Hursthouse on the Repentant Racist: Error, Evil, and Moral Luck

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Some of you may have seen this material before, but I don’t think I’ve ever posted it at PoT, so I’m exhuming it in the interest of getting some comments on it, as I’d like to work on the paper a bit this summer, and am hoping to trundle it about at conferences this fall. (Apologies if I’m breaking blind with that claim, but this is the age of the Internet.) I’m particularly interested in getting comments and/or bibliographical suggestions on some of the empirical issues implicitly raised by the paper.

David Potts recently cited Martin Seligman’s claims in Authentic Happiness to the effect that childhood experiences count for little as regards adult experience. I haven’t fully digested Seligman’s claims (and references), but I don’t think that he had childhood upbringing in mind when he wrote Authentic Happiness. At any rate, I’m interested in empirical answers to questions like the following:

  1. What are the longitudinal effects of a racist upbringing? How powerful are they? How amenable to control or reversal? And in what form? Naturally, the longitudinal effects of racist upbringing are a function of the effects of upbringing, so I’m interested in the more general phenomenon, as well.
  2. What is the role of trauma in the production of racial identity in racists? Does trauma explain the production of racial identity? If so, what is the mechanism?
  3. What does racism (or “racism”) look like in small children? I’ve put “racism” in scare quotes because arguably children with racist upbringings may lack the cognitive sophistication to do anything but act as though they believed in the truth of racism. But behavioral racism without cognitive understanding does not strike me as genuine racism. A child who imitates racists is not herself a racist (at least not necessarily).

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The Untarget Was Collateralized (Updated)

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From George Orwell’s 1984, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak”:

The B vocabulary. The vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases, they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language. …

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. (pp. 249, 250).

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Feuer Frei! Thoughts on Guns and Policing (Updated)

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Beneath the fold you’ll find a picture of me at Essex County College’s Public Safety Academy  in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, using the Firearms Training Simulator (FATS) there. (Is that click bait or what?)

Tasks accomplished tonight at the Academy:

  • I watched my friend and colleague Officer Bob Kish of the Bloomfield Police Department do his firearms certification, which he blew away, with a 93% rating (i.e., 56 out of 60 rounds he was required to fire under tightly timed conditions hit a randomly-appearing target at a distance of 1-25 yards; 80% is a passing score).
  • I shot a bunch of bad guys in the FATS. They died.
  • I learned that I am not a bad shot for a middle aged philosophy professor with a squint. I also learned that I am not a good shot for a police officer who has to operate in non-simulated circumstances.
  • I thought about the philosophical implications of it all (see below).
  • I mailed some letters.

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Felician Conference Postscripts (2): James DiGiovanna on Situationism and Identity

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My erstwhile John Jay colleague James DiGiovanna gave a paper at the Felician Conference called “Situationism and No Identity Whatsoever.” I didn’t attend that particular presentation, so I won’t be blogging it beyond this note, but James has opened it up to comments on his Academia site, so if you’re interested, click the preceding link, take a look, and comment away.

Felician Conference Postscripts (1): Blake Wilson on Private Property

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This is the first in a series of posts on the Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs. For the introduction to the series, read this.

The first of the sessions I attended (and chaired) was one on (private) property rights, featuring two papers–one an essentially Hegelian justification of private property rights by Blake Wilson (SUNY Binghamton), the other a Lacanian account of a dilemma about private property by Chris Ketcham (University of Houston, Downtown). I’m going to discuss Blake’s paper rather than Chris’s, in part because Chris’s paper was aporetic rather than thesis-driven, and also because the aporia in Chris’s paper arises from the idiosyncrasies of Lacan’s conception of our obligations to others, a topic I’m not qualified to discuss, having read very little Lacan.

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Felician Institute Conference: Postscripts

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So the Felician Institute’s Tenth Annual Conference took place this past Saturday. PoT bloggers Michael Young and David Potts were in attendance, as I mentioned they would be; David gave a revised version of a post he did at PoT, and Michael chaired a session on hypocrisy and standing to blame. A great time was had by all.

Over the next few weeks, while I have the conference freshly in mind, I want to write a few very brief posts summarizing and commenting on some of the presentations I attended. My track record in living up to such resolutions is, of course, a pathetic farce, if only because I often think of them at the most inopportune times, and also because I’ve characteristically been (self)-defeated by the lethal combination of time constraints and the desire to be “thorough.” The obvious remedy occurs to me: ignore time constraints and be slipshod. (By the way, ignore the fact that I keep promising to go on blogcation and never do, and that I have a bunch of outstanding comments to respond to, but haven’t responded to them.)

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Political Philosophy Amidst the Ruins

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Well, spring term is winding down at Felician U., so I guess I’m (riot)-gearing up for summer term at Al Quds U. Let’s hear it for the beneficence of the Israeli “Civil Administration” (which is what the military occupation calls itself), its undying respect for “purity of arms,” and the pinpoint accuracy of its “civilian” strikes (against noncombatant civilian targets). Learning Objective 1: try not to get tear gassed, shot, or arrested.

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Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference

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Just a last minute reminder, for those in the area, of the Felician Institute’s Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs, to take place this Saturday, April 23 (9 am – 6 pm) at our Rutherford, New Jersey campus (223/227 Montross Ave, Rutherford NJ 07070). PoT bloggers David Potts and Michael Young will be there; plenary session by J.L.A. Garcia (Boston College); and don’t forget the 4 pm session on the ethics, economics, and politics of adjuncting. Here’s the nearly finalized program. Here’s a link to the Institute’s home page.

I’ll be scarce at PoT until after the conference. Seriously.

Public Finance According to the Atlas Society

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Am I the only person who finds it puzzling that people who insist that they believe in the legitimacy of government, but in five decades have not coherently been able to explain how they intend to fund it, insist on trashing the only mechanism that exists for funding it–while bitterly criticizing people who demand the unearned?

The title of the article in the second link is, “On Tax Day, What if Atlas Shrugged?” Here’s my question: On Tax Day, what if an article about taxation by The Atlas Society made minimal sense? How about any day (or any topic), come to that? Frankly, I’m not sure which event is more likely to take place.

Incidentally, I’d like to thank my accountant Vikrant K. Kapila, CPA for making Tax Day more bearable than it would be if I actually had to do my own taxes.