Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

2015 Felician Institute Fall Symposium: The Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Water

Posted on by under Uncategorized

In honor of Hurricane Joaquin, I thought I’d announce the topic and speakers for this year’s Felician Institute Fall Symposium:

The Fourth Annual Felician Institute Fall Symposium–“The Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Water”–will take place on Saturday, October 24, 2015 between 1 and 5 pm in the Education Commons Building on Felician’s Rutherford, New Jersey campus. Speakers include Joshua Briemberg, Representative for Program Development, WaterAid; Britt Long, Esq., an attorney in private practice and one-time litigator for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation; and Don Conger, North Hudson Sewerage Authority. This event is co-sponsored by the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, the Felician College Pre-Law Program, and the Felician College UN Fellows Program.

If you’re in the area, please stop by. Refreshments served (yes, fresh water, too).

Some interesting water-oriented links (not necessarily indicative of the content of any given speaker’s presentation):

wateraid (1)

What Every 21st Century American Should “Know”

Posted on by under Uncategorized

The journal Democracy is running an article revisiting E.D. Hirsch’s idea of cultural literacy, and looking for readers to help generate an updated list like the one at the end of Hirsch’s 1987 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. 

Here’s the list I came up with, completely off the top of my head (i.e., involving less than a minute of thought, since that’s all the time for thought I currently have).

  1. Wounded Knee 1890
  2. Wounded Knee 1973
  3. The Fort Laramie Treaty (1868)
  4. Russell Means and/or Dennis Banks
  5. AIM (American Indian Movement)
  6. Ayn Rand
  7. Atlas Shrugged
  8. The Fountainhead
  9. libertarianism
  10. BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions)

The list is totally idiosyncratic, and focuses on things that I either happen to be thinking about lately (1-5, 10), or that I’ve thought a lot about at one time or another but that tend not to make it onto lists of this sort (6-9). Arguably, I’ve also cheated a bit because many of my items overlap (e.g., 4-5, 6-8), and one line of the list contains two items (4). Whatever. I still think the list consists of things that every 21st century American ought (in some sense) to “know.” I don’t have time to insert hot links into my list right now, but will do so when I get a chance (perhaps “IOU” should be on the list).

It’s an interesting question what “know” means in this context. I take “know” to mean “recognize as something important and to know something about” (to be contrasted with drawing a complete blank on encounter with the item).* It’s not entirely clear to me what epistemic value there is to knowing a lot of items in this sense; clearly, Hirsch thought that there was enough value there to serve the pedagogical goals of an ideal educational system. I read Hirsch’s book a long time ago and saw him defend its thesis in a lecture sometime in the 90s. I suppose I agree(d) in a general way that ceteris paribus, having broad cultural literacy, even in a weak sense of “knowing,” was better than not having any. But I don’t have strong views on the subject. I just think it’s fun (and easy) to generate a list, so I did.

At any rate, if there’s anything to Hirsch’s argument, I’d argue that my items belong on the list. But I’d be interested in seeing readers’ lists in the combox (obviously feel free to add to Democracy’s list as well).

*For related discussion, see Pierre LeMorvan’s “Knowledge, Ignorance, and True Belief” plus the paper by Goldman and Olsson he cites.

A Traumatic Conversation

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Actual snippet of conversation with a nursing student in the college parking lot:

Khawaja: So have you decided on a specialization in nursing?

Student: Oh, anesthesiology, definitely. Starting salary is $160K. Cannot wait to make that much.

Khawaja: So you’re in it for the money?

Student (earnestly): No! No! I mean, right now my residency is in Trauma. Would I go into Trauma if I was just after money? I go into it because I love it. I love Trauma. Like, half the time I’m covered in blood. It’s awesome.

Khawaja: You like being covered in blood?

Student (puzzled): Well, yeah. Except maternal blood, like during a C-Section. Eww.

She’s a former student of mine. Ethics.

Lust, Shakespeare, Fantasies, and Porn

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I thought PoT readers might be interested in a post written for my “Making Moral Decisions” blog, the site for my Phil 250 class by that name. In my never-ending quest to understand the mysteries of sex, undergraduate ethical attitudes, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I present “Lust, Shakespeare, Fantasies, and Porn.” The topic is the ethical status of lust as reflected in private sexual fantasy. Most of my students found my view “creepy.” I found theirs characteristically bizarre and ill-conceived. Feel free to join the ensuing dialogue of the sexually deaf, but if you do, please comment here rather than on the class site.

