realization.' Potential for growth is one of the necessary characteristics in defining a thing as living and human beings by definition are animals capable of full realization." This seems to be the direction Mirus is going: work with established scientific terms ("intellect," "animal," "growth") and use their common meaning to show that fetuses are just the same as full-grown humans. But this leads to problems, especially for religious frameworks like the one Mirus explicitly operates in. For one thing, not all human-patterned DNA physically has the potential to grow and develop - some will die in vitro, some will live but fail to develop higher brain functions, etc. Even worse, some humans who actually do have will and intellect and all that jazz will eventually lose those capacities permanently, at which point Mirus is bound to say that they're no longer people. Since he refuses to do this - and, more broadly, since both he and Joel refuse to say that fetuses without the physical capacity for development aren't people - this route won't work for them.
Going for something more metaphysical, then, seems to be the right response. This can be done in one of two ways: either through a religious perspective or not. Joel chooses the latter, and this option is also open to Mirus (though he'd never take it). The most famous account of this can be found in Aristotle's De Anima, and that's precisely where Joel looks: according to Aristotle, he says, "there is a particular kind of living thing that has the capacity for reason, namely human beings. Given that reason is such that it cannot be attributed to matter per se...he attributes it to the immaterial soul. Now if the soul as such that it makes the particular living thing be what it is (a human, a monkey, a giraffe, etc.) and is also the principle of life, then any human living thing posesses a rational soul." In cases where the human doesn't actually develop or even cannot actually develop rationality (or, for Mirus, intellect and will), the differences are "purely accidental" - that is, they don't make a difference one way or the other about whether the thing really is a person or not. (Here I leave aside the issue of whether Joel misreads Aristotle, which I think he does. Assume for the sake of argument that he doesn't.) This saves them from admitting that it's okay to kill e.g. really senile people, but it has two very awkward consequences, one ontological and the other epistemological.
First and foremost, this will be bad news for people with conjoined twins. Even in the case where the conjoined twin is just limbs, we'd have to give that entity the same rights we give a full person: after all, the fact that it can't possibly develop rationality or intellect (because it can't even develop a head or a brain) is just an accident, not something that affects what they really are. Similarly for other biological conditions wherein a human fetus or blastocyst is physically restricted from ever reaching full human development, we would be bound to consider them full people and treat them as such. Joel denies this, though, and I bet Mirus would, too. From another point of view, we'd also have to be much more careful with the dead: since physical death is just an accidental state (i.e., not something that affects the metaphysical substance), we'd have to totally overhaul our practices concerning the dead. Especially since we still can't say for sure when a person is biologically dead for good, we would have to begin behaving towards the dead just like we do towards the living (at least, for some significant interval). This may not seem so unreasonable, but consider also that we can keep bodies alive for a very, very long time even without brain stem activity if we try hard enough: since this, too, is just an accident according to this argument, we'd have to treat even decapitated bodies as though they were just fine. Again, I don't think this is something that Joel or Mirus wants to adopt, so I have no choice but to conclude that the secular-soul strategy unavailable to them both.
Finally, Mirus could retreat to a religious (in this case, Christian) conception of the soul. (Joel could've, too, if he hadn't committed himself to making a universally accessible argument.) The biggest problem here - besides, of course, the total lack of evidence and other various problems associated with religion in general - is that Mirus must maintain a certain exclusivity. He has to say, in other words, that only humans have rational souls - or, in his words, that "[n]either a dog, nor a dolphin, nor a chimpanzee, nor any other embodied being besides man is capable of" love (i.e., properly evaluating others and acting for their benefit as a result of this evaluation). As well as this matches up with his tradition, this is a view that can no longer be sustained in the face of the facts. When he claims that animals "give no evidence either of intellectual analysis or of moral judgment," Mirus is just plain full of shit. It seems, then, like the only way out for Mirus and Joel would be to postulate something like this from the start:
(*) By definition, a person (or "living being worthy of moral respect") is either a living human fetus at any stage of development or a living human at any post-fetal stage of development, so long as it has a head and some part of a brain.
