10/30/2009
Unpublished book chapter
This is a chapter in a book about Gandhi-- this chapter seeks to locate Gandhi's policy of non-violence in a classical context of the three aspects of being: violence, non-violence, and non-action. Author argues that this is an important three-part substance that involves domination of one substance (non-violence) over the other two, rather than flat-out rejection of them. Furthermore, current writers simplify Gandhi into a two-part binary of violence and non-violence and suggest that one can be rejected and the other affirmed; both the factual claim and the meta-psychological conception is mistaken, according to author.
Author's first target is Richard Lannoy's binary relation, violence and non-violence. What is missing here is a third possibility: inaction. The three options correspond to three 'gunas': 'tamas' (inaction), 'rajas' (violent action) and 'sattva' (non-violent action). Author brings out through quotations that Gandhi preferred violent action to inaction, which upsets the notion that Gandhi rejected violence as an acceptable mode of action.
Author contends that Gandhi was rajastic (violent) in nature but constantly strove to overcome and dominate that tendency for the sake of sattva, non-violent action. Author locates the metapsychology here as coming from the Bhagavat Gita's discussion of the three gunas-- they are each constitutive elements of action, just one dominating the others during a particular action. Yet from this classical understanding did Gandhi stray, not accepting non-action (tamas) as a worthy possibility.
10/29/09
10/16/09
Waldron, Jeremy - Right and Wrong: Psychologists vs Philosophers
10/16/2009
New York Review of Books Vol 56 No 15 Oct 8, 2009
This is a review of Appiah's "Experiments in Ethics", which is cast as an attempt to take seriously the challenge to ethics coming from the psychologists. Author is critical of Appiah's seemingly facile attempt to grapple with the problems. He claims that Appiah alternates between taking the psychologists' "case against character" or the "psychologits' challenge" too seriously, or then not seriously enough.
Appiah seems to take the psychologists' challenge seriously at first, when he cites numerous studies that apparently show that the so-called virtues of charity or honesty aren't cross-situational, and are frequently influenced by small, seemingly insignificant changes in the situation. E.g. a person is more likely to be helpful to a stranger if he has previously found a spare dime in a telephone booth. The challenge to virtue ethics is that good character traits aren't as entrenched as we'd like to think, or that we frequently misidentify good characters. But author replies that another way to read much of this work is that it is irrelevant to virtue ethics-- many of the experiments are trivial. And in the more meaningful ones, people did show virtues like charity (e.g. the Milgram experiments). Author charges that Appiah doesn't mount a reply in this vein, instead moving to include additional virtues more suitable to being a full-fledged social human (humor, originality, love) or focusing on laws, institutions, and social construction of culture to give people the opportunity to do good in the most favorable circumstances.
The next move in the pschologists' challenge is the challenge to intuition, the 'spontaneous unreflected judgment'. Much work has been done in this field to show them to be flawed and unreliable. Author pushes Appiah: 'flawed' compared to what? Considered moral judgment? Where is that independent source of judgment? How do we talk about considered moral judgments without propping them up with intuitions and without adding some other psychological flaw or taint? This was the work that the reviewer wanted Appiah to do, and which he charges Appiah did not. One current and important challenge comes from a variety of 'trolley' problems that talks about having to sacrifice one person in order to save 5. People's intuitions are very messy when asked about what they would or should do in a multitude of situations. Yet author argues that we need to expand the studies and maybe take away another lesson: people can be prone to optical illusions; why can't they also be prone to moral illusions? We work through optical illusions by measuring, by using other standards, by changing our vantage-point. Why not do the same if we want to get the moral judgments right? Author argues that this reply assumes the same issue that author was asking for earlier-- an independent source of moral judgment.
Author reports that Appiah returns, at the end of the book, to a familiar argument that our considered moral judgments are perfectly safe, a let-down for the author who thought Appiah was taking the pscyhologists' challenge more seriously. Author praises the book for being exploratory, but criticizes it for not being serious enough.
New York Review of Books Vol 56 No 15 Oct 8, 2009
This is a review of Appiah's "Experiments in Ethics", which is cast as an attempt to take seriously the challenge to ethics coming from the psychologists. Author is critical of Appiah's seemingly facile attempt to grapple with the problems. He claims that Appiah alternates between taking the psychologists' "case against character" or the "psychologits' challenge" too seriously, or then not seriously enough.
