Rivalry weekend got me thinking a bit about college football. A lot of people complain about the NCAA, but nobody complains about the fans. Rooting for one's team, it would seem, must be based on thinking that the team is a part of your (academic) community, but at most major programs, college football players are only nominally part of the (academic) community. Supporting this seems wrong. (I'm looking at you, Keys).

I haven't posted much recently because I've been preoccupied with philosophy, and there's not much I want to share on that front. If I did share, it would look something like this: I've just breezed through David Velleman's "Love as Moral Emotion". Velleman argues for a position that I'm drawn to, viz that rather than love being incompatible with morality (as is commonly thought, because love is partial, morality impartial, so love may drive one, e.g., to save one's spouse rather than a stranger despite morality dictating that they are equally worthy of being saved) love is essentially a moral emotion. But while he argues plausible that there is a moral dimension to love, i.e. it enables one to fully appreciate the intrinsic value of the beloved, it seems that Velleman fails to establish the moral significance of love. That is, I'm not sure that on his picture it's doing anything that more morally valuable than the Kantian feeling of respect. So while Velleman makes love morally respectable (maybe), he hasn't persuaded me that it's a moral emotion. But I haven't read the article all too carefully.

  ¶ 1:36 AM 0 comments

  I watched "High Noon" (synopsis)with my Hungarian classmate/roommate. It turned out to be an educational experience. She didn't like it much, because she felt it expressed morally repugnant American attitudes toward interventionism.

The way she first phrased her objection was that she thought Will Kane was being portrayed as a hero even though he did something morally impermissible. After all, he could have fled the town hours before the train arrived and thus avoided bloodshed. And if one can avoid killing someone, then one must do so.

This lead me to think of the following scenario: suppose a space capsule is off-course and has a 75% chance of landing near enough to the location of your houseboat so as to kill you if you remain there (while leaving the sole astronaut inside unscathed). But the capsule is three hours away, so you have time to move to a location where the probability drops to 1% - that's the farthest away you can get. Your houseboat is armed with surface-to-air missiles. So if you're ever in imminent danger of being killed by the capsule, you can destroy the space capsule with your missiles.

My roommate's position was that you must move as far away from the capsule's path as possible, but once you did so, it would be permissible to shoot down the capsule to save yourself if it ended up heading your way, presumably because you've done all you can to get away from the threat.

I thought this might be inconsistent with her living in Los Angeles. After all, the chance of being put in a situation where killing would be morally permissible is much higher in L.A. (let's say, 0.01%) than it is in, say, Vancouver (0.0005%). So if you could make it 20 times less likely that you would be in a position to kill somebody, it seems you must do so.

This is obviously a ridiculous conclusion, but it's not clear what, if anything (since disanalogies abound) is wrong with my roommate's reasoning. She suggests that there is some threshold beyond which one need not reduce the risk, and that seems sensible but ad hoc. What I find more plausible is the suggestion that in none of these cases do we have a duty to remove ourselves from harm's way, but that it would beneficent of us to do so. But that's just the beginnings of an answer.
  ¶ 12:10 AM 0 comments

  I had dim sum at Sea Harbour, a relatively hyped branch of a Vancouver restaurant located in Rosemead. Unfortunately, the restaurant does not have carts rolling around during dim sum, but instead a photo menu and card ordering system (as at some sushi places). While the food was very good, I didn't realize until today how much of the charm is taken away from the experience when one has to make up one's mind about what to order at the beginning of the meal. You can order dishes in the midst of the meal there, but it takes awhile, and its just not the same as having the food float about you. On the other hand, having the dishes come straight from the kitchen helps with freshness - none of the dishes were flat from sitting around on a steam cart.   ¶ 3:36 PM 0 comments

  I suppose it's no laughing matter, but these new SUV cameras to prevent people from backing over their children threaten to render some lovely moral luck thought experiments obsolete.  ¶ 11:41 PM 0 comments

  I've just started grading midterms, and came across my first plagiarism case. Here's a hint for would-be plagiarizers: if you're going to lift several paragraphs from a professional philosopher, you should either change some of the words around, or at least write grammatically in the paragraphs preceding your plagiary. It's really f-ing hard to miss the transition from stilted ungrammatical college freshman prose to hypercomplex academic prose.
  ¶ 10:58 PM 0 comments

  Not much going on except philosophy, and I don't have anything I want to share as of yet on that front, but I did happen across a couple of interesting articles. This one from Slate argues that we should stop routinely calling firefighters "heroes", with which I agree. The point is reminiscent of the the classic Onion article entitled, "Man Loses Cowardly Battle with Cancer" or something. The use of honorifics in the media is absurd and unreflective, and I think it contributes to moral skepticism, i.e. what's a young person to conclude about ethics when the society around her uses moral language in a mawkish, cloying and ultimately cynical attempt to make up for the detachment between those who serve and those who are served?

Then there's this little interview with Noam Chomsky, from the NYT magazine, wherein he reveals that he's never thought of leaving the U.S., because "it's the best country in the world." I found this surprising, but I've never actually read his political writings, which I gather are not terribly interesting.

  ¶ 1:15 PM 0 comments