Cure-alls and Remedies
So I’ve been writing the last few days on a number of only tenuously related themes: cruelty and torture , probability and prediction markets , testability, middle-range theories, and moral realism . Today I’m going to try to draw these themes together and point to a couple avenues for further discussion. Obviously, it’s important to…
I’m just reposting a couple of links from Metafilter’s Optimus Chyme : Everything You Never Wanted to Know about the American Prison-Industrial Complex Prison Nation Don’t click through if you were hoping to maintain your post-holiday glow. This is the sort of thing I hoped would be on the agenda by now. For all the…
Yesterday , I called myself a moral realist, which is to say that I believe that some claims about values are agent-neutral. Going back to testability, I suspect that one place that markets will not yield much benefit is in evaluations of normativity. Despite the fact that I am a moral realist and believe that…
(What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias , and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism . Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.)…
Throughout the nineties, and to some extent in the last decade, there has been a certain brand of political thinker who just can’t imagine the motivation for cruelty. So alien is the concept that these folks (Richard Rorty and Judith Butler, for instance) have developed a deflationary theory of moral philosophy that simply advises us…
Lin-Manuel Miranda has a rap concept album in the works on Alexander Hamilton. I’m a big Hamilton fan (doesn’t everybody have a favorite founding father?) and so this gives me great joy, as does this video of him debuting the first song at the White House: Who was Alexander Hamilton ? Bastard , immigrant , …
Apologies for Heidegger’s Nazism take a few different forms. As I mentioned yesterday , some apologists, call them the Orthodox Apologists, try to show that Heidegger himself simply forgot the lessons of his own early work, or retreated into errancy. At worst, his later Nazi pronouncements betrayed that early work by appropriating fundamental ontology for…
I’m generally opposed to “Great Man” theories of the history of ideas. My preference is for folks like Derek Parfit who acknowledge that philosophy is a discipline that builds on the work of one’s predecessors and that showing clearly why a bad idea is wrong can be tedious but also more useful than the flashy…
Inspired by Sir Ian McKellan’s reflections on Richard III here and here , and this excellent resource on the historical Richard III, I’ve been thinking about designing a course around villains, moral monstrosity, and evil. Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but this is something I like to sit around doing: arranging texts and problems around…
Dr. J has been riffing on the phenomenon of the ‘uncanny valley’ lately . ‘ For those who don’t know, the ‘ uncanny valley ‘ is a theory for why we find some human-like artificial things so weird. My favorite example is dolls, as this image suggests, but masks are also good examples and ultimately Masahiro Mori…