Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In a footnote on p. 197 Sen writes, "A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others runs like this: Why confine oneself in the [original] position  of other human beings only: why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing an idea of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on some notions of biological symmetry. Revolutions do take place demanding equitable treatment of human beings in a manner they do not demanding equality for animals. 'If I were in his shoes' is relevant to a moral argument in a manner that 'if I were in its paws' is not. Our ethical system may have had, as is sometimes claimed, a biological origin, but what is involved here is the use of these systems and not a manufacture of it on some kind of a biological logic. The jest half of the objection...

Okay, that headline doesn't sound like it describes one of the great scandals of our age. This is a little point, but annoying.  In a recent tweet the ACLU quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the subject of abortion and abortion rights.  Clearly there is a Big Picture afoot here. The long "pro-life" campaign to get Roe v. Wade overturned is nearing its (successful) end.  There is a lot that might be said about that, of course. I am not an admirer of the idea of a "privacy right" because I am not inclined to look for the "emanations and penumbra" of legal documents. And in fact Ginsburg, if she had had her druthers, wouldn't have founded a woman's right to an abortion on a broad right to "privacy" either. If I recall correctly, she would have invoked the equal protection clause. But once the case came down, with Harry Blackmun's opinion based largely on Griswold and the right to privacy, there was nothing to be done except to work wit...

Mississippi, a state where pro-death-penalty sentiment was and is very strong, executed six people in 2012.  It has not executed anyone in the years since, largely because pharmaceutical companies have made it difficult for states to get their hands on the drugs used for the lethal injections.  But on Thursday, Oct. 21, the Mississippi Supreme Court announced that David Neal Cox -- the fellow portrayed above -- will be executed on Nov. 21 for the murder of his wife Kim, in May 2010.  David Neal Cox shot Kim twice in May 2010, then sexually assaulted his stepdaughter (the murder victim’s daughter) while Kim was dying. Cox has pleaded guilty. Not only to the murder but to the rape as well -- which means he has given the state the necessary "aggravating" factor allowing for his execution.  What about the issue of pharmaceutical gridlock?  The Mississippi Corrections Commissioner, Burl Cain, says the state has the drugs it will need next month.  But he has also...

  I have been nibbling at the edge of Amartya Sen's book, COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE in recent posts.  Today I'd like to dive into the heart of it. But to do that, I have to start with Kenneth Arrow. Arrow is the author of the "impossibility theorem," the logical argument that there is no optimal way to make collective choices -- no voting system, in particular, that will not be open to devastating objections.  Arrow's argument begins with premises about what is an acceptable, or unobjectionable. We want a system in which each of the five will be true: 1) The system can handle any level of pluralism in its inputs (universal domain). 2) The system does not produce paradoxical circles (in which a beats b, b beats c, and c beats a). This demand is known as ordering.  3) If all individuals in the society prefer x to y, then so does "society." The "weak Pareto principle." 4) The independence of irrelevant alternatives. The choice between x...

  DOL's ESOP Valuation Case Against Engineering Firm Falls Flat | PLANSPONSOR I had planned to say something about this link, but I'm feeling lazy this morning so I'll just drop it here. 

 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year went to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan. Apparently, they independently discovered a new more efficient way of linking molecules to each other, creating new synthetic chemicals.  The new way is called "asymmetric organocatalysis." It means -- well, I'm not very sure what it means. A member of the chemistry Nobel committee explains why it has mattered. "This new toolbox is used widely today, for example in drug discovery, and in fine chemicals production and is already benefitting humankind greatly."  Drug discovery. Hmmm. Is this the Nobel Committee's indirect way of congratulating the researchers toiling in the field of Covid vaccine and treatment? Another question comes to mind, concerning List. News reports say that he is "professor at and director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research." What a name? Max Planck was a subatomic physicist, wasn't he? Did he do any "coal research"...

