Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A couple years ago someone asked on QUORA whether W.D. Ross believe in an "absolute moral principle."  I recently looked up that old question and my response to it, because I suspected it might shed some light on the matter of effective altruism I have discussed here of late. I responded to the question about Ross as follows: ---------------------------------- I don’t believe that Ross would want you to think of any moral principle as absolute. His point was, to put it simply, that there are a plurality of moral principles and that they must be balanced against one another. If you want to think of the need to balance as itself an “absolute,” at least for Ross, you can. But that is more a matter of playing with words than of philosophizing. And yes, there is a difference. Ross begins with what he calls “prima facie duties.” There are five of these: the duty to keep promises, the duty to repair such harms as we may have done, a duty to return services whence we have benefitted,

Old-fashioned union activism is loosed upon us again.  The UAW. Wow.  The UAW has won an organizational vote at a VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2024/04/19/tennessee-workers-vote-to-join-uaw-union/73382830007/   Once upon a time, when my own age figured in the single digits, there were the "Big Three" auto makers in Detroit Michigan and they dominated the auto industry not just in the US but in the world. So much so that union-management relations came to seem a domestic US centric affair.  During the Kennedy administration, the Attorney General's pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters drew some heat from Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Why? Well, first because Goldwater was entertaining thoughts of a run for President himself. But that wasn't the reason he gave, "I need the issue, people."  No, Goldwater said that the Kennedys were going after the wrong union and the wrong union leader. The real crooks were at

  Let us return to as subject broached last week, the US Supreme Court's decision in MACQUARIE INFRASTRUCTURE v. MOAB PARTNERS.  As I noted, the case involves the private (tort) use of an SEC rule, 10b-5, and it says that the omission of material facts by the issuer of securities will NOT present a cause of action in tort by a buyer of the securities unless the omission is such as to render statements that actually WERE made by the company misleading.   Today I'd like to say something about the specific underlying issue. Some of Macquarrie's most valuable assets are terminals for the storage of fuel oil. Its terminals are designed to accommodate high-sulfur fuel oil.  What Macquarrie neglected to say, setting up Moab's ire and this lawsuit, is that under the influence of a United Nations rule relating to climate change, high sulfur fuels are getting phased out around the world. That's a good thing.  But it is a very bad thing for the value of the Macquarrie assets t

In the final book of the famous series of political novels that began with ADVISE AND CONSENT, we get a (relatively) happy ending called THE PROMISE OF JOY, in which Drury's idealized hero, Orrin Knox, finally becomes President. His inaugural speech is recorded in some detail. This one paragraph -- which does not really arise out of anything else in the plot, jumps out at me. "Agriculture will continue to receive the same close attention from my administration that it has received from others. The price gap between producer and consumer is still too low for the producer, too high for the consumer, too close to profiteering for the middleman. We will seek ways to close that gap."   What on earth does that mean? As I say, it is from Drury's hero. We should not lightly write it off as meaningless political blather.  The gap between producer and consumer? Presumably this refers to the gap between what the farmer gets selling wheat and what the consumers put out buying the

  Macquarie Infrastructure v. Moab Partners -- a unanimous decision came down from our Supreme Court last week.  The opinion, written by Justice Sotomayor, says in essence that securities fraud, regarded as an actionable private tort, is a tort of malfeasance, not of nonfeasance.   Let us abstract from the particular facts a bit. Consider any case in which a plaintiff believes that he was sold stock by the issuing corporation at an unrealistically high price. He has sued. Asked why he bought it at such a price, the plaintiff might say, "They didn't tell me about X, a fact known to them and one that soon thereafter eliminated the value of the securities at issue." This decision tells that plaintiff: that isn't enough.  You're going to have to plead, and in due course prove, that they made materially false statements, not simply that they failed to make certain true ones. The decision is a matter of interpreting the text of an SEC rule,  10b–5(b), which makes it

To start off today's discussion, I refer the reader to my post in November discussing what "effective altruism" is and why I think we must judge that somewhere in its reasoning this philosophy goes horribly wrong.  Effective Altruism: The short course (jamesian58.blogspot.com) I won't re-tread that ground but I will observe that the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews site has a review of a new book on the subject. The book is THE RULES OF RESCUE by Theron Pummer. The reviewer is Violetta Igneski . Pummer argues (in Igneski's paraphrase) that "we are not always required to provide the most help possible," that is, maximally effective altruism. He does not reject EA, but wants to reconcile it with a non-consequentialist account of both moral constraints and moral permissions.  The constraints are things that you must NOT do, regardless of your utilitarian calculations, and the permissions are things that you CAN rightly do that are in some respect unhelpfu

