07/31/2009
Unpublished paper
This article starts with a particular problem found in Augustine's Confessions, regarding measurement of time. The idea goes as follows:
-What is past no longer exists, so it can't be measured, what is future has yet to exist, so it too can't be measured. And the present has no extension, so it also can't be measured.
Author points out this is a different problem from Aristotle's, who questions the very existence of time in the first place. Augustine's problem is about both measurement and ontological status. (pg1)
The solution given starts with a Wittgenstein-esque 'diagnosis' of the problem; the problem is that we think that the only kind of measurement is the kind that measures length along a 'traveling band' with a beginning point and and end point, yet all we can see is a small fraction of the middle (the present). The problem, then, is not with time but with our grammatical understanding of 'measurement', that the prototypical kind of measurement, that of length, becomes an essential aspect of measurement. Instead, we should get a 'reminder' of what we do when we do measure time, so that we can get a suitable analysis. (pg2-3)
Author first presents a clarification: we don't measure 'time' but 'a time', a piece of time. Next, we need to look for an event, a happening through time that we want to measure. There are some rules: There needs to be a measurement device that moves at a regular and unchanging rate over a fixed and equal set of units. Now we set the device to '0' and proceed with the measurement. The key here is that a time is used to measure a time, just as a length is used to measure a length. We measure 'over a series of present moments ... rather than at a present moment' (pg4) So there isn't a good answer to the question "how long (time) is it?", but there is a good answer to "how long (time) was it?". In the latter case the measurement is co-extensional with the event in that one dimension (time). (pg4) The temporal measuring device extends through time just as a length-wise measuring device extends through space.
7/31/09
7/24/09
Singer, Peter - Why We Must Ration Health Care
07/24/2009
New York Times, July 19 2009
This is a magazine article for the popular press dealing with the ways to assign value to public health. The article concludes that health care rationing already takes place and that instead we should enter into a conscious public conversation about how to find value with health-care dollars.
The article starts with an example of a drug that had been developed extend the life of terminal kidney cancer patients by maybe 6 months or so. The cost was $54,000. Would you pay for it? Would you want to be paying premiums for an insurance plan that pays for it? The article plays on the difference between the personal choice that you might make compared to the public-health choice that we collectively make. When using public funds to pay for treatments, author argues that it is 'crazy' not to ask for good value, which is equivalent to rationing.
The other argument here is that the US system also rations, but instead of doing so through a bureau, through one's ability to pay for treatment privately. This 'rationing' also leads to increased mortality and morbidity among the poor and uninsured.
The idea of weighing public policy against cost is not new. Author points out that the US does it in public safety frequently: where the costs to implement some new safety measure would be too expensive for the lives it would save. In order to extend the issue to public health, there needs to be a standard measurement that money buys: author talks about the QALY, or Quality Adjusted Life Year. To reflect the difference between treating a 20-yr old vs an 85-yr old, this measurement uses life expectancy to assign more value to the young. The QALY approach runs into prejudicial or adverse discriminatory issues when it tries to deal with more fine-grained issues, e.g. deafness, quadriplegia, etc. The issue here is that disabled people may not want to be treated as second-class compared to healthy ones. Healthy people might claim that they would rather live shorter lives than be quadriplegic, but this might just be an inherent healthy-person bias. Author points out the double-standard here-- if it is just fine to be disabled (according to the disabled group) then why bother curing it?
The remainder of the article discusses the options that the US has in making a public option and that it can take many forms than the supposedly-reviled Canadian and British system.
New York Times, July 19 2009
This is a magazine article for the popular press dealing with the ways to assign value to public health. The article concludes that health care rationing already takes place and that instead we should enter into a conscious public conversation about how to find value with health-care dollars.
The article starts with an example of a drug that had been developed extend the life of terminal kidney cancer patients by maybe 6 months or so. The cost was $54,000. Would you pay for it? Would you want to be paying premiums for an insurance plan that pays for it? The article plays on the difference between the personal choice that you might make compared to the public-health choice that we collectively make. When using public funds to pay for treatments, author argues that it is 'crazy' not to ask for good value, which is equivalent to rationing.
