Referendum Question #5 of Princeton University’s forthcoming Undergraduate Student Government elections. Scroll down (you may have to click “download”) for a PDF with the wording of the referendum. Kudos to these students for the work they’ve done on this. If only I could vote on it, but I’m 33 years too late.
So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response.
I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests. Continue reading
An email to me from a reader of the blog who asked to remain anonymous. As it happens, about a month ago, I wrote to two of the Times’s correspondents, Jeffrey Gettleman and Edward Wong, asking similar questions about their coverage of the West Bank. I have yet to hear back from either of them.
This report from a guest reporter to the NY Times is so different in so many ways from the dozens of other pieces, both news and opinion, that they publish. It reports from places where their own reporters never set foot, describes places and events in a specific and granular manner, directly quotes both Palestinians and settlers’ real words rather than quoting only official propaganda statements, and includes the relevant historical context of the places in the report. Continue reading
The latest issue of Reason Papers is out, vol. 43:2/Fall 2023, featuring a symposium on “Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: Philippa Foot and Ayn Rand.” Participants include Aeon Skoble (Bridgewater State University). Douglas Rasmussen (Emeritus, St. John’s University), Douglas Den Uyl (Liberty Fund), Tristan de Liège, and Timothy Sandefur (Goldwater Institute). The issue also includes the latest installment of Gary Jason’s series on political films, discussing D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
The symposium topic is particularly timely, given the recent publication of three books on closely related themes: Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something (discussing Foot alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely), Claire Mac Cumhail and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals (discussing the same four philosophers), and Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries (discussing Rand alongside Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil). No Foot-Rand comparisons there, however. As it happens, the Foot-Rand parallel hit me during my first week of graduate school about three decades ago; I wrote my first paper in grad school on Foot and Rand on morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. Mercifully, the paper has long since been lost. I’m glad that competent philosophers are now pursuing the topic.
Hats off to editor Shawn Klein (Arizona State) for his hard work on the issue.
I’d meant to post this earlier, but it’s still not too late: my friend Monica Vilhauer is running a course on “Living Authentically,” focused on the work of Simone de Beauvoir via Skye Cleary’s new book on that subject, How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment. Starts a week from tomorrow, Sunday, August 6, 10 am-12 noon, Pacific Standard Time.
I highly recommend every part of this package: Monica, Skye, and Simone. I know one of these ladies personally, one by social osmosis, and one by reputation: I’ve done a workshop on alienation with Monica through her organization Curious Soul Philosophy (which I very much enjoyed); I feel sure that I’ve met Skye somewhere in New York-area philosophy circles, but can’t remember where; and well, Simone de Beauvoir is Simone de Beauvoir. You’re guaranteed to learn something valuable from this trio–about yourself, and about the world you inhabit.
Alienation is a problem easier dismissed than escaped or avoided: there are more incentives for wishing it away than dealing with it. But it’s there. And if it is, it’s a question where that leaves you as far as living authentically is concerned. We each have to answer that question for ourselves–however many of us that amounts to. This workshop will help.
(The following brings together themes from maybe half a dozen or more posts from the past two years or so, many associated with MTSP Zoom discussions of Thomas Scanlon’s *What We Owe to Each Other* and George Sher’s *Desert*. I do not claim consistency with prior posts. I hope this post constitutes progress in a kind of on-again off-again philosophical project. Interspersed Roman numerals indicate footnotes, text of which are below the main text.)
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I think this: it being appropriate for you to resent me for not telling you about the party constitutes my wronging you by not telling you about the party. (i, ii) Wrongings are different from moral wrongs. All wrongings are moral wrongs, but not all moral wrongs are wrongings. (iii) (Moral wrongs, on my telling, are actions that make observer-role indignation appropriate – and the main action that is like this is people wronging other people. Indignation is third-personal agent-directed anger, unlike resentment, which is second-personal agent-directed anger. (iv) )
So an action being a wronging (and likewise an action being morally wrong) is like a joke being funny or a person being admirable. For an item to have such a property is for it to have the (second-order) property of having some (first-order, probably descriptive) property or other that makes it appropriate to have some particular type of response in emotional attitude.
Coming from this framework, I want to ask and answer (at least schematically) two questions. First: what are the most general features of an action that make resentment appropriate (thereby constituting an action being a wronging)? Second: on this understanding of wrongings, why might we be required to refrain from wronging persons?
Encountered this quotation on Facebook today, in a post intended to dismiss fears of job loss through technology:
It is much easier to imagine someone losing their job to a new technology than it is to imagine many people gaining jobs that haven’t been invented yet.
Yes, it’s definitely easier to imagine something that’s happened than something that hasn’t. But what does that prove? Does it prove that fears about job loss are unfounded? Or does it prove the reverse, that those who deride such fears lack common sense? Continue reading
The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Pacific Symposium in conjunction with the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco, 5-8 April 2023. Here’s the schedule info:
Molinari Society symposium, part 1:
Author Meets Critics: Gary Chartier, Understanding Friendship: On the Moral, Political, and Spiritual Meaning of LoveG4D. Thursday, 6 April 2023, 6:00-8:00pm, Westin St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell St., San Francisco CA 94102, Elizabethan C (2nd floor).
chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)author:
Gary Chartier (La Sierra University)critics:
Neera Badhwar (University of Oklahoma and George Mason University)
Michael Pakaluk [in absentia] (The Catholic University of America)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)Molinari Society symposium, part 2:
Author Meets Critics: James Stacey Taylor, Markets with Limits: How the Commodification of Academia Derails DebateG7E. Friday, 7 April 2023, 7:00-9:00pm, Westin St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell St., San Francisco CA 94102, Olympic (2nd floor).
chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)author:
James Stacey Taylor (The College of New Jersey)critics:
Amy White (Ohio University)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)[Glen Whitman (CSU Northridge), previously announced as an additional commentator, had to withdraw.]
Is it legitimate to criticize someone’s physical appearance? I don’t mean: is it legitimate to have or even express personal preferences about someone’s physical appearance. I mean: is it legitimate to issue an objective verdict on someone for looking the way they do, e.g., criticizing the very structure of a person’s face for giving them the facial appearance they have? Continue reading
I spent the weekend at the American Philosophical Association’s (APA) Central Division meeting in Denver, my first APA, believe it or not, since 2011. It was a good time, certainly a welcome relief from my day job in health care revenue cycle management.
The APA is always punctuated, if that’s the right word, by a “Presidential Address,” a lecture given by the distinguished philosopher who is president of that particular division. This meeting’s presidential address was given by Connie Rosati of the University of Texas at Austin, an ethicist whose work I only know in a superficial way. Rosati gave an interesting talk on what she called “The Lincoln Virtues,” meaning a set of virtues associated with, or nicely exemplified by, Abraham Lincoln. The virtues in question involve a certain kind of magnanimity, generosity, and humility–not quite Christian and not quite pagan, but maybe a synthesis of the two or a mean between them. Think of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and you’ll get the basic idea: “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” asserted by a president approaching imminent victory in a bitter civil war. (The address was given about a month before the Union’s victory in the US Civil War.) Continue reading
Policy of Truth 