Piles of Philosophy

Blind Chickens

2011-02-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

There is a natural genetic mutation that has been found in chickens that render them blind. This mutation, can be bred so that offsprings of the blind chickens will be blind as well. Now, fortunately enough, blind chickens are less stressed by overcrowded conditions, since they can't see. So these blind chickens can be raised in normal factory farm conditions without experiencing the same anxiety as normally sighted chickens do.

Should we breed blind chickens so that we can raise them in closer quarters?

Note that these chickens are born blind. They haven't been robbed of anything.... they never had it to begin with. If we don't breed these chickens, the alternative is that some other chicken will exist, that can see, and suffer more, than the chicken that is blind. And as much of an optimist as I am, I don't believe that factory farming will go away any time soon, so simply appealing to eliminate factory farms is naive at best. It would not take much to replace the chickens we have, with blind chickens, but it would take much more effort to redesign the way we farm chickens. So from a practical perspective, this is a way we can reduce the suffering of chickens immediately.

Breeding Smarter Babies

2011-02-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

Do we have an obligation to breed smarter babies? Julian Savulescu says yes!

I'm not sure he's entirely wrong. Levy, argues that we need to concentrate on helping Africa out of poverty, but that seems to me to be a red herring. That is a separate issue, and ideally, we should do both. If we could only do one, then perhaps Africa would be more important, since the vast amount of human suffering there is important to eliminate, as opposed to the benefits of a moderately or even greatly more intelligent population.

Often our obligations will lead us to conflicting things, but if we could do both, we should.

I'm really beginning to like the things that Savulescu is saying. He might be my second all-time favorite philosopher!

CFP: The Walking Dead and Philosophy

2010-12-07T15:41:00.000-08:00

Call For Papers
The Walking Dead and Philosophy

Currently we are accepting proposals for a volume to be published by Open Court press (currently under negotiation) on The Walking Dead and Philosophy. Proposals can be on either the comic book series by Robert Kirkman, or the AMC television series. Please send your 300-500 word length proposal and CV to Wayne Yuen via e-mail at: philosophyforthedeadATgmailDOTcom

The volume is planned to be released with the start of the next season of The Walking Dead on AMC, so authors will need to be able to quickly deliver their proposed chapter. Deadline for proposals will be Jan 1, 2011.

Possible topics chapter topics include:

“Maybe we’ll steal another one.” Should we still be ethical in a world ruled by the dead?; Is it ever morally acceptable to engage in looting?; Not so dead, Rick, Laurie, and Shane.; Losing innocence: Why is it more tragic for Carl to wrong others?; Fear the Hunters: The ethics of cannibalism; “He deserves better.” Do we have an obligation to kill zombies?; Why should we care? Ethics of care in a world of dead; Are Zombies animals? Are they morally valuable?; Is it wrong for Rick to value Carl more than others?; Can we keep it? Please? Pet zombies and the governor’s son.; Left for dead: Merle Dixon and our obligations; Should people have children in a world of the dead?; Justice and vengeance: Michonne and the Govenor. Zombies and sounds: Do they know something?; Rick’s phone: Hallucination or self-conversation?; Zombies, P-zombies and Zimboes: philosophy for the dead; Kill the dead! What does it mean to be dead?; Personal identity and zombies; Is the Governor’s son his son?; Are zombies determined beings?; Which Shane is Shane? The identity of characters between the comic and the show.; “We are the walking dead!” Facing death and life after death.; Zombies and intentionality; Is Rick being authentic? Kinds of life and leadership.; Andrea and feminism: Is kicking ass enough to be a feminist?; Machiavelli and The Governor: Rule of justice or tyranny?; Gabriel and the place of religion.

Other topics will also be happily considered.

I'm too busy being distracted by papers..

2010-11-22T15:48:00.000-08:00

But if you're interested, you can read this great little article on our attention span.
What was once normal, has become a problem.... Because we said so.

A couple of links

2010-11-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

First a video about the Westboro Baptist Church protest being undermined.
For those of you who don't know about the WBC, they're a rather fanatical group that protests anything having to do with homosexuality.... They protest soldier funerals regularly, because they believe that the deaths of our soldiers is God's punishment for our acceptance of a homosexuality.

Next, a link to a recent headline... A 10 year old girl in Spain recently gave birth to a baby. She's not the youngest person to give to a baby. She's almost twice as old as the youngest person to ever give birth...

Choosing a Disability

2010-11-04T08:47:00.000-07:00

Sharon Duchesneau and Candace McCullough are a lesbian couple that also happen to be deaf. In 2001, they decided that they wanted to have a baby. Instead of going to a sperm bank, they approached a deaf friend for a donation of sperm. What they were hoping was that their child would be deaf. In December of that year, they had a baby boy, healthy in all respects, except that he had total hearing loss in one ear, and mostly deaf in the other ear. The parents couldn't be more happy.

Sharon and Candace wanted their child to be deaf so that he could be part of the community/culture that they belong to, the deaf community. Part of being fully accepted in the deaf community is being deaf. This isn't to say that the hearing cannot participate in this community, but they would never really be apart of it in the same way that a deaf person is.

Did they do anything wrong? It seems like that they brought into existence, purposely, a child that has a disability by most accounts. However, the deaf community doesn't view deafness as a disability. In fact, the very existence of the culture is under assault, or at least that's how many view it, because of cochlear implants that can help deaf children hear to a certain extent. Usually these children are not allowed to learn sign language, so that they can more fully develop their hearing and speaking abilities.

Imagine that you had a child, but the child that you had was not a normal child. Your child gave off a strange pheromone that most people would find quite unattractive, with the exception of a few people who could not smell it. The people who could not smell it also give off the same pheromone. Your child finds solace and community within this subset of people, but you can't stand going to social gatherings with these people, because as much as you love your child, the aroma is overpowering. You can tolerate your child's aroma, but only because there is one of her. A group would simply be too much. Would it sadden you to know that you will never be part of the community that your child finds significant solace in, that this community would be doing more to instill values and teaching her how to navigate through life than you as her parent would? If so, then perhaps you have an understanding of why Candace and Sharon wanted a deaf child.

This case has a lot of nuances to it. Whats a disability? Is designing a child like how Sharon and Candace did wrong? Was there harm done to the child?

On the other hand, would there be any significant difference if Sharon and Candace, after their perfectly hearing baby was born, simply put the baby's crib next to the stereo and played incredibly loud music to ensure that it would lose their hearing? (I think there would be.)

A general message to Anonymous

2010-10-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

So the last few days I've been getting comments on my blog that I've been deleting as trolling comments. I've enabled registration, so you can't comment anonymously anymore.

But I just wanted to respond in general to some of the accusations that this person has been making about me.

1. I'm a sad person.
True. I am. I've never admitted to being a very happy person. Nor do I get a lot of traffic on my blog. Most blogs in the world don't. If yours gets a lot of traffic, consider yourself lucky. But the traffic on my blog does not make me sad. I'm generally indifferent to it.

2. I have poor reasoning/ utilize naive reasoning.
Argue with me then! Tell me where I'm wrong! But Ad hominem attacks aren't exactly the hallmark of good reasoning either.

And finally, if you don't like my blog, you're not compelled to read it. I'm sure you can find plenty of other blogs out there that will suit your needs.

What would Plato listen to?

2010-10-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

So I'm lecturing on Plato's Republic tonight, and it just occurred to me, that I could make it a music appreciation night.... Well at least partly.

But then I was stumped. I didn't know what kind of music would correspond to the Lydian, Ionian, Phrygian or Dorian modes.

See, Plato thought that the Ionian, and Lydian modes were to energetic, and may cause the guardians of the Republic to become frenzied and turn on the citizens. They had to be censored for safety. Funeral dirges would also need to be censored, since the guardians can't think death is a bad thing.

But on the other hand, the Dorian and Phrygian modes seemed to be good for military purposes. It could help coordinate marching and such. These would not be censored.

So... What kinds of music would Plato listen to today? I haven't a clue since most of this talk about musical modes is completely alien to me. But with a little Googling, I came up with a few things that I think Plato would not approve of, and some things that Plato would approve of.

Banned music:
Gin Blossom's Hey Jealousy It's lydian
Anything by Flogging Molly Irish music is predominantly Ionian
Wish you were here by Pink Floyd or Rasputina Its a funeral dirge.

Allowed music:
Another Brick in the Wall Part II by Pink Floyd Its Dorian
Sweet Dreams by the eurythmics I'm not sure if this is Phrygian.... Google says its either phrygian or Aeolian. Plato doesn't say anything about the Aeolian mode in the Republic. If it isn't Phrygian, then I don't have any examples of a Phrygian song.

Anyone out there with a better grasp of music theory, willing to lend me a hand here?

Everyday ethics: The Smartphone

2010-10-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

So I had the recent fortune of being at a forum for candidates running for a public office. I'm not going to be any more specific than that, so as not to publicly make any kind of spectacle or anything.

One of the candidates during the forum was using their smartphone to look up statistics on the internet while answering questions. This struck me as unprofessional. Here's someone looking unprepared, googling things on his/her phone DURING the forum.

But then I asked myself, "Am I just being a stogy old guy?" I admit that I'm not very old (32) and I'm by no means a technophobe (although I don't have a cell phone because I don't think it would be very useful to me, but on the flip side, I've been using the internet since it was all text based and the best search engine around was the world wide web worm).

So was I being silly? Lets imagine that in the minds of today's youths, or in this case this particular candidate, they think, "Why research in advance? I have the ability to research on the fly, so I'll do that, which will probably yield me better results than researching beforehand and trying to remember it all." Which isn't to say is false. It probably is true. I know I've made arguments that I couldn't exactly back up with facts, but knew to be true, and challenged people to google it. They do, and I'm right. Is that much different?

So lets say this is the case. Can I really knock him/her down for not being prepared in advance, when that was his/her plan? His/her preparedness is at the tips of his/her fingers.

Its entirely possible that what s/he gets from his/her phone contradicts what s/he was going to say. S/he would have to come up with an argument on the fly to make his/her position match the data. Of course many candidates have to do that when faced with questions. But without being prepared, his/her argument might suffer. But what if s/he's a fantastic arguer? Then this really wouldn't be a "weakness" for this candidate. Heck it might be something to encourage.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I can't find a legitimate reason to devalue this person's decision, yet I found it extremely off-putting.

Am I judging this person purely on social convention, or is there really something wrong with what this person did?

NPR Fires Juan Williams

2010-10-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

Hmm... I find the firing of Juan Williams an overreaction.

I statements are what people are supposed to use in counseling and in heated discussions, and an I statement is indeed what Juan Williams used. He says,

"Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

This seems like the second firing for "bigoted" statements that strikes me as terribly unjust this year.

What worries me more is that this helps stifle real discussion about racial tensions in America. If we can't honestly express how we feel when confronted with certain minorities, then we can make no progress in solving the problem, only progress in pretending that the problem doesn't exist.

Surrogacy and abortion

2010-10-17T16:25:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting case. A surrogate pregnancy, and the parents find out that the fetus is most likely going to be born with Down's syndrome. They wanted the surrogate to have an abortion, the surrogate didn't want to.

I'm not sure she was obligated to have an abortion, but the parents were not legally (by contract) required to raise the child if they didn't want it. So the surrogate would have to care for the child, or she would have to give it up for adoption.

There's something to be said about personal autonomy, and the limits of it. I hate to put limits on personal autonomy, and this case doesn't seem to push me into limiting it. The surrogate gets to decide whether or not she should have an abortion, because it is her body, but its not her baby. To an extent she's limited part of her autonomy in accepting someone else's baby in her body. She can't just have an abortion without their permission, but they can't compel her to have an abortion.

In the end, she had an abortion. Probably, for the best.

The Gulf Spill

2010-10-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

It was a disaster. Hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. Miles of coast line. Uncountable number of animals affected.

Was it morally bad?

Seems like an easy answer right? But why is it morally bad? It was after all, unintentional. It was an accident. It wasn't a malicious act, or an act that was done out of pure recklessness (I'll address this in a second).

Typically speaking, we don't call accidents something that is morally blameworthy. BP didn't do anything morally wrong, if it was an accident (lets set aside the moral questionability of drilling for oil in general).

But we could call the spill a reckless act, if it people weren't taking proper precautions and being generally reckless with their actions. Reckless behavior is something we can hold someone, or in this case some entity, morally accountable for. But there's good reason to think that this was not a reckless action. They were following the law. Sure companies can always go beyond the law in terms of safety, and lets imagine that they did, and the spill still happened. People would still blame BP for being not safe enough. Hindsight is 20/20 right? Its no wonder that none of the other major oil companies would admit a mea culpa on drilling without blowout preventers or a working plan to solve oil spills. So in that regard they are all equally morally culpable, since no one had such a working plan.