Appiah seems to take the psychologists' challenge seriously at first, when he cites numerous studies that apparently show that the so-called virtues of charity or honesty aren't cross-situational, and are frequently influenced by small, seemingly insignificant changes in the situation. E.g. a person is more likely to be helpful to a stranger if he has previously found a spare dime in a telephone booth. The challenge to virtue ethics is that good character traits aren't as entrenched as we'd like to think, or that we frequently misidentify good characters. But author replies that another way to read much of this work is that it is irrelevant to virtue ethics-- many of the experiments are trivial. And in the more meaningful ones, people did show virtues like charity (e.g. the Milgram experiments). Author charges that Appiah doesn't mount a reply in this vein, instead moving to include additional virtues more suitable to being a full-fledged social human (humor, originality, love) or focusing on laws, institutions, and social construction of culture to give people the opportunity to do good in the most favorable circumstances.
The next move in the pschologists' challenge is the challenge to intuition, the 'spontaneous unreflected judgment'. Much work has been done in this field to show them to be flawed and unreliable. Author pushes Appiah: 'flawed' compared to what? Considered moral judgment? Where is that independent source of judgment? How do we talk about considered moral judgments without propping them up with intuitions and without adding some other psychological flaw or taint? This was the work that the reviewer wanted Appiah to do, and which he charges Appiah did not. One current and important challenge comes from a variety of 'trolley' problems that talks about having to sacrifice one person in order to save 5. People's intuitions are very messy when asked about what they would or should do in a multitude of situations. Yet author argues that we need to expand the studies and maybe take away another lesson: people can be prone to optical illusions; why can't they also be prone to moral illusions? We work through optical illusions by measuring, by using other standards, by changing our vantage-point. Why not do the same if we want to get the moral judgments right? Author argues that this reply assumes the same issue that author was asking for earlier-- an independent source of moral judgment.
Author reports that Appiah returns, at the end of the book, to a familiar argument that our considered moral judgments are perfectly safe, a let-down for the author who thought Appiah was taking the pscyhologists' challenge more seriously. Author praises the book for being exploratory, but criticizes it for not being serious enough.
10/9/09
Weinberg, Steven - The Missons of Astronomy
10/09/2009
The New York Review of Books Vol 56 No 16 10/22/2009
This is an article in the popular press about the history of astronomy, its importance in the ancient world, and the places it currently occupies in science. The thesis is that astronomy was developed as a science much earlier than other studies like physics or biology, probably because the movements of the stars and planets followed such regular patterns. The practical also contributed to the advancement of astronomy since it assisted with navigation, predicting the seasons and telling the time. As other mechanisms like GPS and atomic clocks have become widely used, the practicality of astronomy has become diminished. Yet astronomy has become much more important in figuring out our cosmology and sub-atomic laws of nature. For instance, it took observations of the deflection of light around a gravitational field to confirm the General Theory of Relativity.
The article ends with bemoaning the misplaced priorities of NASA and other government funding for manned spaceflight instead of unmanned, arguing that more, and more useful, scientific data could be collected by unmanned space missions.
The New York Review of Books Vol 56 No 16 10/22/2009
This is an article in the popular press about the history of astronomy, its importance in the ancient world, and the places it currently occupies in science. The thesis is that astronomy was developed as a science much earlier than other studies like physics or biology, probably because the movements of the stars and planets followed such regular patterns. The practical also contributed to the advancement of astronomy since it assisted with navigation, predicting the seasons and telling the time. As other mechanisms like GPS and atomic clocks have become widely used, the practicality of astronomy has become diminished. Yet astronomy has become much more important in figuring out our cosmology and sub-atomic laws of nature. For instance, it took observations of the deflection of light around a gravitational field to confirm the General Theory of Relativity.
The article ends with bemoaning the misplaced priorities of NASA and other government funding for manned spaceflight instead of unmanned, arguing that more, and more useful, scientific data could be collected by unmanned space missions.
10/2/09
Connolly, John - Augustine, the Will, and Original Sin
10/02/2009
DRAFT
This paper tries to sort out the complexities and possible contradictions that Augustine finds himself in when trying to combat both Manicheanism and also Pelagians. Author lays out the difficulty:
-The Manichees believed that good and evil were two forces in the universe, essentially that god had an evil equal. Augustine needed to establish there was only one god, a good one. But then the problem of the origins of evil arises. The solution was to claim that humans are stuck with Original Sin from the primal sin of Adam & Eve eating from the tree.