The other argument here is that the US system also rations, but instead of doing so through a bureau, through one's ability to pay for treatment privately. This 'rationing' also leads to increased mortality and morbidity among the poor and uninsured.
The idea of weighing public policy against cost is not new. Author points out that the US does it in public safety frequently: where the costs to implement some new safety measure would be too expensive for the lives it would save. In order to extend the issue to public health, there needs to be a standard measurement that money buys: author talks about the QALY, or Quality Adjusted Life Year. To reflect the difference between treating a 20-yr old vs an 85-yr old, this measurement uses life expectancy to assign more value to the young. The QALY approach runs into prejudicial or adverse discriminatory issues when it tries to deal with more fine-grained issues, e.g. deafness, quadriplegia, etc. The issue here is that disabled people may not want to be treated as second-class compared to healthy ones. Healthy people might claim that they would rather live shorter lives than be quadriplegic, but this might just be an inherent healthy-person bias. Author points out the double-standard here-- if it is just fine to be disabled (according to the disabled group) then why bother curing it?
The remainder of the article discusses the options that the US has in making a public option and that it can take many forms than the supposedly-reviled Canadian and British system.
7/17/09
MacDonald, Scott - Primal Sin
07/17/2009
The Augustinian Tradition, G Matthews ed. University of California Press, 1999 Ch 6
This paper tries to give a satisfactory account of St Augustine's concept of the primal sin of Adam & Eve and of the angels who turned against God. For Augustine, primal sin had to be voluntary, which meant it had to be a free act of will. The difficulty here is that a free act of will to sin suggests a bad will, or some bad efficient explanation. Augustine is constrained because of his debate with the Manichaeans, a sect that believed that there were two powers in the universe, one good and one evil. Augustine believes that there is only one power: God's, and it is supremely good. So Augustine does not want to admit that there is such a thing as a bad efficient cause to a free act of the will. Instead he claims that primal sin (turning away from the perfect goodness of God for an imperfect, lesser good) is a deficient act of the will-- a failing-- rather than one that was properly motivated. Yet this leaves Augustine in a difficult position: that of claiming that primal sin involved a free act of will that has no efficient origin. The unpleasant alternative is to admit that primal sin had origins in a bad will, but such an admission could implicate the creator (God) in the sin, since God created everything and God is only good (pg114-5). The author tries to resolve these problems. Note: this is not an attempt to deal with 'original sin', which is transmitted through the generations from the first sinful human beings. Instead it is an attempt to show how good creatures like angels and Adam & Eve can, through a deficiency, take a voluntary action of turning from God. (pg114)
Augustine's famous resolution of the problem of evil lies in its being a corruption from essence, having no actual essence of its own. Since God made everything good, evil must not be a thing but instead a 'privation' (pg114) or defection from good nature. In the same vein, for Augustine primal sin is corruption of 'rational nature' (pg115) that is done voluntarily and solely by the agent. The cause of primal sin must reside solely with the angels or humans; God must be totally blameless (e.g. God didn't make a faulty product) (pg115-6). Furthermore, primal sin must not be coerced or the result of some irresistible impulse-- the agents must have had the capacity to choose otherwise from what they did do. (pg117-8) Author couples this with Augustine's conception of sin here, which is a turning away from the ultimate, unchanging good (God's) to a lesser, temporal good-- this is a 'disordered' act of the will. (pg118) What explains this disorder, since it is irrational to turn away from God's goodness (and God didn't make humans to be irrational), and the angels and Adam & Eve weren't ignorant in any sense (if they were, they couldn't have full responsibility for their choices). (pg119-120)
Author argues that it must be a carelessness of practical reasoning that was the source of primal sin. (pg121) The carelessness consists in failing to attend to the goodness of God and attending instead to other good things. Primal sinners may still harbor the belief of God's ultimate goodness, but fail to attend to the fact when deciding to commit the primal sin. Author gives an example from modern life: about to go home from work, asks you to coffee; even though you had promised to take your children to the park, you fail to consider your other desires/beliefs and agree to go to coffee. Essentially, you fail to attend to all the reasons you have for going home instead of going for coffee. (pg123) If you managed to consider all your concurrently-held beliefs/desires, you would go home, but you have a failure in practical reasoning and you go to coffee instead. (pg124). Author considers this failure to be not an efficient reason but a deficient reason for willful action. This limitation isn't a defect, but a side-effect of the 'flow of conscious experience' that 'cannot help but make certain of [our] reasons more and others less immediate at any given moment.' (pg127) And the limitation is due to the fact that angels and Adam & Eve were created 'ex nihilo', from nothing (pg127).