I'm not seriously suggesting that BP didn't have any moral wrong on their hands, but the more I think about it, the more it seems difficult to pin some kind of serious moral wrong onto BP.

Phillipa Foot

2010-10-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

I just found out that Phillipa Foot passed away on October 3rd. We've lost a great philosopher, one of the few who can say that they've created a whole new sub-discipline in philosophy, completely unintentionally. Trolleyology. Yes, Phillipa Foot came up with the Trolley Problem, and Judith Jarvis Thompson added to it the fat man.

I would turn the Trolley to kill 5 random people, if it meant saving Phillipa Foot.

So in her honor, I open up her infamous question to everyone.... What would you do, if faced with the decision of killing 5 random strangers on a runaway trolley, or turning the trolley to kill 1 random stranger. What about a doctor who has 5 dying patient and 1 healthy patient whom he can kill to make the other 5 live? And what exactly is the moral difference between the two?

Sex acts and Nuclear Waste

2010-10-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

So the gist of the argument for those of you who have forgotten, or didn't read it, having sex with someone while you knowingly are infected with HIV or something similar, without disclosure, is like burying nuclear waste in someone's backyard that will slowly cause them to get cancer and die.

First I think non-disclosure of most STDs is not a big deal. Most STDs are not life threatening, and at most mildly inconvenient. There are others that are most definitely not benign, but the more benign ones get lumped into the STD category, and people have an incredible fear of STDs, mostly born out of misinformation, ignorance, and lack of understanding. The prejudicial status of these STDs might prevent people from entering into a relationship, or might end an existing relationship. If steps can be taken to prevent transmission, then they should be, without thereby sacrificing the intimate relationship.

But non-disclosure of HIV status and similar life-altering STDs can be very harmful, and I think a person has an obligation to disclose.

But I have a problem with the analogy. Burying nuclear waste in someone's backyard requires them not to know about it. This is more akin to a kind of rape, rather than sex with consent. And when people do consent to sex, most people are well aware that there is a risk of being transmitted an STD, benign or life-threatening. Anyone not aware of this is hopelessly naive, and consequently could never truly give their consent to sexual intercourse, since they are not informed of the risks. (I think there is a moral principle that can be drawn from this... Don't have sex with dumb people, since it would amount to some kind of statutory rape. There might be exceptions to this rule [I'm thinking of the mentally handicapped] but they would be few and far between.)

We don't typically think that people digging in our yard comes with the risk of radiation exposure. Even if we make this example closer to sex, by having say a treasure hunter knock on the person's door, and ask if they could dig up their yard, and with permission, they dig up the yard, leaving behind nuclear waste... etc. it would not be expected that this would happen.

So does this weaken the analogy any? I think it does. I accept his conclusions for the most part, but maybe not to the same degree (see above with the talk about benign STDs), but that doesn't mean the argument is a good one.

Don't Ask Don't Tell

2010-09-21T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'll come back to the STDs being compared to nuclear waste. I promise.

It really irritates me to see how Republicans are currently threatening a filibuster of a bill that will repeal don't ask don't tell. Now there might be a dozen and a half reasons to filibuster the bill, since its attached to other legislation etc. But McCain was waving the flag for why DADT shouldn't be repealed yet yesterday.

He's worried about our troop morale. He's worried that openly gay service members would affect troop morale to the extent that they wouldn't be able to do their jobs as well.

McCain clearly doesn't think very highly of our enlisted. To degrade our troops in saying that they're training isn't sufficient for them to stand next to a gay man or woman without being distracted from their job because they're too worried somebody is going to hit on them is insulting to our armed forces. We have the best trained military in the world. These men and women are disciplined, intelligent, and brave. But of course they all turn into Junior high kids when there is a queer near by right?

To be fair, McCain didn't say that. But I'm pretty confident that what he did say has similar implications, if not so hyperbolic. DADT never should have been in existence. And its about time we get rid of it.

Criminalizing sexual behaviors

2010-08-30T17:15:00.001-07:00

I just want to share the link with you.... I'll comment on the subject later.

Miracles

2010-08-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

Apparently 79% of Americans believe in miracles. This isn't anything new. In fact the number itself is staggeringly persistent. Be it 2010, or 1990 its usually around 80-90 percent.

I think there is something wrong here. I think the problem, isn't with the belief itself, because if you talked to the average American about this particular belief, you'll quickly find that miracles turn out to be rather mundane things. People surviving a hurricane or an earthquake is a miracle. Someone gets a kidney transplant, its a miracle. Someone wins the lottery, its a miracle. Someone finds a parking space in San Francisco, its a miracle.

The concept of the miraculous itself has degraded from something that circumvents the very laws of nature and logic (Jesus walking on water, resurrecting from the dead, pulling an infinite amount of food from a finite basket, etc.) to something that is improbable....

And sometimes not even to that degree. Its not improbable to die in an earthquake. The reverse is true. It's highly improbable that ANYONE will die in an earthquake. Move to California, the probability will no doubt increase. But the last big earthquake, Loma Prieta, caused 58 people to die, in an area where there was approx 2 million people (estimating here... San Jose has a pop of about a million now, and SF the same). 58 out 2 million isn't exactly highly probable.

So whats the point? The point is that when we adopt the use of a term, in a figurative sense, like miracle, to every day occurrences, we start changing the way we perceive the world. No longer is it figurative after a while. It really is a miracle when I find a parking space, God guided my steering wheel towards the area of the park where I would find a vacant parking space, which then reinforces my idea of God.

"Miracle" isn't the only term that this is happening to. "Hero," especially after 9/11 is being degraded into something below what was or is heroic. "Evil" is another term I think that is being thrown around without much attention. But both of these, I think don't have the same ramifications as miracle does, since it directly reinforces a questionable ontological belief.

The Mosque

2010-08-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

I can't get away from this issue. Its on the daily show, its on the front page of google news, its on the news every other day. So lets think about it some.

There seems to be a two groups of people talking past each other, and then there's President Obama. One group, wants to emphasize that this is insensitive to New Yorkers, Americans, and survivors of the 9/11 attack. The other group wants to emphasize that there is a right to freedom of religion, and that to deny the building of the Mosque/cultural center would be in violation of the Constitution, which New Yorkers, Americans, and the survivors of 9/11 attack think make America so great in the first place.

President Obama recently came out and said... well... Both. In one press conference he said that he supports the legal right to build the cultural center/mosque, but in another interview, he said that it wasn't terribly well thought out.

Now this might sound like political double-talk to save face, minimize the impact it might have on future elections for Democrats, etc. but I actually think it may encapsulate the issue quite nicely.

Neither group are holding a position that is mutually exclusive. I can believe that group X has a right Y, but the exercise of right Y in instance Z would be offensive. A right doesn't mean that the exercise of the right wouldn't be offensive.

I might have every right to speak my mind, but doing so may offend some people that I care about very dearly. So I might hold my tongue, and doing so, doesn't destroy my right, or weaken my right to free speech, but rather emphasizes my care and sensitivity towards others.

I think there is a secondary concern here. Islam and Muslim culture in general has already been demonized in American culture, since 9/11. Generally, Muslims are treated with suspicion and caution, or at least it seems like it. They're the new Communist. Undeservedly, of course, since this is a broad generalization of a particular group, based upon the most extreme members of that group. Every group is filled with lunatics, but to paint all Christians as abortion clinic bombers or invading crusaders, would be unfair.

Marginalized groups in a sense, need to work extra hard to be accepted. This isn't fair, but its the way it is. We've seen this before with racially oppressed groups, particularly African Americans. For an African American to participate in the normal walks of life, initially, they had to be head and shoulders better than everyone else. They needed to be Jackie Robinson, instead of some very good baseball player. They had to go above and beyond the "minimum qualifications" to be able to participate. Fair? No.

So either we can change the culture of America (unlikely), and make it more fair for Muslim and those of the Islamic faith, or they have to tread more carefully than others. Personally, I wish we could change the culture of America. Reiterate equality, tolerance, and understanding. But I also have a practical side of me too. I think the Mosque should be built, and nobody would complain about it at all. Of course, that won't happen.

I think Feisal Abdul Rauf should really think carefully about how this would impact how Americans view Muslim and Islamic culture. There is a risk that they may become more marginalized because of the perceived insensitivity of the act of building the Mosque/cultural center, which wouldn't be beneficial for anyone really. But on the other hand, it may bring to the forefront the real Muslim and Islamic culture. It may force people to reconsider their prejudices. But I have a feeling that would be wishful thinking. Those who are vehemently against the project, are unlikely to visit the Mosque/cultural center with an open mind, trying to learn about the those that they have already made a private demonizing judgment.

Euthanasia's terrible reputation

2010-06-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

I find it odd that people have serious reservations about euthanasia still. This isn't to say that there aren't serious considerations that need to be taken into consideration about whether it should be performed in this instance or that instance. But the act, generally, is hard to deny.

Perhaps, its because of its association with the Nazi party that really made things difficult for euthanasia to gain a foothold in the public consciousness. I think, though, this is a product of the unfortunately powerful Nazi propaganda machine more than anything. To say that the Nazi's engaged in euthanasia is like saying a straight man is being discriminatory towards males. Its a misuse of the term.

When the Nazi's utilized "euthanasia" the state determined when it was acceptable for a person to live or die, not based on any particular medical condition, patient desire, or quality of life issue, but rather based on a perceived inferiority of a particular group. We properly call this genocide, and although many today call it that, its hard to shake the synonymous relationship that history made between genocidal acts and euthanasia.

When I speak about euthanasia, I'm referring to a medical practice of terminating a life because the person is terminally ill. The least controversial form of euthanasia, is voluntary euthanasia, where the person to be euthanize is terminally ill and requests euthanasia. There are cases that fall in-between these definitions, and although they are very difficult, I wouldn't call them euthanasia. I'm thinking of cases in which a person is not terminally ill, but requests to be killed because of quality of life issues and their inability to terminate their own lives. The film "Million Dollar Baby" is a good example of such a case.

Surely, we can see the moral differences between the Nazi genocide program, and euthanasia. The Nazis murdered people who wanted to continue to live. If they did want to die, it is most likely because of the conditions that the Nazi's forced them to endure within concentration camps. Causing a person to suffer from a terminal illness is just as bad as murdering them. In the case of euthanasia, assumedly, the doctor or the government did not cause directly their current afflictions, nor is their choice for living out the remainder of their life taken away from them.

Old associations die hard though. (This is by no means a full account of why euthanasia is acceptable. This is simply an account of why a very common objection to euthanasia is not a powerful objection.)

Jeff McMahn on Vegetarianism

2010-06-08T18:22:00.000-07:00

Philosophy Bites did a pretty good interview with Jeff McMahn on vegetarianism. I think he's a bit wrong about his comments on fish (the pain aspect and how less objectionable it is because of it). I'll say more about it after I think about the interview a bit more.

Freegans

2010-06-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

A NYtimes article on a group of squatters living a freegan life. Although I'm not going to advocate freeganism or an entire freegan lifestyle (free houses, really?), I can't really say that I find it wrong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Squatters-t.html?hp

Synthetic life

2010-06-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

I'm watching the science channel's "Creating Synthetic Life" discussion panel on TV right now.... and Paula Zahn makes me want to cry. Her toughest ethical questions for the panel are "Are we playing god?" and "It scares me."

They did talk about bio-terrorism, but they dismissed the objection rather quickly with something to the effect of,
"human beings are cruel to each other, but this also has the potential to be very beneficial to us as well." This is very true, but if a terrorist group can literally manufacture any virus that they have sequenced, then a hemorrhagic virus could cause quite a lot of damage before anyone can do much about it. She should have pressed much harder on these points.

But overall, I'm in support of this research. I'm actually far more excited by this then stem cell research has ever excited me (which it never did much). Whereas stem cell research might provide many medical breakthroughs, synthetic biology could allow us to create new sources of fuel, help clean up oil spills, remove carbon from the atmosphere, etc. SCR benefits are almost exclusively medicinal, synthetic biology is affects everything from energy, to manufacturing, to medicine, to food, to well, anything that we can get living things (bacteria) to produce.

The confederate flag

2010-05-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

So I think most of the media hoopla has died down over this. Its kinda weird when something practically in your backyard garners national attention.

Anyways, I wasn't terribly interested in this particular story as hugely problematic issue. I think it is just a bunch of teenagers getting upset and offended over really nothing. "ZOMG! He's wearing a flag! He must be disrespecting >ME<" as if the world revolved around themselves.

But what >I< did find rather offensive was one particular student. One of the "American" flags that one student was wearing was an image of multiple flags, including the American flag, on the back, and the confederate flag on the front.