There is no obvious set of axioms that leads to this definition, nor can it be easily defended from criticism - in fact, it looks like exactly what it is: a cobbled-together set of conditions with no connection to the actual world. But it's what Mirus and Joel would have to use if they even wanted to start their argument against abortion (and, in Mirus's case, animal rights). And I do mean start: if that definition holds, we'd be free to analyze fetuses as though they were regular ol' people, which means holding them responsible for their actions. Recall, for instance, what Mirus said about humans: no personal being is at the disposal of any human. Very well: then no woman is at the disposal of any fetus! Even if we ignore all of the inconsistencies and factual errors in their respective cases, then, neither Mirus nor Joel has even come close to giving a compelling reason why abortion is wrong.
The unspoken implication here - and the real force behind the argument - is that abortion treats humans (i.e., fetuses) like animals (i.e., non-human animals), and this line of thought certainly resonates powerfully with the unconscious hierarchy that many of us work with on a daily basis. But until we get workable definitions of the relevant terms involved, this will never be anything more than suggestion and innuendo, totally unsuitable for philosophical discourse.
I, on the other hand, have to stick with appreciating the art and inferring the joke from context. Even so, I like it:
It's a nice change to see a webcomic made by someone who can, y'know, draw.
As this country's right wing so often points out, actions typically (perhaps always) have unintended consequences. Though they're pretty much committed to this phenomenon only affecting the government, it really does affect everything. One question that evidences this, as posed by Conor Friedersdorf, is: "Is there an inherent tension between the social norms that advance your agenda on reproductive rights, and the ones that better bring about the world you'd like to see more generally?" In particular, Friedersdorf senses "that the social norms we are inculcating are working to safeguard reproductive choices for women, and to undermine men's investment in pregnancies and child-rearing."
This would indeed be somewhat problematic, and not just because "progressives and feminists are especially invested in pushing back against the notion and reality that rearing children is the province of women": the path of human progress has been, and by definition must continue to be, that an average person of one generation uses a more level playing field in their moral reasoning than an average person of the previous generation. So, for example, where one generation will see homosexuality as a mark of utter sin and corruption, the next will see it as just an undesirable psychological affliction, and so on and so forth until there's no perceived moral difference between same- and opposite-sex relationships and intimacy.* Anything that permanently stalls or, worse, reverses such inclusiveness, then, is at least an area of concern. It is therefore a relief to know that, at least in theory, the conflict can be resolved.
To determine the source of his error, I turn to Friedersdorf's chosen example, a hypothetical** movie designed to appeal to the "the cultural sensibilities of secular liberals. The woman," he says, "gets pregnant: 'I'm late,' she tells her boyfriend. The man, if he wants to keep the sympathy of the audience, says, 'What are we going to do?' The 'we' signals his mutual responsibility for the circumstance and investment in the process -- and the question mark signifies that he'll pretty much support whatever she decides." Ah, but to tell "men [that] they shouldn't have any part in decisions about abortion...inevitably discourages them from responding to a pregnant girlfriend by asking, 'What should we do?'" And so it does: but does that really go as far as he says?
Remember, Friedersdorf said that keeping men out of abortion decision-making will "undermine men's investment in pregnancies and child-rearing." At its most successful, though, his argument can only touch the pregnancies part - and, in fact, it's not even that successful. The telling attribute of Friedersdorf's little scenario is that the boyfriend has to ask the question in the first place. This question pretty much directly implies that the pregnancy was unintended, but part of being a progressive and a feminist is to hold that pregnancy should (in the most idealistic sense of the word) never be accidental - hence the phrases "family planning" and "reproductive choice." When examined only in the context Friedersdorf provides, there most certainly is some tension: the outlook for the boyfriend is, if not outright unmanageable, at least very complicated. Progressives and feminists, however, don't have to operate in this context, as their preferred vision of the world minimizes its occurrence to a level where it's not nearly so threatening.
