« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
...well, it ain't. A taste (quotations from a 2004 American Bar Association report):
"Indigent clients … remain in pretrial detention for up to five or six months without a single contact from an attorney." One woman "was in jail eleven months before a lawyer was appointed," while another person "spent thirteen months in jail without seeing a lawyer or a judge."
And so forth. Read the whole thing.
Via Brian Leiter comes this essay (Word format here) by the always-interesting Richard Rorty, on "naturalism and quietism."
Shorter Rorty: Naturalism is the study of distinctions without differences.
(Cf. Rorty's own remark that naturalists "are inventing spooks...to make work for ghost-busters." It's hard to rival Rorty when it comes to pith. )
What's all this I'm reading about their making a fence along the border using "minute men"? Why don't they use regular-sized men?
MIT's Alex Byrne surveys the philosophical back-and-forth regarding the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. He ends up sketching a few reasons why the hard problem "may...not [be] so hard after all." I'm with Byrne, but want to add that even if the hard problem proves intractable, it certainly can't stand as an argument in favor of dualism.
The move from the hard problem to dualism relies on the notion that if physicalism is false, we need something nonphysical to account for consciousness. But unless we construe the presumably nonphysical something-we-know-not-what as essentially conscious-making, zombies are every bit as "clearly and distinctly" conceivable even on the dualist's picture.
Consider Al (no relation to Alex Byrne). On the assumptions of dualism, Al comprises or instantiates certain natural properties Φ and certain nonnatural properties Ψ. The dualist postulates that Φ and Ψ are necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. Yet we can "clearly and distinctly" conceive of zombie-Al, who is a duplicate of Al in respect of both Φ and Ψ, but who is nonetheless phenomenally void.
This means that the zombie argument defeats dualism in just the same way it defeats physicalism. In fact, it would defeat any ontology that isn't stipulated a priori as containing ingredients essential to consciousness.
UPDATE: The above is a reworked version of this post, which was originally entitled "The 'Hard Problem' in Regress." The "regress" parts of the original argument were otiose.
Quite interesting article in the Guardian about why Germans just aren't funny "the rigours of the German language's far less flexible sentence
structures [thwart the linguistic devices]
that constitute much English language humour...."
I have my doubts about this analysis. When I lived in Munich I watched an interview with a young German man who, when asked about the Germans' putative lack of any sense of humor, simply stated: "Well, maybe that is not such a bad thing."
I tell you, man, they are willfully unfunny.
(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
"Dick Lit" might have been more like it.
The historical conceit behind Dan Brown's/Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code is that a gnostic line of preserved correspondence argues for the idea that Jesus was at the origins of the Jesus myth a mere man and not at all divine. (This conceit is reasonably well disposed of here.)
Interestingly, though, if you invert the idea (thus, Jesus at the origins of the myth was merely divine and not at all a man), you get something along the lines of Earl Dougherty's Jesus skepticism. Which would make a pretty interesting movie. Just, please, don't let Hans Zimmer score it.
I give Ron Howard's The DaVinci Code a C-. It would rate a C but for Hans Zimmer's plodding ("banausic" would give it too much credit) score, a C+ but for Paul Bettany's over-the-top, leucous assassin (Veronica Brebner may be partially culpable, here), a B- but for Hanks' strained gravitas, a B but for Audrey Tatou's wooden delivery, and an A- but for the fact that Ron Howard opted to base the film on...well, on The Da Vinci Code, rather than, say, Foucault's Pendulum.
Wow. Seems that over at National Review, John Miller has come up with a list of the "50 greatest conservative rock songs." Topping the list: the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."
Guess the folks over at National Review are none too originalist when it comes to songwriter's intent.
William Saletan writes in Slate on our trip "down the slippery slope toward eugenics." According to Saletan, the pathway comprises various refinements in prenatal screening that allow parents finer discrimination over the characteristics of the child they will bring to term.
Setting aside concerns of social justice (which are far too broad legitimately to cabin off liberal eugenics alone as objectionable--you'd have to include tutoring, violin lessons and vacations to Europe), I don't think I understand the problem. These technologies are being made available to parents, for their disposal. No one (so far as I can tell) has succesfully argued that the "slippery slope" involved leads to state coercion. And, as I understand it, the goal of totalizing the eugenic "imperative" was (and is) the main ethical and political objection to the eugenics movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Maybe it's the only objection. The "eugenics" we're talking about here is arguably just a logical extension of the mate-choice strategies animals use to increase the likelihood that their offspring will enjoy high fitness. In "nature," animals (including human animals) are forced to base their assessment on the observable traits of their potential mates (intelligence, social status, symmetry [and other aspects of physical "beauty"], physical robustness, etc.) as a proxy. The new technologies simply give us more direct information so that we don't have to rely exclusively on the secondary, phenotypic traits of our potential mates as proxies for the expected fitness of offspring.
And even without such technologies, we now take all sorts of measures to increase the likelihood that our offspring will be genetically healthy. For example, we recommend (strongly!) that pregnant mothers avoid smoking, drinking, or going for a swim in pools of mercury (probably a bad idea for nonpregnant mothers as well). These are all "eugenic" strategies--at least in the sense that they are geared against introducing genetic mutations or distorting gene expression. Are they for that reason objectionable?
If there is anything to object to, it would seem to be the yuppie-weighted valuations given to traits like "intelligence" over arguably more enlightened traits like, say, emotional health, or even wisdom. These less quantifiable traits are impracticable to screen for, and perhaps have an insignificant genetic basis. But assuming I were in a position to chose to bring into the world the one out of hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of my potential children having the greatest likelihood to grow up physically, emotionally and intellectually healthy, wouldn't it be a dereliction of my parental duty to abjure the choice?
Side note: I've completely set aside the issue of the valuation of the lives of the embryos discarded after "deselection," and so obviously nothing I wrote above will be persuasive to pro-lifers. (Hopefully it's persuasive to someone else.) For what it's worth, my view is that undeveloped human embryos are not moral patients. Although choosing where to draw the moral line on this question is tricky, I believe one- or two-week old blastocysts (of the sort I believe are in issue in the screening Saletan is writing about) fall far short of where any reasonable line could be drawn.
UPDATE: Eugene (no etymological relation to 'eugenics,' as far as I know) Volokh has a post on the topic.
Recent Comments