Rust Belt Philosophy

Got caught between grad school and the job today and don't really have enough time to do this article justice - but it seems stupid to postpone it til tomorrow and thereby give myself two substantive posts to write, so here goes a quick summary:

• Whether or not feminists are motivated (primarily or entirely) by envy (and yes, that is the main claim at that link) is not relevant to the accuracy of our beliefs. 
• By focusing on amorphous subsets of feminists - "classical," "vanguard," "devout," etc. - the author (one Selwyn Duke) either artificially restricts membership in the class "feminists" or wrongly generalizes about the whole class based on non-representative samples - or both. 
• It's just ludicrous to claim that "these feminists simply don't have families themselves" or that "these are women who could never have the white-picket-fence lifestyle." Given that quite a large number of feminists and even pick-your-favorite-modifier feminists do in fact have families, Duke is just talking out of his ass here. 
• Really? No "more horrible person [can] be imagined" than Alice Walker? Maybe if your imagination really, really sucks. 
• It would be tremendously impressive if Duke (or anybody, really) could successfully defend the proposition that "a good mother [is] the most successful woman imaginable." (Side note: there's that withered imagination of his again.) Of course, to defend it successfully he would have to have tried to defend it, which he did not. 

Okay? Good - bedtime now. See you all tomorrow.

Let us be honest: any human activity can be done well or poorly, and most of the time it's the latter. William Simpson, for example, probably embarrasses even his fellow crackpots.

"From my earliest memories, there was pain. Abuse and neglect scarred the innocence of a young boy’s youthful imagination, as the harsh realities of life robbed me of all sense of purpose...I was raped by a pedophile at the age of eight. He was a member of this family and was known by me. There were homosexual men living together and my adoptive parents never shielded me from this environment...I attempted suicide by driving a vehicle off of a mountain cliff, that landed in a tree, and I walked away unhurt. Angry that even death evaded me. I often wondered why all of these bad things happened to me, but the answers were never revealed. I lived at the bottom of a liquor bottle and did drugs to not have to deal with the person I had become...Little did I know that God was setting up what has become the deliverance from me."

I mean, c'mon - put in at least one paragraph break in your rambling, incoherent sob-story-cum-religious screed. Glenn Beck, on the other hand? Now there is a real master.

"People who will not only recognize heroes — this is one of the awards we're giving away, three awards to citizens. It's based on — it is based on the Merit Badge, the Purple Heart from George Washington. This, we're giving three away. I haven't seen any speculation on who the three that are going to win, what citizens deserve this merit for faith, hope and charity.

People will gather and see this. And hopefully, we will mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. At least we will begin to look at those things, start to maybe challenge that we haven't valued those things high enough — honesty, integrity, merit, personal responsibility, family and God."

Just for the record, the Merit Badge exists "to allow Scouts to examine subjects to determine if they would like to further pursue them as a career or avocation" and the Purple Heart only goes "to any member of the Armed Forces of the United States who, while serving under competent authority in any capacity with one of the U.S. Armed Services after April 5, 1917, has been wounded or killed." See anything in there about faith, hope, or charity? Me either.

"Chris Wallace just talked to me in his office a few minutes ago. I'm going to be doing an interview with him right after the event for 'Fox News Sunday.' It's the only entire I will be doing. And he asked me why is it called 'Restoring Honor'?

Well, it's not a political event because I haven't found a lot of honor when it's followed by an 'R' or a 'D.' Principles and values that should be universal, but I think in most cases now, it seems in our country, they are non-existent."

Aside from creating mental associations based on no evidence and where no associations are appropriate - a case, perhaps, of neuro-linguistic programming, if that's your cup of tea - Beck's real strength is appearing to have answered a question when in fact he did no such thing. This thing with Chris Wallace is a paradigm example: rather than telling us why he did call his event "Restoring Honor," he just explained one of the (presumably infinitely numerous) reasons why he didn't. Or take this other instance:

"I was leaving the memorial site today and reporter jumped out at me. I was trying to run because I was late for work and I was running to my car and this reported jumped out and she said, 'I'm so and so from ABC.' And I said, hey! And she said, this was her question: What do you expect to gain from this event?

I don't — I don't even know what that means. Do you? I mean, I know what I have to lose. What do I have to gain?"

Yeah, what a totally ludicrous question. He only started a political movement, invited hundreds of thousands of people to a political gathering, and positioned himself so as to address those hundreds of thousands of people as an authority. Why should he have any particular goal in mind? Furthermore, what kind of absolute moron would even think to ask about his motivations? Those dopes at ABC - it is to laugh!

"Most of the reports seem to completely miss the mark of what I've named it. Honor. "Restoring Honor." Merit. I mean, how much more obvious? How are you missing this? Merit, honor.

...Have you heard the media even talk about the idea of honor? Why? How about this question: Why would Glenn Beck say honor is missing? Why would Glenn Beck say the answer is God? What's happening with our religions? Would anybody cover that? No."

If this weren't his MO, it'd be tempting to lambaste Beck for on the one hand refusing to answer media questions about his motivations and then immediately turning around and attacking the media for not understanding his motivations. (Seriously - read over those three blockquotes again in succession, it's pretty impressive.) Given that he does this kind of nonsense constantly, though, criticizing the behaviors themselves would be too surface-level, too thin. The problem isn't the behavior, although for sure if someone found a real-life genie and offered to end the behavior I'd take them up without thinking twice; the problem, rather, is the mindset behind the behavior.

"We're running low on personal responsibility. We've got a loss of integrity, a loss of shame in this country, a loss of principles and values. We've lost our way because we have lost God.

If you want to restore America, you go ahead and do it with your little party thing. I don't think that's going to work.

We've lost our honor. We must restore our honor first, our principles.

Saturday's message — shhh! It's a big secret. I've only talked about it for six months on one of the biggest cable news shows in history and the third largest radio show in America — but only six months, so — shhh, keep it down. Just between us. Don't tell anyone in the media: The secret is God."

Simpson could learn a thing or two from this, don't you think? Say what you want about how his beliefs are insidious, double-faced, or thoroughly unmoored from reality, the man has style.

This - the whole Glenn Beck mission-from-God thing - this is the reason that church and state must be sharply separated as well as the reason that skepticism must maintain its strength and voice. Beck, though he will (and probably has) strenuously claimed otherwise, has set himself up and is continuing to set himself up as God's mouthpiece. Even if his moral positions were utterly unimpeachable, this would constitute a serious problem: we humans need to know the truth about morality, yes, but we also need to know the reasons and justifications that explain and support those moral truths. No matter what else he may accomplish, Beck is quite clearly not qualified to communicate anything even resembling a philosophical structure of morality - and again, in order to trust him with that responsibility we'd first have to believe that he has the right answers, which at the moment would be a borderline insane thing to believe.