Two challenges still remain - first, what to do in the inevitable cases of unintended pregnancy; and second, whether the feminist ideal is at all realistic - but I don't think either is particularly troubling. Even if solutions prove difficult to obtain (which would surprise me), feminism wouldn't be the first position to suffer from questions like these, so Friedersdorf likely still wouldn't be justified in his skepticism. At any rate, he would be better served addressing these questions instead of changing the dimensions of the very discussion itself.
*This is, obviously, a little simplified. You'd expect this to work first of all as a trend, so that it allows for small breaks in the pattern, and then second of all as an approach to a limit, so that you never have to achieve (or expect to achieve) full and total equality in order for it to count as progress. And the trend will vary from case to case, and so on - but the point here is the overall mechanism.
**Which is a little strange: he couldn't have found even one actual example of this? There has to be one, right?
(Shorter me in this post: screw you Hollywood, you are ruining art.)
So, in accordance with my movies post from a short while back, I went and saw Harry Potter and the Almost Last Movie last night at midnight - it was a fine movie, decent acting, decent scriptwriting, very good special effects, some excellent moments of cinematography. But the highlight of the night, as it so often is when I go to the movies, was the trailers. Something in particular struck me about this one:
What are they doing playing "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire?
Someone should please correct me if I'm wrong, cause the last time I read this children's book was when I was, well, a child, but isn't Where The Wild Things Are sort of child-positive? Like, in favor of children being children and stuff? It might have some other things to say, but I'm fairly certain it at least had a good feeling about children qua being children. And yet here's what the song in the trailer says:
If the children don't grow upIf you read the full lyrics, it's actually worse: people who refuse to face reality honestly ("hold your mistake up") can expect to be cold-hearted, blinded and petulant whiners (the "little gods causing rainstorms" have "lightning bolts a-glowing" because of which they "can't see where [they are] going") who'll ruin everything around them ("turning every good thing to rust") for the entire rest of their lives (i.e., until "the reaper, he reaches and touches my hand"). I ask you: is this a positive portrayal of childhood?
Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up
We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms
Turning every good thing to rust
(oh oh oh oh etc.)
(Reaches and touches my hand)
You'd better look out below!
Granted, they don't mean literal childhood (or, at least, I really hope they don't). And granted, the metaphorical angle from which they approach the issue is totally appropriate and even meaningful in a different context. But a catchy, upbeat melody and sweetly-played string section isn't really the same as having actual content that matches the content of the movie.
Among its many failings, Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism purposefully neglects to distinguish among beliefs. "Our beliefs are unreliable on N&E," it says, and then just leaves it at that. But we have many, many different kinds of beliefs, and it means very, very different things for one kind of belief to be reliable as opposed to another. Take this argument from Alex Pruss about what might result if we could, in some sense or other, trust our ethics:
- (Premise) If the cosmos is an (axiologically) abhorrent place, then it is not the case that we should trust our moral beliefs.
- (Premise) We should trust our moral beliefs.
- Therefore, the cosmos is not an abhorrent place.
Appropriate to the richness of the word, Pruss gives several interesting characteristics that would qualify a cosmos as being abhorrent. One such example, he says, leads to:
- (Premise) If there is no life after death, then the cosmos is an (axiologically) abhorrent place.
- There is life after death. (By 3 and 4)
To begin with, my reaction to thinking that my loved ones will die forever is: meh, okay. To be honest, I get a little more upset when thinking about how great works of art will be gone forever, which brings me to my next point. As we learned earlier, people tie themselves emotionally to more than just other people: pets also hold a special place in some people's hearts. Without taking other considerations into account, then, it's hard to say why this isn't also strong enough to demonstrate the spiritual immortality of all manner of earthly creatures.
