Archive for category A Common Morality?
What I Believe…?
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Continuing Crisis, Ethics, Res Publica on June 16th, 2011
Take the example of buying chocolate from a corner shop. If I know, or suspect, that the chocolate is made from coco beans picked by children under the conditions of slavery then, regardless of what I say, I believe in child slavery. For the belief operates at a material level (the level of what I do) rather than at the level of the mind (what I tell myself I believe). And I can’t hide in supposed ignorance either for if I don’t know about how most chocolate is made it is likely that my lack of knowledge is a form of refusal to care. For the very fact that there is Fair Trade chocolate, for example, should be enough for me to ask questions about whether other chocolate is made in an unfair way. Or take the example of buying cheap clothes from a department store. Regardless of what I say, if I don’t ask some basic questions about where the clothes come from I believe in sweatshops. Or at best I believe in ignorance, in not asking questions and in the virtue of being an uncritical consumer. Again these beliefs are not ones I will admit to myself (bring to my mind) but rather they are beliefs I enact as a result of my basic desires (arising from my heart). Finally, if I didn’t stand up to protest against rendition flights, if I didn’t voice my disgust at the practices that go on in places like Guantanamo Bay in my name, then I believe in torture.
link: peterrollins.net » I Believe in Child Labour, Sweatshops and Torture
What about it? Are there “secular” reasons?
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Philosophy, Res Publica on February 24th, 2010
Stanley Fish comments on law professor Steven Smith’s book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, in which Smith argues that there are no purely “secular” reasons for policy decisions.
It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.
This “smuggling” of the religious was pointed out at a deep level in Stephen Mulhall’s Philosophical Myths of the Fall, which persuasively shows the repetitions of the theological idea of the fall of humankind in the supposedly secular thought of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
Read a review of Mulhall’s book here.
Read the rest of Fish’s article here.
No silver bullet…we already know what we need to know.
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Continuing Crisis, Philosophy on February 13th, 2010
Everybody’s looking for new ideas. We’re hoping for the next “big idea” that will save us all from calamity. We face so many problems, there just has to be something new we need to learn in order to solve them. Right? Is that what we’re missing…novelty?
Astra Taylor, documentary filmmaker whose work includes Zizek! and Examined Life, makes the following observation:
Over time I’ve come to believe that our quest for “new ideas” may not be that different from our quest for new cars, new clothes or new entertainment and distraction; just another manifestation of the short-sighted, immediate gratification attitude that created our current dilemma in the first place. It’s a capitalist approach to matters of the mind: That concept is so last season! Out with the old, in with the new! If we’ve encountered a concept before, it’s summarily dismissed as yesterday’s news, as though ideas have a use-by date.
The thing is, many good insights are never put to use, let alone used up. Over the course of history, countless excellent ideas and theories have simply never gotten any traction. Would it be so bad to actually try to put some of the old Enlightenment principles of liberté, égalité et fraternité into practice? Or what about the Marxist maxim of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? Or Kropotkin’s meditations on the possibilities of mutual aid?
This is reminiscent of Chesterton’s remark that it wasn’t, for instance, that Christianity had been tried and found wanting; it’s that it has never really been tried. In his Orthodoxy he generalizes:
Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas;but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas. If I am merely to float or fade or evolve, it may be towards something anarchic; but if I am to riot, it must be for something respectable. This is the whole weakness of certain schools of progress and moral evolution. They suggest that there has been a slow movement towards morality, with an imperceptible ethical change in every year or at every instant. There is only one great disadvantage in this theory. It talks of a slow movement towards justice; but it does not permit a swift movement. A man is not allowed to leap up and declare a certain state of things to be intrinsically intolerable.
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I only say that whatever is justice ought, under given conditions, to be prompt justice.
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Thus we may say that a permanent ideal is as necessary to the innovator as to the conservative; it is necessary whether we wish the king’s orders to be promptly executed or whether we only wish the king to be promptly executed. The guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice there is nothing evolutionary about it. The favourite evolutionary argument finds its best answer in the axe. The Evolutionist says, "Where do you draw the line?" the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it HERE: exactly between your head and body." There must at any given moment be an abstract right and wrong if any blow is to be struck; there must be something eternal if there is to be anything sudden. Therefore for all intelligible human purposes, for altering things or for keeping things as they are, for founding a system for ever, as in China, or for altering it every month as in the early French Revolution, it is equally necessary that the vision should be a fixed vision. This is our first requirement.