  One day last week I was in my home office, typing away on work related matters, and (since the door was open) I half heard a news report about OJ Simpson. People in my line of work love doing resonant "anniversary" stories so, after a little thought, I believed that I knew what the story was: we must have reached the 30th anniversary of the killings or the trial verdict or something.  Well, that wasn't it. Simpson had died. [Of natural causes.] I have nothing to say about this, so I'll just leave you with some links.  Well, I guess I do have SOMEthing to say, at least at a meta level. The fourth of the below links is an oddity. Someone thought it sensible to publish the reaction of ... Caitlyn Jenner. Why? Well, Caitlyn used to be Bruce Jenner and Bruce Jenner was the husband of the ex-wife of Robert Kardassian, one of the attorneys for Simpson, the man credited with putting together the "dream team." So of course we all want to know what Caitlyn has to sa

Many were despairing of such an event. But jury selection is now underway. The former President, Donald Trump, is now being tried in a court whose judgment is not subject to any presidential pardon. He is not being tried for insurrection. He is being tried for falsifying business records. But he is on trial -- his odd de facto immunity from any such proceedings is at an end.  Nothing even remotely like this has happened in our country since 1807, when Aaron Burr went on trial.  Burr was not a former President, of course. Burr was a former Vice President. Another difference: Burr was tried by a federal court. He could presumably have pardoned himself had he been convicted there and had somehow thereafter been elected President. So ... not an exact likeness to the current situation.   But let's talk a bit about Burr. He was the guy who inspired the 12th amendment, changing the way vice presidents are selected, largely so that Jefferson could replace him with George Clinton. Dramatic

  Nebraska is one of just two states that does NOT follow a winner-take-all rule with reference to the allocation of its electoral votes in a Presidential contest. [The other is Maine.]  Part of  Nebraska's allocation of electors works by congressional district. [It gives out two of its five votes on a statewide basis and the other three by virtue of the presidential votes of its three congressional districts.] The result of this is that Nebraska sometimes votes in the electoral college four to the Republican candidate, one to the Democratic, because of the blue political tint of the district that includes the city of Omaha.   Now, there is one plausible breakdown of the state-by-state results this November that has Biden winning by 270 to 268. THAT scenario involves Biden winning that one vote in otherwise deep red Nebraska.  If the Trump forces can change the law in Nebraska, as they are now endeavoring to do, then that scenario yield a 269 to 269 result. Unless the Biden forces

The "green new deal" is a cliche. Now we hear of a national green bank.  As if Alexander Hamilton had hooked up with Rachel Carson. The Biden administration's long talk of a "national green bank"  came into focus last week with the announcement that the administration is providing $27 billion in climate finance funds to coalitions of nonprofit lenders. The funding comes out of funds already appropriated by last year's Inflation Reduction Act. Formally, the "bank" is known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.  The hope is that the GGRF will evolve into something like a true bank, borrowing from private capital on the one hand what it lends out to private enterprises on the other, and making enough back from its debtors to pay its creditors. The hope, furthermore, is that this will truly be a NATIONAL bank in a Hamiltonian sense, the center of a network of private banks that will end up financing everything from community solar projects to EV chargi

  In watching an episode of SOUTH PARK, years ago, we learned that the devil plans to give himself a big party.  This was Season 10, episode 11, back in 2006. I won't bother you with a plot outline, I only want to focus on one point, what seemed at the time a silly bit of word play that now, in 2024, seems positively a prefigurement. What it prefigures I will let you decide. But the plot has Satan planning for himself a big Halloween party on Earth on the analogy of the Sweet Sixteen parties that rich Daddies among humans throw for their girls, and that were the subject of a reality television series at the time. Satan's is to take place in the fancy ballroom of a  ritzy Los Angeles hotel.  Some time before the actual party, Satan visits that ballroom with a party planner. The party planner says that "Diddy" had thrown himself a birthday party here recently.  Also, when Satan offers an idea (something like, a big ice cream fountain in one corner of the room) , the pl

I today finish my laborious piece-by-piece road through PROCESS AND REALITY with you, dear reader, by my side. Near the end of PROCESS AND REALITY, our author gets systematic about presenting his conception of God.  The underlying idea here is of the physical cosmos and God as partners, not Master and Slave, not Creator and Created, but partners on the dance floor of existence together. That is my way of putting it. Not his,  This is his way of putting it. It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God is many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as it is to say that in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.  It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.  It is as true to say that God transcends the world, as that the World t

... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality.  I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself.  "It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not amount to consciousness."  He uses the phrase "adversion and aversion" and sometimes "adversion or aversion" repeatedly, with "adversion" apparently meaning attraction and "aversion" meaning repulsion. The two words suggest reaction to lures, positive or negative.  These "high-grade organisms" approach food and they avoid preda

