A fine story by Josh Eidelson at Bloomberg makes it clear what the McDonald's case before the NLRB is about. Or what it WAS about, because it has now been settled. The issue is a common one in our time. The franchising business model is ubiquitous, and the franchising company often has a lot of leverage over the franchisees. This, in turn, means that the employees of the franchisees can reasonably suspect, when their boss (the franchisee owner) is breaking the law to their disadvantage, that his de facto boss (the franchisor) is telling him to do so, or is encouraging it. Also, there is the eternal temptation to reach for the deepest pockets around, and those will generally be franchisor pockets. The NLRB has gone back and forth in recent years about when if ever a franchisor can be considered a "joint employer" of the workers hired by the franchisee. It is a question of enormous importance in dollars and cents terms, and this settlement might fairly be criti...
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The dialogue Philebus is not one of the best known or oft interpreted in the Platonic canon. Maybe that's for the best. It would surely cause some confusion for undergraduates, not least because the titular character, "Philebus," has very little to say in it. The discussion is chiefy between Socrates and a student of the sophists named Protarchus. So why isn't it called the Protarchus ? I accept my ignorance. The central issue, at least in terms of narrative structure, is the value of a hedonistic life versus that of a life spent in pursuit of wisdom. Spoiler alert: the conclusion is that the ideal life includes components of both, but that the life spent in pursuit of wisdom at the expense of pleasure gets "second prize." In the course of this, there are lengthy digressions, as it seems, about cosmology and such. As is often the case with Plato's dialogues, the digressions contain the real philosophical meat. What is perhaps best remembered a...
Steven Pinker has attracted a fair amount of attention with a new book, Enlightenment Now, in which he argues that technology is good because it has made so many lives better, science is good because it allows for technology, science came to us from the Enlightenment, and thus the Enlightenment was good and requires revival. It seems like a jejune thesis. Whether it makes for a worthwhile book I wil have to leave up to those who actually read the book to judge. What interests me is that the book seems to have created a number of quite spirited responses. That is generally a good thing. Without Edmund Burke, the best known writings of Paine and Wollstonecraft would never have come about. If you can't give Burke a 'hurrah' for anything else you can spare one for that. Pinker seems to have earned THAT sort of hurrah at the least. As to those reviews, I'll quote just one. John Gray writing in the New Statesman says that the book is "a rationalist sermon deli...
"The brute fact about the universe is that it is not fully expressible, it is not fully exhaustible, it is not at rest, it is in motion; this is the basic datum, and this is what we discover when we discover that the self is something of which we are aware only in effort. Effort is action, action is movement, movement is unfinishable -- perpetual movement. That is the fundamental romantic image, which I am trying to convey, as best I can, in words -- which ex hypothesi cannot convey it." So says Isaiah Berlin, in The Roots of Romanticism, especially with reference to Fichte, a portrait of whom I've included here.
Our President fancies himself the great dealmaker. In his head, he's gotten into a room with "little rocket man," whose "button" is so much smaller than his own, and talked him into nuclear disarmament and perhaps with a five year plan for dissolving the North as a country and recognizing the capital city of a unified peninsula as Seoul. I have zero expectations for the forthcoming meeting. In fact, I'm hoping for zero because there is a considerable possibility of a negative outcome. The great deal-maker, after all, has led his companies into repeated bankruptcies. That is the basis of the "business success" of which he brags -- using "the system" -- which means a system of laws designed to relieve debtors. But where is the bankruptcy court judge who is going to bail him out if he makes a mess of this?
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Upper Skagit Indian Tribe v. Lundgren, concerning the limits of tribal immunity. Two years ago, during the period when Republicans were keeping the ninth seat on the Court vacant, the Justices deadlocked 4-to-4 on an analogous matter, leaving in place a 5th circuit decision favorable to tribal sovereignty in what seemed to some a borderline case. The opinion was per curiam, and all that issued was a brief announcement, "the judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court." At any rate, the particular borderline at issue this week is a different one. It involves the in rem jurisdiction of state courts and whether that sort of jurisdiction works to limit the immunity of tribes. For those who don't know the lawyer's Latin, in rem means "about the thing." The "thing" in question is often though not always a parcel of land. In this case, the Lundgren family and the tribe are e...
Thanks to friend Henry for forwarding me a review of Cheryl Misak's recent book on pragmatism in England. I may never obtain the book, but I'll summarize here what the review says it says, and end with a quotation (from the book via review). The book recounts how, in 1908-09, Bertrand Russell, at Cambridge, developing his own logical atomistic views, took pragmatism to be an American re-working of a familiar foe, the coherence theory of truth distinctive to the Anglo-Hegelians. Russell was quite hostile to the coherence theory, and his view of this new variant of it from across the Atlantic was no more sunny. But, beginning with 1914, Russell was adopting pragmatic theses himself. By 1921 he had come around to the quite American understanding of belief itself as a "disposition to act." It was Ramsey, though, not Russell, who made the Cambridge warming to pragmatic winds more official or explicit. For Ramsey, Peirce was THE pragmatist, and a central influence...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role in the creation of romanticism has been exaggerated in some circles, says Isaiah Berlin. In making this case, he says that there isn't as sharp a break between the canonical Enlightenment figures on the one hand and Rousseau on the other as is sometimes thought, at least if we look to actual content. "If we consider what it is that Rousseau actually said, as opposed to the manner in which he said it -- and the manner and the life are what are important -- we find that it is the purest milk of the rationalist world....Rousseau's actual doctrine is not all that different from that of the Encyclopaedists. He disliked them personally, because temperamentally he was a kind of dervish from the desert. He was paranoiac, savage, and gloomy in some respects ... he did not have much in common with the people at Holbach's rather irreverent table or at the elegant receptions with Voltaire held at Ferney. But this was to a certain degree a per...
Now ... why, in the face of such arguments as that I quoted yesterday, am I an incompatibilist? Here's why: the argument simply misses the point. What William James, and Isaiah Berlin, and more recently Robert Kane (the author of the volume pictured above) have been saying is that moral judgments with regard to action X (whatever it is) will come to seem meaningless unless we presume that there was a genuine possibility that X would not occur. Take that woman in the restaurant. We see her look at the menu, we see her order a meal, and presume as empiricists that she has just made a choice. Is this a choice to which moral judgments apply? The naive but appealing answer is, "yes," or at least, "it might be." If you believe in animal rights you will think her decision morally better if she ordered tofu than if she ordered pork. Aside from that, consider the possibility that she has a medical condition (we need not specify/stipulate further) and she has ju...
Most readers will surely know by now that I am what is known as an "incompatibilist." I believe that determinism as to human behavior is incompatible with moral judgment. Today, though, I would like to simply quote a gentleman who recently made the case for compatibilism in the comment section of another blog. It is a very well put statement of the point, and I'll quote it today without further comment or contention. -------------------------- A woman goes into a restaurant, sits down, peruses the menu for a minute, and then calls the waiter over to give him her order. We cannot see what is going on in her head. But, assuming she has a normal brain, we expect it to be similar to what happens when we do the same thing, read a menu, evaluate our options, and place an order. We call this empirical event “choosing”. Options are presented, evaluated by some comparative criteria, and a choice is output. So, we know what happened (a choice was made) and we know ...