The point is that we already know what we need to know. We just have to have the will do follow our conscience and the courage that will take.
[Read the rest of Astra Taylor’s essay here: http://bit.ly/9vyz34. Read more of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy here: http://bit.ly/bQzeGO]
Dear Mr. President—From Jennifer First
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Anarchism, Continuing Crisis, Peace, War on October 14th, 2009
Have a look:
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Dear Mr. President,
On October 5, 2009, I witnessed my mother, a 55 year old grandmother be assaulted by your Secret Service right in front of your house. It was so frightening for me, and what your protectors did in your name destroyed any faith that I had left in your willingness to listen to your citizens to end the violence being committed by our country.
My mother, Joy First, is the most peaceful, loving person that I have ever met. She has always had a completely selfless altruism that has led her to take care of others, even when it puts her own personal comfort and safety in jeopardy. As a mother and grandmother, she has always given up much for her children and grandchildren, in an effort to see us not suffer. In the past several years, my mother, Joy has extended this mothering and altruism to all of the children of the world. She has put her comfort and safety on the line countless times in an effort to stop the killing of the world’s children and grandchildren. On October 5th, my mother, Joy, went to your front door to plead with you to stop bombing and shooting of innocent children in Iraq , Afghanistan , and Pakistan .
My mother, Joy, was joined by a group of almost 2 dozen other peaceful civil resisters who were asking you to end the senseless killing in the Middle East . Instead of engaging in civil dialogue with these resisters, someone from the house where you live with your family sent out around two dozen armed secret service agents to assault these peaceful people. So, as I was watching what I believed to be a demonstration of our American democracy, I saw the scene descend into what frighteningly became much more like a scene from an Orwellian novel than from the America I had learned about in Social Studies. And then all of the sudden, people were being dragged, and then, there was my mother, being bounced around like a ping pong ball and being pushed violently by members of your Secret Service.
I ran over to where my mother, Joy, was finally pushed on the ground, and she was sobbing as she was being helped up by her friend. Her friend was so angry that he began to yell that the Secret Service was pushing people’s mothers; they were pushing grandmothers. And I felt the anger swell up inside of me as I saw my mother crying, and I looked at the large, strong men who had been violently pushing my 55 year old mother to the point of tears. Resisters and their supporters wisely moved to a park across the street to process what had happened and decide what to do next. And in the park, I comforted my mother, as I sat next to her in shock.
I don’t mean to make this personal, but you have made this personal to me when your Secret Service attacked my mother, and you have made it personal to the families of the world when you have killed their relatives. How would you feel if your daughters Sasha or Malia witnessed their mother Michelle being assaulted by armed guards? How do you think your daughters would feel? What would it do to Michelle? What would the world say? Well then, please imagine how I felt and how my father felt when he heard when happened right in front of your house where your family lives.
Mr. President, I voted for you in November because I believed in you. I believed that you would put an end to the policies and unjust wars of the Bush administration. Since you have been in office for the past 9 months, I have listened to the excuses that people have made for your continuation of the wars, and I have felt torn between feeling sympathy for your situation and a childish expectation that you will rise to the occasion to protect the children of the world from harm. But on that day, Mr. President, you stole my youthful naiveté and innocence. I left Washington without faith in my government or in my president. It was instead replaced with fear. I am lucky that I have seen such strength and resolve in my mother and her community of peaceful resisters. So I have faith that this senseless killing will stop, but I know that it will not be by your hand.
Jennifer First
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Here’s one of those things….
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Continuing Crisis, Economy, Unwise on July 11th, 2009
One of those things that makes you scratch your head: MoveOn.org is giving away “free” stickers promoting clean energy for America. It is a very attractive sticker, designed by the same person who did the Obama “hope” poster. The website notes: “Stickers are 4″ by 5.125″ (about the size of a postcard) and will take 5-7 weeks to arrive.” If you would like more than one sticker, you will have to make a small donation; but the first one is “free.”
There is a nifty gadget on the site that gives you an up-to-the-minute count of how many stickers have been given away “free.”
