I am willing to do whatever it takes to be successful and for my team to win.This quotation, out of context, sounds like just the right thing to say -- the "team player" line, just wanting his Bucs to win, etc. It's funny, however, given the context: Michael Irving had just asked him whether he'd consider leaving Tampa Bay for another team where he would be used more effectively. So "my team" in Johnson's quotation apparently referenced not the Tampa Bay Bucaneers, but whatever team Keyshawn Johnson happens to be on. I'm not criticizing Johnson or his attitude -- I'm merely remarking that it was an amusing use of a relative article.
Jesus actor struck by lightning Actor Jim Caviezel has been struck by lightning while playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's controversial film The Passion Of Christ. The lightning bolt hit Caviezel and the film's assistant director Jan Michelini while they were filming in a remote location a few hours from Rome. It was the second time Michelini had been hit by lightning during the shoot.The Onion couldn't have done better.
Defense Secretary Donald H . Rumsfeld and the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly defended a new deputy undersecretary of defense of intelligence with a reported penchant for publicly casting the war on terrorism in religious terms. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, whose promotion and appointment was confirmed by the Senate in June, has said publicly that he sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christians. ... And the enemy is a guy named Satan."Right now, I don't have time to go into this in detail. Or the stomach. I'm disgusted.
['How to be Gay'] "legitimizes behavior that literally puts the lives of young people at risk," Glenn continued, adding that homosexuality was a lifestyle choice, as opposed to race, which was unchangeable. "There are no former African Americans," he said.Emphasis and clarificatory block-quote by me. Avoid the temptation to argue with the second claim, and focus on the first one. I've helped you by italicizing it. What's Glenn talking about? Is he worried that gay men might become the victims of hate crimes? And why would the BDH print a statement like that without giving it a little bit of background, or context, or justification, or refutation, or anything? Like the Patriot Act story, linked above, I haven't found any other news source reporting this feature of the story. This time, of course, the surprising statement is a quotation, and so I have to conclude it actually occurred. But seriously, folks: huh????
Yup.
Opposition to the Patriot Act brought together Republicans, concerned residents and students alike last night at a public hearing in city hall. The Civil Liberties Resolution, a motion supported by Ward One Councilman David Segal, proposes to outlaw the Patriot Act within the city of Providence.I'm no expert on how the various levels of government interact with one another, but I'm pretty sure that somebody once wrote that a local or state government can't override a federal law. So what's going on? I can think of three possibilities:
"This resolution says to the federal government we don't think this is a good law and we think you should change it," Secretary of the Rhode Island Green Party Greg Gerritt told The Herald. "People are not happy with the policy coming out of Washington."Now this version sounds much more reasonable. I found what I think to be the text of the resolution at citizeninfo.org. There's a lot of whereases and indirect language in there, but at least most of the actual "resolved" text seems not to fall into the category of "making the Patriot Act illegal". But there is one interesting paragraph:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That the City Council of Providence urges the city administration and its citizens during the course of their daily life to be guided by the collective responsibility and obligation of safeguarding the constitutional protections afforded all people of our city. The Council recognizes that this is the paramount responsibility of local law enforcement personnel, appointed and elected government offices that are ultimately responsible for upholding the solemn oath they have taken to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the State of Rhode Island...Does this mean to be read as "we urge government officials and citizens not to obey the Patriot Act because we think it's unconstitutional?" It is certainly interesting language, anyway... it's fun to hear a government encourage me to break the law. But I still don't see the "making the Patriot Act illegal". I'm curious as to how successful a strategy (3) would be likely to be. In case anyone's wondering, I give a "thumbs down" to the Patriot Act because I give a "thumbs up" to civil rights. My other question is, why is the Brown Daily Herald published weekly?
I'm curious as to how you defend your utilitarianism given that you seem to accept ethics itself has serious problems. If your starting intuition is that we all seem to want happiness, that's a far cry from saying happiness is \"good\". It is just saying it is desirable.jdsm is responding to my comment, recognizing that it's not easy to see why intuitions should be given any weight at all when forming (moral and other) theories. There are a few quick responses that I think are important: (1) I've never tried to "prove" utilitarianism using a universal desire for happiness as a first principle. Those arguments have been made throughout the history of ethics, and are correctly regarded by most as more or less garbage. (2) In my defenses of utilitarianism in my blog, I've been defending the theory against arguments that are based in moral intuition. I have not really been trying to argue against the person who doesn't believe in ethics (or in the use of intuitions in ethics). This is because the comments that got me started on utilitarianism in the first place assumed moral realism. (3) A parallel case will demonstrate that it's not absurd of me to continue thinking in terms of utilitarianism, even though I'm not entirely solid on the basis of moral realism. I believe that there are very old general skeptical concerns that have yet to be answered. Two excellent and famous examples will suffice -- Descartes's argument that we can't know anything about the external world, and Hume's argument that there is no justification for belief in the principle of induction. Both arguments, I think, have never been adequately refuted. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do physics anyway. Likewise, I believe it is appropriate to work on a moral theory, even if one hasn't yet justified morality in general. If I eventually discover something about morality that is incompatable with what I've been assuming (such as, for example, that it doesn't exist), then obviously I'll take back everything I've said about utilitarianism being true. But I'm not going to wait around until I'm positive that ethics is justifiable before thinking any further, any more than I'd want science to come to a screeching halt until somebody figures out how to justify induction. If it'll make you feel better, think of all my moral theorizing as a giant conditional. "If moral realism is true and something like reflective equilibrium is an appropriate tool for the discovery of moral truths, then I hold the following beliefs and use the following arguments."