Why is the confederate flag a symbol of patriotism? Its a symbol of a failed cessationist movement that threatened to DESTROY America in Civil War. A cessationist movement sparked over and largely motivated by the desire to enslave people. If you're going to pick a symbol that would represent your patriotism, then I'd humbly suggest that you pick a different symbol.

Worst yet, it doesn't even seem to give with the social rhetoric that people often tout. Love America or leave it. The south apparently didn't LOVE America so they tried to leave it. So waving the confederate flag suggests that one doesn't love America.

Now, I'm sure some would say that there is a certain patriotic overtone to the the confederate flag. The American ethos of forging ahead, doing thing differently, independent spirit. But we don't celebrate our failures. We don't hoist up for all to see DDT and exclaim, Forging ahead! Independent Spirit!

Perhaps its a symbol of Southern culture? I'm not opposed to symbolizing particular sects of the our nation by a flag. Heck, each part of our nation has particular symbols that represent them. The Hollywood sign, The Golden Gate Bridge, The Empire State Building all represent subcultures of our nation. Put it on a flag, and wave it, and you've got yourself a symbol. But to pretend that the confederate flag doesn't represent a pro-slavery movement is like pretending rainbow flags show your support for rain.

Wear a peach. Wear a cotton ball. Wear a plantation house. Wear a mint julep. Wear Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane. But don't wear the General Lee.

Why I am not a Localvore

2010-05-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a pretty good read on the Greening up our food, and why it may be hurting the impoverished around the world. Oddly, he doesn't make the most obvious argument for helping the impoverished world and that is simply buying food products from those that can export them. As more people become localvores, foreign farmers lose more consumers, pushing them further into poverty. Now Paarlberg is concentrating on those who are in much worse conditions, and I agree those are people we should assist first.

But this is where I start disagreeing with him. First, he says that we should bring the industrial model to Africa. Now we have tried industrial models in Africa, and they don't succeed because, infrastructure aside, its too expensive. In America we give farmers heavy subsidies to ensure a reliable income in times when crops fail because of weather, or whatever other reason. These subsidies also keep food prices artificially low, making them affordable by all (at least for the staple crops like corn and wheat).

Second, when he says that the industrial model does not create unsafe food, he seems to be focusing only on plants. With crops, he's correct. With livestock, he's incorrect. In fact, most outbreaks involving crops, are usually traced back to livestock. But he conveniently forgets this when he brings up fertilizer run-offs. Suddenly farming includes livestock again.

So what about animal manure and fertilizers? First, fertilizers and pesticides are already OVER used. If there is little financial incentive to avoid over fertilizing and over spraying, other than you're wasting product, but the product is already dirt cheap as it is, and the losses are could be significant if you UNDER fertilize and spray, farmers tend to err on the side of overuse. This is the profit first thinking that characterizes industrial food production. So his analysis that organic farming would be worse, because the amount of livestock would increase is simply flawed. First, if we simply had fewer livestock, we would have less need for cropland, since most of our cropland is devoted to feeding our livestock. Second, if we utilized manure instead of petroleum based fertilizers, industrial farmers would aim to UNDER fertilize than over fertilize, since it would be more expensive, and increase the risk of E. coli which could significantly damage their brand marketability.

But Paarlberg does bring up many good points about the green revolution in food, like organic not being particularly healthier, or safer for that matter. The industrial argiculture is becoming more green, and more efficient, as always, and in many ways this is better for the environment.

Strangely, Paarlberg doesn't suggest the easiest way that we can aid the impoverished of the world. Donate money to them. World poverty rates have dropped almost in half from the 60s to today, largely due to the work of NGOs. World poverty does not have to continue to exist. If we have been able to reduce world poverty in half in 50 years, we could eliminate it in probably 20 more years if we simply gave money, in a responsible manner, to assist them.

4/20

2010-04-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I've never smoked pot. Not that I'm against pot, or anything, but I'm just not the kind of person who likes to have fun by ingesting chemicals. I don't drink very much, if ever at all either.

I have my sympathies with people who want to legalize pot for medical purposes, and my suspicions about people who want to legalize pot for recreational purposes.... I'm not sure I'd vote for legalization for recreational purposes, but if it passed, I wouldn't be terribly upset over it. Heck, I wouldn't be upset at all, I just might go and buy a legal joint and join in the party that would inevitably follow.

But, I think people who advocate legalization for recreational purposes have a steep up-hill climb to face. One of the biggest hurdles is an appearance of legitimacy. Some may have some very good legitimate arguments for recreational legalization, (I'm not convinced though...) but the movement's face isn't a very good one.

Take a look at these pictures. These aren't exactly representative of the movement, but this is what many people think of when people think of legalization. In particular, look at pictures 3 and 7.

Picture 3 shows a clearly underage kid using a bong. Not exactly a responsible face to present, although I'm sure nobody was objecting to this around them. Encouraging children to smoke pot, or to do any kind of recreational drug, I think is rather irresponsible. And before supporters ask, Yes, I would say that to caffeine as well. Utilizing a drug for recreational purposes needs to have a stronger justification than its fun, in the same way as driving a Hummer is fun. Sure, there isn't likely going to be catastrophic effects from one person driving a hummer around for fun, but it begins to foster a kind of character that I'm not sure many, if anyone would call intrinsically valuable. What kind of character does it foster exactly? Look at Picture 7.

Picture 7 shows a pregnant woman at a 4/20 event. Now, it doesn't show her smoking, but second hand smoke can have adverse effects on the health of a fetus, be it tobacco or pot. I think it shows a kind of reckless disregard of consequences, in favor of the momentary pleasure. Basically, a hedonistic lifestyle.

Again, I'm not strongly against legalization for recreational use, but I think at the very least it needs a better face.

Free Speech vs. Animal Cruelty

2010-04-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court today voted 8-1 to overturn a previous ban on animal cruelty videos because it unconstitutionally restricts free speech.

I'm not sure what to think about this. On one hand, I deeply respect the freedom of speech. On the other hand, I think that anything that supports animal cruelty should be stopped, including videos of dog fighting, cockfighting, etc.

Video depictions of cockfighting and dog fighting, encourage more of the same because if the videos sell well, then it is another source of revenue for dog fighting organizers. Much like child pornography, the more of it that is consumed, the more individuals are exploited. I would roll Bumfights into the same category. Similar to bumfights, when a particular dog becomes well known, or a successful fighter, that may create a stronger demand for videos of the dog.

But on the other hand, I'm also weary about carving out swathes of untouchable areas of the world that we do not have freedom of speech over. But, like child pornography, I think there are areas in the world that demand just that.

I like what Justice Alito says in the dissenting opinion, "The Court strikes down in its entirety a valuable statue, that was enacted not to suppress speech, but to prevent horrific acts of animal cruelty."

The social costs of being vegetarian

2010-04-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a pretty interesting interview with Melissa McEwen on Let them Eat Meat. I've posted my main objection with Melissa's position, but I also want to say, that I might be splitting hairs here, since her diet isn't one that I would particularly disagree with (it sounds like she is what Singer would call a conscientious omnivore).

Over here Pamela JSW writes that we ought not be vegetarians because of the harm it does to us! In the interview above, Melissa suggests one of the wrongs of a vegetarian diet is that it affects the family dynamic. No longer can a single dish feed the entire family, but people must bend around the individual's eating preferences. Pamela makes the same argument in her first argument.

These are the social costs of being a vegetarian. Are these enough reasons not the be a vegetarian? (I'm not suggesting here that Melissa is saying that it is. Pamela says this problem is surmountable) I think that these should be taken seriously as concerns, since they do affect lots of people (everyone you know and would like to eat with you essentially), and they affect particularly the people you care about (family and friends).

Being vegetarian is more than just choosing for yourself. Its also being accommodating of others. I'd never dream to invite myself over to a friend's house and demand a meat free meal. If I'm invited, I might expect that they would take my eating choices into consideration. But when I invite friends over, I also take their eating choices into consideration as well. That's simple politeness. Does this mean I sometimes buy meat? Yes. Not much, and not very often, but I do. Does this go counter to my personal beliefs? Yes.

But if I were a christian, and I invited someone over to my house, I wouldn't necessarily expect them to come to church with me. There is a line somewhere in the hazy sands that we must draw, but where that line is, I don't expect to have an easy answer. If my friend were Muslim and asked if she could pray while she was at my home, I wouldn't object.

Pamela's third argument however, is a little more interesting. She says that being a vegetarian may cause me to look down on others, in a moral way. Seeing most of my friends are not vegetarians makes me look at them as morally inferior, or with a defected character, which would harm the relationships that I hold with them.

Now, I don't think is an absolute. If you're a veg, or vegan that you will look down on others. I think I do it every day. Rather, instead, I think it might be indicative of a flaw in your own character, a kind of moral judgmental-ness. Instead of evaluating a person as a whole in their moral character, one fixates on simply a particular aspect of their character. Now no doubt, people can be bad people because of an aspect of their character, and ignore that aspect, they're a great person. But a wise person (since we're talking virtue theory) would be able to distinguish between acts that tarnish the whole of a person's character, versus ones that do not. I'm not sure diet is one that is, so I don't judge people based on their eating habits.

Understanding animals, Understanding pain.

2010-04-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

Is it really possible for us to understand an animal's experience? I'm not sure that it is. Clearly, there are classic arguments like Nagel's What is it like to be a bat, that shows that we will never know the subjective experience of having sonar from just looking at their brains. I will never know the subjective experience of giving birth. But this doesn't prevent me from understanding the pain that a woman is feeling when she is giving birth.

How do I understand this? There are two ways. 1. I can talk to her and ask her to describe what she's feeling. This is the most obvious route, but its the less used route, strangely. (Ma'am, you're currently screaming and there is a child coming out of your uterus, please rate on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the worst pain you've ever felt in your life, and 1 being in no pain at all, how you're feeling. Is it a sharp pain? Is it an ache?) 2. The argument by analogy. She is generally analagous to me. She has two arms, two legs, a head, etc. She yelps in pain like I do when I stub my toe. She's screaming in pain, like I would if I were experiencing something quite painful and traumatic. So she must be experiencing something quite painful and traumatic.

Both of these investigations into pain however a fundamentally flawed. The argument by analogy doesn't give us a guarantee, or even a reasonable assurance that the experiences will be similar. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because of what my doctor told me recently. Before my MRI, my doctor said that if he suspects that I have what he thinks I have, that he would be very surprised that I'm not in more pain. Indeed, I did have what he thought I had, a herniated disc. And I was in some considerable pain, but I guess I have a rather high tolerance for pain. And so long as it isn't in my head (I use to get frequent headaches/migranes), I could deal with it. So whereas my doctor would have been exhibiting much more pain responses (moaning groaning, complaining about the pain, or whatnot), I did not. Did that mean I was experiencing less pain than he was thinking? Not necessarily.

The direct route, also is flawed. After my surgery, the nurse asked me to describe the pain that I was in, and what kind of pain I was willing to tolerate (to help gauge how much medication to give me). I said I was probably at a 6, and could tolerate an 8. She looked back at me, and said, "Remember, 10 is the worst pain you've ever experienced in your life." I said, "Yeah. This is definately not the worse pain I've experienced in life, but it definately hurts. But I could definately tolerate it." This was put to the test later, when I had physical therapy for the first time. The PT made me stand up and walk around. Its amazing how much your head weighs. My neck is in excruciating pain (even with a pre-hit of morphine). But I walked about 3x farther than the PT expected me to walk. Ask me to rate that walk on a scale of 1-10, I'd say it was about an 8. I definately didn't tolerate the walk very well, and even called my PT the "Bad Man" when he came back the next day for another round of torture (the second time included a walk all the way down the hall and back, some exercises with a fake step, and then I pushed him to let me walk up a flight of stairs).

So what did this all mean in terms of communicating my pain? Was I experiencing less pain than others? Was I more tolerant of the pain that I experienced compared to others? Both? Neither? I haven't a clue.

So if I can't understand pain of others in any meaningful way, how can I make an argument by analogy with something that doesn't share a body deisgn like mine? Does it hurt a cow when I poke him with a stick? I certainly can't ask her.

eww gross

2010-04-14T17:42:00.000-07:00

So if you want to see what I look like after the operation walking around without gauze.... click here. You don't actually see my sutures or anything, because its behind a some plastic tape and under that is blood and benzene and stuff they used to keep it from getting infected. In a couple of days I should have a better picture for you.

The picture is pretty high resolution, so you should be able to zoom into it pretty good.

surgery went well

2010-04-12T19:33:00.000-07:00

recovery is estimated to be 6-8 weeks. you use you neck for a lot more than you think you do. sitting is very tiring.

I'll be out for a few....

