Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Dunn said that he did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 for religious reasons. He did not identify a specific religion whose belief system leads him to this. But let us suppose it is Dunnism, and he is the Pope of it. He naturally doesn't want to be forced to excommunicate himself. Six Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court said, "tough luck, soldier, you're in a chain of command." the other three -- Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch -- said that Dunn should NOT be relieved of his command for this reason. His religious rights should trump the chain of command. (And yes, I know I'm using the word 'trump' there as a verb and that one could interpret that punningly as a reference to the guy who appointed Gorsuch. Grow up, folks. I use "trumpet" for such purposes. And you can spell it if you like with a silent "s" in front.) What I would like to point out, though, is that in 2022 when on...
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What might a discerning historian of , say, twenty years from now write about Covid-19? He might have in front of him a primary source like this: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/vaccines-should-end-the-pandemic-despite-the-variants-say-experts/ That is an optimistic appraisal from a month ago. Perhaps despite all the deaths, all the devastated families, and all the long-haul injuries even of survivors, much of the worries about the "variants," at least, was overdone. The vaccines that have been developed can, it seems, cover a wide rage of Covid-19-ish infections and allow us as a species a chance to give ourselves herd immunity. We as a species will get through this without too much more damage. The following statement might seem more shocking than the above: All the social distancing and mask wearing and locking in seems to have come out a wash. There is no consistent correlation between the rules in place in the area and its susceptibility to t...
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism By John Donvan and Caren Zucker Crown Publishers, New York, NY, 2016. 670 pages, $30. Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille Autism is part of who I am. Or, at least, I believe so. There’s never been anything so formal as a diagnosis, but people who love me, including some with credentials as health care providers, have told me, usually with some effort at softening the presumed blow, that I am “on the spectrum.” I have long since given up any impulse to argue the point. I don’t believe I’ve ever owned the term “autism” in public before, so I will use this book review, then, as a coming-out moment. The readers of The Federal Lawyer know something of me, from my numerous book reviews in the magazine. You have had plenty of opportunities to judge both my analytical abilities and the sort of stylistic quirks that enter into my prose style. That doesn’t make you diagnostic authorities, but it does mean that you are an appropriate community ...
I've heard it said that utilitarianism has this pragmatic benefit: it could constitute a plausible ethical consensus (even if we're all only pretending to believe it?) that could lessen the intensity of moral conflicts. In other words, it is better to argue over non-fundamental things than over fundamental things, because we're more likely to go to war over the latter than the former. Thinking this through: reaping this benefit would require us, I suppose, to give our consent to the simplest possible form of utilitarianism, because only that one can promise to turn serious substantive moral conflicts into mere mechanical computations. In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham, portrayed above, then, let us suppose that pleasure could be measured in, say "positive hedons." Pain could be treated as negative hedons. Consider whether the govt should require a vaccine. Add up all the positive hedons the policy will create (discounting for uncertainties), subt...
Last week saw a tempest in the anti-vaccination world. If you aren't part of that teapot, and don't have anyone on your facebook newsfeed who is, then you may have missed it. Andrew Wakefield and Brian Hooker claim that a "whistleblower" has come forward from out of the nefarious CDC to reveal that the Center has been covering up decisive proof of a vaccine/autism link. The first thing to be said about this: it isn't true. Here is a fine discussion . The whistleblower, unsurprisingly, "wishes to remain anonymous," or maybe he doesn't and his name is William Thompson. So what we have is the notion that Thompson, or maybe No-Name, told Hooker that the CDC changed the database in one study in an "arbitrary" way in order to hide the true results. But it still isn't clear what exactly Thompson (or whomever) said to Hooker. Hooker portrays himself as the recipient of a leak, but wraps that leak up in so much paraphrase, and ties it...