Postscript, September 17, 2015: The Phil 250 creepshow continued with discussion of this horror show of an article in Vanity Fair (ht: Kate Herrick). I had my students write up a response to this passage:

They [“girls”] all say they don’t want to be in relationships. “I don’t want one,” says Nick. “I don’t want to have to deal with all that—stuff.”

“You can’t be selfish in a relationship,” Brian says. “It feels good just to do what I want.”

I ask them if it ever feels like they lack a deeper connection with someone.

There’s a small silence. After a moment, John says, “I think at some points it does.”

“But that’s assuming that that’s something that I want, which I don’t,” Nick says, a trifle annoyed. “Does that mean that my life is lacking something? I’m perfectly happy. I have a good time. I go to work—I’m busy. And when I’m not, I go out with my friends.”

“Or you meet someone on Tinder,” offers John.

“Exactly,” Nick says. “Tinder is fast and easy, boom-boom-boom, swipe.”

Where’s the function argument when you need it? At some level, I just feel like slapping these kids, but that wouldn’t be very Socratic of me.

I asked my students about these guys, and an alarming proportion of them applauded Nick (didn’t just agree, but applauded). Incidentally, most of my students (more than two-thirds) are women between 18-21 years old. Here’s the overlapping consensus, put in my words:

  1. Assume ex hypothesi that Tinder hookups of the preceding sort are consenting. If so, both parties assume all the risks of the transaction.
  2. When women who frequent Tinder claim to be hurt (in the psychological sense) by the men on it, one of two things can be said about their situation: either (a) the mutual consent involved completely nullifies any claims about their being harmed (as in ‘volenti non fit injuria’) or (b) if the women really are harmed, then they are fully culpable for being harmed because in consenting to the interaction, they assumed the risks of being harmed. In either case, the guys are off the hook. The men are not culpable because the whole point of a hookup is to inflict the kind of harm that the women are complaining about. To complain about harm in this context is like a boxer’s complaining about being hit by a right jab in the middle of a boxing match. If ignorance is involved, it’s surely culpable ignorance.

I found this an interesting (if horrific) set of views. For one thing, it is, in form, a tacit consent argument. The claim is literally that women using Tinder are tacitly consenting to be harmed by it, and since they are, they forfeit the right to complain.

Second, I find it interesting that the argument involves the same basic presuppositions and structure as the Brennan-Magness line on adjuncts: a quick inference to the culpability of a group on the losing end of a bargain; a further inference from their culpability to their having forfeited the right to complain about ill-treatment; and a reminder that the bargain was, after all, consensual, so that the complaints amount to unseemly whining.

Third, though it’s obviously not a scientific sample (about 60 students), I found the coalitions that formed in my classes somewhat interesting. There were, broadly speaking, two of them:

Majority: the hard-hearted sexually conservative women plus the women in favor of casual sex plus virtually all of the men, endorsing (2) above.

Minority: the sexually conservative women with feminist sympathies plus the feminist liberals in favor of monogamous sex, rejecting (2) above.

Roughly speaking, the hard-hearted line was,

Tinder is something I’d never do; I have moral standards. Those who do it are sluts who deserve the harm that befalls them, if it even counts as harm at all.

The casual sex variation on this theme was:

Well, Tinder is something I’d do, but since I’d never be harmed by it, you’d never find me whining about it like the losers in the article. Hookups aren’t harmful; they’re fun. Everyone knows that Tinder is for hookups, and as long as you’re clear about that, there shouldn’t be a problem.

The men grunted their approval of this latter line. Here’s the most articulate male response I got:

Well, I mean, like…if they’re offering, what do they…and no one is forcing them…is anybody like forcing them? ….like, why are they all like complaining?…I just don’t get it.

The sexually conservative quasi-feminist women led the confused, inchoate counter-charge against their hard-hearted sisters. Mostly their view was that the men were taking unfair advantage of the women, with the liberal monogamists chiming in with an enthusiastic, “Yeah–what she said!”  But this group was outnumbered by the majority group and somewhat overwhelmed by its own sense of righteous indignation.

For the most part, the men sat glowering in the back of the room, wondering when the girls (and the professor!) would shut up and class would end. I mean, what does any of this have to do with anything in the real world? Boom-boom-boom swipe.

Ten (or So) Lessons of 9/11

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I posted this a year ago as “Ten Lessons of 9/11.” I’m reposting it, essentially verbatim, with a new mini-lesson tacked onto (2).