These people seem to rely on the personal conversion story, so let me conclude by replying in kind. Where Simpson has his truly tragic childhood, Beck has alcoholism; you'll have to forgive me for not having so miserable a past. If we accept the premise that each of us is recovering from something or other, I will file myself as a recovering sentimentalist. During a certain period of my life I took my own emotions as compelling evidence for the truth or falsehood of whatever propositions happened to trigger them. (If you can believe it, this ranged from mind/body dualism to moral relativism.) My experience and my reaction to the world, I am thankful to have learned, are important and valid for me but only marginally informative in the wide view. Likewise for Simpson and Beck: for those men, God (or more accurately the concept of God) is a powerful driving force, but they commit an egregious error by concluding that the same goes, and indeed must go, for everyone else. I am interested in separating true from false in order to make the world truthfully a better place, and I fully recognize the importance of discussion and debate in that process - but the Simpson/Beck God show admits of no honest conversation and no independently formed allegiance to the truth, which can only mean that I am and will be its opponent until either it or I am no longer able to stand up for our respective sides.

Isn't it nice of the Muslims to give us so many opportunities to discuss extralegal means of controlling behavior? First outerwear, now architecture - it's so thoughtful of them!

"If Park51 gets built, thanks to its provocative location the nation will scrutinize what takes place inside. Americans have the opportunity right now to be clear about the civic values expected from any Islam practiced at the site.

That means setting aside bombast and asking the imam questions born of the highest American ideals: individual dignity and pluralism of ideas.

• Will the swimming pool at Park51 be segregated between men and women at any time of the day or night?

• May women lead congregational prayers any day of the week?

• Will Jews and Christians, fellow People of the Book, be able to use the prayer sanctuary for their services just as Muslims share prayer space with Christians and Jews in the Pentagon? (Spare me the technocratic argument that the Pentagon is a governmental, not private, building. Park51 may be private in the legal sense but is a public symbol par excellence.)

• What will be taught about homosexuals? About agnostics? About atheists? About apostasy?

• Where does one sign up for advance tickets to Salman Rushdie's lecture at Park51?"

That's Irshad Manji, and she has a point - the same (kind of) point, incidentally, made by Leah Libresco.

"I don’t like Islam. As an atheist, I obviously dislike it for preaching what I believe to be falsehoods and encouraging people to waste a significant portion of their life in empty ritual and meaningless taboos. Of course, the previous goes for most religions, except those which are too watered down to say much of anything at all.

What really bothers me about Islam (as well as Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and some evangelical traditions) is the way it treats women. Wishing women would dress modestly is different from treating their uncovered arms or hair as an assault upon the righteous. Offering specific workshops or meeting for groups according to gender or race or age or any other characteristic is different from mandating separation, particularly when that separation serves primarily to isolate women."

Neither segregating the swimming pool by gender nor endorsing (some) ludicrous claims about non-believers nor any of the other things that Manji would like to prevent is heinous enough to justify a legal prohibition against the community center, just as (many of) the horrendous practices that Libresco mentions are nonetheless not horrendous enough to warrant government interference. All the same, we have obligations as citizens and, more fundamentally, as human beings to put a stop to (or at the very least to militate against) all of those practices. How, you ask? Chief, I suggest we use the spiral of silence.*

"The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. The theory asserts that a person is less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if one feels that one is in the minority for fear of reprisal or isolation from the majority."

The reprisals here need only be emotional; criticisms like Manji's or Libresco's (or, I can only hope, mine) serve to rebuff unacceptable opinions and behaviors and thus decrease the confidence of a person to hold those opinions or engage in those behaviors. Isolation is a little harder to achieve but can, I think, be more effective for that: if one finds oneself in a situation that departs significantly from one's moral (or, I guess, other) principles, it can send a powerful message indeed to simply stand up and walk out. (One can always decline to participate in the first place, of course, but in my personal experience it's been hard to predict just which events to avoid.)

This manner of discouragement has several distinct advantages over both more direct strategies and the unadulterated optimism of just trusting that things are going to get better on their own. For one thing, spiral-of-silence techniques don't require the use of any hard power; nobody should ever go to jail or the hospital as the result of this kind of reprisal or isolation. Plus, they're flexible: in a society oriented more towards politeness and softness of speech, one can tread softly and have success; elsewhere, a more strident approach will still be appropriate. And, of course, activating the spiral of silence is active, which means it could at least possibly fulfill one's moral obligations. The one problem with this sort of thing is that it requires a great deal of patience and devotion, as it quite frequently means putting pressure on one's friends (which is awkward) and restraining oneself somewhat around strangers (which is frustrating). With a little practice, though, those obstacles become less significant.

While the precise steps to take might not be clear yet, I trust in the imagination and creativity of my readers - you can, I feel, figure that part out on your own. Keep in mind, though, that for the spiral of silence to work it is not necessary to change anybody's mind. At some point, we all have to accept that some minds are already made up and the best we can do is convince those minds to not say such stupid shit as they have been saying. Baby steps are, after all, appropriate when dealing with people who lack even the basic moral capacity of babies.

*If you don't know why this sentence started with "Chief," I am not going to fill you in.

Doing some reading for grad school, I came across the following proposal by Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp (made on page 285 of their A History & Theory of Informed Consent):

"A set Y of consent requirements in sense2 is morally preferable to any set Z [qua consent] if, all other things being equal, (1) Y results in more informed consents (in sense1) than Z, (2) Y results in fewer 'false negatives' - that is, fewer informed consents in sense1 will fail to meet the formal requirements of informed consent in sense2 - than Z, and (3) Y results in fewer 'false positives' than Z - that is, fewer authorizations that are not substantially autonomous will meet its formal requirements as informed consents in sense2."

On the terminology used here, sense1 refers to a wholly moral conception of informed consent (i.e., when an act of consent ["a consent"] carries moral weight) whereas sense2 merely refers to whatever legal requirements happen to be operating in the context specified. Faden and Beauchamp realize, of course, that the two are logically independent - in theory, a nutty enough country could define a legalistic concept of informed consent to be anything at all - and so want to explore the appropriate connections between the two disparate concepts. The excerpt above represents their theory about how sense1 (moral) informed consent should govern or serve as a check on sense2 (legal) informed consent.