As I write this (1:50 pm on 7/11), 203,678 stickers have been given away free.
In the time it took me to type these letters, the number has grown to 203,707. At the current clip, I’d say about 25 stickers are being given away every minute for “free.”
So, the head-scratching: What is the carbon footprint of this promotion? The 203,707 “free” stickers will be made out of 29,000 square feet of some kind of paper/plastic material, will be produced on machines (running on coal-generated electricity, most likely at this point in time), and will use some sorts of interesting chemicals for the inks and stickum. The 203,707 “free” stickers will have, backing paper you have to peel off, I’m guessing. That’s 29,000 square feet of waste backing paper that will end up in the landfill. Each one of these “free” stickers will be mailed–i.e., sent on trucks and planes (mostly not using green technology)–to their recipients. The recipients will stick them, I’m guessing, on their automobiles (even the best of which burn fossil fuel). Or on their laptop cases, which use (probably) coal-generated electricity as well.
I’m just asking….
But at least we’ll be able to prove we are green. We have a sticker. And it was free!
2:13 pm…204,685…Current rate now looks like 44 stickers per minute…..
"Free" green sticker. Note (and I swear I am not making this up): the filename for this graphic is "pu_sticker." Perhaps they meant "stinker"...?
Chiapas–¡VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Continuing Crisis, Res Publica on July 5th, 2009
Food for thought, after yesterday’s celebration of our American revolution:
“The Chiapas rebellion was distinctive among guerrilla struggles in that it did not seek to seize state power. Instead, it aimed to win the right of people to govern themselves within their own communities. It did not call upon other Mexicans to take up arms for a new national social agenda, but for the space and means to elect popular, democratic movements tied to particular locales. One commentator, Gustavo Esteva, called it a ‘new kind of movement’ and the ‘first revolution of the twenty-first century.’ By that he meant the feisty manifestation of a growing struggle of people around the world for economic and political survival and sovereignty within their own communities. [...] It wasn’t a Marxist guerrilla group, for example. It had no clear-cut socialist ideology or political platform and no one leader. Nor was it a fundamentalist or messianic group. Its members came from different Indian groups, professed different religions, spoke different languages, and were explicitly ecumenical. [...] As mentioned, its goal was not to seize power to govern the country but rather to reclaim the community. It did not eschew, but used, modern means of communication and a strategy of networking varied coalitions of dissent. Perhaps most strikingly, it did not call upon the government for cheaper food, more jobs, more health care, and more education. Rather than trying to find its niche in Mexico’s efforts to solve its problems by strengthening its role in a global economy organized around the needs and wants of a consumer society, it sought to order its own world around the organic needs of community. In Esteva’s words, it was not a revolt in response to a lack of development but a response that Chiapas was being ‘developed to death.’ People ‘opted for a more dignified way of dying.’ This more dignified way consists of a ‘commons’ the community carves out for itself in response ‘to the crisis of development’; ‘ways of living together that limit the economic damage and give room for new forms of social life’; ‘life-support systems based on self-reliance and mutual help, informal networks for the direct exchange of goods, services, and information’; and ‘an administration of justice which calls for compensation more than punishment.’”
–Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community Earth Ethics [Orbis 1996], pp. 128-129.
You heard it here first about the President’s “reasoning”…
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Health, Life itself, Philosophy, Science, Religion, or Both on March 16th, 2009
…on embryonic stem cell research, but of course not as eloquently as Charles Krauthammer puts it.  He writes, in part:
I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.
On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of “science” and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.
It gets even testier, but deservedly so.
And, nota bene, Krauthammer is not completely opposed to embryonic stem cell research. This complaint about bad thinking should be a concern of everyone, regardless of what side of the issue you are on.
Exposed ideology….
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Health, Philosophy, Res Publica, Science, Religion, or Both on March 14th, 2009
Some good reading from Michaela Kingston at Mercator.net (republished Creative Commons license) :
Pardon me, your ideology is showing
Not all barriers to stem cell science are bad, Mr President. And the biggest ones, like greed, one-upmanship, exploitation and hype, cannot be removed by executive order.
“Removing Barriers To Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells” is the title of the Executive Order signed on Monday by President Obama. The alleged barriers are “Presidential actions” that limited the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services over the past eight years. As a stem cell scientist and an American citizen, several things about Obama’s order and his accompanying remarks disturb me.
