Another rather stupid article by Slate economist Steven Landsburg (it happens to be about Schiavo, but that's not why it's stupid). He once wrote an article advocating the death penalty for computer worm writers, which I took to be a tongue-in-cheek self-parody of simplistic cost-benefit analyses, but now I'm not so sure -- Keys, maybe you could start a campaign among economists to get him off Slate, because he's giving you guys a bad name. Here's an excerpt from his latest piece:

"If you promise me that my estate will go to my daughter instead of some random stranger, I'll work more and consume less—which means everyone else can afford to work less and consume more... That's a good reason to promise you'll enforce my will, and it's also a good reason to keep that promise, so people will believe such promises in the future.

On the other hand, I see far less reason why you should let me dictate, say, the disposal of my remains. I might have strong preferences about the matter, but once I'm gone, those preferences are quite irrelevant, and while I'm alive, your promise to enforce those preferences is unlikely to change my behavior in any socially useful way."

Why is this stupid? For one, it implicitly analyzes the value of preference-satisfaction in terms of believing that one's preferences are satisfied (which comes out in his dismissal of the preferences of the dead per se and his separation of reasons to make a promise and to keep a promise). Any of the well-worn thought experiments against simple-minded utilitarianism (e.g.Nozick's Experience Machine, which shows that there is something dissatisfactory about believing one's preferences are satisfied even though they are not) begin to reveal the problems with such a view, viz. that it rests on an extremely narrow theory of value, which has absurd consequences, e.g. that one doesn't have reason to keep promises unless it has beneficial consequences in the narrow Landsburgian sense.  ¶ 5:40 PM 0 comments

  Congressional ridiculousness aside, it's been heartening to see that most (?) people seem to recognize that the Schiavo case is morally (though perhaps not legally) complex, and are not going to get zealous one way or the other.

I haven't apprised myself of all the relevant details of the case, but here are some things I think I think:

-- it would be morally permissible to keep the tube in as well as to remove it. And I think most people are onto this, and the most disturbing voices we hear are those on either extreme, who either think we must remove the tube or to keep it in.

-- I'm not too concerned with Terri Schiavo herself, since it seems reasonable to assume she's not there anymore, what with no cerebral cortex and all. If that's true, then the case becomes enormously less interesting, and the ambiguity I noted in the first comment isn't really moral ambiguity so much as it is that either course of action is morally insignificant. I suppose the real interest in the case lies in what it reveals about the people doing the deciding about the tube -- both sides of which are probably committing a fundamental error if the above analysis is correct, because they both seem to be assuming that she's still a person. If there were reason to think she were still a person, then -- astonishingly -- I think I *could* find myself on the side of W and "erring on the side of life", though many other details of the case would have to be filled in first.

- There are deep problems with motivation on both sides -- "deep" in that it seems that in any such case it will be hard to determine whether what one's own motivation for making the decision would be.

-- While I am in favor of yanking the tube, I do wonder why some people in the debate seem so eager to yank that tube - maybe we can chalk it up to the polarizing effects of the extreme right.

-- A living will would not make such situations unproblematic, because of the potential problem of partial information.

-- while the Congressional legislation was ridiculous, I don't think it was ridiculous because the decision is essentially a state/private matter, but because of the details of the "law" passed.

-- tangent: the killing/letting die or active/passive euthanasia distinction is not useful at all, and I don't understand why so many people are attracted by the idea that it is sometimes okay to pull life support, but never okay to inject someone with an overdose of morphine or whatever. There is a distinction there, I think, and of course there are sometimes (often?) cases where killing someone would be wrong but letting them die wouldn't be wrong, but it would not be because one act was a "killing" while the other was a "letting die", but because of a different distinction -- namely, the attitude that we take toward the victim -- that those two categories need not map onto

  ¶ 8:24 PM 0 comments

  The, um, captivating story of the woman in whose apartment Brian Nichols -- the courtroom killer -- surrendered. The Atlanta Journal Constitution requires free registration, but it's worth it...  ¶ 11:59 PM 1 comments

  Frank Rich's "The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told" prompted me to find the South Park version of the joke -- I'd like to see the movie when it comes out.   ¶ 10:36 PM 1 comments

  Two band names from a single Snapple cap:

Real Fact #110
Frogs Never Drink  ¶ 1:09 PM 0 comments

 
"my mother, whose subjective experience of temperature was notably consistent with low gas and electric bills, claimed to be a devotee of 'fresh air'..."
  ¶ 5:29 PM 0 comments

  “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works.”
  ¶ 1:49 AM 0 comments

  I ran into college classmate John Dolan, who was also dining alone and studying at Buffet City, a predominantly Chinese all-you-can-eat restaurant on LA's Westside with their own website. The food is unspectacular but generally tasty (though virtually everything errs on the side of being overly sweet), and the ingredients are better than one might fear, except for the sushi, which is gross, with the exception of the California rolls. The fare is largely American chinese (e.g. General Tso's chicken) but with some more authentic dishes mixed in: the barbecued squid which I saw for the first time today (my 3rd trip, first for dinner) was just short (by being too sweet) of something you might find at a cantonese joint. They had tasty little egg custard dumplings, and I like their "chili chicken", which is essentially slices of dark meat stir fried with jalapeno.

I don't like eating chinese by myself or with only one or two other people because one can't then get the proper sampling of dishes at a given meal, which is the beauty of the Chinese a.y.c.e.  ¶ 3:53 PM 0 comments

  If you're bored and have 10 minutes, check out this great radio piece on face transplants.  ¶ 5:28 PM 0 comments