Their second and third criteria are, I would imagine, the more intuitive for most people. What you don't want is a set of sense2/legal requirements that allow for something called "informed consent" that has no substantive relationship with the sense1/moral definition of the phrase. This is true pretty much just as a specific case of a general rule: we don't typically ever want our legal definitions to stray too far afield of the underlying moral concepts, because if they do we run the risk of punishing innocuous behavior (in which case our criminal laws would generate too many false positives) or permitting injurious behavior (in which case they'd generate too many false negatives). Put in the most basic of terms, requirements (2) and (3) are just long-winded ways of saying, "It is better for any given legal concept of informed consent to match the moral definition closely rather than loosely."

One might be tempted at this point to raise an objection concerning feasibility. After all, we're talking here about legal requirements, which can only be practiced and enforced by governments or government agents and which must therefore be weighed against competing goods, the proper role of the state, and so on. To their credit, however, Faden and Beauchamp anticipate this objection, and spend the next few paragraphs dealing with it. Criteria (2) and (3), then, are pretty well-conceived, as near as I can tell. But what about (1)?

It may seem - I thought this at first, for example - that (1) is an insurance policy against (2) and (3) being used to generate a trivial Y on which there are zero informed consents; indeed, may well be its intended purpose. (I haven't seen them defend it, at least not yet; updates coming as appropriate.) And anyway, (1) seems perfectly reasonable - what should a set of consent rules be aimed at obtaining if not informed consents? The only problem is that this presumes a view of medicine that doesn't necessarily hold up. Observe, for instance, their earlier discussion about what happens when there isn't consent (278):

"Following the analysis of substantial autonomy in Chapter 7, we can whittle down [our] definition by saying that an informed consent in sense1 is given if a patient or [research] subject with (1) substantial understanding and (2) in substantial absense of control by others (3) intentionally (4) authorizes a professional (to do [the authorized acts]).

It follows analytically from our analysis in Chapter 7 that all substantially autonomous acts satisfy conditions 1-3; but it does not follow from that analysis alone that all such acts satisfy 4. The fourth condition, then, is what distinguishes informed consents as one kind of autonomous action...A person whose act satisfies conditions 1-3 but who refuses an intervention gives an informed refusal."

Somehow this concept of an informed refusal gets left behind when they begin to discuss the proper form for a legal structure of consent. Again, it may seem tempting to say that this just isn't a problem because the law really should favor treatment (or participation in research) over non-treatment (or non-participation), but that is really very implausible.

For one thing, some religions require their followers to forgo certain kinds of medical care. While in many cases these refusals should in fact be overruled by the law (see e.g.), there's not a great reason to say that a person should be forced to undergo any given level of medical care when their religious beliefs dictate otherwise. The problem, of course, is hardly limited to religious beliefs: a medical or research procedure may entail a too high a level of risk, too low a chance of success, an end goal not endorsed by the potential consenter, and so on and so forth. So long as there isn't a truly compelling state interest in mandating the procedure despite such objections - like the need to prevent epidemics, on which we base our requirement that some would-be travelers either assent to immunizations or stay home - we should recognize that refusal on the basis any of these reasons does in fact satisfy the state's interests in medical and research scenarios.

Once we recognize that the state has (or should have) no specific desire for informed consents as such, however, Faden and Beauchamp's (1) starts to look a little odd and out of place. Instead of its current formulation, I suspect that it should say something like, "Y results in more total informed consents and informed refusals (in sense1) than Z." While this is a pretty easy fix, that fact can hide the potentially dangerous effects of actually believing that consent policy should be constructed so as to result in the highest number of consents possible - effects that, I would guess, Faden and Beauchamp already recognize and simply forgot to account for in this particular section of their text.

Somewhat shallowly, conceiving of government as an entity whose responsibility is to generate informed consents is liable to encourage people to just get any old consents and then tack the "informed" label onto them. For evidence of this claim, see e.g. the U.S.'s pathetic educational system: driven by bad legislation, schools produced warped curricula and monitoring agencies produced warped evaluative methodologies. Since it is, I propose, always easier to draft bad legislation than good legislation, the odds are good that something similar would happen if we tried to put quotas on watermarks on the sheer number of informed consents acquired. More deeply, this whole topic strikes at the heart of what medicine is for. If the overriding purpose of medical care is to produce the highest possible level of physiological health, then obviously issues about consent are tangential at best: doctors should just treat people, period. While that hypothesis would support the strictly pro-consent mindset suggested by a straightforward Faden and Beauchamp's (1), very few people would support the hypothesis itself (thankfully). A similar result can be obtained in a much more plausible way, though: all we need is a single, static conception of "the good life" and we can then begin to tailor medical care to it. On an understanding like that, some medical interventions are absolutely necessary and so make consent a non-issue; similarly, others are absolutely forbidden and therefore make refusal a non-issue. Before you dismiss this kind of hypothesis as equally unrealistic, consider the fact that some groups argue quite consistently against birth control, euthanasia, gender reassignment surgery, and the like. In other words, this second kind of hypothesis already is accepted by many people, with the predictable results.

Presumably this "good life" question will come up again in some future readings, at which point I'll have more to say about it. In the meantime, this little nitpick will have to hold you over; with this one exception, Faden and Beauchamp have been close to impeccable.

Just don't say I never did anything for you, 'kay?

"A frequently heard statement of cultural relativism goes like this: 'If it feels right for you, it's OK. Who is to say you're wrong?' One individual's experience is as 'valid' as another's. There is no 'preferred' or higher vantage point from which to judge these things. Not just beauty, but right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder. The 'I' indeed is the 'ultimate measure.'

The special theory of relativity imposes on the physical world a claim that is very similar to the one made by relativism."

Presumably this loony toon, Tom Bethell, also has something to do with the recent Conservapedic crusade against relativity (as seen, for instance, at Faith In Honest Doubt). You never quite can tell, though - the universe is an odd place that features many, many stupid people. Either way, this argument is all kinds of ridiculous.

"So how come the speed of light always stays the same? Einstein argued that when the observer moves relative to an object, distance and time always adjust themselves just enough to preserve light speed as a constant. Speed is distance divided by time. So, Einstein argued, length contracts and time dilates to just the extent needed to keep the speed of light ever the same.

Space and time are the alpha and omega of the physical world. They are the stage within which everything happens. But if they must trim and tarry whenever the observer moves, that puts 'the observer' in the driver's seat. Reality becomes observer-dependent."

Right: truth "becomes observer-dependent," except for how "the speed of light always stays the same." It's kinda impressive, isn't it, how he takes all of two paragraphs to generate an outright contradiction? But hey, nobody ever accused Bethell of being the cleanest shirt in the closet.*

"The contraction of space and the dilation of time are deductions from relativity. But they have not been observed. In easy Einstein books, drawings of spaceships that are shortened because they are moving at high speed are imagined by artists in accordance with theory. No physical experiment has ever detected length contraction."