Let’s start with the title. It implies that after Monday there will be fewer barriers to responsible scientific research involving human stem cells. Is this true?
First of all, let’s distinguish between barriers to scientific research and barriers to responsible scientific research. Barriers to scientific research include the inherent limits of human creativity and intelligence, and the external limits imposed by laws and limited resources (eg, funding and personnel).
Barriers to responsible scientific research are myriad — and much harder to control. They include, above all, human ambition, which spurs us on to achieve great things, not only for the good of mankind but also for national and personal recognition. When this is combined with sloth and a lack of stiff penalties for the publication of fabricated data, it constitutes a serious barrier to responsible scientific research.
Another barrier is the diminishment of the dignity of a particular class of people. A barbaric example of this occurred not so long ago (with Federal funding!), when government researchers studied syphilis amongst African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1932-1972 — all in the name of finding cures (for Caucasians).
Yet another barrier to responsible research is pressure on scientists from media hype, special interest groups, lobbyists and a poorly informed but well-meaning public to pursue dead-end research.
Barriers to responsible research
Which of these barriers to responsible scientific research did Obama remove?
You could argue that he decreased scientific competition in the field of human embryonic stem cells by increasing funding. Fewer sharp elbows in frantic races for results should produce more responsible research, right? In theory, maybe. But in practice, we scientists love to study what’s most exciting — partly for the buzz, partly for the glory, and partly for the media coverage that will ensure continued funding. We have to eat, too, you know.
Maybe the barriers Obama removed were those which inhibited scientific research in general, not responsible scientific research. After all, everyone “knows” that Bush was an anti-science ideologue. His record must be full of barriers to science. Yet, when we focus on what he did for medical research, we see nothing of the sort.
Take National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. In President Clinton’s last year in office, the NIH budget was US$20.3 billion. Over the next two years, Bush increased that by more than 15 percent each year. His final budget proposal granted NIH $28.3 billion. More like Santa Claus than an anti-science ideologue, I think. Obama himself only asked for a 4 percent increase over that.
Were those barriers inherent in Bush’s science policy? According to Obama, Bush’s 2001 decision “limited federal funding” of ESC research. The fact is, Bush provided federal funding for ESC research where before there was none. In 1996 Congress passed the Dickey Amendment which prohibited both the creation of human embryos for research purposes and research in which human embryos are destroyed or discarded. Two years later, in 1998, human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) were first isolated. This created a “need” to destroy human embryos. As Clinton left office, he proposed guidelines, which, had they been enacted, would have allowed federal funding of all human ESC research as long as federal funds were not actually used to destroy the embryos.
Did Bush ban this ESC research? From the media reports you might think so. In fact, Bush liberalised the law. He opened the door to research on already-created embryonic stem cell lines. Like a true politician, he struck a compromise between squelching ESC research entirely and taxpayer-funded destruction of embryos.
Bush’s record
According to Obama, Bush’s decision was based on ideology, not scientific facts. Obama promises to support ESC research only when it is both “scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted”. But just think for a minute. Wouldn’t it have been irresponsible for Bush to throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a three-year-old technology? In 2001 no one had any idea whether or not ESC research was “scientifically worthy”. Full support at that stage would have been equivalent to parents beginning to pay Harvard tuition fees when their child was only three years old. No one responsible invests their family’s money in wildcat schemes; why should a president do so with taxpayers’ money?
But at least it’s clear now that ESC research is scientifically worthy, right? Actually, no.
ESCs may have the potential to cure many diseases. But after ten years and billions of dollars, they still have not realised their potential. In the meantime, stem cells isolated from adults have proven to be quite effective in relieving human suffering. Even better, if you’re on the ESC bandwagon, are “induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells”, which behave almost exactly like ESCs but do not involve embryo destruction. These iPS cells do not involve costly embryo manipulation and can be made from a patient’s own cells, avoiding immune rejection.
Safety and efficiency issues with iPS cells will most likely be resolved in a few more years. Remember, they were first created in 2006, so they are still toddlers. Even so, just as Bush gave federal funding to the promising toddler ESCs in 2001, he also encouraged the study of iPS cells, just a year after they were discovered, with Executive Order #13435.