2010-04-08T18:15:00.001-07:00

I've been having arm pain since last Feburary, I got an MRI Tuesday and met with my doctor today. On top of a herniated disc in my neck which is pressing on my nerve to my arm (hence the pain) I have a congenital defect in my spine. Essentially, where my spine should be floating in spinal fluid, there is a severe narrowing that is putting pressure on my spinal cord. They need to cut a door of sorts in my vertebrae to relieve the pressure. Its really lucky I herniated my disc, otherwise if went untreated, I could be paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident quite easily. Also if untreated, I'll slowly become paralyzed.

I'm going into the hospital tonight, and getting surgery tomorrow.

Wish me luck!

An aside to my students:
I'm not exactly sure when I'll be back to work. Please show up to class as normal, instructions will be given to you.

What (if Anything) Is Wrong with Bestiality

2010-04-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Ever since Peter Singer suggested that bestiality was morally permissible not too long ago, I've been puzzled by why its not completely obvious to most people that bestiality isn't wrong. Sometimes it just takes someone pointing out the obvious to stir the pot.

Neil Levy defends Singer's point that bestiality is not wrong. He writes:

Thus, though there is nothing immoral about bestiality, it might nevertheless be irrational for us to cross this boundary. It would be difficult to do so while yet retaining a strong grip on our identity.

So here's some context. Levy spends most of his paper responding to possible moral objections to bestiality: it is a perversion, there is no consent, animals have a lower cognitive ability, it wrongfully utilizes animals as a means to an end, it inculcates vices in our character. He rejects all of these arguments.

But then, he switches gear and talks about our identity as a species. We determine who and what we are by the limits of our abilities, upper and lower. He writes:

In fact, both sets of limits, upper and lower, are in part definitive of humanity. My suggestion is this: The set of limits definitive of human life contains elements from many different sources. Some of them, like the limit represented by human mortality and by our physical bodies in general, are given by nature.... Others, however, are cultural limits. They are the products of the collective imagining of a people. They are, however no less identity constituting for all that. These two sets of limits are nively captured by the word "humanity."

So as a people, we can define ourselves by the natural limits on our bodies and socio-cultural limits that we impose on ourselves. Good so far.

But our lower limits, which are largely culturally defined, are also identity constituting.... if we cross our upperbounds, we will cease to be human, becoming something different and not necessarily better. If we cross our lower limits, a similar fate threatens. To transgress this boundary might be to move to another form of life, in which characteristic human activities have no place or are transformed in ways unimaginable from here. This might be a limit we cannot cross while yet retaining our sense of who we are.

This seems pretty flimsy. If our lower boundaries, in this case, bestiality, is culturally defined, then why must this definition be the "correct" definition? Levy says we have no real reason to think that it is. These boundaries are flexible, like he states above.

...To the extent that someone engages in bestiality, she will find it harder to retain a grip on her identity as a full member of our community, and we will find it harder to admit her to full membership.

So if we take this position seriously, we might be able to say something like, homosexuality is outside the identity of humanity, and so we should avoid homosexuality because we might not retain our sense of "humanity." Levy has a reply:

...We needn't be scared of the prospect of a new communitarian homophobia. Arguing against homosexuality that it represents a crossing of a signifcant limit places any prohibition against it precisely where it ought to be: in the open, in the realm of public and democratic discourse. When we realize that the taboo is socially defined, we can begin to assess its costs and its benefits; Given that a taboo against homosexuality would seem to impose a major cost upon a significant minority of the population, I suspect that it would not long stand such public scrutiny.

So because social taboos against homosexuality impose a major cost (sexual and social freedomsI would imagine) on homosexuals, it wouldn't stand public scrutiny. Wouldn't a taboo on bestiality do the same for those who wish to engage in it? After all, Levy just finished saying that we would find it hard to admit these people full membership in what we call "humanity." And for what? A socially defined lower bottom floor of what makes a person part of humanity. This sure sounds an awful lot like: "Most people really don't like it."

But wait:

This is not to say that we must retain the taboo against bestiality. The limits which define our humanity, in the sense here at stake, are, by nature, contingent and shifting.... If this i the case for our upper limits, which are importantly natural in origin, then how much more is it true with regard to the culturally defined lower limits?

Clearly, they would have to be MORE true right? Surely its much harder to make someone live 110 years than it is to say that homosexuals should be respected.
Levy finishes with:

Nevertheless, if these considerations are correct, this is not a decision to be made lightly. To redraw the map of our limits, at the bottom as well as at the top, is to set for ourselves new boundaries within which human life will take on a new shape. Perhaps Kant ws, at least in part, right about bestiality: nothing less than the meaning of our humanity is here at stake.

I don't think this is terribly ambiguous, although it is. He could be saying, that there is no moral prohibition against bestiality and that because humanity is, in important ways, socio-culturally defined that we can simply decide to say that people who engage in bestiality should not be ousted from membership in humanity, in full or in part. But I'm pretty sure what he is saying is that we shouldn't change our definitions of humanity because changing the meaning of humanity is well.... wrong? That can't be right, since there is nothing immoral about bestiality. Imprudent? Just something we should think long and hard about?

What Levy is doing here is manipulating our attachments to "humanity." To change these definitions suggests that we are inhuman. And metaphorically these are the lower levels of humanity. Why aren't these taboos the upper limits of humanity? Or off to the side somewhere? It could be that we are busting through a ceiling rather falling through the floor. Morally acceptable bestial sex may show an elevated concern for the suffering of animals (being careful not to harm animals while we have sex with them) and trying to share with them an intimate aspect of one our highest expressions of love, care, and devotion.

If we change our conception of humanity who knows what we'll become. Maybe we'll just become more human, just as we did when we stopped owning slaves, made great strides in equality with women and other races, and became concerned about how we treat animals.

induced pluripotent stem cells

2010-04-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

iPSC are stem cells that are produced from adult stem cells. The adult stem cell is not as plastic as embryonic stem cells, but they can be reverted back to a state of pluripotentcy, where they can act as embryonic stem cells. This is ethically significant since there is a great amount of controversy over using embryonic stem cells since they involve the destruction of some embryo or fetus to obtain them.

In this month's (april) Scientific American, Steve Mirsky writes: "So what I don't get is why aren't people who are against using embryonic stem cells in research just as against using iPSCs?" He gets to this question by pointing out that iPSCs have the theoretical possibility of being implanted in a womb and grown as a clone. Most who are against stem cell research are also against cloning and so consequently should be against the use of iPSCs.

Mirsky is bringing up what seems like an inconsistency in the anti-stem cell research camp. But I don't think he's entirely right. First, I'm totally for stem cell research, but I'm in more favor of iPSC research, although in practical terms, iPSC research will be slower research. But back to me in a second. What are the anti-stem cell camp against exactly? Its isn't stem cell research strangely enough. Very few opponents of stem cell research would actually say that the research itself is morally wrong, rather the source of the research material is questionable. Destroying embryos are wrong and if this research promotes embryos being destroyed, then it is wrong because of that, not because of its aims or the research itself.

So since iPSC doesn't destroy embryos, then it is morally acceptable research. But what about the possibility of cloning? For someone to be upset by iPSC because of concerns over cloning, one would have to make a slippery slope argument. iPSC research will lead to human cloning. Clearly this isn't any more true than legalizing gay marriage leading to inter-species marriages.

So why worry about iPSC when embryonic stem cells will in all likelihood produce results quicker? Simply put, it would make more people happy. If we could grow meat in a petri dish that is identical to real meat, without the animal cruelty, we should do it because it would make more people happy. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just raise a cow? Sure it would. But if we could avoid the problematic aspects of eating meat, then we should.

Now some might say there are no problematic aspects of embryonic stem cell research, whereas there are problematic aspects with animal husbandry. But we could still easily imagine a world where all animals are not factory farmed, where they have pleasant lives and a Temple Grandin approved death. People would still be unhappy to see animals dying, and whether that is reasonable or not isn't the issue, for me anyways. I don't think we can really control how things make us feel. If seeing cats on fire pleases the people of France, then it does, no matter how unsavory it is. I love Survivor (Go Russell!) and I know that its terrible television. But I love it anyways. I can't help it! This isn't to say that we should indulge in things that are morally bad so long as they make us happy, but rather if we can avoid making people unhappy and not do anything morally bad, then we should do so.

The cat litter project

2010-04-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

So a little while back I posted that I was making a digester for my cat litter. Here are the results so far. My first batch that I put into the hole in the ground never really disappeared. But within a few days of dropping them in, I knew why. The water in my digester was being absorbed into the ground far too quickly for the enzymes to work on what was already a very dry lump of feces. Since the poop dried out in the cat litter, it would need time to rehydrate then liquefy. It simply wasn't getting that time in the digester.

So I thought about trying to flow the rate of water absorption in the digester by putting something in the ground like clay cat litter or something like it to retain the water longer. But I didn't like that idea, since it might be possible that it wouldn't actually slow the water absorption, and that would leave me scooping out the litter from the hole in the ground, mixed with all sorts of yuckiness. I then thought of just putting a plastic bag under the entire thing, and maybe a pipe sticking out of it to aid in water absorption.... essentially turning the digester into a miniature, but simplified, septic tank.

But then I returned to the problem at hand. I wasn't giving enough time for the water and enzymes to break down the poop. So a simple solution presented itself while wandering the halls of Home Depot. The Kingsford Charcoal dispenser. It was a simple and elegant solution. Fill the bucket with some water and add the enzymes. There's a handy easy to remove lid and flip top hatch to make adding water, used litter, enzymes etc, or complete removal for dumping. The one I got was black, so I don't have to see the waste, and it heats up from the daylight sun, helping the enzymes work a bit more efficiently (I might have to worry about it getting too hot in the summer though).

So I put another bag of waste into the dispenser and a couple of days later, mostly liquified poop, with quite a bit of litter. The litter I'm using is a mix of pine based litter that clumps, and wheat clumping litter. I'm betting what I saw was mostly the pine.

Last thoughts: My digester has basically turned into a hole in the ground for me to pour some really nasty water out. But I still needed it and it'll be interesting to see what happens in there as things continue to degrade (like the biodegradeable bags that I used to transport the litter to the digester). I feel like I'm using more water in eliminating the waste this way. You win some you lose some. But for all intents and purposes, I'm getting free water from my rain barrel, which will offset all the water use during the rainy season. I only need about 5 gallons of water in the charcoal dispenser a week. Once I get this down to a more efficient system, I might need less. Its not all that much more work for me. The only work was an initial investment of digging a hole in the ground. Everything else is pretty much the same. Scoop the boxes, bring it to a can, and drop it in. I just have one extra step of dumping out the can maybe every week, after the enzymes get a chance to break down the litter.

The bathroom dilemma: Yuck and Inconvenience

2010-03-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

So last time, I presented the problem. I've spent some time thinking about it, and in particular the false dilemma that I presented.

I presented the problem as a choice between the waterless urinal and the 1 gallon automatic flush urinal. Many people have pointed out that I have a third option, the bushes by my office. If I'm serious about saving water, and 2.5 minutes is too long to walk, then couldn't I water the bushes by my office as a compromise? I did a little digging, and it turns out that it may actually beneficial to your plants (at least your tomato plants)!

But there is a pretty strong yuck factor involved in peeing in public. So inconvenience versus yuck! This is what ethicists are for! First, generally, I don't think that yuck! is a justification. If I said something like, "Peeing in public? Yuck!" That isn't good enough moral reason for me not to do it. "Gays getting married? Yuck!" amounts to the same thing. The argument from yuck is essentially: This act disgusts me. People should avoid doing disgusting acts. Therefore I should not do this act. Plug in anything that is disgusting and you have an argument. But the relevancy of how an act makes us feel and whether we should do it is questionable. I think barfing is disgusting, and cleaning up barf is probably more disgusting. But I think I should do it (cleaning it up that is, not barfing per se).

But there is a difference between gay marriage and peeing in the bushes. One issue has heavy "moral weight" and the other not. I think something has "moral weight" when decisions made about x either affects a great deal of people, or affects some people in a great deal, in a significant way. This is terribly vague I know, but I think the vagueness is necessary. Gay marriage affects both a great deal of people, and some people in a great deal. I'm not sure if peeing in the bushes would count in either sense.

So whats the point of this distinction? I want to say that on issues that concern "everyday ethics," that is issues that have only a light "moral weight" do not require the same kinds of justifications as weighty moral issues. "Yuck" may well be enough for me to not to do something that that has little moral weight. Why? Yuck makes us unhappy, in a temporary sense, not in a lifelong sense. When we engage in a something that is only yucky (cleaning up barf as opposed to torturing someone, which is both yucky and cruel), we usually don't think that this will ultimately affect our overall evaluation of our lives. Everyday ethics deals with precisely that, a small wrong, not a wrong that will ultimately affect the overall moral evaluation of our lives. The less weighty a moral issue, the more it can be affected by yuck!