We’re just a few days away from the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from the last decade and a half of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples to illustrate what I’m saying. But I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own.

(1) The inevitable gap between normative theorizing and political practice
A war can be justified in principle as a proportionate response to unprovoked aggression, have a rational object, have clear and publicly stated conditions for victory, and still not be worth fighting because there is no guarantee that the war will be fought on the grounds that were publicly given for fighting it. Even if a war seems perfectly justified on every conceivable matter of principle, remember that wars are fought in the real world, not ex hypothesi in thought-experiments, and that every theoretical simplification you make in thinking about a war will be more than matched by some unforeseeable complication that arises in the fog of war. Those complications may well be significant enough to nullify everything else you managed to think of, and destroy the best theoretical case for “going.”

(2) The perpetual opacity of post bellum considerations
It’s always easier to grasp the immediate and supposedly urgent reasons for going to war than to conceive, in detail, of the post bellum conditions that the war is supposed to bring about–much less to predict those conditions. But in confronting any suggestion that “we need to go to war,” try to imagine and predict how things will go in the end game, starting with the best-case scenarios and moving to the worst. I predict that you’ll find it hard even to imagine how to bring about the best-case scenarios (at least in any fine-grained way). The harder you find this, the better the case for not going.

(2a) One notable but easily-overlooked post bellum consideration: refugees. If you decide to fight a war, expect a refugee crisis, and figure out what you intend to do about it ahead of time.

(3) The crudeness of just war theory
The conceptual apparatus that philosophers bring to bear on the conduct of war consists of a set of extremely crude tools for dealing with the actual conduct of warfare. This being so, we face the following dilemma: either we should go to war in the knowledge that our best tools for dealing with it are so pathetically crude, or we should, if possible, avoid going to war in the knowledge that our best tools for dealing with it are that crude. I think it’s obvious that the latter fork provides the better way out of the dilemma.

Some examples of the conceptual crudity of some commonly-invoked ‘principles’:

  • The so-called non-initiation of force principle merely tells us that for any x, if x is an instance of force, x ought not to be initiated. It doesn’t give us any indication of the permissible range of values for x, and doesn’t tell us what to do if we face an instance of initiated force.
  • The so-called ‘last resort’ principle is, on its own, merely a directive to appeal to war (or ‘force’) as a last resort; it gives no criterion of ‘lastness’ in resorts, and gives no criterion to determine what counts as a ‘use of force’ (often conflating ‘force’ with ‘warfare’ in confusing ways).
  • The so-called principle of proportionality appeals to a quasi-mathematical metaphor that is in practice very hard to make literal or apply in any determinate way.
  • The so-called principle of discrimination tells us to target combatants but not non-combatants; it doesn’t define ‘combatant’ or ‘non-combatant,” much less apply that distinction to hard cases, or tell us what to do when non-combatants are innocent shields of combatants. Nor does it deal with the obvious but little discussed fact that ex post facto reports of ‘civilian’ fatalities in battlefield conditions are extremely imprecise, and more easily fabricated than reported with accuracy.

(4) The inevitable unreliability of allies, both moral and strategic
Either you go to war alone or you go with a coalition. If you go alone, you fight the war isolated from the rest of the world, so that your adversary can count on active or passive allies throughout the world. If you go with a coalition, the problem becomes that you can’t control what your coalition partners do, no matter how insane or immoral they turn out to be. To this day, it’s unclear whether we should have allied as closely as we did with the Soviet Union during World War II; it’s also unclear whether we should have allied so closely with right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War to fight the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their proxies. The same unclarity extends to the alliances we’ve more recently formed to fight Islamist terrorism.

(5) The inadvisability of ‘reconstructing’ another country, whether for your good, theirs, or both
A country that still suffers race riots over its own legacy of slavery and racial discrimination probably can’t be relied on to reconstruct other countries that suffer from their problematic historical legacies—especially when those engaged in reconstruction are hated as imperialist interlopers, don’t know the history of the countries they’re reconstructing, lack the resources to engage in reconstruction, are confined for security reasons to well-fortified barracks, don’t speak the native language, and are politically hostage to a public back home that is totally uninterested in what they’re doing. It tends not to help that the problematic legacies of countries that are candidates for ‘reconstruction’ arise in large part from ill-conceived prior attempts at reconstruction produced by centuries of imperialism.

