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Monthly Archives: December 2010

Snow.

December 12, 2010

The wicked white path, softened by its appearance which disguises its harshness, gives me the illusion of travel as I …

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Coffee and Altruism. || I'm working on something related to the concept of altruism, which I think is an underused/underexplored concept in moral philosophy (it gets plenty of attention in other disciplines, though, such as evolutionary biology and social psychology—where it's part of a large family of concepts like prosociality, helping behavior, and so on). Anyway, I already read a couple of chapters of this work, which is part of the Open University series of Concepts in the Social Sciences, and it's pretty good. Scott and Seglow begin with a history of the concept, tracing its coinage to Comte (see one of my previous posts), but arguing that the idea of other-directedness goes much further back (which of course it does). Are we altruistic? That depends in part on how we define the term. What motivates us to be altruistic? Why do we care about the well-being of other people at all? When we are motivated to be altruistic, are we responding to reasons? Is it through rationality that we arrive at concern for others, as in Kant? Or are we responding to emotions, to the compassion and pity we feel for the suffering of other creatures, as in sentimentalists like Hume? And how did altruism evolve? Does it matter that, with globalization, we no longer tend live in close-knit communities where it is easy to identify each other and hold each other responsible? To what extent do we have a duty to be altruistic? Isn't altruism supererogatory—that is, morally good but not morally required? Or should altruism be part of what we owe each other by virtue of being creatures that co-inhabit the world and—contrary to strictly individualistic accounts—share a number of common goals, practices, and goods? I have plenty of thoughts on these questions, feeling more strongly about some answers than others, but I'm still working them out and I'm not quite ready to share them yet. 😅

If you're the kind of person who gets excited by 800+ pages worth of classic texts (66 of them in total) in ethics and moral theory, then this book is for you. That should be enough to sell it, I think, but just in case you're not entirely convinced: this anthology includes classic pieces from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Mill, to contemporary classics from the likes of Thomas Nagel, Thomas Scanlon, Thomas the Tank Engine (just kidding), Martha Nussbaum, Derek Parfit (may he rest in peace), and Peter Singer. Central topics covered: Why be moral? | The meaning of moral language. | Morality and objectivity. | Consequentialism. | Deontology. | Virtue and character. | Value and well-being. | Moral psychology (personal favorite). | Applied ethics. | I bought it because I was looking for a book that included Bernard Williams' critique of utilitarianism—this one did, and it seemed like an all-around valuable work to have and slowly make my way through. Reading and re-reading the classics (in your field) is always a good thing.

Here's a light book about an interesting subject—big data, and what it can reveal about human behavior (or, more grandiosely put, about human nature). I started reading it yesterday and am already halfway through; I might just finish it tonight. Also, yay for reading outside. ☀️

Coffee and human enhancement. || I'm reworking an essay that I wrote a couple of years ago (one of my favorites from that period) to try to publish it. I won't go into the precise nature of the subject, because relatively little has been written about it (and I think I have relatively original take on it); although I very much like sharing with you guys, it probably isn't smart to put the idea out there on the good old I-net before the paper is ready. However, I can say that it has to do with human enhancement, which is why I'm currently reading this book—to (perhaps) supplement some of the parts that I already wrote. To what extent should we use science and technology to try to make better human beings? This is the core question that underlies the ethics of human enhancement. Think of the ability to select the genes of potential children, for instance. Should we—and, if so, to what extent—allow the practice of so-called 'designer babies' (human embryos that have been genetically modified, usually following guidelines set by parents, to produce desirable traits)? Resistance to the idea of enhancement is often based, explicitly or implicitly, on an idea of what human nature is or ought to be. It is surprisingly difficult to settle the terms of human enhancement debates, let alone come up with a convincing account concerning the ethical boundaries of enhancement. But hey, that's what's makes it interesting—philosophically speaking.

