John Mikhail @ Balkinization, links to various responses to his book defending a Chomskian, innate, but also Rawlsian, logical and non-conflicted, "moral cognition" and "moral grammar". He links also to his reply,  all hosted by The Jerusalem[!] Review of Legal Studies. 

Two conversations with Mikhail, podcasts, at Philosophy Bites. The first centers on a discussion of the Trolley Problem, in this case using a choice between being asked to switch a train from one track to another or to kill one person and distribute his internal organs to five dying patients.  Mikhail says the reason the first is seen as acceptable by most people and the second not is that in the first the death is seen as a "side effect". 

repeats

The trolley problem has morphed to include many variations, and even its earlier forms included discussion of “the doctrine of double effect” and of intentionality, treating the act of killing to save lives as an unintentional consequence of a moral act. Utilitarianism doesn’t need to nit-pick about intention; it’s simple enough to say “I chose to kill 3 people to save 10”. But the focus on intention denies full moral existence to those who’ve been killed, and I know of no study asking people to imagine themselves as the fat man and asking if they’re able to intuit a moral difference between being pushed by a man’s hand or by a turnstile with someone’s finger on the switch. 

Regarding the changing intuitions of the actor, Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiments showed that proximity, of authority to subject and of subject to “learner”, was the main factor in affecting the level of obedience to the command to cause harm. An anthropologist will know why a guillotine is not like an ax and why a governor is not called an executioner even if the man who bears that title is only following orders. Again, such data are treated as irrelevant to philosophy, because once the point of view is chosen it can’t be changed. Rather than seeing the inevitability of competing perspectives of the actor and his victim, the moral issue to be faced is defined only through the experience of one of them and not the other. Philosophy searches for truth and perspectivism just doesn’t fit the bill.

The doctrine of double effect goes back to Aquinas, and the Church is an authoritarian institution. Philosophy qua philosophy is always authoritarian. Democracy on the other hand is a means for society to negotiate problems that have no absolute solution.

related: see previous post

Fill (with Jews)

The J Street Conference, 2013
The perversity of the image is as self-evident to an outside observer as it was unimagined by its maker.

The nationalism of the vanquished becomes the barbarity of the conquerer. Israel was founded as a land without irony, but it's inescapable. Garveyism for Jews, Jewish fascism. etc.

repeats here for a discussion of "national self-determination", whatever that means (and no one knows). But it's fairly certain that as far as Joseph Raz and Avishai Margalit are concerned, the 20% of the Israeli population who are not Jewish exist in some sort of limbo, since the "nation" the two of them are concerned with is the nation of Jews, not the nation made up of citizens of Israel.

Quine:

Meaning, let us remember, is not to be identified with naming. Frege's example of 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star' and Russell's of 'Scott' and 'the author of Waverly', illustrate that terms can name the same thing but differ in meaning. The distinction between meaning and naming is no less important at the level of abstract terms. The terms '9' and 'the number of the planets' name one and the same abstract entity but presumably must be regarded as unlike in meaning; for astronomical observation was needed, and not mere reflection on meanings, to determine the sameness of the entity in question.

...A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.

I've quoted that enough but never used the most obvious example: 'Evening Star' and 'Morning Star',  'Palestine' and 'Israel'.

repeats: It makes no sense to refer to formal logic as philosophy. no fucking sense at all.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

MOSIREEN

I hadn't realized. Beinart is evolving.
Like M.J. Rosenberg, faced with the choice between adaptation and open fascism he chose to change.

The Palestinian experience has not changed. Zionist, American, and European perception of the Palestinian experience has changed.

Swag Bags from Al Qaeda

ISIS has been visiting hospital patients in Ghouta, #Damascus, handing out ISIS-branded gift bags. #Syria pic.twitter.com/xtzYjkfUcp
— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) September 26, 2013

Traders may have gotten last week’s Fed news 7 milliseconds early

Somebody placed massive orders for gold futures contracts betting on exactly that outcome within a millisecond or two of 2 p.m. that day -- before the seven milliseconds had passed that would allow the transmission of the information from the Fed's "lock-up" of media organizations who get an early look at the data and the arrival of that information at Chicago's futures markets (that's the time it takes the data to travel at the speed of light. A millisecond is a thousandth of a second). CNBC's Eamon Javers, citing market analysis firm Nanex, estimates that $600 million in assets could have changed hands in that fleeting moment. 

There would seem to be three possibilities: 1) Some trader was extraordinarily lucky, placing a massive bet just before a major announcement that would make that bet highly profitable. 2) There was a leak, either by a media organization with early access to the data or even someone at the Fed. Or 3) The laws of physics have been violated as the information traveled from Washington to Chicago faster than the speed of light. 

You can see why Option 2 looks the most plausible. 