So I'm not peeing in the bushes. Why? Because its not a morally weighty issue and it makes me go yuck! The burden of proof, I think, is on others to show why this is a morally weighty issue that forces me to discount yuck. If we were talking about being a vegan versus being a vegetarian, would the yuck factor be enough to take veganism off the table? I'm coming around to the possibility of it being morally light enough because the difference of moral weight between a vegan and a vegetarian is the difference between being a good person and a slightly better person. But if we were talking about the difference between a vegetarian and a omnivore, even a conscientious one, the difference in weight is significantly larger because of reasonable doubts about where our food is coming from. It turns the compassionate omnivore into a regular omnivore.

So what about the other possibility, that its too inconvenient? If morally light issues can be overridden by yuck, could it be overridden by inconvenience? I think it might. But first we should compare yuck with inconvenience. I think most people would pick something inconvenient over something yucky. It may be inconvenient for me not to eat anything at this moment, but it sure beats eating something yucky. So, yuck gives us better reasons to reject some moral proposition than inconvenience because it affects our lives in a greater magnitude than yuck (and remember I'm not saying that yuck or inconvenience is affecting our over all lives a great deal). So if its merely inconvenient that I walk 2.5 minutes to the waterless urinal, then I should, since the ethical gain is worth it. But what if I drank a cup of coffee at home, drove half an hour to work, and really needed to go? I don't think people would typically label this an inconvenience. We hyperbolically describe these situations as emergencies. But what actually is happening is that we are faced with turning something inconvenient (walking 2.5 minutes) into something yucky (soiling ourselves). The moral weight of the issue hasn't changed, but our justification for rejecting the 2.5 minute walk has. Heck, even compared to the yuck of peeing in public and the yuck of soiling ourselves, peeing in public would be the more preferable option.

So... unless I'm being pressed with a yucky situation, I have a moral obligation to use the waterless urinal.

LOST!!!!

2010-03-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

So if you haven't seen last night's episode and don't want things spoiled, stop reading now.

So we finally know what this whole show is about... And its not really surprising, since they told us early on in the series (maybe the second episode when Locke talks to Walt about backgammon).

So here are my thoughts on last night's episode:
-Alpert gets one heckuva baptismal experience from Jacob. This reinforces the idea that Jacob is the good guy and The Man in Black is the bad guy.
-The exchange between Alpert and Jacob really is more telling than anything else. Jacob says that he can't absolve Alpert of his sins... But he's God.... Why can't he? Simply put, because Jacob wants people to be responsible for their own actions. If absolution of sins came for no reason, then the free will that Jacob so desperately wants people to exercise on the island is meaningless.
-The Man in Black tried the direct approach. Ask Alpert to kill Jacob. That clearly didn't work. So his next attempt... the Long con. Manipulate the people that Jacob brings to the island, to prove to the Man in Black (El Diablo) that people will choose to do the right thing, when faced with temptation, to show that people are not as good as Jacob believes they are.
-But Jacob is dead.... And now that we know the motivations behind bringing people to the island, we might understand this to be an even larger allegory of Nietzschean philosophy. God is dead. Its the ultimate test of free will and morality. Without Jacob there to provide guidance, to tell Richard how to advise the islanders, will they choose good over evil still? Or will the islanders open up Pandora's box and let smokey leave the island?
-Finally... a future hope... I really hope that Hurley takes Jacob's place. Hurley represents the everyman throughout the show. Hurley being promoted to the guardian of the island would be symbolic of the everyman being capable of triumphing over evil, overcoming themselves (Nietzsche again), transcending mere humanity into the director of their own fate and values.

one more on food

2010-03-23T14:29:00.001-07:00

Jamie Oliver, the naked chef, on his one wish. He is not a vegetarian, but he is emphasizing that what we eat is killing us.

Factory Farming

2010-03-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

Today I presented vegetarianism to my ethics class. Here are some more links to help people understand factory farming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming
http://www.idausa.org/facts/factoryfarmfacts.html
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/campaigns/factory_farming/

And a couple of links to vegetarian health
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/vegetarian-diet/HQ01596
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16441942

I tried to avoid any site that is obviously biased (PETA etc,) and included sites that have good reputations (the humane society, mayo clinic). And for the other side:

http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Myth-Food-Justice-Sustainability/dp/1604860804

Although, I don't think that this book really presents the arguments fairly. Cherry picked statistics and straw man arguments seem to miss the point about animal suffering. Instead she focuses on the quacks (All animals should live, and we should protect animals from each other), and sympathy (animals die in making your lettuce). I don't have a problem with animals dying. They die all the time. I just don't think that humans should inflict unnecessary suffering, which she doesn't seem to give much justice to, and seems to believe that if we all became vegetarians, that we would have need more farmland, rather than less, which even government statistics point out is plainly false.

More on poop

2010-03-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

Living in California near the bay, I'm particularly concerned about what goes down the drain. I think one of the greatest assets that California has is its spectacular coast line! Recently, sea otter deaths have been linked to toxoplasmosis parasites found in cat feces that is either flushed into the toilet, or gets into the bay through runoff. And although its not conclusive, its the likeliest source. Last summer when I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I started thinking about how I could reduce my cats' impact on the environment. I wanted to do something about their litter waste. We switched from a clay litter to a compostable litter, and started throwing away the litter in biodegradable bags. But ultimately, I wanted to make sure that their poop didn't make it into the bay at all. The easy way of doing this, was ensuring that the cats' poop never left my charge. So last weekend I built an underground digester.

Essentially, its just a hole in the ground, with a plastic lid over it, so that I can keep animals (like the cats) out. I drop their used litter into the hole, add some septic tank enzymes into the hole, a bit of water, and voila! The litter gets broken down, liquefied, and fertilizes the soil around it. I'm still waiting for the first bag to break down, that I put in there. Supposedly it should only take a few days. Its been in there for now 2 days and I'm getting impatient. If this works well, then maybe I'll start collecting my own waste and dropping it down the hole. ;) Or maybe not.... Some things really are too gross for me too.

Everyday Ethics: How far for a gallon?

2010-03-17T15:21:00.000-07:00

So my last post got me thinking about how much we are willing to sacrifice for something that isn't worth all that much... Clearly, people are willing to chip in when it isn't a big sacrifice (recycling). The perceived gain from recycling is far greater than the actual gain.

But there are real gains from small acts sometimes. I think water conservation is a good example of this. Small amounts of water saved every day could have dramatic effects on the local and extended environment. So here's a real dilemma here for you. The campus that I work on has recently opened a new building. The new building is built with a green philosophy, so the men's bathrooms have waterless urinals. However, my office is on the other side of campus. It would take about 5 minutes to walk to the use the urinal, which would save exactly 1 gallon of water every time I did this. A 10 minute round trip. If I used the closest bathroom to my office, I could be done and back in probably 2 minutes.

Do I have a moral obligation to use the waterless urinal?

Being green makes you mean?

2010-03-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

There's a great post on Practical Ethics on how being green might just make a person more selfish. This is not a new phenomenon, as it happens with world poverty as well. Is it a bad phenomenon? Savulescu suggests that it is because it distracts us from the problem. We think we're doing good, when recycling has only a minor effect on the environment. What we should really be doing is walking, biking, and taking public transit, rather than driving. But because we sort our trash, we feel as if we've done our part.

No doubt this is true... but I hesitate to call it a bad thing. We need positive reinforcement, otherwise we may not do anything at all. We need to incentivize people to become exemplars for others. Once we have done the some good, we should be encouraged to do more.

Avatar and philosophy

2010-03-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

So my proposal to the forthcoming Avatar and philosophy volume was accepted! Just like all my other official publications, its on ethics. Specifically, what we can learn about our treatment of animals from the Na'vi.

But I want to write about something besides animals and ethics here... So if you haven't seen Avatar yet, and you don't want it spoiled, stop reading now.

So Jake at the end of the movie undergoes permanent relocation into his Avatar by a tree (it looks way better in the movie than this makes it sound). Is Jake dead? One might be inclined to say that his body is dead, but Jake isn't. This presupposes a couple of things.... That Jake either has a soul that now inhabits his avatar, and that is why he is alive, because his soul is still around. Or that Jake's consciousness/identity continues to persist in the avatar, and that is why he is alive.

If its the first, that Jake has a soul, then nobody really ever dies, assuming souls are the traditional immortal entity. So we're just wrong when we say that ANYONE dies. I think this is a little far-fetched, not to mention metaphysically problematic. But the other alternative is just as problematic... We could argue that Sigourney Weaver's character is not dead, just inside the aforementioned tree (I'm betting that in the future sequels [Cameron has already said he envisioned a trilogy] that she comes back via the tree). Or we could argue that people who lose their memories or have a break in their consciousness (coma) have died and returned to the living.

It is easy to talk about biological death, but its much more difficult to talk about death of an identity... Do identities die? And isn't that what we normally talk about when we talk about people? When I think of my wife, I'm not thinking of my wife's body.... I'm thinking of her identity. Are they one and the same? I don't think they're the same, but I find the problem of personal identity maddening on almost every level.... I guess thats why I'm so attracted to identity puzzles.

Miscarriages may become illegal

2010-03-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

A law in Utah criminalize miscarriages, making it a felony homicide. That means a woman could conceivably be put in prison for life because she has a miscarriage.

Now I understand the intentions behind the bill... It seems rather irresponsible to purposely bring about a miscarriage. But this seems to criminalize spontaneous miscarriages that 1 out 4 pregnancies naturally result in without being irresponsible. There has to be a better way to word this bill to exclude normal miscarriages, and include the irresponsible ones.

The Black Blog

2010-03-09T11:48:00.000-08:00

So I have a pretty dark blog. I wonder if it hurts people's eyes when they read my blog. That is generally why people write on light backgrounds with dark writing... To ease eye strain.

But why a dark blog? I'm trying to save energy. Not too long ago, a few people calculated what the energy savings would be if Google changed their homepage from a white background to a black background. The energy savings would be something like 8.3 Megawatts of power per day.

The more we become conscious about our energy use, the more we realize that we use a whole lot of energy when we're not even trying to.

The moral status of plants

2010-03-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

Its hard to talk about animal welfare without inevitably having people try to drag you down the slippery slope of the rights of plants. If animals get equal consideration of interests, what about plants?

Its pretty tempting to say that a carrot being chopped, diced, then boiled, sauteed or just eaten alive, would be morally wrong. But there are pretty clear relevant differences between plants and animals, the biggest being that animals are conscious, plants are not. The burden of proof are on the defenders of vegetables that plants are conscious, not on me to show you that they are not. But if you insist, consciousness as we know it, requires at the very least a central nervous system e.g. brain, that they lack completely. Show me a plant with a brain, and then perhaps we can discuss the rights of the veggie.

BUT.... Switzerland has recently built it into their constitution that the moral status of plants must be considered. So what is an ethicist to say about the moral status of plants?

In April, the team published a 22-page treatise on "the moral consideration of plants for their own sake." It stated that vegetation has an inherent value and that it is immoral to arbitrarily harm plants by, say, "decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason."

There are a couple of points here that we need to parse out here. First: vegetarion has inherent value. I'm not sure that it does. Life for life's sake isn't particularly compelling to me, otherwise I would be happy when I find weeds in my lawn. There's more vegetation! I remember listening to the Ig Nobel awards (A satirical awards show that gives awards for the strangest research) last year, and hearing about the paper for the first time. The recipient of the award said that if you ever had a house plant and felt bad about it dying, then you understand the inherent value of vegetation. But I don't think I feel bad because of the plant's death, I feel bad because I've lost the aesthetic value of the plant, and its been replaced with something that creates ugliness.

I do find that it is wrong to arbitraily harm plants... But not because of an inherent value in plants, but because of the environmental impact (however small) that it will have. If its a small impact, then the wrongness may be only a small one, that can be overlooked. But done at a massive scale, the wrongness scales exponentially. (Sheesh I really am a consequentialist arn't I?)

All of this is for a point however. Switzerland doesn't want genetically modifiied crops in their country. If GM crops are created, and typically they are created infertile so they can't spread their genetically modifiedness (its a word.... now.) around to other crops. But if plants have dignity, then it would be wrong to deprive them from reproduction.

This is all dancing around the notion of the sanctity of life. Tampering with life is wrong, strong period. But this notion is pretty archaic in today's society. We tamper with ourselves, just as much as we tamper with other beings, be it plastic surgery, cybornetic implants, or flu shots, we tamper with the way we function, and the way we are. Peter Singer has a pretty good book that gets to the heart of this issue (unsanctifying human life).