Court put on a bit of a show over the mifepristone litigation. Or, at least, the oral arguments were so widely and intensely followed it smelled a bit like a Barnum production.  There is much that one might say about this dispute.  But this is the first time you will have seen anything about it in this humble blog, so for today I will just stick to some of the basics.  Mifepristone is part of the standard medicinal protocol for  early-term abortions. Early here means within 70 days of a pregnant woman's last menstrual period. When it was first introduced in the United States the usual term was RU 486, and I am not sure when that more resonant term [it always sounds like a question, to be followed by "well, ARE YOU???"] lost favor. Was RU 486 a brand name?  The percentage of abortions in the US that are medicinal rather than surgical has increased steadily since the approval of mifepristione here at the turn of the millennium. According to the CDC numbers, only 1% of abor

I admire those scientists -- I mean actual credentialed working scientists -- who deign to spend a lot of time explaining science to layfolks like me. They are a differentiated bunch. Examples that come to mind are: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Polanyi, and -- my personal favorite -- Sabine Hossenfelder.  This must be roughly the tenth time she has inspired a post in this humble blog.  Let me introduce her credentials. Hossenfelder has a Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt, for which she wrote a thesis on "Black Hole Relics in Large Extra Dimensions."  That will give a flavor of such of her work as is aimed at peers.  She is also a fellow blogger. In a recent post on one of those blogs she argues that humans have been lying to ourselves about plastic. She thinks that the stuff is building up and may well prove disastrous for us.  To this point she cites the OECD, which says that the use of plastics doubled globally in the period 2000 to 2019.  But, she al

 I love physical keyboards.  This is why, for a long time, I stuck with the blackberry.  They had a cleverly designed keyboard that allowed for something of a sense that one was actually ... typing.  Like the old days.  Like in an office in a '40s movie. Click click clickity click.  I'm typing on a keyboard now, as I watch these letters and words come up on the screen of my desktop computer. A lot of people do without them.  People TALK to their computers now. I say bah and humbug to them, though I am without my old blackberry, so I use a virtual keyboard (on an Android system) in that context  I have to live with virtual keyboards for telephones. But for my laptop and desktop, I can stick with the physical sort. Like Snoopy on his doghouse.  And so ends the cranky old man's tirade. 

I admit to having very mixed feelings about the whole TikTok issue. Let's review.  The US House of Representatives has passed, in what is nowadays an impressively bipartisan vote, (and with 352 yeas) a bill that would force Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face a US ban.  A study last year out of Rutgers University indicated a "strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese government." Perhaps more worrying, the broad use of TikTok is a means by which interests in China may build up a database on Americans and America, and whoever at ByteDance can get that information would be susceptible to demands from his/her government to pass it along.    What information exactly (aside from dance trends) would China get in this way that it could turn to nefarious purposes? It could help identify targets for recruitment for espionage, or data could be crossed-checked w

  I mentioned Whitehead's apparent sympathy with Heraclitus in my last post about him. My reading had not yet at that point discovered Process and Reality. Part II, Chapter Ten , which takes the form of an extended meditation on the sentiment "all things flow." In Heraclitus' Greek, panta rhei.   The sympathy is here made explicit. Indeed, a full understanding of that sentiment is said to be one of the main goals of philosophizing at all.  Some of the thinkers of the early modern world tried to ban flow, or fluency, from their picture of the world.  But Whitehead adds, "Newton, that Napoleon of of the world of thought, brusquely ordered fluency back into the world, regimented into his 'absolute, mathematical time, flowing equably without regard to anything external.' He also gave it a mathematical uniform in the shape of his Theory of Fluxions." What a marvelous packing of two concise sentences!   Almost as magnificent as Heraclitus' two words.

  The arbitrage of rental periods turns out to be a somewhat common (or at any rate a not-too-rare) business model. A company or other business entity can enter the market as a tenant, taking long-term rental properties, and then turn around and serve as landlord, leasing out the same spaces (perhaps after renovating them, etc.) to shorter-term and higher-rent paying tenants. If this works: great!  The arbitrager has one stream of money going out the door and another larger stream coming in the door.   If it doesn't work ... the relations between a landlord and a tenant can become a complicated matter once the tenant has placed itself under the protection of a bankruptcy court by way of a chapter 11 filing. As sub-lessor tenants attempting this arbitrage play have done repeatedly.  This isn't the most exciting subject in the world but, hey, this is a hobby blog. My hobby blog. I may come up with something that interests you more the next time.  If a business declares bankruptcy

