Feed on hiatus

We will resume publishing the week of 8/10.

Lab rat rights

I cite articles about animal rights because I think it is an important issue, regardless of your position on the subject, because merely thinking about it forces you to also think about human rights. The numbers here are surprising.

Last year, 3.6 million animals were used in medical research in the UK, whereas more than 200 million animals were raised for the meat trade, many of which were in factory farms. Thus, animals in research are only a tiny fraction of animals raised for human use: for every research animal, there are 50 animals in the meat industry. Moreover, the case against factory farming is much stronger than the case against animals in research... Compared to the research industry, the meat industry thus involves more than 50 times as many animals, whose presence contributes much less to human welfare, and who arguably suffer more as well. More...

Measuring democracy

Over the years we've kicked the concept of democracy around a lot. The thing is, it is not a static concept easily defined, but some form of government somewhere on a very broad spectrum.

What I want to do here is highlight the pros and cons of two extremely different approaches: the minimalist and the maximalist one. The former could, for example, view democracy as no more than a system of regular elections, and measure simply the presence or absence of elections in different countries. The latter, on the other hand, could include in its definition of democracy stuff like rights protections, freedom of the press, division of powers etc., and measure the presence or absence of all of these things, and aggregate the different scores in order to decide whether a country is democratic or not, and to what extent. More...

The Obama Doctrine

Etzioni on BHO's foreign policy vs the previous administration's. This piece is a good summary.

Obama has laid out a strong new normative foundation for his foreign policy. He seeks to promote peace and security but leave democratization and liberalization to the people who find their regimes oppressive. This is in direct contrast to the Bush Neocon thesis that forced regime change is essential because only democracies are reliable partners in peace. More...

That vicious professor from Harvard? Oh, right. He's black. He probably is vicious.

You've probably seen something about this already, but I am rather stunned by the story of Professor Gates, of all people, suffering this indignity.

A police officer was standing on his porch and asking him to come out of the house. "Instinctively, I knew I was not to step outside," Gates said, describing the officer's tone as threatening. Gates said the policeman, who was in his 30s and several inches taller than him, followed him into his kitchen where Gates retrieved his identification. "I was thinking, this is ridiculous, but I'm going to show him my ID, and this guy is going to get out of my house," Gates said. "This guy had this whole narrative in his head. Black guy breaking and entering." More...

Do animals have any legal recourse against human beings?

I find animal rights fascinating. Try following along with this story of the beagles that glow in the dark.

Ruppy the ruby puppy is a transgenic animal whose belly and paws glow under ultraviolet light thanks to genetic code from sea anemones...The most striking thing about Ruppy is how little attention she attracted from animal rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals made no comment. Nor did the Humane Society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or such beast-friendly philosophers as Peter Singer and Matthew Scully... You might attribute the blasé activist reaction to the built-in ethical dilemmas of Ruppy’s case. To argue that the scientists have mistreated these dogs you’d need to establish that the beasts would have been better off not existing in the first place. The concept of wrongful life has actually been litigated in the court of human behavior, with mixed results. More...

Pfizer political contributions

What does this mean? Pfizer switches parties?

There has to be some way this works into the potential 2009-10 rezzes.

Hate speech

Ah, those wacky Canadians. They have a different view of hate speech from the US. Illuminating.

Hate speech in the U.S. can only be punished when it is likely to incite imminent lawless action... In Canada, however, it’s not the likelihood of actual harm than can turn speech into prohibited hate speech. The expression of hatred, irrespective of the possible consequences of this expression, is considered a crime. The content itself is the crime, not where it may lead. More...

Obscenity in print

Free speech nowadays means free publication of pretty much anything. It was not only so. The legal complications of the Lady Chatterley's Lover case are instructive.

[Lawyer] Rembar mulled over a question that [Justice] Brennan apparently hadn’t considered: What if a book met the standards of obscenity yet also presented ideas of “redeeming social importance”? By Brennan’s logic, wouldn’t it qualify for the First Amendment’s protection after all?

On a sheet of paper, Rembar drew two slightly overlapping circles. He labeled one circle “Material appealing to prurient interests.” He labeled the other “Material utterly without social importance.” By Brennan’s reasoning, only material that fell inside both circles — that was both prurient and worthless — should be denied the privileges of free speech. More...

How to talk fast and influence people

Ryan Ricard posts on talking fast. He's got it right. I think it's especially important for speakers to realize that, as they speed along, we may only be getting half of what they're saying, which is enough for us to misunderstand it, but not enough for us to yell "Clear!" The fastest speakers I have known have been as clear as the proverbial bell, and I was able to flow them 100%, and my flows would look like the Encyclopedia Britannica because they were so chocked to the gills with information. You have to be fast AND clear. Fast without clear is deadly.

Who is the author of the book the author wrote?

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is being republished in a new edition that A.E. Hotchner, a writer himself and a friend of EH, claims is not only not true to EH's intentions, but downright unethical.

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work... Ernest was very protective of the words he wrote, words that gave the literary world a new style of writing. Surely he has the right to have these words protected against frivolous incursion, like this reworked volume that should be called “A Moveable Book.” More...