One of the reasons why my girlfriend gave me poetry for my birthday is that lately I have pretty much exclusively been buying and reading works related to my research (ethics, moral psychology, and so on). A case in point: here are some new books. 1] The Panic Virus offers the story—the true story—behind the vaccine-autism controversy. Andrew Wakefield caused a stir in 1998 when he published research that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism (well, the findings are slightly more complicated, but that was the gist and the idea that stuck). The paper created a shockwave, the effects of which are still felt. The research, which was fraudulent, has since been repeatedly rejected—no causal link has been found between the vaccine and autism. Wakefield, who turned out to have a vested interest in the findings, was struck off the UK medical register for unethical behavior, misconduct, and fraud. Yet to this day, medical license lost or not, he goes on pushing his anti-vaccination agenda. That's why it's so important to know what really happened. The Panic Virus covers a good chunk of the Wakefield fiasco and its aftermath. 2] I've read sections of Leviathan and Durant's classic work; I figured I'd get the works in question. The Cambridge series of classic texts are wonderful. 3] In Everybody Lies, Stephens-Davidowitz uses big data from Internet searches to gain insight into human behavior—into what people -actually- do and search for on the Internet, as supposed to what they report. Can big data tell us about people's actual/real preferences as opposed to what they say for themselves? Let's see how strong S-D can make the case. 3] I pre-ordered the paperback edition of Blood and Silk a long time ago. Having lived in Southeast Asia for some time, I am always interest in reading about its developments and history (especially, of course, in the case of the Philippines). "Southeast Asia is often hailed as a model of economic development. Yet why are its richest countries such as Malaysia and riddled with corruption? Why do Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines harbor unresolved violent insurgencies? How does China's growing influence, contested by the US, ...

Coffee and Kraut. || "This therefore is the first precept of law, that good is to be done and pursued, and bad is to be avoided. And on this all other precepts of the natural law are founded." — Aquinas, Summa Theologica | What does it mean for something to be good for something else? When we say that exercising is good for you, that love is good for you, that philosophizing is good for you, what do we mean? Is there something that underlies all of the ways in which we use the term 'good' (:for someone, to someone, something better or best)? Can we develop a systematic account of the good that covers the myriad ways in which the concept is applied? Richard Kraut explores these questions in What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being. At its barest and most basic, he puts the question as follows: What, in fact, is the nature of the relationship that holds between G and S when G is good for S (where "G" is a placeholder for goods and "S" for individual subjects)? I got this book specifically for a couple of chapters that will probably go into a paper I'm working on, but I was quickly drawn into the rest. I appreciate the way in which he ties the concept of 'good' to flourishing, which then applies, at least potentially, to all beings—to the extent that they are able to flourish. Not uncontroversial, of course. Favorite passage so far: "The linguistic awkwardness that might be felt in talking about the welfare of a plant has no practical or philosophical significance. To see this, consider a child who plans on lighting a fire and destroying a forest, simply for the sake of such destruction. Should we stop him? Certainly. But why so? Is it only because he may endanger human lives, kill the animals that live in the forest, and prevent it from serving human purposes? Why should not the fact that his act is bad for trees and a great many other living things—in fact, all the things in the forest that are flourishing—also be counted as a reason for interfering with him? Would we not be concerned, and rightly so, about his destructiveness, even if we knew that the forest is uninhabited by animals? After all, the child is not innocently rearranging the world; ...

Omg it finally arrived! I pre-ordered this as soon as I heard that it was in the making (a major event). It brings together in English for the first time all of De Assis's stories contained in the seven collections that were published in his lifetime, from 1870 to 1906. If you've followed me for a while, you'll know that he is one of my absolute favorite writers; I read the Dalkey Archive edition of his stories, which was great—but this is all of them. This is 930 pages of stories by Machado. I don't know when (if ever) I've been as excited about a literary work being published.

Coffee and Comte. || You might know that Comte coined the term 'sociology' (although it has recently been claimed that the term was first introduced by the essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès in 1780), but did you know that he coined the term 'altruism'? Probably… All the same, the term is employed by Comte in his Catéchisme Positiviste to describe the ethical doctrine that he supported, namely that individuals have a moral obligation to renounce self-interest and to live for others ('altruism' is derived from the French 'altruisme' [from 'autrui' or 'other people'], which in turn is derived from the Latin 'alter' ['other']). This Hackett edition collects the first two chapters of Comte's massive Cours de philosophie positive. The first—The Nature and Importance of the Positive Philosophy—expounds his law of three stages, according to which each branch of our knowledge passes in succession through three different theoretical stages: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the final scientific or positive state. The second chapter—The Classification of the Positive Sciences—is where Comte outlines his ideas about the sciences and, most relevant to my purposes, his doctrine of altruism.

It was my birthday yesterday, and even though I had to work all day (I got up at 7 and got back at 6:30), I returned home to a wonderful meal prepared by my lovely girlfriend, who also got me a whooole bunch of presents. Since we first read Anne Carson together, and since we both love her, she got me Float and Glass, Irony & God, and because she's as awesome as she is, she also managed to get me a Carson that I didn't even know existed but that I would very much have wanted to have had I known it existed, and which I am so thrilled to get to read now: Economy of the Unlost, a study of the ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos and Paul Celan. To sweeten the deal, she got me this awesome edition of Dylan Thomas' poetry. #blessed || (Also, in order to celebrate, we got Tai Tai some 'cat soup', which she very much appreciated.)

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