Assuming that this is even true, which judging by this wiki article it may very well not be, it's just a wee bit disingenuous to list one prediction of general relativity that hasn't been experimentally confirmed in the hopes of casting aspersions on the theory itself. For one thing, the experimental state of not having been confirmed is practically useless as philosophical evidence. If Bethell had been able to claim that length contraction has been experimentally disproven that would've been quite a big deal, but this? This is literally nothing: he has no data, no information. And then, of course, there's the fact that several other relativistic predictions have been experimentally confirmed - but why should Bethell list those? He's not interested in the truth, he's interested in making some kind of whacked-out political point.

And what if he were right? If relativism turns out to be false (as it very likely will), how exactly does that bear on relativity? The two share an etymological ancestor, sure, and as Bethell remarks they both "arose at about the same time"...but so what? It takes a truly tepid intellect to come up with an argument as ludicrous as "these two theories have kinda similar-sounding names and showed up within some years of each other, therefore the truth of one depends on the truth of the other." You might - well, let's be honest; you do - have your own problems, but I think we can all be grateful that we're not as deranged as Tom Bethell is.

*Yes? No? Every so often I try to come up with a new one of these but this one I'm not so confident about.

Although the breadth of suggested solutions to my country's educational failures is indeed wide, I do believe that Pat Buchanan (soul of ingenuity that he is) has managed to come up with a new one: stop trying. See, where the "elites," those pesky bastards, would have us strive harder for the sake of an educational system that doesn't have vastly different outcomes for different racial groups, Buchanan says we ought to just "accept that, be it by nature, nurture, attitude or aptitude, we are not all equal in academic ability." There is, he thinks, an instructive analogy to be made with athletics.

"When it comes to sports -- high school, collegiate or professional -- Americans are intolerant of lectures about diversity and inclusiveness. They want the best -- the best in the NFL, the best in the NBA, the best at Augusta, the best at Wimbledon, the best in the Olympics, the best in the All-Star Game, the World Series, the Super Bowl.

When it comes to artistic ability, musical ability, acting ability, athletic ability, Americans accept the reality of inequality. We are not all born equal, other than in our God-given and constitutional rights.

We are not all equally gifted. There are prodigies like pianist Van Cliburn, chess wizard Bobby Fischer, actress Shirley Temple. Every kid halfway through first grade knows who can spell and sing and who cannot, and who is bright and talented and athletic, and who is not.

What most Americans seek is a level playing field on which all compete equally, for what we ultimately seek is excellence, not equality."

By applying our aesthetic attitudes to education,* Buchanan argues, we will have achieved "[t]he beginning of wisdom." Unfortunately, his article ends with that proclamation and so we, his readers, are deprived of the opportunity to learn about all the other phases of wisdom, which perhaps might have been helpful in terms of evaluating this whole thing. But he's given us so much already, hasn't he? Surely we can make do with just this.

Let's start, then, with the notion of inborn, latent talent. All of us, he claims, can tell whether a child "halfway through first grade" has talent in a certain area. In the spirit of acceptance that he calls for so bravely, let me be the first to recommend, given this self-evident and indubitable premise, that any child who does not seem "bright and talented and athletic" by the age of ten (you can see that I'm being very generous here, letting them go for so long) should summarily be dismissed from whatever academic, hobby, or athletic organizations they happen to belong to; this dismissal must, of course, have the force of law behind it if it is to be at all effective. (If this should comprise all of the organizations they belong to, we can just use them to work the jobs that are currently attracting illegal immigrants - it's a win-win!) Trying to improve a child's future is a fool's errand and a waste of time; better to concentrate on ensuring that the born winners actually win later in life.

Second, since we are now equating cognitive capacity with athleticism and artistic skill, I am forced to recommend that we balance our schools' curricula: either remove some academic subjects in order to allow more time for sports and arts (I'd start with history, personally) or expand the school day to allow for equal time in all three disciplines. Not only will this help to dispense with the silly falsehood that academic learning is somehow more useful or more central in adults' lives than sports and art and therefore more valuable to society than those other two things, it will drive up the level of free-market-esque competition in all fields, thus guaranteeing that we really do get the best in academia, athletics, and the arts.

Finally, Buchanan's impassioned call for an equal playing field must be heeded. Until the day when every student's parents can afford all the best learning tools for their children - high-end computers, tutors, etc. - the government's only choice (in the interest of providing "[w]hat most Americans seek"!) is to provide those tools to all students at the taxpayer's expense. How else could an even playing field ever be achieved? Similarly, those parents who prove themselves to be academically unfit - by feeding their children too little or otherwise malnourishing them, by devaluing education or failing to value it highly enough, and so on - must have their children temporarily (temporarily!) removed from their care and relocated to state-approved educationally fit homes. Again, this may seem like a draconian and an extreme solution, but the Constitution and our God-given rights and whatever promise us a level playing field, so by God a level playing field is what we must have.

There are some ancillary measures that I'd like to propose as well, like bolstering our nation's public healthcare system so that all of our children play with a level safety net as well, but I figure we can knock out the really crucial stuff first and then get to the bells and whistles. America is a nation of winners, dammit, and we do ourselves a disservice by insisting on an educational system that tries to help everyone finish at the top. We should applaud Buchanan for his truly wise insight into the nature of competition: in order for there to be winners, there must also be losers. It is, therefore, high time that America got back in the business of making losers, too.

*And yes, I count athletic stuff under the general aesthetic category.

Special bonus! Fellow LOST fans will also be excited to learn that this is comic number 815 over at Left-Handed Toons, which I promise you is just a coincidence.

Seriously, it's just not a good idea. She is, as Fazale Rana astutely observes, "provocative," but maybe it's smarter to put in the effort and find just one other provocative person to serve as one's rhetorical role model. I dunno - judge for yourself.

"Pop music icon and performance artist Lady Gaga goes out of her way to be provocative. Other celebrities are provocative unintentionally.

The same is true about the features of the cell’s chemical systems. As discussed in my book, The Cell’s Design, the defining characteristics of biochemical systems are all indicators of intelligent design."

Rah rah ah-ah-ah! Er, wait, sorry - were we done with the Lady Gaga thing? Is that over now? Okay, good.

"In my book The Cell’s Design [do you get the feeling he's trying to sell this just a little?], I follow after William Paley, arguing that biochemical systems share many features in common with objects and systems produced by human designers. And because of this parallel we can take such features in natural systems as evidence for intelligent design. In other words, if certain characteristics and features indicate that a structure or process is the product of a human mind and we observe these same properties in biochemical systems, then by analogy it logically follows that life stems from the work of a Mind as well."