  The headline says the 45th President has written to the Pulitzer Prize committee to rescind the Pulitzer Prizes given to reporters who filed stories on Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in 2016.  Yuk yuk yuk.  Pulitzer committee, "Tell ya what Mr. 45. We'll do a forensic audit of the course of events leading to those awards. We will carefully study whether the reports receiving the award were at any stage written on bamboo paper. When we're ready, we'll put out a report that will say that the awards were slightly MORE deserved than we had originally thought.  "You'll be able to declare that a victory for yourself because, after all, that is how you roll." 

 In showing the complicated nature of the distinction between fact and value, Amartya Sen introduces the proposition, " a government should not increase the money supply more rapidly than the increase in national production. " That statement has a "should" in it so a simple application of Hume's guillotine suggests that this is a value statement. Thus it cannot be demonstrated to be so by facts.  Yet of course people advocating it will have facts to discuss, as will those who oppose it.  I'll expand upon Sen's point here a bit.  I believe that increasing the money supply beyond productivity in the underlying economy produces inflation and I hold inflation to be a bad thing because I believe the smooth functioning of a price system is a good thing. That good thing has various good consequences for buyers and sellers alike, and for their dependents.  In principle IF you could persuade me that the smooth functioning of a price system is NOT a good thing, th...

 One venerable opinion in aesthetics is that "all art aspires to the condition of music."  Those words are Walter Pater's. The idea has many other expressions from many other adherents though. An aphorism similar in intent that that of a venerable put down of music critics, "It is like dancing about architecture." (Why might one not create a ballet about architecture? "Blueprint for the House by Swan Lake" perhaps?)  Part of the idea here is that music is a collapse of matter and form. The matter is the sound wave passing from instrument toward a human ear. The form is -- the wave of sound passing from instrument to human ear. With every other art there is a duality. The matter of painting is the paint and the canvas. The form is the image imposed upon the canvas. As for writing, the matter/form distinction has become a hopeless mess there since glowing screens have replaced paper and ink.  An idea related to Pater's is that music should not seek...

  There is reason to hope that the "stop the steal" stuff is on the retreat at last, away from the center toward the margin of political discourse in the United States.  In January, of course, the Republicans lost two critical seats in the U.S. Senate because of an impossibly mixed message to their base, "Your vote doesn't really matter. It will be changed by nasty Dominion voting machines and by the machinations of child-abusing traitors. Yet you ought to get out and vote!" The first part of that overwhelmed the second, the Democrats did get out their vote, and they won both Senate seats from Georgia. The mixed message wasn't quite as absurd and self-defeating as it seems, though. We have had reason to worry over the intervening months that the message is "elections don't matter in general, they are always a charade, so a military coup wouldn't be such a bad thing -- it would be just a little more honest." And THAT message is a truly vicio...

 Clint Eastwood can't really make a bad movie. He is always fascinating to watch, and disappears into every character he plays. That said, though, CRY MACHO is not one of his better movies.  "Macho," by the way, is the name of a rooster. Eastwood's character is supposed to save a boy in Mexico and bring him to the US border, where his father will take custody and bring him across it. The boy is a street kid neglected, or worse, by his mother, who supports himself by cock-fighting, so "Macho" is his meal ticket.   Of course the bird and the name are played for heavy-handed symbolism throughout the movie. The boy's father, who seems to be the Eastwood character's last friend in the world, turns out not to be who he seems to be exactly.  I won't tell you any more. Watch this movie if you are a big Eastwood fan -- you inevitably will anyway. If you aren't you can give it a pass. 

  John Hinckley, the man who sought to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, has been granted unconditional release from his psychiatric confinement by a federal judge.  If all goes as expected, Hinckley will be leaving where he chooses, coming and going as he pleases, as of June 2022, forty years after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury in Washington D.C.  Hinckley was born in May 1955 to a wealthy family in the oil business. He was not yet 26, then, when he shot and severely injured President Reagan and three other people -- a police officer, a secret service agent, and Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady. Hinckley was infatuated with the actress Jodie Foster, best known at the time for the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which it is precisely infatuation with Jodie Foster’s character (as above) that causes the character played by Robert De Niro to attempt a political assassination.     Hinckley wrote Foster a letter,...