If consequentialism gives us some reasons for protecting kinds of life from harm and not others, does that mean that some animals could conceivably be harmed just like plants? Sure. In fact, I'm not terribly sure I can muster a strong defense for keeping Panda Bears around on the planet beyond that they please humans aesthetically.... but ultimately that may be enough for a consequentialist. If Pandas were to mutate into a non-aesthetic beast of a creature that did nothing but eat bamboo, and had no predators and no other ecological niche to fill, then extinction wouldn't be a loss at all.

Reason vs intuition

2010-03-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

I get a lot of puzzled looks from students in my classes. Sometimes its because I'm just weird. Others times is because I present them something that is perfectly rational, but wildly non-intuitive. So because its non-intuitive, the reasoning must be wrong. They'll throw up objections and try to refute the argument, and I respond successfully, but they'll still reject the argument.

Sometimes they'll just throw out reason. The arguments are dumb! Apparently dumb arguments are any argument whose conclusion are non-intuitive. Why is it so difficult to accept that our intuitions can be wrong? Its not a new experience that our intuitions are wrong. I would venture to argue that all of our intuitions have been wrong several times in our lives. Unfortunately, in those times when we've been wrong, often an experience refutes the intuition, instead of reason/argumentation. In philosophy, we often can't just appeal to experience, in part because sometimes the experience itself is what is in question.

But I am comforted that philosophy isn't the only discipline to suffer from this problem. Mathematics has its share of non-intuitive conclusions, that are firmly backed by reason. For example: .999999999999...(an infinite string of 9s) is equal to 1.

Now intuition might tell us that it's not equal to 1, but only really close to one. But in fact, 1 and .9999999999... are the same number, just two different ways of writing it. 2/2 is 1, 4/4 is 1 and .999999999... is 1.

A simple proof can be done of this:
1/3 = .33333333333333333...
2/3= .66666666666666666...

1/3 + 2/3= 3/3 =1
.33333333333...+ .66666666666...=.99999999999...

By the rule of transitivity of identity, 1 =.999999999999...

Now if you're acquainted with who I am, you'll know I'm terrible at math, so maybe I'm making a mistake.... But I'm not mistaken. I refer you to this blog pos t which has two follow up posts linked on the original post that explicates the proof in great detail. And the blogger has to deal with the same intuitive vs rational argument that I deal with on a regular basis in my courses. So why is there such a resistance to give up our intuitions, and is there a better way to get people to give up their intuitions when dealing with something that can't be experienced?

Looting

2010-03-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

Okay my arm still hurts, and I don't know why.... I'm going to make an appointment to see the doctor today...

But back to looting. Most people think that looting in general is wrong. It would be wrong for me to take my class to Wal-Mart and by shear force of numbers overwhelm them and take their goods. (I'm stipulating that looting is a group action. You can't loot by yourself, you loot with other people. Looting by yourself is just stealing or shoplifting....)

However, when we are faced with drastically different circumstances, is looting okay? Some might simply say, "yes... because my survival is at stake." But clearly this isn't going to be a good enough justification, ethically speaking. To abide by some moral obligations, I may have to sacrifice my own life to fullfill them e.g. jumping on a grenade that threatens to kill the members of my platoon.

I want to say that looting is morally permissible under the following condition.... that those around you fail in their obligation to refrain from looting. I see looting as a group responsibility. Some group responsibilities decrease in obligation because many are failing to follow their duty. E.g. if many people are walking on the grass, when there is a sign that is posted to not walk on the grass... as people fail in the duty, the obligation to not walk on the grass begins to erode. Once people have pounded a pathway through the grass, its rather irrelevant that I continue to walk around the grass, rather than on the pounded pathway.

Now as people loot, the obligation for you to refrain from looting also gets pounded away. The owner of the property will inevitably have ownership of all of his useful property looted. Now, it would be LESS advantageous for a single person to horde a great deal of resources in a disaster scenario, than for the resources to be spread amongst many people. Aid will eventually come, whats needed is to bridge the interim time between the disaster and the response. 100 cans of beans is in all likelihood more than enough to get by on. In fact, it would deprive others from being able to survive the interim, if you horde more than you need. So once the looting begins, each individual who loots actually increases the utility of the act (looting).

One might respond that they have been responsible... They piled up supplies before the earthquake in an event of an emergency. Then arguably, one could still loot, and give the looted supplies to those who could benefit from them, and did not have the capability of looting because they were injured or trapped.

Of course this all assumes life or death scenarios. Looting wouldn't be permissible if the San Jose Sharks failed to win the Stanley Cup..... Again....

augh!

2010-03-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

I'm in some serious pain. I'm not sure what exactly I did to my shoulder/back/neck, but its been hurting for a while now. So I'm going to try to lay off the computer for a while... which is rather difficult for me.

So.... I'll give you guys something to discuss:

Looting after an 8.8 earthquake. Go.

What you can do with my body after I'm dead.

2010-02-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

In my ethics class, and in general when the topic of death comes up, I usually tell people that they can do anything that they want with my body after I'm dead. Kick it to the curb, feed it to cultures, mummify it, have it stuffed. Whatever, so long as it doesn't upset the living, in particular my friends and family (since they would be the ones most upset by the treatment of my body, I would imagine).

But there is a possibility that it would not be in my interest for my body to be fed to the vultures.... Cryonics. Should I take seriously the possibility, however remote, that in the future, my body could be dethawed and revived with more advanced medicine? The argument is a simple appropriation of Pascal's Wager. If I freeze my body and I can't be revised, I lose nothing. If I freeze my body and I can be revived, I gain an extended life. If I don't freeze my body, I'll never beneft. So no matter how small the odds, I should freeze my body.

Now there are externalities here that we must take into consideration, specifically cost. I would have to deprive myself a significant sum of money while I'm alive for the possibility of a future life. And who knows what the quality of my future life will be. I may simply be a decapitated head in a jar a la Futurama.

I also think it would be important to take other ethical obligations into consideration. For example, if I were to be frozen, my body would continue to generate a significant carbon footprint for the duration of my freeze because of the energy it would require to maintain my low temperature. I may not benefit if I don't freeze myself, but the environment may be harmed if I do.

In the end though, I don't think I'd like to be frozen. I think waking up in the future would be rather disorientating and I'd spend way too much on future Blu-Ray TV series compilations. ;)

Dogs are worse than SUVs part II

2010-02-23T16:33:00.000-08:00

image from live life veg blog

My very first blog post here was about Dogs being worse than SUVs for the environment.

One of the arguments for vegetarianism is that it lightens our carbon footprint, and since dogs (and cats) are carnivores, they have a heavier carbon footprint than a vegetarian pet like a parrot.

So it stands to reason that there are really three options that we have with our carnivorous pets:
1. Continue keeping them, and ignore or try to rationalize the environmental impact of our pets.
2. Don't keep carnivorous pets.
3. Continue to keep carnivorous pets, and change their diet to a vegetarian one.

There might be a few more options I'm missing, but I think these are the most obvious choices for most people. So what should we do? In my original post, I suggested that I might have to move towards 2, out of concern for the environment. But rarely are things so cut and dry. Many pets would exist regardless of people taking them in or not, and in my case, both of my cats were kidnapped from litters that were given birth to by stray cats. However, my taking them in has guaranteed a particular impact on the environment, whereas, if I left them, they may have died to a car accident or starvation, or animal control.

So now we're balancing animal welfare against carbon emission. To say that one is more important than the other is odd, since one of the reasons for concern about carbon emission is the welfare of the animals that would be affected by global warming.

I don't think option 1 is a terribly rational position, so I'm not going to defend it much, or give it much analysis. But I do want to point out that when I first posted the original entry, this is what most people seemed to opt. Either the carbon footprint is negligible or there are other benefits that we get from keeping animals that outweigh the harm done to the environment. But arguably, I could make the same arguments about SUVs.

Now the third option is a questionable one as well, because if we turn our carnivorous pets vegetarians, they may not be very happy. So we'd be trading a portion of their happiness for a large portion of carbon emissions (I say a portion because I'm assuming that the vegetarian pet food out there undergoes significant processing which would make it less carbon friendly). And lets not forget that some pets have special dietary restrictions/formulas that they need.

None of the obvious options seem like a very good solution, and well probably be getting another cat when one of my two die eventually. So in actuality, I'm in camp 1, but I don't like being there.

Are Neanderthals Human?

2010-02-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

So I was reading this article today about cloning neanderthals. I'm not terribly sure its a good idea to clone neanderthals mostly because of the harm it would inflict on the undoubtedly hundreds of failed clones. But thats another blog post for another time. What got my interest piqued was this:

"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering. "This is a species-altering event," says Andrews, "it changes the way we are creating a new generation." How much does a human genome need to be changed before the individual created from it is no longer considered human?

Neanderthals are not human (scientifically). So why would they have human rights? Well the answer is easy, because the set of rights that we call human rights are not exclusively humans, but rather apply to all persons. Assumedly if Spock from Star Trek were to beam down on earth right now, we would not deny him rights and protections that we grant to other human beings.

Thats simple enough. But what makes something a human being? Genome? As we tinker and through natural evolution, our genome changes. And if we change it enough, would we lose our rights? Again, probably not.

But I want to put forth a bolder claim. I want to say that either "human" is so hopelessly vague as to be a meaningless term, or that it applies to the things that we may create through genetic engineering, including a cloned neanderthal. So I'm going against science here. Neanderthals are human, in the same way that I'm Hawaiian (I'm not Hawaiian in the usual sense). Being Chinese, my ancestors helped colonize polynesia, and eventually Hawaii. Hawaii thus, are really just asians with some modifications. (This goes back to the race debate we were having with the census).

Now whereas race is almost a meaningless set of vague descriptions of a category, species identification is a little more exact. It usually involves inter-breeding possibilities and such. But presumedly we could interbreed with a very different species, so long as we modified the genetic recombination in a way to produce fertile offspring (this is what they supposedly do in Star Trek for interspecies children unless they were by sheer coincidence genetically compatible).

*edit* Hmmm... apparently its not terribly controversial that neanderthals are human.... I take it all back.

Who is PNS for?

2010-02-17T14:07:00.000-08:00

PreNatal Screening is the process in which many genetic abnormalities and birth defects can be detected before birth. But when someone screens a fetus, who are they doing it for?

It seems like there are two obvious possible answers. The first one is the baby, the other is for the mother or parents. But neither are terribly satisfying answers.

Lets say for the sake of argument that Milly gets a prenatal screening on her fetus. The test returns a positive hit for Down's syndrome, and for the sake of argument, its not a false positive. If this is for the sake of the fetus, then the parents should now be either marshalling resources to take the best care they can for their baby, or terminate the preganacy to spare it suffering.

But how can an abortion be in the interest of the baby? Its not like Down's syndrome is so debilitating that the baby cannot have a happy life.

If the screening is for the parent's interest, then the preganacy should be terminated, and the parents can try again, which would save them a huge amount of money and medical resources that could be spent on other people.

If its for the interest of the baby, then shouldn't we mandate that all women have prenatal screenings, to ensure that the parents can marshal the resources needed for the disabled baby if it is disabled?

If its in the interest of the parents, then how could we possibly mandate such an invasive test?

Lingering Doubts of a Vegetarian

2010-02-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

Veganism is not my cup of tea. I simply can't do it. But does that mean I'm promoting animal cruelty? This has been discussed at length elsewhere, so I'm not going to go into it. I think that being a vegetarian is definately doing a lot of good for the environment, since it reduces animal suffering by reducing demand of factory farmed animals.

But what about incidental animal products? By incidental I mean things that are made from animals that they're not directly farmed for. Arguably there are no incidental products, everything that animals give us are part of why we raise them. I'm thinking of things like leather and such. On my person I could probably count at least 10 animal products that would rule me out of being vegan (shoes, belt, wallet, backpack, dental floss, tylenol, coat, watch (its a waterproof one), lip balm). Not to mention things like packaging that these things come in, preservatives that my food has, and the drugs that I take, even the stitches or sutures that would be put on me if I needed them.

Being a vegetarian allows me to utilize animal products, but that doesn't guarantee that the animal products I utilize are from humanely treated animals.... In fact there really is in no way to tell since many incidental animal products are not regulated by the FDA since they're not going to be eaten.

Perfection is the enemy of progress though. I'm not morally perfect, but I'm moving towards doing a lot of good. Maybe some day I will eliminate leather from my person, or wax products, but until then, I can sleep at night knowing that I'm still doing a lot of good.

The gettier Problem

2010-02-13T07:46:00.000-08:00

So I promised I'd put up a blog post about the Gettier Problem in my Ancient philosophy class. So here it is.

The gist of the problem, is that Justified True Belief does seem necessary for knowledge (you need all three), but it isn't sufficient for knowledge (you can still not know something even if you have all three).