The interesting thing here - well, okay, one interesting thing here is that there's still anything interesting to say about this played-out argument. But aside from that, the interesting thing here is that Rana explicitly limits his analogical thinking to biochemical systems. Reasoning that hinges on the use of analogies tends to be effective precisely because it circumvents that kind of limitation: if the analogy is a good one, presumably it applies to all kinds of other systems as well, like maybe this one.

"So let's say you're a spider. And, following the advice of that song in The Little Mermaid, you decide you want to devote yourself to a life under the sea. How the hell are you going to do that? You're a fucking spider.

Well, you could do what the Diving Bell Spider does and build your own freaking mini-submarine. It spins a balloon-like web in which it can trap oxygen and breathe like a raver huffing nitrous oxide out of a Hefty bag."

Without a reason to permit the analogy in biochemical systems but not in animal behavioral systems, Rana's argument looks awfully ragged. He also needs to level a little about the strength of his analogy. Unlike purely conceptual comparisons, the analogy that Rana has in mind is inferential, meaning that it stands or falls on the basis of a certain collection of evidence. Listing only the evidence in favor of the analogy provides at best a partial picture, as there will typically be antagonistic evidence as well (as exists in spades in this case). To be honest, going for a one-sided picture at first isn't the worst thing in the world: if you try that and fail, you save yourself the effort of then looking at the other side. And if you succeed, you can always settle for having obtained a prima facie argument in favor of whatever conclusion you want - you just can't claim overall victory in the way that Rana does, is all.

Anyway, if this is what suffices for provocation these days then count me severely disappointed. (Although! Score one for Rana in terms of his "I am Lady Gaga" thing.) It's curious that Rana manages to continue to make this argument in the face of its well-known and in-built problems, many of which are highlighted in his word choice, but curiosity and provocativeness are not exactly the same. His book might work as a doorstop, but judging by this sad display that would be about its only use.

Caveat one: there will be semi-major spoilers, maybe.
Caveat two: these criticisms apply only to the movie; I plead agnosticism about the graphic novels.
Update: I no longer plead agnosticism about the graphic novels. They are great, you should buy them and read them (in that order). And then you should buy a ticket to Scott Pilgrim the movie and go see something else instead.

That being said, I may still get myself into some trouble by saying this: Scott Pilgrim is as close to a perfect indictment of video game culture as Roger Ebert could ever hope for. Oddly, however, I can't seem to find Ebert's review of it - so I'll go with Stephen Whitty's and Mark Davison's instead. Quoth Whitty,

"Its hero plays bass in an alternative rock band. Its fight scenes are shot like video games. And it’s based on a graphic novel.

What’s not to like?

Well, to many older viewers, everything. They’ll find the film too loud, too violent and way too full of Michael Cera."

Davison counters:

"There were initial grumblings about Michael Cera’s casting in the lead role but he manages to pull it off well – admittedly he is still very much ‘Michael Cera’, but pleasingly the screen Pilgrim keeps much of his inked counterpart’s charm, as well as his less attractive self-obsession."

Pictured: a face that Michael Cera is genetically incapable of ever making

Point: Whitty. (But! I am not old; I just have taste.*) Michael Cera is an albatross and about as one-note as one-note gets. I'm about two and a half volumes in to the graphic novels and I feel confident in saying that Cera has somewhere between 45-60 percent of the emotional range necessary to play Pilgrim. And that's saying something, since the character is basically a cardboard cutout. That brings me to my next point - again, Whitty:

"The story is obviously ridiculous if not on the edge of offensive. Scott’s teen girlfriend plays into porn-like stereotypes of underage Asians. His devotion to Ramona is so self-abasing, it’s masochistic.

That everyone in the film is aware of this doesn’t make it much easier to take."

And Davison:

"...despite his name being in the title Scott isn’t the main draw anyway, but rather the rich background of supporting characters – all parts are cast to very closely match the original book designs, and a parade of recognisable faces turn up in even the smallest roles. The women of Pilgrim’s world are also far much more interesting than those usually offered in the action-comedy genre, with not only Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona providing a suitable match for Pilgrim’s positive and negative qualities but other particular stand-outs including Ellen Wong as Scott’s school-girl ex-girlfriend Knives who is delightfully sweet, hyperactive and, as her name would suggest, a mean fighter in her own right and the ever-reliable Alison Pill providing an amusingly bitter commentary on the events of Scott’s love-life as Sex Bob-Omb’s drummer Kim."

Point: neither. Knives - which, by the way, that is a terrible fucking name even if it is heavily sardonic - is neither "porn-like" (what??) nor "delightfully sweet"; that either man should think so speaks rather poorly of their art interpretation abilities. They are, however, both equally right in emphasizing how little Cera's character contributes to the movie. Partially this is Cera's fault, as he spends the entire movie being out-acted by basically everybody else onscreen (especially the aforementioned Pill and Kieran Culkin), but, far worse, it's also due in large part to the utter dearth of character provided by the screenwriters and probably the original author himself.

To fully understand Scott Pilgrim and its missed opportunities, it helps to look at the other artworks in this genre, which I will call "hipster romantic comedy" (more on this momentarily). Most recently, this genre saw commercial and relative critical success with (500) Days Of Summer, which itself was flawed in non-trivial ways. Two much better examples are Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Science Of Sleep (a third example, to be named later, will help to define the genre). It's easy to note that the main characters in those movies (both male and female) are extremely well-acted and well-written; this helps to demonstrate one reason why Pilgrim falls so flat. Both movies also share Pilgrim's focus on using imaginative filmmaking, but where they use it to explore the protagonists' inner lives Pilgrim just throws it in every now and then. Quite possibly it could have avoided this...if its protagonist had had an inner life. Without providing a realistic human character against which to run these various cinematic games, any such project is doomed from the start. The same, incidentally, goes for the women in Pilgrim: the few who show hints of depth are given minimal screen time and infinitesimal attention by the script, which is really hard to watch knowing that similar stories have included Kate Winslet's Clementine and Charlotte Gainsbourg's Stephanie. But wait - shouldn't this not matter?

"Pilgrim might have it’s [sic] basis in low key mumble-core style navel-gazing comedy, but then it cranks things up to 11 by throwing in the obstacle of Ramona’s seven evil exes, and a lot of surprisingly well-choreographed fight scenes."