Capital markets exist to serve the real economy: Stock and bond markets exist to allow companies to raise the funds they need and savers to invest for the future. Futures and options markets exist to let companies and individuals hedge against potential losses, smoothing out the risks of fluctuations in currencies, commodity prices, or whatever.

There is a role in these markets for traders whose work is more speculative. Having opportunistic traders in the markets always watching for mispricings can be beneficial to the real companies and individuals looking to save or invest because it means they are more likely to be able to get a fair price and carry out the transaction whenever they want. (The traders ensure, to use the formal terms, liquidity and efficient price discovery). 

But when taken to its logical extremes, such as computers exploiting five millisecond advantages in the transfer of market-moving information, it's much less clear that society gains anything.

repeats

[Y]ou have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.

repeats

In his version of our present dilemmas no one is to blame. "As citizens, we may feel that inequality on this scale cannot possibly be good for a democracy.... But the super-rich are not at fault." 

...Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, this story combines a claim about improvement ("growth is good") with an assumption about inevitability: globalization—or, for Robert Reich, "supercapitalism"—is a natural process, not a product of arbitrary human decisions. 

again "The Good Banker"

The imperative of speed, the conflation of technological and moral progress, of science and morality.

Modern liberalism begins in universalism, treating various people's interests as equal or equivalent. But the global view of individuals as actors has given us an asocial model of morality: 

"If her interests have the same value as his, then my interests must have the same value as yours."

-massive realignment in Syria today.

-minimal coverage of the UN in the US political web
---
update written up

“People who design machines and airplanes, no matter how much they believe that what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into tools of industrial civilization. It's never unscathed. They’re cursed dreams. Animation, too. Today all of humanity's dreams are cursed somehow. Beautiful yet cursed dreams.”

Yet, make no mistake. The goal of Graham, the neocons, Israel and Saudi Arabia is not a negotiated solution permitting a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. The goal is a U.S. war to smash Iran.

Ted Cruz

The elite academic circles that [Ted] Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

Douthat 2001[now archive.org, but linking to The Crimson] 

Coming to Harvard, I now have a new sense of the power and success that is at our fingertips - I know I will be one of the 25 richest writers of the future.

And again

Now I know that there was a lot of outrage about these comments on various House and organization e-mail lists, and a few of us “lazy” Harvard types even took a break from polishing the family silver to fire off letters to the Daily and Dean Inouye. This is well and good. But if we can set aside our justifiable pique for a moment, we might realize that we’re doing people like Inouye, Amira, and my ever-so-well-educated Legal Seafood waiter a grave disservice. They’re not the real enemy here, my Harvard brethren—and the sooner we recognize it, the better.

No, the real enemy is silent and deadly, a mental disorder so pervasive and persistent that it defies any quick-fix cure. Call it, if you will, the Harvard Syndrome.

This disorder’s symptoms vary widely, needless to say, based on individual constitutions—but fortunately, the symptoms are easily recognizable to the trained (i.e., Harvard-educated) eye. For one thing, the Harvard Syndrome causes otherwise sincere people to lie, with almost pathological zeal, about their motives for not attending Harvard. The lies can range from the banal (“lousy undergrad education,” as my Legal Seafood chum insisted) to the breathtaking and patently unbelievable (“I really liked Yale better”). But however involved and intricate—or charmingly clumsy—the lie may be, the truth is always the same. The Harvard Syndrome sufferer was denied admission to Harvard.

In 2005

The Truth About Harvard
It may be hard to get into Harvard, but it's easy to get out without learning much of enduring value at all. A recent graduate's report.

Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
Ross Gregory Douthat arrived at Harvard University in the fall of 1998 carrying an idealized vision of Ivy League life. But the Harvard of his dreams, an institution fueled by intellectual curiosity and entrusted with the keys to liberal education, never materialized. Instead, he found himself in a school rife with elitism and moneyed excess, an incubator for the grasping and ambitious, a college seduced by the religion of success.

Ulrich Beck, A God of One's Own

Blurb: "Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Compared to faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict are insignificant."

Symposium Talking Peace with Gods
Bruno Latour [PDF]

repeat: "The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known."

Latour, Chalmers, etc.

Lewontin:  "No one in my tradition believes that the words are very important. After all, if I misspeak someone else will say the right thing because we are both talking about the same things and ultimately the gods will speak through us. So words are not the matter."

Beck, Latour et al. are arguing over words not acts. Arguing over ideas.

note taking for myself. remember this shit.
---
update: jumping forward

Pic of French diplomat stopped by Israeli soldiers in Jordan Valley today. Sent by aid worker at scene of incident pic.twitter.com/gZSr2nt4uv

— Hugh Naylor (@HughNaylor) September 20, 2013

Russell Brand
repeats. "A pop star, not a college professor. An actor, not a philosopher."
"comedians"

Maria Farrell, sister of Henry and self-described "army wife" whose husband is deployed in Afghanistan, and who prays every day for the health of the Pope.