Postmodern fiction reading list

Yep. Really. From the L.A. Times. And, by golly, it's not only an interesting list, but there's some good books on it.

Sometimes you need to read something other than Kant, you know?

Jerry Lewis knows profundity when he reads it

Want scary? Celebrities comment on Ayn Rand.

Sample quote from Mr. Lewis: The Fountainhead is "a very profound book...Makes you think!" Yeah, that it does, Jerry.

Philosophy for beginners podcasts

These five lectures are right up my alley. Plus there's links to a million other philosophy podcasts.

Just give me more hours in the day, please...

Self-assisted suicide

Here's a subject we haven't seen in a while, but in addition to its intrinsic issues, it relates to other rights we have, or don't have, over our selves. Mill, by the way, talks about our connections to others as undermining the idea that we could harm ourselves without cost.

Why should there be a moral right to end your life? We own our own body. Our body is part of our private property. It is something that is ours; it is the thing par excellence that is our own. It is not common to several people and it cannot be given away. It cannot even be shared or communicated. It is the most private thing there is. Owning our body means that we are the master of it. Other people have no say in the use of our body; they should not use it, hurt it or force us to use it in a certain way. This underpins the security rights such as the right to life, the right to bodily integrity, and the prohibition of torture and slavery. But it also implies the right to self-determination, and therefore, the right to die. More...

How to succeed as an Ayn Rand character

This chart sums it up.

Affirmative action explained

I post on Aff-Act a lot. I abbreviate it A-A in my flows. It is a subject of great interest, because it takes what would otherwise be random chance in life and manipulates it. And of course, present thinking on SCOTUS is making it look very much like all sorts of minority supports could be eliminated in the future because we don't need them any more.

...one's qualifications in the present are a function of one's opportunities in the past. There are very talented white children born in the lap of luxury on the upper west side of Manhattan, and there are equally talented Hispanic children born in poverty in the south Bronx. It should surprise exactly no one, except possibly Pat Buchanan and Michael Goldfarb, to learn that they will not get the same SAT scores. An affirmative action system that corrects for this lack of balance is not taking a "less qualified" person and putting her above a "more qualified" person. It is giving equally qualified people the same opportunities. This is liberalism 101, not rocket science. More...

Machiavelli

I have longed been a fan of Philosophy Bites, but I will admit that I'm not as up-to-date as I would like to be. Admittedly, some of the interviews make my head hurt, but as a general rule they are accessible and informative. This one on Machiavelli and The Prince is an example of what they do best. Give it a try.

Stephen Hawking on ETs

I will admit that this has absolutely nothing to do with debate. So sue me. It really sums up the whole situation of man versus bug-eyed monsters (if any). And I freely admit that, before today, I did not know that there was such a journal online as the Daily Galaxy.

If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, Hawking says "there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?" More...

When faith supersedes analysis

This article is a good discussion of the nature of belief, and the belief in belief, if you will. Worth reading.

Can you imagine anything "so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism"? Intellectually, most of us would say not. But, in fact, we often act as though the answer is yes... This is the kind of cognitive prophylactic that Daniel Dennett had in mind when he talked, in Breaking the Spell, about "belief in belief". This occurs when a tenet comes to be seen, in his words, as "so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism". He thought that such a protective cloak should not be thrown over any belief, whether true or false, or whether that belief is in the empirical equality of human beings, the power of science, or of belief in God. More...

Etzioni on do-gooder Westerners

The thesis is that we send our wonderful folks over to some backwoods nation, we give 'em a few bucks, democratize them, and everyone reaps the benefits.

Not.

Of some value for the keep-the-money rez?

Even in countries with far more stability and infrastructure than Iraq and Afghanistan, development aid has often fallen painfully short of its goals. More than half of World Bank investment recipients from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s had the same or worsening rates of per capita income as before they received aid. Corruption and mismanagement of funds run rampant on both sides of reconstruction efforts. By attempting multiple projects simultaneously, each far too ambitious in its own right, on ever-tightening aid budgets, the West often causes more problems than it solves. More...

International law

I love the subject of SCOTUS and the citing of foreign law. Obviously we have our own constitution as the source of our law, but there are other people in the world and using their experience to understand our own is, well—go back and look at the cartoon I just posted.

American judges can use foreign materials to "cast an empirical light" (the phrase is Stephen Breyer's) on modern problems. The best example of this -- which isn't very well known -- is Earl Warren's use of foreign legal evidence in Miranda v. Arizona (the case that gave us "Miranda rights"). More...

Clinton (Bill) is pro same-sex marriage

I missed this in the news. It's of interest only because, as the article says, he's the highest ranking democrat to do so.

As far as I can tell, Clinton is the highest profile Democrat to back same-sex marriage. He's also the man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act and left us with Don't Ask Don't Tell. More...

We are/are not alone

If you understand this cartoon, you understand the core dilemma of humanity, and are ready to become a philosopher.

Regarding Albert Camus

Nowadays all the philosophy on the bestseller lists is self-help books, and trust me, that ain't philosophy. Back in the day, Camus and Sartre would get on there, and maybe even win a Nobel Prize or two. You could do worse than familiarizing yourself with the works of M. Camus. (BTW, it's ke-moo, not kay-muss, but you're French and you knew that already.)