Friday, I shared some thoughts about Rudyard Kipling's poem RECESSIONAL.  I quoted especially this verse: Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Today I would like to talk briefly about the two Biblical references, Nineveh and Tyre.  Nineveh figures in the story of Jonah. Jonah was ordered to deliver God's wrathful message of impending destruction to Nineveh, a city near the one we know as Mosul.  Jonah is reluctant to do his duty, and in the course of his flight he is swallowed whole by a large sea creature.  Everybody remembers that bit. What they might not remember is that eventually Jonah gets to Nineveh.  He cries out that in forty days God will destroy the city.  But Nineveh reforms its ways. God sees this and relents. Nineveh is not destroyed. The biblical resonance of Tyre is a bit stranger. In the book of E

  Rudyard Kipling, in his poem Recessional (1897) famously prophesied a time in which the British Empire would be no more, hard though this may have been to imagine in 1897, the diamond anniversary of the reign of Victoria.  The poem consists of five stanzas of six lines each, and each stanza has a straightforward ABABCC rhyme scheme. The third sticks to my mind right now.  Far-called, our navies melt away;   On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Of course, the British Empire did in fact melt away, under the pressure of two world wars in the first half of the following century and then of the sweeping anti-imperial mood in the non-industrialized parts of the world that followed the end of the second of them. Fortunately, as it melted away it was replaced in near-hegemony by a more-or-less friendly successor power where people spoke the same language, so its fa

This is my fifth recent post on the meaning of Whitehead's masterpiece, PROCESS AND REALITY.  On the big issue of Time versus Timelessness, Whitehead generally seems more on the side of Heraclitus than on that of Zeno. He believes that time, change, motion are all real. Indeed, at points in this book he seems to be struggling to invent a new vocabulary to allow precise statements about the realities of THOSE realities.  But every once in a while he can pull us up short with a mention of "eternal objects."  What the heck are THEY?  An eternal object is an abstraction. Whitehead uses "eternal" in this sense to mean precisely outside of time.  And he uses "object" to denote something objective, neither a social construction nor a subjective whim. So Whitehead, it is fair to say, is not a nominalist about abstractions.  Eternal objects are the sorts of things that can recur. That is, Christopher Faille as a living breathing person does not recur.  The pers

The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr The true US Declaration of Independence from our Mother Country may be found in these words.

  ... the Love of my Life wanted to get to the nail salon for a scheduled appointment a few days back. We also needed to pick up some dry cleaning.  I suggested I knew a convenient route, we could do the latter on the way to getting to the former.  I might mention that her nail salon is a couple of towns away, and it happens to be in the town I grew up in. I can be a bit cocky about the best routes for getting to places there.  On the day in question.... she had to be there by 12:30 PM.  That was mission critical.  I told her as we left our driveway we could pick up the pants and get to the salon too. Right after we picked up the pants, she became anxious about the salon and how I was taking my bloody time and ... YOU'RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT. She started looking obsessively at the clock. When we were in my home town I noticed one conveniently green light and said, "We can go straight here -- it wouldn't be my usual route but..." "You aren't going to get ther

  THIS is a fine and perceptive scoop.  May have been the best single piece of 'morning after' journalism on the Super Tuesday primary. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/05/super-tuesday-2024/cryptos-big-night-00145274 Congrats to Jasper Goodman.  Personally, I think it is still an open question whether Bitcoin and all its kin, cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets, are a permanent feature of the American and world financial landscape or whether they are going to vanish away.  They may be doomed to become as hard-to-find as an etch-a-sketch.  BUT ... if you are of the permanent-feature persuasion, you will consider March 5, 2024 an important on the way to the securing of that status not through market savvy but through the political system.

Artificial intelligence, in the form that bothers people most these days, is a matter of the consumption of very large masses of text, and their re-packaging and re-use of that text to look and sound like something new and original.  Should this worry us? Maybe not. It may be about to self-destruct.  After all, as it happens more and more often, the AI algorithms are more and more busy digesting AI-generated texts. As a group of (admittedly human) researchers noted recently, “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models." The models as they consume their own work will self-degrade and become useless over time. One of the members of the group of scholars involved is Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University professor. He has put the problem this way, in a blog post,   “ Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will m

 So, what's it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the tee shirt we live?  I have written of late in this blog about Alfred North Whitehead's book, Process and Reality. But I have written chiefly of what he says there about other philosophers.  Plato, Locke, Hume....Now I hope to get to the core of Whitehead's original thought. What does he say about ... process and reality? What is his cosmology?  I have to bring one more historic figure, Leibniz, into the mix even to say this next bit, though. Because you can think of Whitehead's core supposition as a monadology. Any one of us is a society of society of societies ... all the way down. The ultimate bottom level, the individual nuggets (or monads, if you will) at the bottom of this hierarchy of societies? Whitehead seems to think there is a bottom, and he does give it a name: occasions. A lot of unconscious and brief occasions, conceived of as independent of content, might constitute the bottom building block. Sort of a