It’s a little known fact that Plato’s truly last and final dialogue was called “The Coronavirus,” took place on a college campus in north Jersey, featured a protagonist named “Khawaja,” and had a soundtrack by Ozzy:
Student 1, walking down the quad: So Khawaja, are we closing or not?
Khawaja: I don’t know.
Student 2: You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?
Khawaja: I don’t know.
Given the coronavirus outbreak, I’ve decided to cancel the panel discussion on local government previously announced here. I’ve also canceled an event I’d been organizing on political speech in academia, originally planned for April. I’m hoping to re-schedule both events in the fall, assuming that coronavirus worries are resolved by then.
If you want to see the unconcealed essence of American higher education in action, pay attention to one simple contrast: As the coronavirus spreads, universities across the land are either closing or contemplating closure. But “closure” doesn’t quite mean closure; it means “continuity of instruction” for the duration of the public health crisis. So faculty and staff are struggling to convert on-ground classes to an online format, in order to maintain “continuity of instruction.” Not easy, not fun, but necessary. Continue reading
I’ve been teaching Sarah Williams Holtman’s “Kant, Ideal Theory, and the Justice of Exclusionary Zoning” in my applied ethics class. At one point, the discussion turns to norms of privacy. I address a question to the Felician-Franciscan sister observing the class this semester.
Khawaja: Sister, are there distinctive norms of privacy in the convent?
Random student, from out of nowhere: No, there’s no privacy. My sister’s always in my room, and I’m like, girl get out, yo! But she never listens.
On Wednesday nights, as part of an articulated program with my home institution, I teach a class at Middlesex County College, a community college in Edison, New Jersey about an hour away. A couple of weeks ago, a student walked into class a few minutes late, visibly upset and flustered. I asked her what was wrong. She told me that on her way to class, she’d crossed an on-campus street at the crosswalk. By state law, cars approaching a crosswalk are supposed to yield to pedestrians, but one didn’t, and in failing to yield, almost hit her. In anger, my student flung her coffee at the offending car, splashing it. At that point, the occupants of the car got out, physically attacked the student, then got back in their car, and drove off. Continue reading
When Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, there were people out there who were absolutely certain that the explanation was sexism: the American people couldn’t (they insisted) handle the idea of a female president, and voted accordingly. You couldn’t get such people to consider the possibility that maybe Hillary Clinton lost the election because she was a complacent, uninspiring candidate. Continue reading
Student, to me:
Dude, my generation’s acid is like your generation’s acid…on acid!
And you thought “OK, boomer” was a cutting generational comment. The comment came up (in case you were wondering) during a discussion of Martin Seligman’s critique of psychopharmacology in his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (pp. 47-48). I don’t remember the exact route by which we went from anti-depressants to acid, but whatever it was, it had a well-conceived pedagogical purpose. “Two drugs diverged in a wood,” etc. Continue reading
What is the Meaning of Super Tuesday, you ask. I’ll tell you.
Start with the facts. Biden made a comeback. Sanders won California. The other candidates either got pushed down, or dropped out, mostly to support Biden. The one candidate who was clearly defeated was not Sanders but Bloomberg, whose candidacy lacks any clear rationale or support, and looks increasingly petulant and pointless. My only hope is that Bloomberg doesn’t drop out before I finish my series on stop and frisk, because I don’t want to have started it for nothing.* Anyway, what does all this mean? Continue reading
I’m finding the dialogue of the deaf over Bernie and Cuba exasperating. I’m not going to comment on the details–on the “first-order issues,” we might say. What I want to say is that it helps to clarify the underlying issue and make some relevant distinctions.
The basic issue is that Cuba is supposed to be a dictatorship, which is evil, but Bernie is praising it for increasing literacy, which is good. Assume (for the sake of argument) that Cuba is a dictatorship, and dictatorships are evil. The puzzle is whether you should ever praise an evil thing for doing a good thing; it’s a puzzle whether (or how) good things can ever arise from evil things. Put slightly differently, it’s a puzzle whether evil agents should ever get credit for any of the good they do (or seem to do), given the discredit they deserve for the very great evil they do.
Roderick Long recently posted a short essay on Facebook called “Abortion and Rape,” by a pseudonymous author named “Catiline.” Rumor has it that Roderick is Catiline and vice versa, but we don’t traffic in rumors at PoT, so “Catiline” it is.*
The essay is structured as a response to this anti-abortion argument (hereafter, “the Argument”):
Abortion involves killing an innocent person.
It’s always wrong to kill an innocent person.
Therefore abortion is wrong.
According to Catiline, the Argument is valid but unsound: both premises are false. “Abortion and Rape” proceeds by making a case against each premise, followed in the discussion of premise (2) by answers to objections. If the Argument is the most plausible or typical sort of anti-abortion argument out there, and it fails, we can infer that the pro-choice position has in some way been vindicated by its failure. At a bare minimum, it’s won round 1 in a long battle. QED. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 