It's a nerd movie, right? Video game references and indie music and kung fu - what could go wrong! But not even Davison in full bubble-head mode can get away from the life "lesson at the end" of the movie. He attempts to explain it away as "a playful dig at the usual last minute moral revelation in rom-coms," but that's pretty much bullshit. Without a serious attempt at working out the kinks in the featured relationship, Pilgrim would have been a straight-up romantic comedy, and you'd have to be a real idiot to mistake it for a straight-up anything. This, then, is one necessary component of the hipster romantic comedy: an apparently flat-lining relationship that undergoes a (not necessarily successful) period of resuscitation. The lone other necessary component is the only characteristic shared by Pilgrim, (500) Days Of Summer, Eternal Sunshine, Science Of Sleep, and Neon Genesis Evangelion: the protagonist has to be completely unsuited for a relationship but badly desiring of one nonetheless.

Lookie lookie! A Soul Calibur reference!

Evangelion, some of you will note, departs sharply from the other movies listed in that its style has no relationship to hipness or hipsterism or really anything with "hip" as its root word. That is because the hipster romantic comedy, despite its suggestive name, doesn't strictly speaking have anything to do with the hipster scene. Instead, it's the hipster mindset that matters (or at least a caricature thereof): some or all of the main characters have to be extraordinarily introspective and that introspective bent has to be tied to an over-emphasis on authenticity or being true to oneself (especially as contrasted with the expectations placed on them by the other characters in the story). Hipsters (stereotypically) achieve this by delving so deeply into irony that they lose the ability to retrace their steps and arrive back at sincerity, but that's certainly not the only way to get there. Hipster romantic comedies take advantage of this to create sympathy for the distressed party(ies) - deeply introspective, independent people tend to come off as eccentric geniuses at first - at which point they can begin to explore the characters' flaws more deeply and hopefully work towards some kind of resolution and accompanying moral. In Eternal Sunshine the moral is that people are fucked up and if you get into a relationship you have to thoroughly understand how fucked up people are; in Science Of Sleep the moral is that your relationship won't succeed if you conceive of the other person in your relationship as part of a story you've dreamed up; and Evangelion just wants you to grow a fucking spine already. The problem with Pilgrim - the gigantic, neon-blinking problem - is that its moral is bullshit and never really tries to be much more.

You'll have to see the movie yourself (or read a more spoiler-laden review) to identify that lesson specifically, but even in the abstract it should be easy to imagine that a story featuring stringently archetypal characters would have trouble working those characters into any kind of new, interesting, or compelling rearrangement. If the movie had focused more on the fight scenes to the exclusion of relationship drama, this wouldn't have been a problem. The same goes for geek culture, comedy, or the ensemble cast; really, any other emphasis would have rescued the movie from the inevitability of its clumsily fabricated resolution and denouement. In its current configuration, Pilgrim is a movie about a relationship that merely contains a bunch of neat side-features. In order to have succeeded, it needed to be basically anything else.

*To emphasize this point, allow me to correct Whitty on one point: the movie, at least in my theater, was in fact too soft. Pilgrim's band plays (small-number)-chord grunge rock with mediocre lyrics, and the unifying characteristic of (small-band)-chord mediocre-lyric grunge rock bands is that they play really loud. Those scenes should have been deafening; they were not.

Death as a subject of reflection has been floating around the blogs somewhat recently as a result of Christopher Hitchens and his personal reactions to his own (perhaps impending) demise. One of the least philosophical reactions to this point - which was offered up, naturally, by a professional philosopher - is this one:

The following bon mots "about being honest with yourself" allegedly result in feelings of invigoration and energy - see what you think.

"Look, I already spent an hour on my bike and ninety minutes in the yoga studio today. Honesty can wait." - Me

"It's a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth.' And so it goes away. Puzzling." - Robert M. Pirsig

Although I am by no means a scholar of classical political philosophy, even I know enough to see the problem with David Koyzis's reasoning here.

"McGill University's Douglas Farrow notes the libertarian preference for John Stuart Mill's harm principle: 'The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.' Of course, no flesh-and-blood society has ever existed for which this harm principle forms the primary (much less the sole) basis for freedom. A mature, differentiated society includes multiple non-state communities, each of which has its own identity and standards for membership. These standards necessarily impose constraints on those subject to them. To belong to an Orthodox Jewish community requires one to follow Torah and, more specifically, centuries of rabbinic interpretation of its precepts. If one violates these, one can expect to face sanctions from the community.

Is there something intrinsically oppressive in communities imposing standards on individual members? Though few would go so far as to assert this overtly, the logic of the harm principle must eventually give a positive answer to this question. If so, the state must intervene to 'protect' these individuals from having to submit to standards unrelated to this principle."

Now maybe Mill said some more stuff that makes this argument less fantastically wrong - and in fact I plan on reading Farrow's piece tomorrow just to make sure - but "this formulation" of the harm principle emphatically does not do the things that Koyzis accuses it of doing. To wit, the formula is this:

• If the state has rightfully exercised its power over any member of a civilized community* [against that person's will - thanks, Mark], that member would otherwise have caused harm to others (such that the state's intervention prevented that harm).

Whereas Koyzis and apparently Farrow are interpreting it like this:

• If a member of a civilized society would cause harm without state intervention, the state must intervene to prevent that harm.

In case you can't already tell, that second one is the reverse of the first (give or take verb tense changes). Mill's principle may be pretty weak on its face - the justice system, for example, operates in the vast majority of cases after the harm has already occurred, but we can't exactly just get rid of it - but one of the many things it doesn't say is that states are compelled to forcibly prevent each and every instance of harm. I don't yet know whether Koyzis is really that stupid or whether he just so happened to quote the wrong sentence of Mill's, but it sure doesn't help that his ulterior motive in all of this is to protect "marriage, family, institutional church, and state" in the name of safeguarding "the wellbeing of the individual herself." This kind of reasoning, as we well know, is prone to permitting all manner of atrocities on the reasoning that the individual herself wouldn't have been happy in their absence, either: everything from empirically false (and psychologically damaging) sex education to public stoning has been justified in the name of an abstracted concept of wellbeing that looks great on paper but fails to translate to the real world. Again, whether Koyzis himself wants to travel down that kind of road is currently unclear, but it's worrying enough that he opens the door that leads there.

More on this story as it develops, assuming that it develops.

*And why, I wonder, should it matter that it's a civilized community? Do the theorems of political philosophy apply differently to uncivilized peoples? Like, in the U.S. it's wrong for the government to torture people but in Darfur it's not a problem? That's just a bizarre notion.

We first encountered this Pittsburgh landmark way back in winter, at which time I was too busy moving and re-moving chairs from parking spots to investigate further, and then again in spring, when I was...well, too lazy. Since the building belongs to the U of Pittsburgh and I am now a student at that same U, I figured now was the right time to return to it and do something a little more in-depth.

Just to remind you, this is what it looks like from the outside. Incidentally, this is also what my friend Shawn looks like. Now to the inside! (Of the building, not of Shawn.)


