We’re just a few days away from the fifteenth 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. Continue reading →
[The following is loosely inspired by a compare-and-contrast re-reading of Scanlon’s material on coercion in his Moral Dimensions (p. 74, 78, 108-111) and Michael Huemer’s initial discussion of coercion – in his stipulative sense that simply means exercising or threatening to exercise physical violence or control over another person – in his The Problem of PoliticalAuthority (pp. 9-10).]
1. One might coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in a ways that are never permissible. One might also coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in ways that are permissible if the patient consents – but they have not consented (and in the right circumstances like having full information and with the conditions of consent or non-consent not themselves being coercive). Both sorts of coercion presuppose antecedent moral requirements, moral requirements not to do specific things that negatively impact the ability of others to exercise their agency. So the requirement not to coerce would seem to be a generalization over particular ways of interfering with the agency of others that are of these two types (absolutely forbidden, forbidden unless the patient consents).
I spent the afternoon yesterday trawling JSTOR and EBSCO for articles. There is–and you’ll have to trust me on this–nothing more enjoyable than an afternoon spent in the library, skimming through scholarship that was being published when you were in grade school.
I couldn’t help chuckling over the sheer curmudgeonliness of this item, a critique of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class:
Dale Edward Williams, “Were ‘Hunger’ Rioters Really Hungry? Some Demographic Evidence,” Past and Present, vol. 71 (May 1976), 70-75.
Have scare quotes ever been so dismissive? The thesis, apparently, is “not really.” At any rate, they could have been hungrier.
It is fitting or appropriate to admire the admirable (and similarly, it is fitting to value the valuable). According the the fitting attitudes account (FA) of an action or person being admirable, admirability is nothing more than fittingness to be admired. And according to the reasons account of an attitude being fitting (RFA), an attitude being fitting is nothing more than the balance of reasons (of the right sort) favoring having the attitude toward the object. This gives rise the the “wrong kind of reason” problem: we need to say which reasons are the right reasons for admiring to make for admirability because a person or action is not rendered admirable by, say, my threatening her (or God threatening everyone) should she (or any given person) fail to admire, say, children torturing cats. Nor are these sorts of reasons relevant to it being admirable to help someone in need at some significant expense to oneself (e.g.).
(Note the change in the time of the event to 6:30 pm.)
I’m the co-chair, with Dr. Edward Ogle, of Felician University’s Committee on Leadership and Social Justice (CLSJ). Our theme this year is “Race and Criminal Justice in America,” and I’m pleased to be able to announce our kick-off event: a presentation by Professor Mark Denbeaux, of Seton Hall University Law School, on his recent co-authored study of racial profiling in Bloomfield, New Jersey (“Racial Profiling Report: Bloomfield Police and Bloomfield Municipal Court“).
The event will take place at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, September 27, 2016in the Education Commons Building at Felician University’s Rutherford, New Jersey campus (223 Montross Ave, Rutherford NJ, 07070). I will serve as discussant; all are invited and welcome. (Note: Felician University’s sponsoring the event does not necessarily imply agreement with the contents of the Seton Hall Report, or with Professor Denbeaux’s views).
The CLSJ had originally conceived of the event as a debate between Professor Denbeaux and a representative from Bloomfield Municipal Government, but unfortunately, despite a summer’s worth of invitations to Bloomfield (several invitations each to the mayor’s office, to the Police Department, and to Councilwoman Wartyna Davis), Bloomfield has not only declined our invitation but declined to acknowledge it altogether. (If any relevant party in Bloomfield government sees this, and thinks that I’ve been too hasty in making the preceding claim, feel free to contact me at khawajai at felician dot edu. I’m still open to participation by a representative of Bloomfield Township, but the date and time of the event should now be considered fixed.)
Here’s a video based on Denbeaux’s report, from Vice News.
And here’s another video, an out-take from the first one, that opens in a new window. Here’s some press coverage of the report, from NJ.com. Some more, more, more, more, and yet more. (And one more, for good measure.) I neither fully agree nor disagree with Denbeaux’s report, and hope to blog it–as well as Bloomfield’s refusal to acknowledge my invitation–in the near future.
In chapters 7 and 8, Haidt describes in detail his account of our innate “moral foundations”—a relatively small set of fundamental psychological mechanisms that underlie and produce our moral intuitions. In previous chapters, he has argued that moral judgment is driven primarily by moral intuition—that the intuitive dog wags the rational tail—and that our moral intuitions cover more areas of life than just harm and fairness. It is now time to get specific. Just what are these fundamental, innate sources of moral intuition, and how can we show that we really have them?
1.1(3) (part 1, para. 1, line 3 of Derek Bowman’s “The Circumstances of Justice”
We owe (or are due) things from each other and there are general principles (of justice) that specify just what it is that we owe to each other. That the verb here is ‘specify’ suggests a normative, explanatory role: the general principles explain why each of us owes it to each other to refrain from PHI-ing, but not to refrain from PSI-ing (or perhaps why each of us owes it to each other to refrain from PHI-ing in certain circumstances but not others). However, one of several to-me controversial things that Rawls’ characterization of justice suggests is that these general principles do not do this work, but rather some slightly different work – the work of justifying the adoption (perhaps the public adoption) of a prescriptive norm (or a nested set of prescriptive norms with a certain structure). That might go something like this: each of us is to refrain from PHI-ing with respect to each other person (and all of us is to stand ready to enforce the prescription to refrain from PHI-ing by demanding that potential rule-breakers don’t break the rule and by punishing actual rule-breakers). On this second way in which the general principles might work, they do something like specify conclusive reasons to construct a particular social practice. Continue reading →