I think the easiest example of the Gettier problem to wrap people's mind around it, is the one I used in class. You walk into a room, and you see someone who looks like your friend Bob. You form the belief, "Bob is in the room." Its true. You believe it, and you're justified in believing it because you see someone who resembles Bob in the room. But who you see is not Bob, but Steve, Bob's twin brother. Bob is hiding under the bed.

Now the common objection is that my justification is based on something untrue.... But everything I've said is true... I've seen someone who looked like Bob.

In class I replaced Steve with a mirrored reflection of Bob. I see someone who looks like Bob, (but I'm not actually seeing Bob) etc. etc. In that circumstance lots of people want to say I have knowledge. But if thats the case, how is that meaningfully any different than the Steve case? In both cases I'm looking at something that resembles Bob, but is not actually Bob.

The wikipedia entry on the Gettier problem is pretty good, and covers most of the other common objections, and some of the less common attempts to solve the problem. Here you can read is actual paper. Again, I can only wish I could write such a short paper, and change philosophy so significantly.

Panspermia

2010-02-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

Image from http://sail.quarkweb.com/

Do we have an obligation to ensure that life continues after life on Earth can no longer be sustained? Its inevitable that life on this planet will end. Eventually the sun will gobble up the earth and incenerate everything on it. So should we start preparing a panspermia project to send life from Earth to other places in the universe?

Michael Mautner thinks so. So lets take a look at his argument. The article summarizes his argument as follows:

As members of this planet’s menagerie, and a consequence of nearly 4 billion years of evolution, humans have a purpose to propagate life. After all, whatever else life is, it necessarily possesses an incessant drive for self-perpetuation.

So first, it says that evolution has produced ust to have a purpose.... to propogate life. Life intrinsically has an incessant drive for self-perpetuation, therefore we have an obligation to continue the perpetuation of life elsewhere in the universe.

I think this argument has all kinds of problems with it. First, its not clear that evolution gives purposes to anything. To say that implies that evolution is some kind of reasoning force to begin with, trying to accomplish something. Evolution is nothing of the sort. Evolution is simply the name we put on the a feature of biological development through reproduction. Evolution doesn't want, desire, or even aim to make better things. Evolution is RANDOM. Through random chance, animals, plants, etc, are given new traits, which either aid in survival, reproduction, or do absolutely nothing, or hinder survival or reproduction. It is perfectly plausible that evolution would produce animals that are poorly suited for their environment, and yet they continue to exist because of luck (however unlikely it is).

So evolution has randomly given human beings a purpose.... to propogate life. How does purpose get transmitted or developed through evolution? Conceivably it could be hard-wired into our genes and consequently our brains to make us behave in this particualr way (nevermind that this trait may not in fact be present in all human beings). I don't find this terribly plausible, but I'm feeling generous and concede the point.

So we have a evolutionary purpose. Does this translate to a moral purpose? Do I have moral obligation because my biology compels me to? This is dubious at best. I may have an evolutionary drive to fight or flight, but that doesn't make it morally acceptable for me to fight or flight. I may have a moral obligation to do one and not the other. Genetic or psychological predispositions do not give us moral justification for acting in any way at all. Someone who is predisposed to rage doesn't suddenly have an obligation to attack people any more than a woman who is ovulating has an obligation to seek out a partner.

Increasingly its becoming more common for people to believe the opposite, that we have an obligation NOT to reproduce, in order for future generations to live a more comfortable life. Overpopulation concerns are essentially concerns about the future generation's comfort and living standard. But overpopulation concerns, and panspermia plans are ultimately dependent upon an idea that we have an obligation to future generations. I've already argued that this isn't as obvious as most people think it is in end of the world scenatios, which this is.

Another puzzle is that Mautner suggests that we send bacteria to seed other planets. If he is serious in the idea that we have an obligation to propogate ANY life, not just human life, because of evolution (how that happened might be an example of my point about the randomness of evolution), then we currently have an obligation to breed bacteria and not kill off bacteria. Arguably, we could justify killing some bacteria in self-defense, but we should be actively trying to raise the number of living things on this planet, not just human. Since we could more easily increase the number of life by increasing bacteria more so than any other life form, we should start cranking out agar mats and seeding it with whatever it is that we can.

Am I being too hard on him? I feel like I am, but I just think his argument is as absurd as I'm making it sound.

The census

2010-02-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about race and discrimination lately, mostly because of the upcoming census. First I want to address a few concerns I have about the census in general....

It treats race as if they are clearly differentiated, even real categories that people belong to. Barack Obama is black, even though he is half caucasian. But what do these categories even mean in the first place? Michael Jackson is Black, but Eminem is not. There is very little evidence of a biological basis for the racial deliniations that people make.

Second, the increased number of categories in the census is an interesting response to the perceived discriminatory agenda of the census. People self-identify their race in many different ways. You may be a Latino, but others would call you Hispanic. You might consider yourself Mexican, and not Hispanic or Latino, but what you don't realize is that you fall in the exact same category as Native American. The upcomming census tries to offer a wide variety of categories for people to self-identify with, to reduce the number of people selecting Other. There are some people who self-identify as Negro, not Black or African American, thus Negro is now on the list of races to select from, but others find the term derogatory.

What's so important about people not selecting Other? Social services, outreach, minority benefits are all dependent upon what the census says. Political campaigns are built around census information. When people select other, they are reducing the possibility of themselves receiving benefits. They are not making it less likely they will be discriminated against, they're making it more likely that they will simply invisible to the government.

So on one hand, we have what I would call the Truth: There is no race. 44% of Native Americans die Caucasian. How does that happen? People self-identify their race. On the other hand we have what I would call the practical: Identifying your race will help prevent racial discrimination.

Goth Kitties

2010-02-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

Okay... First read this article.

So did Holly Crawford do anything wrong?

The defense's argument is an interesting one. We allow parents to pierce their children's ears and such, why not allow us to pierce our pets? Why have a higher standard for the animal and a lower standard for the human?

I think there are two things wrong with this line of reasoning. First, the piercings of a human's ears won't necessarily affect coordination and mobility, but they may affect them on a kitten (espescially on the tail). But I don't think this is a heavy consideration. Assumedly the kitten could learn to adapt to the piercings.... Afterall they have to learn to adapt to their four legs too (kittens are sooooo wobbly!).

The second problem, and I think the more pressing flaw is that there is a higher standard for animals and a lower standard for humans line of thought. There should be higher standards for the treatment of animals in some cases I think, precisely because we don't know what they are experiencing. Erring on the side of caution is reasonable. For children, we can simply ask them how they feel about being pierced (assuming they are old enough to be communicative). We raise standards of treatment for less abled people, it stands to reason that we raise the standards to a similar height for animals. Not because they're more important, but because they need the protection from exploitation. We treat adults and children differently for the same reasons.

But these are just the flaws in the defense's argument. Presumedly they can be wrong, and Crawford still hasn't done anything wrong.

Ultimately the piercings are for aesthetic purposes. The difference between the child and a pet, is that the child can appreciate the piercings. They can make the the choice to remove the piercings in the future if they do not like them. Pets can't do that, or worse, they will try to do that and tear out the piercing. So the wrongness here isn't the harm thats been done to the cats (I'm not sure if the harm of the actual piercing is negligible, but I'm willing to concede the point). But rather that it endagers them to future harm. A piercing gets caught on a fence or on a pillow, and the cat will expeirence a great deal of unnecessary pain, so that we could amuse ourselves with having a pierced cat. The tradeoffs of benefits here doesn't hold up.

LOST!

2010-02-03T13:25:00.000-08:00

I can't help but write something about Lost. The show is great! The season premier was great! Whats not to say about this show? I'll try to avoid spoilers of the premier, in case you haven't seen it yet.

Clearly, there are philosophical themes abundant in Lost. Characters named John Locke, Desmond David Hume, Rousseau, etc., can't be ignored. But even some of the smaller details reveal great things to think about.

In last night's premier, eagle eyed viewers (and who isn't watching Lost with eagle eyes now?) might have spotted a copy Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling in the entrance to the temple, which really matches the the overarching thematic struggle of faith and reason that the show has been dancing around for 6 seasons now.

And I'm intrigued by the "Flash-Sideways." Is the entire season going to be like this? So many questions.... and hopefully they will be answered soon!

Meta-philosophy: What is philosophy?

2010-02-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

So the semester is begining and in most of my classes I start off with the standard question of "What is philosophy?" My standard answer is "The discipline that studies and examines assumptions." This is a pretty wide net, but it has to be, since philosophy is a very wide discpline. It does the job of including everything that is philosophy, and excludes everything that isn't.

But inevitably people still mistake philosophy with other things. Religion is philosophy. Poetry is philosophy. Novels are philosophy. So why aren't these things philosophy?

The most accurate answer would be that some of these things are philosophy, sometimes. Religion, poetry, novels, etc are philosophy when they question the fundamental assumptions that we make. But questioning is only the first step in philosophy, otherwise everyone would be a philosopher. If everyone is a philosopher, then that means everyone does philosophy. But I'm pretty sure everyone doesn't do philosophy, or at the very least, everyone doesn't do good philosophy.

Science begins with a hypothesis, but making up hypotheses doesn't make someone a scientist. So what comes after questioning? An attempt to answer the questions that we've raised using good reasoning. This is the philosophical equivalent of experimentation.

Now I get friends telling me all the time that my definition of philosophy is too narrow, or elitist. Only good reasoning = philosophy. But I think its reasonable to make a distinction between good reasoning and correct conclusions. People can have good reasoning and be lead to incorrect conclusions.... I think. And even if not, I think we can make a distinction of the quality of reasoning that philosophers engage in, versus non-philosophers. Non-philosophers usually crutch on relativism or subjectivism to attack arguments. Philosophers will usually look past such strategies.

But I'm open to finding a better definition of philosophy.... I have a nagging feeling that my definition of philosophy casts its net too wide, including things that shouldn't be philosophy.

Super Commercials

2010-01-27T16:16:00.000-08:00

The Super Bowl is right around the corner and that means fantastic commercials.Or maybe some really controversial ones?

Apparently, the ad will feature Tim Tebow's mother who will relate her experience of being advised to have an abortion, refusing, and giving birth to Tim Tebow, football player extraordinaire (I really don't know much about football so I'm taking this at face value).

So firstly, the commercial's position itself is a pretty bad one. Just because Tim Tebow's mother gave birth to Tim Tebow, doesn't mean that a person should or should not have an abotion, because it is just as likely that Tim Tebow's mother could have given birth to the next Osama Bin Laden or Adolf Hitler. Sure I can be happy, as Tim is, that I was not aborted, but if I were aborted, would I be unhappy that I was aborted? Or another way to put it, would I be any unhappier than the billions of possible other children that didn't get conceived and gestated to term? (I recognize that there is a difference here between an actual conceived being and potentially conceived beings here.)

Secondly, I find it rather troubling that anyone thinks that a complicated issue such as abortion can easily be summed up in a 30-60 seconds. But unfortunately that what this ad and the inevitable rebuttal commercials will be trying to do. Discourse through commercials is like discourse through bumper stickers, it can be done only at the most superficial of levels, making people think less about he very hefty issues that they are considering.

Finally, I don't want to come off sounding like I'm against people's freedom of expression here. I'm fully behind their right to speak their mind and share their arguments. I'm actually looking forward to the commercial, even though I'm fully pro-choice. But is the Super Bowl really the platform that people should be using to communicate such touchy issues such as abortion? Not too long ago, there was a huge hubub over Janet Jackson and a certain performance that she exhibited during half-time. Now although, I don't think seeing Janet Jackson's nipple harmed anyone in any way, I don't think it was terribly appropriate either, since, as many people pointed out, the Super Bowl is a family event. I know my neighbors' children will be watching it. Should we be putting conversation starters like this in the Super Bowl?

Sorry for the lack of posts

2010-01-20T19:18:00.000-08:00

My father is still in the hospital and they still don't know whats causing his pneumonia... So its been preoccupying my time. More philosophical ponderings will follow soon.

Hospitalization

2010-01-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

So my dad was admitted to the hospital a couple of days ago for pneumonia. It looks like he's going to be okay, but he's still pretty weak. They'll probably release him today or tomorrow.

But here's what struck me. When he was admitted around 8:30pm to the emergency room, he didn't really get a chance to eat anything from the hospital for almost 12 hours. They don't serve dinners in the emergency room, and when they transferred him to an isolation room (they thought he might have H1N1), it was past dinner time, and then they somehow missed out on him for breakfast. (Apparently every single room in the hospital was taken... they had patients overflowing into the delivery rooms of the hospital. Jokes about unintentional c-sections ensue.)