But then again, maybe this is acceptable for Pruss. I really don't know how the various Christian denominations come down on the question of pets in heaven, so it's quite possible that he'll go, "Yep - you've got it right!" Rather less encouraging, though, should be the converse of the question he asked. In other words, consider somebody you love, and then picture that person burning in hell for eternity. Pretty abhorrent, right? Or, if that doesn't do it for you, try imagining somebody you hate - like, really hate - basking in heavenly bliss for eternity. I dunno about you, but I would characterize that situation as abhorrent. Pruss, it would seem, has to choose at least one of these outcomes, but how? All we're working with are the gut reactions of a self-selected group of (almost certainly highly biased) readers, which have - gasp! - turned out to be largely inconsistent. It's beginning to look like he cherry-picked the reaction he wanted out of a much larger group of very similar (if not relevantly identical) reactions, which won't do at all.
To help clear up the logjam created by this mass of musings, I've generated a new poll. If you please, select the most abhorrent option from the list, which I've composed of the alternatives mentioned in this post and then a control. After the poll closes, we'll analyze the results.
I don't normally just quote folks, but when the time's right... Ladies, gentlemen, and other - Matt Steinmetz on the Sarah Palin point-guard analogy:
"I know as point guards we're in the minority here, but I can't let a politician – or anyone for that matter – denigrate the position I've come to love. This has nothing to do with partisanship. This has to do with all point guards coming together and refuting this kind of speech.
I'm talking all point guards, past and present, pros and non-pros, from Bob Cousy to Jason Kidd to that guy Hank at the gym who may be undersized but still tries to play the right way.
Let's break down the quote:
'Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me – sports – basketball. I use it because you're naïve if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now. A good point guard drives through a full-court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket.Where do you even begin with this assault on the point guard position?
'And she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And I'm doing that – keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities – smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom. And I know when it's time to pass the ball, for victory.'
C'mon, a good point guard knows never to drive through a full-court press. A good PG knows you beat the press with a pass. Unless you're Curly Neal or maybe Earl Boykins, dribbling into traffic will put you on the bench, down from the coach and sitting with the scrubinis.
And how about ' ... keeping her eye on the basket.'
Well, that's about the last place a point guard's eyes should be. Now, if you're Billy Ray Bates or World B. Free or Reggie Miller, keeping your eyes on the basket may be a little more acceptable. But good point guards don't focus on the rim. That's unheard of. Unless, of course, it's time to get a little some for themselves.
And what about the 'And I'm doing that -- keeping our eye on the ball ...'
Now I don't want to nitpick here but that's about the first thing a point guard learns -- to not look down at the ball while dribbling and handling. Sure, it might work for Corey Maggette but he's the exception -- and he's not a point guard, either."
As a more general point of order, point guards are basically not supposed to look at the ball ever (while on offense). The primary job of a true point (i.e., someone playing the role, not just the smallest player on a team or the one who just usually dribbles the ball upcourt) is to unite the five players on the floor into a cohesive points-scoring group.
When you have the ball, that means working to distort the defense (or working to set up a play that'll distort the defense) so that teammates can better position themselves to score - which, of course, they'll only be able to do if you take your eye off the basket to see where they are with respect to the defense. When teammates have the ball, that means making sure that the play proceeds as planned - or, if it's too late for that, getting the ball back and refocusing your team. Again, this simply can't happen if you glue your eyes to the ball or to the basket.
The reason for this is very simple: the ball and the basket are static where the team is dynamic. That is, the ball and the basket aren't going to do anything you don't expect them to - this isn't football with its ridiculous bounce-physics or one of those arcade mini-basketball games where the rim moves back and forth. More philosophically, the nature of the ball and the basket don't change over the course of the game: the one will always be fit for going through the other no matter what else happens. But your teammates will change over the course of the game, especially in more competitive leagues. Players go between hot and cold, energetic and lethargic, selfish and selfless, controlled and harried, focused and distracted, confident and hesitant, even smart and stupid; and point guards make sure that, on any given possession, those capable of contributing get the chance to do so and those incapable of doing so stay the hell out of the way. Good luck figuring all of that out if you spend all your time ogling the ball.
If Palin's analogy is at all accurate - I mean, the fixed-up version where she actually describes the position correctly - then this is a tacit admission of what we've known all along: right now, she just isn't capable of contributing to politics. To which I say, okay! Don't let the gym door hit you on the way out!