Ugh. Some days, no matter how many nice or exciting things happening in my personal and professional life, I just feel that we are all, quite simply, fucked. 

As a mini-reward for getting a small work thing into my outbox by 0900, I read Russell Brand’s take on his recent adventure award-ceremony-land, when he reminded GQ that its main sponsor, Hugo Boss, used to do a nice line in Nazi uniforms.

Bertram comments

It is indeed remarkable how all the places inhabited by the super-rich (Kensington, Mayfair, much of Geneva, the XVI arrondissement …) are really crushingly dull. At least little of real value will be lost when we burn them down.

 Bertram: "I’m sympathetic, I really am"

I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere)…. Second, it is all very well Juliet Schor telling us to transition to a low hours/lower consumption economy. I’m cool with consuming less. The problem is that I, and just about everyone else, has taken out huge mortgages and bank loans to pay (in part) for the consumption we’ve already had. Hard to reduce the hours unless (or until) the debt goes away. Third, there was distressingly little discussion of the politics of this.

Hell is other people
---

Duncan Black continues his drift away from his own past.

20 years ago a friend loaned me Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts Into Air, thinking I'd enjoy it. Shortly after, we had a falling out and it sat on my bookshelf ever since.  Last week, one day before Berman died. I finally picked it up. It's a work of desperate optimism.
Callie Angell committed suicide 3 years ago.

Path dependent rationalism: Brighouse and the primacy of status-seeking

I cannot tell you how many students I have talked to who were deterred from applying to more selective private schools by the sticker price, applied only to Madison because it had low tuition, but who, I know, would be in much less debt than they are if they had applied to and attended the more selective, elite, private schools that they spurned because of the sticker price (which they would not have had to pay).

start here or here
or here

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model." 

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland." 

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

 And Brighouse spends his days pondering utopia.

"What is it like to be a bug?"

repeats
ad infinitum

Any creature capable of acting on more than simple reflex is conscious.
Consciousness is definable as the conflict between the twin and equally mechanical processes of reflex/conditioned response and calculation. Absent those conflicting imperatives there is no consciousness.
Animals are indecisive machines: neurotic computers.

so fucking obvious; or it should be, for a materialist.

Leiter: Why Legal Positivism (Again)?
Linking to a paper at SSRN
From the abstract

Why is legal positivism the dominant view among legal philosophers? The address begins with a somewhat lengthy methodological preamble, offering reasons to resist the extravagant metaphysical inflation of the purported theoretical virtues of positivism in some recent jurisprudential writing by Dickson and Shapiro, among others. Artifacts do not have essential attributes, not even functional ones. (Leslie Green's partial resistance to my metaphysical deflation in his recent "The Morality in Law" is shown to depend on some confusions about the status of the claim that law is an artifact.) I then suggest that legal positivism has three theoretical virtues counting in its favor. First, if we take seriously the benchmark for theoretical adequacy that Hart gave for his theory - namely, that it capture what the ordinary educated person familiar with a modern municipal legal system understands by the concept of law - that positivism does the best job of accounting for this ordinary understanding. (Particular attention is drawn to Raz's original arguments for legal positivism of this form, as opposed to his perhaps better-known, if more controversial, argument from the nature of authority.) Second, the positivist account of law is the one deployed fruitfully in all the empirical social sciences. Third, the positivist theory does not involve incredible or controversial metaphysical assumptions. The last two theoretical considerations are acknowledged to presuppose naturalism, but I suggest that doing so is unavoidable.

Following the logic of legal positivism you'd have to think Raz has given Palestinians the out of not being obliged to accept the morality of Israeli law or even of the existence of the state. But then…
Joseph Raz and Avishai Margalit,  "National Self-Determination". find it on the web.

just stupid.

Duncan Black

Olds
Anyone who is younger than 20, that is anyone born after 1993 or so, really doesn't remember the horrible events of September 11, 2001.

It was a big deal, but it was a long time ago.
by Atrios at 17:11
223 Comments

What a fucking idiot.

Who the fuck needs history? 10 years or a thousand, what's the difference?

Deleuze, where analytic philosophy meets conceptual art.

Thoughts have become concepts.
Concepts are called objects.
Writers of financial contracts are called financial engineers.
Contracts are called instruments.
Banking has become an industry.
Politics and economics are called science.
Rationalism has become empiricism.
Metaphysics has become physics.

All that is solid melts into air, and all that is ephemeral becomes material.
Late capitalism as 12th century nonsense, without irony.

I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:
It will not speak of me or others,
Of love or youth, or of anything else,
For it was composed while I was asleep
Riding on horseback.