I just came across this website (via Everyday Philosophy at the Purple Bike Café) that is gradually releasing videos from what appears to be a comprehensive introductory ethics course by Michael Sandel at Harvard. I’ve read Sandel, but I had no idea he was such a gifted lecturer.
The aesthetic is a little weird — the production qualities suggest daytime talk show meets Sunday preaching meets professional comedy. But the intellectual content is excellent and it’s great to see a high profile philosophy professor grappling with highly motivated undergrads and using the discussion to help teach a course — and a very large course at that. Lots of great ideas for how to teach certain issues. It’s also a little eerie to get a peek inside someone else’s intro classroom and see how he interacts with his students. I highly recommend it.
(Also, how cool is WGBH public television to make this kind of thing possible?)
Over at A Ku Indeed, Chris wrote a post about David Frum’s piece on the need to put some distance between Glenn Beck and the GOP. While Frum’s piece is helpful, it’s hard not to see conservatives-in-exile as lying in the bed made by years of disparaging government. But that’s not the point of this post.
I was reading Josh Marshall’s site the other day when I saw the news item about Cass Sunstein being confirmed more or less along party lines and clicked through to see who had voted against him. With his free-market credentials, I was surprised to see that there was even a problem with cloture. So I googled around and found the particular craziness that Frum was talking about (which, while I am not a utilitarian, is reprehensibly wrong about Peter Singer and utilitarianism in general).
One of the things that made Rush Limbaugh so popular during the 1990s was his railing against “political correctness” that connected with an American public who felt alienated by the technocratic direction government was headed after the Cold War. Charitably, the idea was that a common man’s common sense was actually superior to tolerance and the political calculations of governing. Of course Limbaugh was really just interested in advancing conservative correctness and didn’t mind killing tolerance in the process, but the general idea caught on and he rode it to fame. Later Sean Hannity replicated Limbaugh’s views on TV to good success. Refined anti-political correctness became a dogma of the fledgling conservative “intellectual” movement.
But with Hannity and Limbaugh you could always sort of see the veneer of a lust for ratings on whatever crazy right wing meme they were touting (Limbaugh’s said as much in interviews). Beck is able to create a much better illusion of it not being there. Or maybe it’s not actually there. I can’t even tell sometimes. He doesn’t try to stay within the bounds of political discourse on the right and it could very well be because he doesn’t actually know them. He really is making it up as he goes along, with little to no concern even for consistency. (How else do you get by with railing against both the free-market healthcare system and reform?) This gives his persona a certain innocence that seems to have tapped some audience that no one could hold before. In a way, his ignorance allows him to embody the most authentic form of anti-political correctness. The very words “public”, “czar”, and “tax” are just politically correct doublespeak. All of the people who were left behind when conservativism had tried to become a principled movement found their place again. You don’t need to know that gender-neutral pronouns are a result of feminism or even common sense. You just need your fear (preferably of ACORN) and cable TV.
The new anti-political correctness is why Glenn Beck and the right can now stand against the likes of Cass Sunstein and David Frum. It’s why Sarah Palin had more hardcore supporters than John McCain. It works like raw meat to people who are uncritically hungry for validation of their fear and distrust of President Obama and Washington DC. It should scare the pants off of anyone who’s not thinking with their limbic system. And as far as I can see, no one knows what to do about it.
When President Obama took office in January, many Americans (including, of course, myself) breathed a sigh of relief. One of the big thoughts behind this sigh was that we had someone in charge of the executive branch who understood that government could be part of the solution to some of our domestic problems, particularly the tragedy of the American healthcare system. As the administration’s work on healthcare came to center stage in recent months, the debate has largely centered on whether or not the solution should include a “public” health insurance option or “public plan” and if so, how strong that option should be. The function of the public plan would be to provide an affordable, comprehensive alternative to private health insurance plans if those plans became too costly, too limited, or inaccessible due to job loss or other factors.
All of these issues are incredibly important and following the details of what might emerge is even pretty exciting for those of us in the nerdy minor leagues of health policy. Will there be a strong public plan, a weak one, a national healthcare co-op, an insurance exchange of private plans, or some mixture of all of the above? But lately I’ve become concerned that the debate as a whole shows that something far greater is at stake: whether we as a country still have the ability to do big things together.
This piece by Sam Schulman at the Weekly Standard appears to be the newest case against gay marriage that doesn’t have anything to do with either Biblical or secular accusations about the immorality of homosexuality. It’s a variation on the “damaging the institution of marriage” argument in which—get this—homosexual marriage is so inherently romantic that it will irrevocably damage the kinship system by diminishing the proper role of heterosexual marriage as its centerpiece.
The kinship system has never, apparently, adapted to new kinds of relationships before and is hanging by a thread. It is also the only thing standing between children and prostitution.
To say that this argument trades on Byzantine views of female (and male) sexuality and marriage would be being rather unkind to Byzantium. Schulman has Jurassic views of female sexuality and marriage.
So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, all the taste and texture of real meat (and maybe fewer health problems) without any of the animal suffering. Chris MacDonald, over at the Bioetech Ethics Blog asked if anyone had any good ethical concerns about it. Just about three days ago, I thought the biggest problem with synthetic meat was that it might be disgusting. But I may have changed my mind.
It occurred to me that if someone could synthetically produce animal meat, there really isn’t a whole lot preventing anyone from synthetically producing human muscle tissue and human meat. And, of course, there would be no human suffering involved in harvesting this meat. (For the moment, ignore any problems with the ethics of the research you’d need to do to get this far.) Would there be anything wrong with eating synthetically produced human meat? Continue Reading »
I meet people all the time who a) have progressive views about public policy and b) fondly remember reading Ayn Rand’s books. I’ve always thought this tension could be explained by people forming preferences about books before they form preferences about political positions. But there is something interesting going on in the comments to this post over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog at Think Progress.
While Yglesias is a great, bafflingly prolific blogger and Think Progress is a useful site, the comments are kind of the Mos Eisley of the progressive blog world. So I tend to ignore them. But looking at the comments here and subtracting those that believe Rand is actually right, it looks like progressive people who read Rand have two very different reactions to the basic tenets of Rand’s thought:
1) They believe that the individually self-sufficient John Galt is an excellent ideal, but practically unachievable by human beings because of our imperfect human nature. Call this view Unattainable.
2) They believe that the individually self-sufficient John Galt is a bad ideal full stop because human dependency on others is an important and valuable feature of human nature. Call this view Undesirable.
Both reactions lead to progressive policy preferences, but for very different reasons. It’s hard to see that tension not coming home to roost in the long term.
“But it is noteworthy that if we secretly deceived this lover of the beautiful by planting in the ground artificial flowers (which can be manufactured exactly like natural ones)…and he discovered the deceit, the immediate interest that he previously took in them would disappear at once…” (Critique of Judgment, Sec. 42)
I like to think the Folgers Crystals people were gunning for Kant in the Analytic of the Sublime.
My name is Adam Potthast and I am a philosophy professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri-Rolla). I tend to post mostly on ethics, Kantian ethics, and Mac-related topics. This semester, I'm teaching in London, so expect more Europe, UK, and travel-related posts. More than you ever wanted to know can be found in the About Me section and my academic homepage.