Harrington's first turnover occurred just two plays into the Lions first possession. Corner Ahmad Plummer stepped in front of Harrington's pass intended for Charles Rogers deep in Detroit territory at the 27-yard line and returned it to the Detroit 23. Six plays later San Francisco quarterback Jeff Garcia found his nemesis Terrell Owens from 6-yards out to give San Francisco a 7-0 lead.Nemesis? I know that things between my two favorite 49ers offensive stars have been less than great lately, but I can't help thinking that the media wants to make more out of it than there is. Maybe it's because they're not the same race.
More generally, the common line of reasoning in ethics is troubling. The arguments tend to be (1) X strikes one's moral intuition as immoral; (2) Let us make a line of reasoning leading to the incontrovertable conclusion that Y strikes one's moral intuition as moral; (3) See how Y is structurally identical to X, therefore (4) X is moral. By deferring to our moral intuitions in their arguments, the utilitarians have essentially conceded the point before the game has started. Yes, I believe Y is moral, but I simultaneously feel that logically indistinguishable X is immoral. And since morality is based on psychology and intuition, not on any great holistic theory, there is nothing wrong with that.This is a good lead-in to a Philosophy Buzzword post I've been meaning to write for a few days. In fact, reflective equilibrium was the concept I had in mind when I first decided to start a series like this. As a reminder, I mean to be writing generally for a non-philosophy audience, but I also mean to be reporting uncontroversial facts about how philosophy is done. If you know better than I, and I'm wrong, please tell me. In many realms of philosophy, intuition plays a central role. Ethics is a good example -- we construct ethical theories based on the idea that our intuitions are correct. But, as pathos point out, on the surface, that just doesn't look like a productive way to go about constructing a theory. We assume intuitions are right, and use that to prove that some of our intuitions are wrong? Philosophers do (at least claim to) have an answer. Reflective Equilibrium is, I think, the mainstream method for choosing a theory to account for intuitions. It's not unchallenged as a source of justification, but I think I can accurately describe it was a tool that most philosophers who deal with these issues use. I will stick to the ethics example here because ethics is both a good example and interesting, but reflective equilibrium can be used for many different kinds of questions as well. Very roughly speaking, here's the idea: you want to have a theory of ethics, and by the time you're done, you want it to be consistent with all your ethical beliefs. This may involve rejecting some of your intuitions, because some of your intuitions might not get along well together -- either because they directly contradict one another, or because no plausible theory could accommodate both. Here's the method: in order to come up with a theory of morality, you start with some "raw" moral intuitions. Raw moral intuitions are intuitions about actions in specific cases. "Yesterday when my mom said 'good morning', it would have been morally wrong to shoot her," etc. The next step is to come up with a possible theory to explain most or all of these intuitions. The point of a theory, of course, is to generalize beyond the specific intuitions you've already looked at. Maybe you come up with the following as a piece of your theory: "it's always morally wrong to kill people." But you're not done yet -- probably not by a long shot. Your theory covers cases that you haven't consulted your intuitions about yet. So now you want to think of possible problems with your theory -- can you think of any counterexamples? "Well, I think it'd be ok to kill someone if he were trying to kill me." Or maybe, "I think Buffy was morally justified in killing Angel, because that was the only way to stop the universe from being sucked into a hell dimension." Now you have a tension between your theory and your specific intuitions, and you have to decide which will give way to the other. At this point, I think that the odds are good that you'll choose to modify your theory, rather than conclude that it is actually morally wrong to kill in self-defense. So you might add in principled exceptions to your theory, or you might re-frame it altogether. What factors do we consider when weighing theory versus raw intuition? Here are a few suggestions:
Terrell Owens huffed and he puffed and he threatened to blow his offensive coordinator's house in last Sunday. After watching the tape, Keyshawn Johnson wished his receiving buddy had done one more thing. "He should actually have punched the guy," Johnson said.Odd things make me laugh lately.
Since the ban is voluntary, the MPAA hasn’t laid down any penalties if any of the studios, or their subsidiaries, break ranks and start sending out screeners later in the season. “We’re counting on people’s integrity to keep their word,” Valenti said. “If they don’t, they have committed a mortal sin.”Fascinating.