Most of the space in the first few floors is for studying and looking awesome. I can only vouch for the latter. (The upper floors are offices; you won't be seeing any pictures of those floors.)



I do sometimes feel out of place walking around in there without a bow, quiver, and one of those pointy knight helmets. You know the ones, right? The ones that they used to put on LEGOs all the time?

Anyway, the main attraction in the Cathedral is the series of themed classrooms, each of which reflects a country, era, or other culture. Since I trust you all so much to be good world citizens, I won't condescend to tell you which of these rooms traces back to which culture. Instead, you get to guess - have fun!

Room 1




Room 2


Room 3




Room 4


Room 5


Room 6


Room 7


Room 8




Room 9

There's quite a lot that I will permit in the name of plurality; being as I am a liberal in most things, plurality is for me a worthwhile goal and therefore one for which other things can sanely be sacrificed. There are, however, limits.

"Just as the [aesthetically] pleasant neighborhood emerges from a diverse set of buildings all striving to 'fit in' with their neighbors without losing their own particular status, so too manners in ordinary human conduct recognize, preserve, and quietly insist upon what Marion Montgomery termed 'the very graciousness of being,' a tacit acknowledgement of the value of the other. The tradition of civility checks our tendency to put ourselves forward at the expense of comity.

Civility in the political sense allows diverse individuals and groups, even when partisan, to pursue the good of all."

By advancing this argument, RJ Snell puts me and people like me in an awkward position. Nominally he and I support the same thing, but from all indications the content of that named thing differs in his understanding and in mine. In particular, comity covers "the good of all" so fractionally that I have very strong doubts that Snell has even understood the phrase.

On the other hand, perhaps he knows exactly what he's talking about and simply doesn't care. After all, he does rely on our "tradition of civility," which has indeed guaranteed "the value of the other" - if, that is, that "other" is not actually an other. To the same extent that civility is used to support and cushion a specific demographic subset of society, it undercuts every other such subset (although not necessarily to the same extent or in the same ways). Perhaps an ideal form of civility would achieve the pluralistic ends that he and I both appear to want, but traditional civility is pretty obviously not up to snuff.

A much bigger problem, though, is that I'm not actually sure I understand what "civility" means for Snell. Observe:

"So important is civility, the moderating of particular interests for the common interest, that 'it comprises a pattern and standard of judgment without which the institutions of civil society cannot flourish.' Thus, while civility is not reducible to liberal democracy, civility is a necessary condition of its success...

Here I’d suggest that the two forms of civility highlighted by Shils—good manners and civil society—indicate an underlying third sense without which neither good manners nor civil society could be ultimately reasonable, namely, respect for the dignity of others, for their 'very graciousness of being.'

...Civility in this third sense means due respect—piety, even—toward citizens of the cosmos, or, as we usually refer to them, persons."

From this excerpt alone we have three plainly non-interchangeable definitions of civility and a fourth that supposedly integrates some combination thereof:

1. Good manners
2. Civil society
3. Piety towards persons
4. The moderating of particular interests for the common interest

We here at Rust Belt Philosophy have known of David Hart's mental infirmity for some time, but today I discovered either that he has degenerated past a point of no return or that it was much worse than any of us could have initially suspected.

"I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings."

But wait - it gets worse. As in, much worse.

"For one thing, there is the haunting air of necessity that hangs about it, which seems so difficult to reconcile with its relatively recent provenance. It feels as if the game has always been with us."

Here again we have proof that one man's "haunting air of necessity" is another man's (i.e., my) "frustrating air of just-go-the-fuck-away-already." The reason, therefore, that baseball "feels as if [it] has always been with us" is the same reason that time dilates in the queue at the DMV: the more you think about it, the more you want any other state of affairs to be true.

"It requires a whole constellation of seemingly bizarre physical and mental skills that, through countless barren millennia, were not only unrealized but also unsuspected potencies of human nature, silently awaiting the formal cause from beyond that would make them actual. So much of what a batter, pitcher, or fielder does is astonishingly improbable, and yet—it turns out—entirely natural."

Please, wanton fortunes of the cosmos, let this be the last time I encounter the phrase "mental skills" in reference to sport-playing. And for crying out loud, if throwing things, catching things, and hitting things with sticks are unexpected and improbable human behaviors, what exactly can we count as expected or probable? You want bizarre? Talk to me about yoga or figure skating or the playing of almost any musical instrument.

"And there is something equally fateful, as has been noted so often, in the exact fittingness of the game’s dimensions: the ninety feet between bases, the sixty-and-a-half feet between the pitching rubber and the plate, that precious third of a second in which a batter must decide whether to swing."

Look, everyone! Numbers! ...actually that's basically it, these are just numbers with no other reasoning or anything attached to them. How exciting...?

He goes on for a while more - like, half or 60% of the article more - but at this point my pity is overwhelming my spite and so I must constrain my commentary. For the sake of future generations, we must understand this article of Hart's as a warning. If we continue to support baseball to the extent that it can survive, we will only subject more and more of our children* to the dangers of entering into whichever deluded state of mind Hart inhabits. For the sake of all that is good, the next time you want to watch a baseball game, just turn on some soccer instead. The world, and posterity, will thank you.

*By which I mean, your children. My children are going to know damn well how terrible baseball is if I have to Clockwork Orange them into that knowledge.

As featured recently on the Colbert Report and other sundry places, this Gallup survey has demonstrated, to hopefully nobody's surprise, that U.S. survey-takers have some very odd beliefs about morality. For one, they think that this is a morally acceptable resolution to use for text in .gif form:

A little sharper text would've been really nice, Gallup people.

Anyway, my first reaction was, "Really? People think that marital infidelity is worse than suicide or fur coats?" But that's a bit of a mistake, as this survey operates on a binary and so doesn't actually measure the extent of the approval or disapproval. I do, however, see somewhat of a pattern in the kinds of behaviors that are tolerated or not.

Those activities that have been filed under "playing God" tend, at least in this survey, to be frowned upon: issues at the boundaries of life and issues regarding departures from "traditional" sex and marriage are rated as being either utterly unacceptable or highly controversial. (Why those issues count as "playing God" and others don't is not really a question for this post.) Less metaphysically weighty(-seeming) activities like gambling or animal testing, on the other hand, generally get a pass; one might, in view of how I labeled the other category, gather these activities under the banner of "playing human." If this proves anything at all - which it very well may not - it seems to be a major point in favor of reading Kurt Vonnegut.

