Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Revised CFP: Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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I’ve revised the CFP for the Felician ethics conference to reflect the title of J.L.A. Garcia’s plenary talk, “Grounding the Metatheory of Morals.” So is this going to be an excursion into Aristotle, Aquinas via Maritain, Kant, all three, or something else? I have no idea, so save the date (April 23), show up in delightful Rutherford, New Jersey, and you can hear the answer for yourself.

Better yet, submit a paper–but hurry up, because there’s only five weeks before the deadline. (That means you, Gordon, Carrie-Ann, and Michael.)

Please circulate the CFP to interested parties in your networks, and especially to adjuncts with opinions on the controversy over adjunct employment conditions, since there’s a dedicated session on that topic.

Snowmageddon 2016

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Apropos of Snowmageddon 2016 on the East Coast, I can’t resist reproducing this email exchange I had with my friend Rick Minto the day before Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012:

Rick: Hope this note finds you well, and in a position to safely avoid the wrath of Sandy.

Irfan: Carrie-Ann and I have been having this bantering argument about whether Sandy is really dangerous (her) or just media blather and hype (me). Just went to the deli across the street where we managed to split the regulars down the middle on that question. One guy on my side said, “I can’t believe they interrupted the Jets game to talk about this stupid thing.”

Am I ready? No. Am I worried? No. Have I learned from past mistakes? Not really.

Mood music for the occasion….

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2nd Call: CFP, Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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CALL FOR PAPERS

The Tenth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs will be held in the Educations Commons Building of Felician University’s Rutherford campus, 227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, NJ 07070, on Saturday, April 23, 2016, from 9 am – 6 pm.

Plenary Speaker:
J.L.A. Garcia (Boston College)
“Grounding the Metatheory of Morals”

Submissions on any topic in moral or political philosophy (broadly construed) are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2016 to felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Completed papers are preferred to abstracts, but abstracts will be considered. Authors should ensure that they are available to appear at the conference on the conference date before submitting.

Presentations are invited for a special panel discussion on the ethics, politics, and economics of adjuncting. The invitation is open to all, adjuncts and non-adjuncts alike, from within philosophy and outside of the field.

Please direct questions to Irfan Khawaja at felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Sad but True: The Republican Predicament

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The conservative intellectual Peter Wehner has an Op-Ed in Thursday’s New York Times called “Why I Will Never Vote for Trump.” Though Wehner’s thesis is in many ways a belaboring of the obvious, it’s worth reading, as much for its condensed summary of the obvious as for the obvious things it manages to omit. The omissions offer an interesting glimpse into the thought processes of the most morally decent thinkers on the political right. What the glimpse reveals, I think, is that even the most morally decent thinkers on the political right are too clueless and bereft of original ideas to cure what’s wrong with it.

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A Teenager Shall Lead Them

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I’ve written before about the resort to force and intimidation in discussions of Palestinian-Israeli issues, but here’s an outrageous case– and one that hits close to home. From The New York Times, “Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office“:

A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.

She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.

The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.

New Jersey has some of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the nation. After the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, in 2010, it passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, a far-reaching law with stiff penalties for educators who do not sufficiently respond to complaints of harassment or intimidation.

Read the whole thing for a fuller account of the story. Here’s a January 7 story from the Bergen Record, and here’s a January 8 story from the same place. Muftah reproduces some of the tweets involved. (Unfortunately, Koval’s Twitter feed is no longer operating in the public domain.) Fair Lawn, by the way, is just a few towns west of Lodi, where I teach.

Setting aside whatever narrowly legalistic insanities may reside within the various “anti-bullying” statutes, this is not a morally complex matter. A high school student tweets her political views about Israel. Some of what she says contains profanity. Some is sympathetic to, or appeasing of, Hamas. Some of her peers don’t like what she says. She gets some verbal flak from some of them. One “unfollows” her Twitter account. She doesn’t reveal the “unfollower’s” name in public, but reveals it to someone privately.

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American (and Muslim) Complicity in Saudi Theocracy

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Here’s the best short commentary I’ve recently seen on our complicity in Saudi tyranny, from the letters section of today’s New York Times:

To the Editor:

What are American “interests” in this region, who determined them, and why have they not been shared with the American people?

We get energy from the Saudis and also used to buy significant amounts of oil from Iran. But we diversified our oil purchasing after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and cut off all Iranian shipments after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. With the current glut of oil on the market, we have never been in a stronger position to press the Saudis for democratic reform. But we don’t.

The only plausible answer is that they continue to buy enormous quantities of American weapons and get support from that lobby. They also continue to invest tens of billions of their petrodollars in Western banks. So despite all our talk about human rights and democracy, it appears that our “interests” are being dictated by the arms industry and Wall Street, both of which have a lock on the White House and Congress.

We the people, who do have an interest in human rights, are left to write letters to the editor and hope that our so-called representatives will hear our voices above the money machine in Washington. Something is very, very wrong with this picture.

VICTOR GOODE

Long Island City, Queens

The writer is a professor at the CUNY School of Law.

Every element of that is right, but there’s one thing he doesn’t mention: no boycott of or blacklist against the Saudi regime can work unless Muslims, especially Sunni Muslims, decide to join in and boycott the hajj and umra pilgrimages to Mecca (and Medina).

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Happy 2016

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So 2015 is basically over. I probably couldn’t summarize the year better than Roger Cohen does in this column for The New York Times–it’s got Palestinians, it’s got Jews, it’s got Native Americans, it’s got Syrian refugees, it’s got flyover country, it’s got anti-Trump derision, and it’s ultimately about a tired old guy lumbering around America, ranting lugubriously about why so much of the world has come to suck so bad. (Sound familiar? )

This was PoT’s first full year in operation; the blog started as a solo act mid-year in 2014. This year, we managed to land 37,000 unique visitors, and took on five new bloggers–Matt Faherty, Michael Young, Hendrik Van den Berg, David Potts, and Stephen Boydstun. Most of our visitors came, unsurprisingly, from the U.S., followed in turn by the U.K., and the Palestinian Territories.

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