Camus was the first serious writer I engaged with seriously. Political writing is frequently disastrous; but Camus was never disastrous. Quite the opposite. He was spare, calm, controlled, lucid, stylish. He was, and so was his writing. Camus was also deeply principled; he was consistent in his principles. Like Sartre, he was, for a time, a committed Socialist; but unlike Sartre he sloughed off Socialism — and any ideological fealty to the U.S.S.R. — when he saw that it contradicted higher principles. Political expediency was not in his blood. He saw through the lie. He knew that a human being is a human being is a human being; and that human beings are more important than ideas.He knew that a human being is a human being is a human being; and that human beings are more important than ideas. More...

Polician social network

A social network for policy debaters? That's the goal here. Check it out.

International handouts

If we do end up arguing the keep-the-money rez, articles like this are going to come in handy.

Michael Gerson: Surely, Moyo should recognize the difference between aid provided to oppressive kleptocrats and aid given to faith-based organizations distributing AIDS drugs.

Dambisa Moyo’s reply: I’m not going to sit here and say the fact that 2 million Africans are on HIV drugs is a bad thing. Of course that’s a good thing. But whose responsibility is it to provide those HIV drugs? American society does not operate by sitting around and waiting for handouts. Why should we as Africans? More...

Nozick and the risk of rights violation

Interesting analysis of rights and Nozick on PAP.

Obviously, we all run the risk of having our rights violated. Depending on where you live in the world, this risk may be big or small. For some, the risk always remains a risk, and their rights are always respected. But that’s the exception. Many people live with a more or less permanent fear that their rights will be violated. This fear is based on their previous experiences with rights violations, and/or on what they see happening around them.

I see at least two interesting questions regarding this kind of risk:

Is, as Nozick argued, the risk or probability of a rights violation a rights violation in itself? Do people have a right not to fear possible rights violations?
And, to what extent does this risk of rights violations lead to rights violations? More...

Plato and justice

If you're really into philosophy, you don't start with Heidegger, you start with Plato. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is being regularly updated; some of the articles are as fundamental as this one on ethics and politics in The Republic.

Plato's Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help to define justice as a virtue of a human being. Socrates is finally close to answering the question after he characterizes justice as a personal virtue at the end of Book Four, but he is interrupted and challenged... More.

Immunization when there isn't enough to go around

Interesting, short think piece. More questions than answers.

Fears of the spread of pandemic influenza in the UK continue to grow. Three apparently previously healthy patients have died here. There are now plans for widespread immunisation later in the year - though initially this is likely to be restricted to those at highest risk, and those in 'vital' professions.

Who should be vaccinated? This is a question of distributive justice. More...

Diversity on SCOTUS

With Sotomayor being grilled, there's lots of discussion everywhere of just about everything to do with the law and judges. This is a good explanation of two possible pros for affirmative action.

A good angle into the question might be to think about two different ways you could justify an affirmative action program. One argument would be that affirmative action is needed to correct a lack of opportunity: You might say (indeed, I would say) that certain groups face historic disadvantages that are worth correcting. A second and distinct justification would be that diversity creates social benefits. The usual argument is that diverse classrooms have better discussions, and a diverse officer corps runs a better military, and a diverse business force helps navigate that cliche of an "increasingly globalized world." More...

Organ donations

There's been a lot of discussion on this subject on Andrew Sullivan's blog, and it all started with this article in the Atlantic. I think that, intuitively, we're all against organ selling, but maybe this will start you thinking.

...We first have to give up the idea that “organ donor” means someone dead. Deceased donors are, of course, essential for hearts. But not for kidneys. And not enough people die in exactly the right way to meet the need for kidneys... If every single person who died the right way became an organ donor, an optimistic estimate would be that 7,000 more kidneys a year would be available for transplant. Since the list is now increasing by 6,000 a year, that would be enough to end it—in 80 years... Living with a single kidney is almost exactly like living with two; the remaining kidney expands to take up the slack... The main risk to the donor is the risk of any surgery... The National Organ Transplant Act forbids offering “valuable consideration,” generally construed as cash or an equivalent quid pro quo, for an organ. But very few people are willing to give someone a kidney without getting something in return. Last year, 106 people anonymously donated kidneys to transplant centers as nondirected donors; a few more gave kidneys to people they’d met online but hadn’t previously known. But almost all living donors are helping a relative or friend. Although many people call these donations “altruistic,” they in fact offer donors a substantial benefit: saving someone they care about. More...

Dissing people's religion is now illegal in Ireland

Via Andrew Sullivan, this wonderful picture of free speech in the land of leprechauns.

On Friday July 11th, 2009, Ireland passed the Defamation Bill by one vote. One of the aspects of this bill would make it illegal to criticize religion… any religion under penalty of fines up to 25,000 Euros. That is the equivalent to nearly $35,000... The story checks out... The Garda Siochana is the Irish police who can now (under this law) break into people’s homes and confiscate copies of any book which might be critical of any religion. More...