There are two objections to this explanation that the author addresses:
1) This kind of failure might be possible, but it only represents momentary lapses or small errors and don't represent some sort of deep-seated corruption, the kind of corruption required for the gravity of primal sin. (pg128)
Reply: small lapses can build up into a pattern of the same behavior, small peccadilloes can create a pattern of thought that results in a characteristic lapse. (pg129-130)
2) This explanation still doesn't give the reasons for primal sin-- now you need to explain why the primal sinners had the motives and desires to fail in their practical reasoning.
Reply: while perhaps every willful action must be explained by appeal to reasons/beliefs/desires/motives, we don't insist on the same for every time we don't do something. And this explanation for primal sin entails a failure to act-- a not-doing of something-- not an action. (pg130-2)
Author ends the paper by broadening the account of primal sin into a genuine explanation of culpable irrationality that can be added to the cannon of moral decision-making.
The Augustinian Tradition, G Matthews ed. University of California Press, 1999 Ch 6
This paper tries to give a satisfactory account of St Augustine's concept of the primal sin of Adam & Eve and of the angels who turned against God. For Augustine, primal sin had to be voluntary, which meant it had to be a free act of will. The difficulty here is that a free act of will to sin suggests a bad will, or some bad efficient explanation. Augustine is constrained because of his debate with the Manichaeans, a sect that believed that there were two powers in the universe, one good and one evil. Augustine believes that there is only one power: God's, and it is supremely good. So Augustine does not want to admit that there is such a thing as a bad efficient cause to a free act of the will. Instead he claims that primal sin (turning away from the perfect goodness of God for an imperfect, lesser good) is a deficient act of the will-- a failing-- rather than one that was properly motivated. Yet this leaves Augustine in a difficult position: that of claiming that primal sin involved a free act of will that has no efficient origin. The unpleasant alternative is to admit that primal sin had origins in a bad will, but such an admission could implicate the creator (God) in the sin, since God created everything and God is only good (pg114-5). The author tries to resolve these problems. Note: this is not an attempt to deal with 'original sin', which is transmitted through the generations from the first sinful human beings. Instead it is an attempt to show how good creatures like angels and Adam & Eve can, through a deficiency, take a voluntary action of turning from God. (pg114)
Augustine's famous resolution of the problem of evil lies in its being a corruption from essence, having no actual essence of its own. Since God made everything good, evil must not be a thing but instead a 'privation' (pg114) or defection from good nature. In the same vein, for Augustine primal sin is corruption of 'rational nature' (pg115) that is done voluntarily and solely by the agent. The cause of primal sin must reside solely with the angels or humans; God must be totally blameless (e.g. God didn't make a faulty product) (pg115-6). Furthermore, primal sin must not be coerced or the result of some irresistible impulse-- the agents must have had the capacity to choose otherwise from what they did do. (pg117-8) Author couples this with Augustine's conception of sin here, which is a turning away from the ultimate, unchanging good (God's) to a lesser, temporal good-- this is a 'disordered' act of the will. (pg118) What explains this disorder, since it is irrational to turn away from God's goodness (and God didn't make humans to be irrational), and the angels and Adam & Eve weren't ignorant in any sense (if they were, they couldn't have full responsibility for their choices). (pg119-120)
Author argues that it must be a carelessness of practical reasoning that was the source of primal sin. (pg121) The carelessness consists in failing to attend to the goodness of God and attending instead to other good things. Primal sinners may still harbor the belief of God's ultimate goodness, but fail to attend to the fact when deciding to commit the primal sin. Author gives an example from modern life: about to go home from work, asks you to coffee; even though you had promised to take your children to the park, you fail to consider your other desires/beliefs and agree to go to coffee. Essentially, you fail to attend to all the reasons you have for going home instead of going for coffee. (pg123) If you managed to consider all your concurrently-held beliefs/desires, you would go home, but you have a failure in practical reasoning and you go to coffee instead. (pg124). Author considers this failure to be not an efficient reason but a deficient reason for willful action. This limitation isn't a defect, but a side-effect of the 'flow of conscious experience' that 'cannot help but make certain of [our] reasons more and others less immediate at any given moment.' (pg127) And the limitation is due to the fact that angels and Adam & Eve were created 'ex nihilo', from nothing (pg127).