From what I've read of Vonnegut, which consists of most but not all of his works, the man did not exactly have a high opinion of people in general. (Having lived through a firebombing will do that do you, I guess.) But he is nothing if not perversely optimistic - or should that be optimistically perverse? - and so he offers this piece of advice in his Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."* Along those lines, maybe we ought to pretend to be humans less often and pretend to be God more often - at least, insofar as we take humans to be the kinds of things that have free reign across the rest of the natural world and God to be the kind of thing that is duty-bound to behave in the right way. Ideally one day we'd be able to do without that fiction-based, artificial (and, I would argue, ultimately detrimental) distinction, but until then we have to make do some way or other.

*Other advice from the same book: "Make love when you can. It's good for you."

Bill O'Reilly makes me sad.

"As an American, I always think my country is best, and truthfully, I never thought Finland was in the same league until Newsweek enlightened me. I kind of like having options in my life, and the USA offers plenty of those. If I want to freeze, I can sidle on up to Alaska. If I want it hot, Florida is a short plane ride away. We also have plenty of lakes here, and you can actually swim in most of them. We have two oceans, the Rocky Mountains, the desert southwest and San Francisco, which is really another planet.

But I am happy for the Finns because they don't get much attention. And Finland is a fine place, although Newsweek is definitely overstating things. Unless I missed it, I don't believe millions of people are sneaking across the Swedish border trying to take up residence in the paradise of Finland.

Or am I wrong?"

As ever, the only appropriate answer to that rhetorical question is, "No, Bill, you're not wrong - you're just an asshole." That link goes to the Newsweek story to which he refers, which, near as I can tell, is just one more in a long string of studies that praises the Scandinavian nations for their efficient health care systems, strong economies, and overall high level of education. While it's certainly possible to object to these studies on philosophical grounds - say, by arguing that the variables measured by the studies don't accurately reflect the extent to which those people live "the good life" - this thing about immigrants is as dumb as dumb gets: although USA is indeed 11th to Finland's #1 ranking, Sweden earned the number three spot and Mexico is all the way down at forty-fucking-fifth. The last time I checked, the difference between 1 and 3 was way smaller than the difference between 11 and 45; add to that the fact that this isn't a linear function (that is, the difference in quality of life between 1 and 3 is not the same as the difference in quality of life between 11 and 13) and the whole illegal-immigrants argument is shown to be the absolute fraud that it is.

If O'Reilly is really so concerned with the USA's ranking on this list, maybe it would be wise of him to incentivize intelligent debate (and therefore, one hopes, intelligent policy) rather than continuing to dabble in knee-jerk propagandizing.

Margaret Somerville starts off her article on human exceptionalism really well:

"Some philosophers are arguing that at least certain animals should be regarded as persons in order to give them the same rights and protections as humans. Alternatively, they argue that humans should be regarded as just another animal, which results in the same outcome, a loss of special respect for human beings.

...Following logically on that, these philosophers then argue that some seriously mentally disabled humans and babies, who are among the most vulnerable, weakest and most in need members of our societies, are not persons, and, therefore, do not have the protections personhood brings, for instance, protection of their right to life. And, likewise, they propose that at least some animals should be regarded as non-human persons on the basis that these animals have some of the characteristics of personhood that the humans they regard as non-persons lack. They propose that animals which are self-conscious, intelligent, and have free will and emotions comparable to those of humans, should be treated as non-human persons."

It's slightly dishonest of her to say that "a loss of special respect for human beings" logically precedes the belief that "some seriously mentally disabled humans and babies...are not persons" as though the latter follows inescapably from the former, but that level of shadiness I can allow in a newspaper editorial. More importantly, she's absolutely correct to bring up this issue in a public forum. One of the things we philosophers learn to do is "bite the bullet," a phrase that basically means "accept the politically unpopular implications of one's view." Oftentimes this process goes on behind closed doors - or close enough: in academic journals - and so the general populace doesn't learn about the more questionable aspects of certain theories. And, despite her overhasty claim about what "these philosophers" believe, Somerville has indeed identified an incident of bullet-biting that people ought to know about. So that was good, but then she kept on going.

"People who believe the kind and degree of respect owed to an entity depends on its intelligence, would argue that some super-intelligent robots will deserve more respect than humans. They define intelligence narrowly, as logical, cognitive mentation and, for them, these robots are more 'intelligent' than any humans. This approach has far-reaching and serious implications, well beyond the degree of respect that should be shown to an individual human, as compared with an individual robot.

If there is nothing special about being human, there is no essence of our humanness that we must hold in trust."

This is far less cogent, although she may still know what she's talking about. Notice, first of all, that she has moved from "self-conscious, intelligent [creatures with] free will and emotions comparable to those of humans" to entities that are merely "super-intelligent." How popular is this latter view as compared with the former? I for one haven't actually ever encountered it - does it even exist? And then there's the whole thing about having nothing to "hold in trust." I don't know what that means and I can't see how it follows from anything she's said up to this point; basically it just sounds like she wants to spook people. But, okay, she is a working ethicist and professor, so maybe she knows better than me. This next bit, however, is just nuts.

"Implementing and maintaining 'special respect' for humans will require that we recognize humans as having innate human dignity that must be respected, and that we regard as unethical interventions that contravene that dignity, such as designing our children, making a baby from two same-sex people, creating human-animal hybrids, cloning humans, using human embryos as a 'manufacturing plant' to produce therapeutic agents, euthanasia, and, with the new neuroscience, perhaps most worrying of all, designing, controlling or intervening on our minds."

Seriously, that's a disturbing list. At this point it's not clear that Somerville has really thought about this at all - "making a baby from two same-sex people" is about as harmless as it gets, and we've been "designing, controlling [and] intervening on our minds" ever since the first person discovered a natural psychotropic compound. The other entries may be more controversial, but she doesn't explain her objections to them and so I can't rebut those objections. Suffice to say that I'm not convinced, especially given her laughable distaste for psychiatry and artificial reproduction.

You really have to wonder why everything has to come back to teh gayz. Stem cell therapies and the unfortunately named "animal-human hybrids" are at least complicated technological matters that require a fair understanding of medicine to even begin to analyze. But there is absolutely no good reason to say that it constitutes a grave moral problem to take the genetic information of two women (say), create a fertilized egg with their combined information, and then implant it in one of them (or a surrogate). Yeah, all of that stuff might sound kinda iffy, but the last time I checked "sounding iffy" was not on the Big List o' Moral Warning Signs. Whatever this special thing is that humans supposedly possess, if we have to say that queer people have less of it (or must benefit less from it) than everyone else then it's not at all plausible and certainly not worth keeping around. I hope to find, at some point, a take on human exceptionalism that doesn't include tenets so blatantly wrong as these, but so far I've had no luck with that at all. Expect more on this topic as my classes start.