(6) Truth as the first casualty of war
Truth really is the first casualty of war, in large ways as well as small. Once war begins, wait for the lies and half-truths to proliferate—from all sides, about all things. And don’t assume that you’ll have the luxury of sifting truth from falsehood during wartime, either. The informational imperatives of wartime are simplicity, digestibility, and coherence with one’s own war effort. If reality doesn’t fit that template, reality will be sacrificed to wartime imperatives, and it will be decades (if that) before anything like a more rational or objective equilibrium is restored. (If you’re interested in ‘getting involved’ in the efforts behind a genuinely justified war, ditch the idea of a military draft or compulsory national service and try an anti-rumor campaign: induce people to stop believing rumors, to stop spreading them, and to criticize any rumors that come their way. You’d be amazed how much harm is done by rumors, and how hard it is to counteract them.)

Incidentally, one casualty of war on the side of those who don’t want war is truth about the nature of foreign aggression. Dogmatic pacifists have a problematic tendency to pretend that foreign aggressors either don’t exist, or are not really aggressing because they’re responding to legitimate grievances. That attitude is too obviously false to be usefully employed in any successful anti-war effort. So don’t.

(7) Domestic liberty as the next casualty of war
The next casualty of war is domestic liberty, along with the ever-present temptation to declare ongoing states of ‘emergency’ demanding ‘emergency measures’—in part by expanding the scope of the concept of ‘emergency’ to cover anything and everything, at whim. Try coming up with a serviceable definition of “emergency,” and try to stick with it.

(8) Civil defense as an alternative to war
If you really want to avoid being attacked by foreign aggressors, seriously consider the possibility of coming up with a civil defense policy that (a) blunts the force of any aggression, (b) costs fewer lives than a war would, (c) gets the whole population involved in the “war” effort, but (d) doesn’t sacrifice domestic liberty in the process. A tall but not necessarily impossible order–no more impossible than the proverbial war that leads smoothly to victory. Your civil defense policy will inevitably have to apply at the borders of your country and be integrated with your border/immigration policy. If you confront dogmatists who insist on ‘open borders,’ ask them whether open borders as they conceive of them require a nation to allow foreign aggressors into the country without challenge. Then ask them how respect for rights would be served by such a policy.

(9) Speak up, speak out
If you oppose the idea of going to war on a given occasion, say so–a lot, to everyone, including your political representatives. People may well regard you as a monomaniac, but in this case, that’s a good thing. Better a monomaniac than a cipher.

A proviso: if you’re going to speak out against war, try not to trespass, vandalize, assault people, or blow things up in the process. It makes you look stupid and hypocritical, and it won’t stop the war.

(10) Patriotism
If you regrettably find yourself in a war, don’t bother to show your patriotic spirit by flying a flag or putting some bellicose bumper sticker on your car. Find a support organization for injured or debilitated veterans, and support it—financially or otherwise. Nothing clarifies the nature of warfare more powerfully than time spent with combat veterans. And nothing makes it clearer that even the ‘best’ wars are an enormous waste of lives, limbs, blood, effort, time, materiel, and money. If saying that doesn’t count as ‘patriotism’ where you live, say it anyway. Or find somewhere else to live.

A bonus meta-lesson: It’s perfectly OK to come up with outright excuses for not going to war, as long as the excuses don’t obscure the need to go to war in the rare case when war is justified.

New Blogger: Hendrik Van den Berg

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I’m pleased to announce that Hendrik Van den Berg has agreed to blog for Policy of Truth. Hendrik is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He’s currently a Lecturer in Economics in the Department of Economics at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He also happens to be on the Editorial Board of Reason Papers.

PoT is a little philosophy-heavy, so I thought it’d be nice to bring someone on board from another discipline, but Hendrik’s approach to economics is normative enough in focus to make a nice fit with PoT’s focus on political philosophy. Here’s the biographical blurb from the Mt. Holyoke site:

Professor Van den Berg teaches economic growth and development as well as international economics. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Albany and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to obtaining his doctorate degree, Van den berg served as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Managua, Nicaragua in the position of Commercial Officer, and at the U.S. Trade Center in São Paulo, Brazil, as Market Research and Promotion Officer. Hendrik has published many articles and is currently examining the biases of neoclassical economics and the influence of the neoclassical paradigm on the fields of international economics and economic development.

Here’s his CV.

He also backs Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a $15 minimum wage by the year 2020.

What’s up with this blog, anyway? First we’re worried about fish. Then we’re worried about adjuncts. Derrick’s carrying on about empathy and refugees and what not. We already had a Marxist, and our resident classicist turns out to be a vegetarian opponent of strip clubs. Just when you thought we were going respectable–with Potts–we manage to haul a left-wing economist into our midst. Are things ever normal here? I mean, seriously, what next?