There are two objections to this explanation that the author addresses:
1) This kind of failure might be possible, but it only represents momentary lapses or small errors and don't represent some sort of deep-seated corruption, the kind of corruption required for the gravity of primal sin. (pg128)
Reply: small lapses can build up into a pattern of the same behavior, small peccadilloes can create a pattern of thought that results in a characteristic lapse. (pg129-130)
2) This explanation still doesn't give the reasons for primal sin-- now you need to explain why the primal sinners had the motives and desires to fail in their practical reasoning.
Reply: while perhaps every willful action must be explained by appeal to reasons/beliefs/desires/motives, we don't insist on the same for every time we don't do something. And this explanation for primal sin entails a failure to act-- a not-doing of something-- not an action. (pg130-2)
Author ends the paper by broadening the account of primal sin into a genuine explanation of culpable irrationality that can be added to the cannon of moral decision-making.
7/10/09
Urquhart, Brian - What You Can Learn From Reinhold Niebuhr
07/10/2009
The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009
This is a book review of three books, one reprint from Niebuhr 'The Irony of American History', and one from Andrew Bacevich 'The Limits of Power', and finally from James Traub 'The Freedom Agenda'. The reviews are fairly straightforward and largely summarize the main theses. Many of the points are put into the context of being vindicated by the post-Iraq GW Bush presidency.
1. Niebuhr 'The Irony of American History'
This review of a book written in 1952 talks about the US dream of 'managing history' and succumbing to the temptation of applying our socio-polictical concepts across the globe. Niebuhr also talked about the lack of stability of the US economic system and of the 'pretensions of virtue' that blind a nation like the US into seeing world affairs as black-and-white, good-vs-evil. An overarching theme here is the inscrutable nature of world political events and the pathos of such a powerful nation (the US) to attempt to control and mold such events.
2. Bacevich 'Limits of Power'
Bacevich's book carries much of Niebuhr's theme, talking specifically about the grand delusions that the Bush administration had about the military capabilities in Iraq. The review also contains a shortened version of Bacevich's analysis of the decline of US power since the 1950s. In the economic analysis, the US went into importing of much of its needed oil and going from being a creditor to being a debtor. Also since then the US has taken the position that it is in a permanent crisis-- or on the brink of it-- of national security. This has created the strong presidency to ascend over the congress and the permanent militarization of the US. The conclusion? The US doesn't need a bigger army, but a more modest foreign policy.
3. Traub 'The Freedom Agenda'
The review of this book casts it as a practical tome dedicated to posing and working on the tough questions of the US's foreign policy. Again Niebuhr is echoed in the discussion of the failure of Bush's 'Freedom Agenda' of bringing democratic regimes to other lands. The book is full of analysis and critiques of such attempts, e.g. Somalia and Bosnia, and unintended consequences like Hamas' election in the Gaza strip.
The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009
This is a book review of three books, one reprint from Niebuhr 'The Irony of American History', and one from Andrew Bacevich 'The Limits of Power', and finally from James Traub 'The Freedom Agenda'. The reviews are fairly straightforward and largely summarize the main theses. Many of the points are put into the context of being vindicated by the post-Iraq GW Bush presidency.
1. Niebuhr 'The Irony of American History'
This review of a book written in 1952 talks about the US dream of 'managing history' and succumbing to the temptation of applying our socio-polictical concepts across the globe. Niebuhr also talked about the lack of stability of the US economic system and of the 'pretensions of virtue' that blind a nation like the US into seeing world affairs as black-and-white, good-vs-evil. An overarching theme here is the inscrutable nature of world political events and the pathos of such a powerful nation (the US) to attempt to control and mold such events.