Harry could have laughed out loud with relief. He was safe. There was simply no way that Snape would dare to try to hurt him if Dumbledore was watching. Perhaps that was why Snape was looking so angry as the teams marched onto the field, something that Ron noticed, too. "I've never seen Snape look so mean," he told Hermione. "Look -- they're off. Ouch!"And for the next several pages, the narrator ignores Harry -- who is flying around above them -- and tells us about Ron and Neville's fight with Draco Malfoy. Eventually, Rowling non-transitions us back to Harry's point of view:
"Ron! Ron! Where are you? The game's over! Harry's won! We've won! Gryffindor is in the lead!" shrieked Hermione, dancing up and down on her seat and hugging Parvati Patil in the row in front. Harry jumped off his broom, a foot from the ground. He couldn't believe it.Now I don't really feel like getting into an argument on the literary merits of Harry Potter just now. I'm not positive that this is a horrible inconsistency... after all, I read it a number of times before noticing it. (I won't tell you how many times I've read the book, (1) because I'm embarrassed to, and (2) because I've lost count. Ok, so mostly just (2).) Do authors do this kind of thing frequently? Would I get marked down in novel-writing class if I had a sudden point-of-view shift like that? It's just so weird, because otherwise, the whole cannon is from Harry's point of view.
I find it very surprising that a moral theory would even try to deny aggregation of moral worth. I guess it's because they want to avoid consequences like, "for some number x, it would be morally justified to kill an innocent person in order to prevent x headaches." But that's just obviously true, isn't it?I was half-serious in the sense that while I do believe that the quoted claim is true, I do not genuinely believe it to be obviously true. Neither, apparently, do many of you. Some interesting comments on that post: Joshua said: Look at it this way: 1) It's wrong to kill 1 person to prevent 1 headache 2) If it is wrong to kill 1 person to prevent X headaches, it's wrong to kill 1 person to prevent X+1 headaches. How then do you get to "There exists an X such that it is right to kill 1 person to prevent X headaches" in a reasonable, principled fashion? Well, the best response to most instances of the Sorites paradox is to deny the generalizing step (2). I'm fully willing to embrace the moral fact that it's wrong to kill one innocent person in order to prevent one headache (indeed, if it were otherwise, suicide pills would replace aspirin). But where's the justification for the second claim? I admit that (2) sounds plausible -- but I say it's false. A consequentialist ought to recognize that while one headache is bad, two headaches is worse. And death is even worse. Furthermore, the difference between death and two headaches is smaller than the difference between death and one headache. Dave said: I wonder if the solution might involve dividing suffering into classes - different levels across which it is not meaningful to compare. There cannot be some number x where x headaches override one murder, because murder is in a more intense class of suffering. We recognize that one murder is so bad that we're willing to accept *any number* of headaches in order to prevent it. This is what people in philosophy refer to as a lexical ordering (think in terms of a dictionary, where all the A-words come before all the B-words, etc.). And yes, people do try to hold this position in terms of consequentialist ethics. This idea intuitively sounds right -- it allows us to hold on to our intuition that murder is worse than any number of headaches -- but I suggest it loses all intuitive force once it's recognized that there are levels of harm between headaches and murders. It's pretty clear to me that it's possible, in principle, to come up with a near-continuum of wrongs, from the infliction of a headache up to murder, with a very long series of slightly-worse things you could do to a person. It just doesn't seem reasonable to point, in any principled way, to one of the tiny gaps and say "that's the one where it's worse to have a gazillion of the slightly less bad harm than one of the slightly more bad one." Here's A Second Way of Thinking About Things That Demonstrates That I'm Right. Catchy title, huh? (This example is from Alistair Norcross, see below.) Suppose I have a headache, and no pain-killers in my house. I'm considering going out and driving to the drug store to buy the means to cure my headache. Suppose further that I know as an empirical fact that going on a 5-minute drive increases my chances of dying in a car accident by some non-zero percentage -- maybe it increases my chances of dying by one in a billion. Surely I'm not being irrational to risk my life, just for a headache! This is meant to demonstrate that while the harm of death and the harm of headache differ severely in degree, they do not differ in principle, and it is reasonable to trade one for an appropriate amount of the other. Follow-Up: Alistair Norcross, one of my undergraduate professors at Rice University and a major influence on my ethical theorizing, has written a fair amount about these issues. Check out "Great Harms from Small Benefits Grow: How Death can be Outweighed by Headaches" and "Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives". Both are short and easy to read. Remember, I'm heavily-influenced by him, so don't be surprised when he says the things I did. (As an interesting side-note, I've learned something interesting over the years about debate in general. I'd always thought that when intelligent people disagreed about something, they argued about it until one of them was clearly right, then the walked away in agreement. Since then, I've realized that arguments are often won long after they're over -- for much of Alistair's Consequentialism class last fall, I took myself to be successfully refuting Consequentialism. And now I'm sitting here, giving you the arguments he gave me.)