-The Pelagians believed that one could improve herself enough so that she could turn against sin on her own, thereby overcoming the weakened human condition brought on by primal sin. Augustine found this contrary to requiring Jesus for salvation and therefore had to argue that primal sin could not be overcome without god's grace.
Augustine's conception of primal sin was important to bolster his defense against both Manicheanism and the Peligians. However it has been argued previously that primal sin seems troubling: it must originate with the first humans, but not from any defect in their wills, or their characters, since that would mean that their maker (god) was partially at fault for their sin. But from whence does it come, if not from their ill will (pushing the problem one step back) or from a fault in their character? MacDonald has suggested that the answer lies in an act of negligence, of failing to attend to good reasons you have for doing something. This paper is largely a review of MacDonald's theory of Primal Sin; the conclusion is that this theory isn't enough to underwrite primal sin.
Author makes a comparison to MacDonald's theory of primal sin to the case of Aiden Quinn, the relatively upstanding individual who absent-mindedly text-messaged as he was driving a MBTA trolley, and ended up hitting another one. The intuition here at first bolsters MacDonald: this is a case of a careless act without ill-will, and yet we are very much inclined to blame Quinn for this negligence-- in short: it is sinful negligence without ill-will.
But author argues that we have a yet further analysis of this event if we are to consider it truly blameworthy-- that the actor failed to exercise the caution of the 'prudent man'. The standard we hold someone to prior to punishing her for gross (sinful) negligence is the standard of what a prudent person would take note of and account for in her decisions. The problem is that we do not believe that Adam & Eve could have failed that test, a hypothesis that MacDonald asks us to believe if his theory of primal sin is correct. It doesn't make sense that they would fail this test, thus making MacDonald's theory of primal sin implausible. This leaves the primal sin still in the difficult situation of being a sin ex nihilo, and remains a problem for Augustine.
DRAFT
This paper tries to sort out the complexities and possible contradictions that Augustine finds himself in when trying to combat both Manicheanism and also Pelagians. Author lays out the difficulty:
-The Manichees believed that good and evil were two forces in the universe, essentially that god had an evil equal. Augustine needed to establish there was only one god, a good one. But then the problem of the origins of evil arises. The solution was to claim that humans are stuck with Original Sin from the primal sin of Adam & Eve eating from the tree.
-The Pelagians believed that one could improve herself enough so that she could turn against sin on her own, thereby overcoming the weakened human condition brought on by primal sin. Augustine found this contrary to requiring Jesus for salvation and therefore had to argue that primal sin could not be overcome without god's grace.
Augustine's conception of primal sin was important to bolster his defense against both Manicheanism and the Peligians. However it has been argued previously that primal sin seems troubling: it must originate with the first humans, but not from any defect in their wills, or their characters, since that would mean that their maker (god) was partially at fault for their sin. But from whence does it come, if not from their ill will (pushing the problem one step back) or from a fault in their character? MacDonald has suggested that the answer lies in an act of negligence, of failing to attend to good reasons you have for doing something. This paper is largely a review of MacDonald's theory of Primal Sin; the conclusion is that this theory isn't enough to underwrite primal sin.
Author makes a comparison to MacDonald's theory of primal sin to the case of Aiden Quinn, the relatively upstanding individual who absent-mindedly text-messaged as he was driving a MBTA trolley, and ended up hitting another one. The intuition here at first bolsters MacDonald: this is a case of a careless act without ill-will, and yet we are very much inclined to blame Quinn for this negligence-- in short: it is sinful negligence without ill-will.
But author argues that we have a yet further analysis of this event if we are to consider it truly blameworthy-- that the actor failed to exercise the caution of the 'prudent man'. The standard we hold someone to prior to punishing her for gross (sinful) negligence is the standard of what a prudent person would take note of and account for in her decisions. The problem is that we do not believe that Adam & Eve could have failed that test, a hypothesis that MacDonald asks us to believe if his theory of primal sin is correct. It doesn't make sense that they would fail this test, thus making MacDonald's theory of primal sin implausible. This leaves the primal sin still in the difficult situation of being a sin ex nihilo, and remains a problem for Augustine.
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