2. Bacevich 'Limits of Power'
Bacevich's book carries much of Niebuhr's theme, talking specifically about the grand delusions that the Bush administration had about the military capabilities in Iraq. The review also contains a shortened version of Bacevich's analysis of the decline of US power since the 1950s. In the economic analysis, the US went into importing of much of its needed oil and going from being a creditor to being a debtor. Also since then the US has taken the position that it is in a permanent crisis-- or on the brink of it-- of national security. This has created the strong presidency to ascend over the congress and the permanent militarization of the US. The conclusion? The US doesn't need a bigger army, but a more modest foreign policy.
3. Traub 'The Freedom Agenda'
The review of this book casts it as a practical tome dedicated to posing and working on the tough questions of the US's foreign policy. Again Niebuhr is echoed in the discussion of the failure of Bush's 'Freedom Agenda' of bringing democratic regimes to other lands. The book is full of analysis and critiques of such attempts, e.g. Somalia and Bosnia, and unintended consequences like Hamas' election in the Gaza strip.
7/3/09
Mameli, Matteo - On Innateness: The Clutter Hypothesis and the Cluster Hypothesis
07/03/2009
The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 60 Num 12 Dec 2008
This paper discusses the various problems with specifying what it is for something to be innate and a proposed meta-analysis (Clutter or Cluster) of the concept.
The analysis starts with the 'minimal condition' which is that something that is innate is not learned, and what is learned is not innate. (pg721). Examples of this are Plato's Meno and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument about the deep rules of grammar. Author argues that even the minimal condition is too strong since it calls the sex of a particular reptile non-learned (innate) when in actuality it was merely the result of the temperature while being incubated. (pg722) Perhaps, though, 'learning' can be reinterpreted to being a subset of larger 'MAPS', or 'Mechanisms for Adaptive Plasticity', which can be employed without using a psychological process. Under this fix, what is innate is what is not the result of the developmental outcome of a MAP. But author claims this goes awry too because of developmental maladies that aren't acquired through MAPS, but are nonetheless not innate. (pg723)
Author then considers multiple attempts at giving an analysis of innateness. The first is that what is genetically encoded is what is innate (pg724). The difficulty here is that genetic encoding creates things like proteins, not 'whole organism phenotypic traits' like sexual preference, ability to speak a language, obesity. There is a supposed consensus that such traits develop through causal processes that 'involve genetic and non-genetic factors' (pg725). In this way, whole-organism traits cannot be innate, if innate means 'genetically encoded'. The fix here might be to say that for innateness, genes must affect the developmental process relative to the emergence of an innate trait. But author invents a thought experiment that supposedly involves a learned trait that still satisfies this condition. The trait is the ability to understand the theory of Special Relativity-- author argues that this trait is learned but also could be the result of genes that affect the developmental process. (pg725-6) This thought experiment can combat simple genetic encoding analyses and also an account of innateness that specify a certain type of genetic encoding: evolutionary adaptation by natural selection. (pg726-7)
Another possible analysis of innateness is high degree of broad heritability. In this account, high heritability means that variation is mostly due to genetic factors. Author argues that this concept is ill-suited for innateness, since it doesn't have the tools to account for traits like 'having one head' (too universal to count), and it also misses universal traits that are altered by accident, like the trait 'having 10 fingers'. If most of the people without 10 fingers have lost them due to accidents, then the variation is due largely to non-genetic factors, putting the heritability of 'having 10 fingers' on the low end of the scale. (pg728)
The final analysis of innateness is that it involves invariance or canalization, that is, emergence of a trait given most environments-- or a certain degree of developmental 'buffering' against environmental variation. The problem here is that clearly learned traits like 'the belief that water is a liquid' are highly invariable and canalized. (pg729-730)
Author proposes two meta-analyses for the concept of innateness. The first is the Clutter hypothesis, the second is the Cluster hypothesis. The clutter hypothesis is that innateness is a mix of useful concepts that we have just started to pull apart with science, though previously we didn't have the capacity to do so. Therefore the concept is a clutter of different distinct ones and (probably) should be dissolved. (pg730-4) Ironically, author claims that some work has been done that shows that the concept of innatenes 'comes naturally' to humans (pg733). The Cluster hypothesis instead argues that the various aspects of innateness-- canalization, heritability, genetic encoding-- are properties that cluster around a deeper causal process of innateness. In some circumstances we should expect each property of innateness to emerge, but in others, only one property may be present. Those who advocate the cluster analysis will be required to tell the story about this deep causal process, but it is still open as a possibility. (pg735-6) Author claims that it is an empirical question which analysis is true.