Oddly enough, Obama revoked Executive Order #13435 on Monday. Why? Perhaps because it contains inconvenient Bush ideologies like Sec 2 (c): “the destruction of nascent life for research violates the principle that no life should be used as a mere means for achieving the medical benefit of another”.
Why is cloning “profoundly wrong”
President Obama, like President Bush, is a hard-nosed politician and makes decisions based on a mix of prejudices, ideologies and facts. Consider these sentences from his address: “And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.”
Why, Mr Obama? Surely science does not tell you that it is profoundly wrong. On the contrary, science would suggest that if the technical challenges of reproductive cloning can be overcome by scientists in the United States, it could help to “ensure America’s continued global leadership in scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs… [which] is essential not only for our economic prosperity, but for the progress of all humanity”.
If you’re from another country, I apologise. It has become synonymous with patriotism here to believe that the world will always be better off with America at its helm. I love my country; but unless we can curb our thirst for power over life, we will continue to seek cures for the wealthy, the educated and those with a voice at the expense of the poor, the ignorant, and those without a voice. We will continue to find ways of living “longer, healthier lives” until one day the words “terminal” and “incurable” really are gone from our vocabulary and we have arrived at a Brave New World.
Michaela Kingston is the nom de plume of an American stem cell researcher.
This article is published by Michaela Kingston, and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.
Morality is not ideology….
Posted by eweislogel in A Common Morality?, Health, Peripatetic Potpourri, Philosophy, Science, Religion, or Both, Wisdom on March 11th, 2009
On March 10, President Obama moved to relax restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s editorial for the day applauding the move was entitled “A Return to Science.” By”return” the Editors mean “from ideology.” There was also an editorial cartoon by Tony Auth on the same page depicting a giant scary monster labeled “Ideology” being summarily ejected from an institutional building labeled “science.” The basic idea conveyed by the editorial and the cartoon moved your Peripatetic Prattler to fire off an instructive letter to the Inquirer, which was printed in today’s edition of the paper. It is available, along with other letters and comments on this issue, here.
As is often the case with letters to the editor, the letter as printed is an edited version of the letter as sent. I appreciate mine being printed, and the edited version does convey the key point I tried to make. But here is the full, somewhat more provocative, letter, as sent:
To the Editors:
I write neither in defense nor in opposition to the President’s decision to loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, but rather to draw attention to an insidious idea that infects both the Inquirer’s editorial and Tony Auth’s editorial cartoon (3/10) on this issue. In claiming that the President’s “directive helps to separate ideology from scientific inquiry,†the Inquirer’s position tends to reduce morality to ideology. But this effectively opposes science to morality, and insofar as “science†is opposed to morality, it is no longer science but the ideology of “scientism.†This ideology dismisses as mere “ideologues†those opposed for moral reasons to using human embryos willy-nilly for scientific research. But this dismissal is not rooted in amoral scientific reasoning, but in its own deep-seated ideological presuppositions.
I’m not so sure “ideology†or morality can (or even should) be finally and completely separated from science, anyway. Ask yourself: Would you prefer that science drive morality (even if it drives it out of the public square)? Or would you prefer that morality drive science (even if it were to put the brakes on certain courses of research)? If the second option makes you nervous (as it clearly does the Inquirer), before you take the first option you might remember such “men of science†as Mengele and Kevorkian. Both held that being expert in “science†makes one expert in “morality.†Both believed that if science can do it, science should do it. That’s all the “morality†that’s needed—the rest is “ideology.†They would never “shut off a field of vast potential without knowing the possible results.â€
But morality is not based on the possible but on the good. Dismissing morality as “ideology†stifles debate and impoverishes democracy. Those of us who believe this are willing to live—and perhaps die, as someday we all must (a point we seem never to remember)—with option two.
Let me be very clear: I am not at all calling those in favor of embryonic stem cell research “Mengeles†and “Kevorkians.†I am cautioning against arguing like them when advocating for such research. There may well be, on balance, a stronger moral argument in favor of embryonic stem cell research than against it (the editorial mentions some important moral considerations). But the claim that we should engage in it simply because scientifically we can is not a scientific claim or a moral claim, but an ideological one—and a dangerous one at that.