And Another One Gone: Another Adjunct Bites the Dust

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Here’s a contribution to the adjunct debate from the Chronicle of Higher Education by an adjunct who has more or less been forced out of the field for financial and logistical reasons. Read it if you feel so inclined, but there’s a quiz afterwards.

And here’s your quiz–multiple choice, with the option of a short answer in the combox. Which of the following is, morally speaking, the fitting and appropriate response to this essay?

(A) Gratification that one more deluded, incompetent, and unqualified adjunct is leaving the field. (Jason Brennan: “This person took my advice. She got another job that pays better, rather than trying to pursue a job for which she lacks the minimal qualifications. Good for her.”)

(B) Mortification at how badly adjuncts are treated by the field, and head-shaking regret at how bad things are out there for deserving people.

The case for (A) focuses on in the fact that the author holds an M.Ed degree (rather than an MA or a PhD), wants to teach at the college level, but can’t find a full-time job. The argument suggests that all college-level teaching requires that the would-be instructor possess a terminal degree, presumably a Ph.D. or at least an Ed.D. Since the author lacks both, her complaints should summarily be dismissed as whining. She should be happy to have left the field, and we should be glad that she’s gone.

The case for (B) presupposes that the article accurately recounts the author’s experiences as an adjunct, and assumes ex hypothesi that she is a good teacher. The presumption is justified by the fact that people in the author’s predicament do exist; even if the author herself turns out to be misrepresenting her experiences, what she says can stand in for those whose experiences are correctly described by her essay.

Assuming all that, the case for (B) focuses on the fact that she’s ill-paid and ill-treated. It’s not clear that anyone in particular is to blame for her being ill-paid, but it’s lamentable that she is, and (B) laments that. It is clear that particular individuals are to blame for her being ill-treated, which is what motivates the “mortification” to which (B) alludes.

As you’ve probably guessed, I regard (B) as the correct answer. Like this author, I’ve taught at community colleges (Mercer, Middlesex, and Western Monmouth Community Colleges, all in central Jersey). I’ve also worked closely, for more than a decade, with writing instructors who have credentials comparable to hers. I don’t see any legitimate pedagogical or academic reasons against hiring an exceptional (or just plain motivated and competent) person with an M.Ed on a full-time basis to teach intro-level literature courses, or to teach English composition on a full-time basis (if that’s done within the English Department). Granted, the author says she doesn’t like teaching English composition, but I’m a full-timer and there are classes in our curriculum that I don’t like teaching, either (Intro Philosophy, Philosophy of Education). You can’t always get the schedule you want. If English composition is all there was, English composition would have to do.

Faculty positions aside, I also don’t see any good reason against hiring an M.Ed to teach on a full-time basis as a tutor (or some equivalent) in a college or university Writing Center. Once hired, of course, I assume she’d get a full-time salary and benefits package. People tend to forget what a thankless job it is to teach writing at that level–and how crucially necessary. Thankless: It’s like teaching ESL, but to native English speakers. Necessary: it’s like teaching ESL, but to native English speakers. It’s also a job that most faculty regard as beneath them, even as they freak out about their students’ illiteracy and wonder why the idiots can’t write. “Go to the Writing Center!” mutters the harried Associate Professor at the hapless illiterate in his office, longing to get back to that paper he’s writing for Phil Review. Yeah, I get it, superstar. Just pray that someone is there. And while you’re at it, pray that someone put a line in the budget to pay whoever’s there.

The truth is, the average faculty member neither knows where the Writing Center is, nor knows who staffs it–nor cares. The Writing Center is, to paraphrase Mike Rowe, a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. Somehow it seems to come as a surprise to the “real faculty” that those someones ought also to get paid. Granted, maybe the money isn’t there to hire such people where the author lives or has sought work. In that case, our author is back at square 1: she’s got to find other employment. Option (B) acknowledges that possibility–without treating it as something to celebrate.

If you think the right answer is (A), I’d love to hear why.  But if your academic career consists of going from one R1 school to another, and you’ve never taught at a community college, and you’ve never taught students at a lower-tier institution, and you’ve never done sustained work with M.Ed’s in a Writing Center, then I’m not sure why anyone who’s spent the last decade doing that (as I have) should take your advice at face value. But I’m always open to persuasion.

Are ya happy? Are ya satisfied? How long can ya stand the heat?