The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 60 Num 12 Dec 2008
This paper discusses the various problems with specifying what it is for something to be innate and a proposed meta-analysis (Clutter or Cluster) of the concept.
The analysis starts with the 'minimal condition' which is that something that is innate is not learned, and what is learned is not innate. (pg721). Examples of this are Plato's Meno and Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument about the deep rules of grammar. Author argues that even the minimal condition is too strong since it calls the sex of a particular reptile non-learned (innate) when in actuality it was merely the result of the temperature while being incubated. (pg722) Perhaps, though, 'learning' can be reinterpreted to being a subset of larger 'MAPS', or 'Mechanisms for Adaptive Plasticity', which can be employed without using a psychological process. Under this fix, what is innate is what is not the result of the developmental outcome of a MAP. But author claims this goes awry too because of developmental maladies that aren't acquired through MAPS, but are nonetheless not innate. (pg723)
Author then considers multiple attempts at giving an analysis of innateness. The first is that what is genetically encoded is what is innate (pg724). The difficulty here is that genetic encoding creates things like proteins, not 'whole organism phenotypic traits' like sexual preference, ability to speak a language, obesity. There is a supposed consensus that such traits develop through causal processes that 'involve genetic and non-genetic factors' (pg725). In this way, whole-organism traits cannot be innate, if innate means 'genetically encoded'. The fix here might be to say that for innateness, genes must affect the developmental process relative to the emergence of an innate trait. But author invents a thought experiment that supposedly involves a learned trait that still satisfies this condition. The trait is the ability to understand the theory of Special Relativity-- author argues that this trait is learned but also could be the result of genes that affect the developmental process. (pg725-6) This thought experiment can combat simple genetic encoding analyses and also an account of innateness that specify a certain type of genetic encoding: evolutionary adaptation by natural selection. (pg726-7)
Another possible analysis of innateness is high degree of broad heritability. In this account, high heritability means that variation is mostly due to genetic factors. Author argues that this concept is ill-suited for innateness, since it doesn't have the tools to account for traits like 'having one head' (too universal to count), and it also misses universal traits that are altered by accident, like the trait 'having 10 fingers'. If most of the people without 10 fingers have lost them due to accidents, then the variation is due largely to non-genetic factors, putting the heritability of 'having 10 fingers' on the low end of the scale. (pg728)
The final analysis of innateness is that it involves invariance or canalization, that is, emergence of a trait given most environments-- or a certain degree of developmental 'buffering' against environmental variation. The problem here is that clearly learned traits like 'the belief that water is a liquid' are highly invariable and canalized. (pg729-730)
Author proposes two meta-analyses for the concept of innateness. The first is the Clutter hypothesis, the second is the Cluster hypothesis. The clutter hypothesis is that innateness is a mix of useful concepts that we have just started to pull apart with science, though previously we didn't have the capacity to do so. Therefore the concept is a clutter of different distinct ones and (probably) should be dissolved. (pg730-4) Ironically, author claims that some work has been done that shows that the concept of innatenes 'comes naturally' to humans (pg733). The Cluster hypothesis instead argues that the various aspects of innateness-- canalization, heritability, genetic encoding-- are properties that cluster around a deeper causal process of innateness. In some circumstances we should expect each property of innateness to emerge, but in others, only one property may be present. Those who advocate the cluster analysis will be required to tell the story about this deep causal process, but it is still open as a possibility. (pg735-6) Author claims that it is an empirical question which analysis is true.
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