So when they finally served him some food, it just came. There wasn't anything like a menu or him giving a preference. A nurse came in and plopped a plate of mashed potatoes, roast beef, and veggies on his table.

So I thought... What if I was my dad? Its inevitable(!) that I'll have a hospital stay in the future and I'm a vegetarian. The last time I had an animal product in my mouth, I almost threw up. I don't think I'd have an obligation to be a vegetarian in a hospital, since I don't have the option to do otherwise (be a vegetarian) since it is, in this scenario, necessary for my health.

What if I were overseas, and the hospital menu was dog? Humpback whale? Panda bear? Aborted fetus?

At what point does necessity overtake our moral sensibilities? People draw lines at survival and health quite often when it comes to eating, but for other values they would simply say they'd rather die than do X. Its this internal ranking of our values that this illustrated for me. Animal suffering is important to me, but not so important that I'd risk damage to my health. Peter Singer argues that we should give to the poor to the extent that we are not sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance (which he leaves vaguely defined so the individual can determine what is actually of comparable moral significance). My health is something of comparable moral significance to animal welfare.

But the aborted fetus question that I posed above isn't just about comparable moral significance. Its about our personal sensitivities. I might be willing to die before I eat an aborted fetus, not because I find abortion or cannibalism morally objectionable, but because I find it gross. Place a bowl of maggots in front of me and I just might rather sacrifice my health and starve.

All of this got me to think: "How important IS ethics to me?" Because apparently my personal sensitivities could outrank my ethical beliefs (I'm willing to eat meat for my health, but not willing to eat maggots for my health). How important are they for you?

Everyday Ethics: Bread at the Restaurant

2010-01-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

So there's been a lot of discussion recently about Oreo cookies in the blogosphere. I don't really want to repeat much of that, but if you read Jean's blog, and read my comments there, you'll see how it inspired me with this entry.

I was in Europe last summer. Being a vegetarian in Paris is hard. Being a vegetarian in London is amazingly easy. But oddly, there was one time, in London, when Tiffany and I ran into a restaurant and couldn't find a vegetarian option that sounded appealing to us (you can only eat so much pasta). We sat down, looked over the menu, made our selections, and the waitress replied that they were out of what we wanted (it was late). So we decided to leave the restaurant, and picked up a veggie burger at Burger King (which was significantly different than the veggie burgers in the states).

But the ethical dilemma here is that when we were seated, they served us some bread. Like I pointed out in Jean's blog, we all end up paying for the bread, eaten or uneaten through what we buy at the restaurant. We can't simply say, I'll skip the bread, and demand a 20 cent discount on our meal. But Tiffany and I didn't buy a meal at the restaurant. So the bread was left uneaten and since it was served it was probably thrown away (assuming the health codes are the same in the UK as in the US). Did we steal bread? Did we have an obligation to pay for it?

Now I'm sure there are studies that show that the bread is a hook to keep customers from leaving the restaurant after being seated without ordering something. If not studies, then perhaps that is the true motivation for the bread. Whatever the case, in this particular circumstance, I think we were justified in leaving without paying, since the restaurant was advertising a particular meal (on their menu outside) and didn't have it.

So change the scenario slightly... We sit down, I open up the menu and have a sudden realization. I'm not hungry. I share the thought with my wife and she realizes she's not hungry either. The bread is at our table and the waiter patiently waits. Do we have to order to pay for the bread? I could order a soda or something small. Or is the bread truly complimentary? Could I go from restaurant to restaurant sitting down, mulling over the menu as I snack on the bread, and retire at the end of my night not ordering anything, yet fully satisfied? If the bread is truly complimentary, I could do that.

The bread isn't truly complimentary, as my latter scenario suggests. I think most people would find it a little questionable, just like going to the ice cream store, sampling all the flavors and leaving without purchasing anything. The intent to cheat the system is wrong here. But in the more difficult scenario, I had no intention of cheating the system, I just thought I was hungry and realized I was mistaken.

At first glance I want to be consistent with what I said about the Oreo's (I should pay for them) then I should pay for the bread. The service was provided for me.... But in the case of the bread, I didn't ask for it, in the case of the Oreos, I did (by taking them out of the minibar). Had I sat down and asked for bread and not ordered anything, I think I would be doing something wrong.

Avatar and philosophy

2010-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

So I got a CFP for Avatar and philosophy a few days ago, but I hadn't seen the movie yet. So I didn't read through the proposal, since I was afraid of having the movie spoiled for me. But I saw the movie today, and it was great!

I just cranked out a proposal for an Avatar chapter on the Na'vi's relationship with animals in the movie, and what we can learn about our own relationship to animals. I'm hoping it'll get accepted, but I'm not holding my breath.

For those of you who are not in the know, and want to submit a proposal here's the CFP:

Call for Abstracts

Avatar and Philosophy

Edited by George A. Dunn

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Please circulate and post widely.

Apologies for Cross-posting.

To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, at wtirwin@kings.edu.

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

Eywa and the Gaia Hypothesis; Avatar and the Heideggerian Critique of Technology; Descartes versus Pandora: the Modern Project to Master Nature; Locke on Nature, Labor, and Property: Who Owns Pandora?; The Na’vi Way of Life: Hobbes Versus Rousseau on the State of Nature; Na’vi Spirituality and the Philosophy of Spinoza; Avatar and Aristotle on the Souls of Plants and Animals; Avatar and Our Responsibilities to Nonhuman Species; “More Neural Connections Than The Human Brain”: Can a Planet or a Forest Be Intelligent?; Avatar and Hinduism: What Exactly is an Avatar?; Chinese Philosophy: Is Qi the Same as Avatar’s “Energy that Flows Through All Things”?; American Indian Philosophy and Na’vi Shamanism; Avatar’s Environmentalism and Deep Ecology; Colonialism, the Na’vi, and the Rights of Indigenous People; The Problem of Evil: Why Is Goodness So Fragile on Pandora?; “Eywa Doesn’t Take Sides”: Good and Evil in Nature; Questioning Avatar: Does Natural Always Mean Better?; Going Native: The Responsibilities of Anthropologists and Social Scientists to Their Subjects; Wittgenstein and Trying to Understand an Alien Form of Life; “I See You”: Levinas, the Face, and Responsibility to the Other; Business Ethics and the RDA Corporation; "Our Only Security is in a Preemptive Strike": Avatar and Just War Theory; Is Jake a Traitor?: Avatar and Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty; Grace and the Colonel: Are Scientists Responsible for the Uses Others Make of Their Discoveries?; Jake and the Colonel: The Ethics of Following and Disobeying Orders; Avatar and the Virtues of the Warrior; Neytiri, Grace, Mo’at, and the Feminine Care Ethic; Learning of the Ways of the Na’vi: Avatar and John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education; Neytiri and Jake: The Philosophy of Love; What’s In a Name?: Grace Augustine and the Path of Moral Transformation; Avatar and the Philosophy of Religion: Theism, Pantheism, and Panentheism; Avatar and the Possibility of Finding Scientific Explanations of Religious Phenomena; Avatar, Dualism, and the Philosophy of Mind; Personal Identity: Is Jake Still Jake When in His Avatar?; Merleau-Ponty, Avatars, and the Phenomenology of the Body; Avatar and Issues Related to Disability; Ignorance, Pride, and Greed: What Can Avatar Teach Us About Why People Do Bad Things?; Avatar Aesthetics: Engaging the Imagination Through 3D and CGI; Avatar and the Philosophy of (Creating a New) Language; Identity and Community: What’s It Like to Be Sometimes Human, Sometimes Na’vi?; Communitarianism versus Individualism in Avatar; Happiness and the Good Life: Have the Na’vi Achieved It?

Submission Guidelines:

1. Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV’s: March 2, 2010

2. Submission deadline for accepted papers: August 3, 2010

Kindly submit abstract (with or without Word attachment) and CV by email to: George Dunn at FritFerret@aol.com.

Animals' desires

2010-01-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

So there has been a small drama concerning a sea lion in my part of the world. The short of it, it has a fishing line wrapped around its neck, cutting into its flesh and it doesn't want to be caught. It was first spotted in San Francisco, then 70 miles south. Three attempts to capture it have failed, but nobody is talking about giving up on it.

So, clearly, the sea lion doesn't want to be helped by humans. (It may want help, but at the very least not from humans.) We want to help it. Does it matter that it doesn't want to be helped by us? My instincts say no it doesn't really matter if it wants to be helped or not, it would maximize utility for us to help it.

But then again, something nags at me that there is something wrong happening here. I'm not just a plain maximize pleasure utilitarian, but rather a preference utilitarian like Peter Singer. I want to satisfy things' preferences. So if I want to say the right thing is happening by helping the sea lion, I have to say either that it really does prefer for us to help it, (which I think is clearly not true) or that it would prefer to live more than the cost of its aversion for our help.

But I'm not sure that the sea lion has a preference to live in the future anymore than a fly. It simply doesn't have the intellectual capacities for it. So to argue the second option, would require me to say that the sea lion can envision its future existence in some way.

Now normally, when I talk about animal suffering, I can easily skirt this problem, by simply saying that they prefer not to be suffering. We can raise animals without making them suffer. But this isn't a domesticated animal. Under factory farming conditions, we are inflicting suffering on animals. The animal can clearly have a preference for not experiencing the pain we are inflicting on it, and it could have a preference for the domesticated life. So I could be satisfying all of its preferences by raising it humanely.

In the case of the sea lion, I can't argue that it wants a domestic life. I can't argue that it want our assistance. I could argue that it wants to avoid suffering and currently it is suffering. But just because it is suffering, is that enough justification for me to intervene against its wishes?

There is a third possibility, but I find it a little distasteful. We could simply wait. Eventually, the sea lion will weaken and then perhaps it won't run. Then we could assist since its preference is more ambiguous, sort of like the presumed consent that doctors utilize when assisting unconscious people. But this strikes me as allowing the animal to suffer simply "in service to our ideologies," much like what Jean has been discussing on her blog in regards to the abolitionist stance on animal farming.

Lets change the scenario slightly. We find a sea lion with shark wounds. We could help it, but it doesn't want our help. Should we chase it around the state until we can catch it? I think it is arguable that we ought to just leave it alone and "let nature take its course." There is a significant difference though: its injuries are due to human actions, or more specifically human negligence. We bare responsibility for the sea lion's injuries. We're the shark. So even if it doesn't want the help, we still need to help it. But if it were the victim of a shark attack, then perhaps we should just leave it be? I don't like that conclusion.

The conjoined twins dilemma

2010-01-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

So after some serious thought about the conjoined twins dilemma, I think I have a solution. We punish the twin, seperate if its feasible, and if its not feasible, we still punish the twin, knowingly punishing the innocent twin as well.

Now that seems pretty hard-hearted, but here's my reasoning. Punishment is rarely ever without "splash damage", affecting those around the punished. Family, friends, co-workers, etc will be affected by this person's punishment to varying degrees. Family may feel as if they are being punished because of the person's removal from their lives. Sure we give them visitation rights, but its not quite the same as going out to a movie with them.

Similarly, if we must punish an innocent person (which we do in the normal course of punishment via family relations) to punish a guilty person, then it seems fairly consistent to punish the innocent twin along with the guilty twin. If we can seperate the twins, then we should do that, so that we reduce the punishment on the innocent twin. The surgical seperation amounts to the social seperation that the families experience. I'll admit that there is an additional layer of complexity between surgical seperation and social seperation. And to reduce the problem we can even make the surgical seperation optional. The innocent twin can choose to be surgically seperated or not.

In cases where seperation is not possible... Seperation might still be considered if the crime is a capital crime. The only reason why seperation is usually not possible is because it would result in the death of one or more of the twins. In the case of a capital offense, if the guilty twin can be surgicially removed from the innocent twin, resulting in his or her death, then essentially the death penalty has been carried out. If the innocent twin is the one that must be killed, or both twins would stand a good chance of dying in seperation, then a life in prison sentence seems more fair, again dependent upon the choice of the innocent twin (maybe s/he would prefer risking a deadly operation to life in prison).

Surely most of what I'm proposing isn't legal.... but I think it might be morally permissible.

Transparency in food

2010-01-04T10:21:00.000-08:00

I've said before that transparency in our food is important for us to be responsible omnivores. Since that isn't possible, I don't think we should be omnivores. But for those who believe that there is enough transparency in our food, you might want to look at this link. Two high school students, sequenced the DNA from a variety of food sources and found that they were not as advertised. High quality caviar was in fact from a very common "low grade" source of caviar, the Mississippi Paddlefish. Goat's milk cheese turned out to be made from a cow.

It makes me worry as a vegetarian since if even the listed ingredients aren't accurate, then how can we as vegetarians be sure that our tofurkey is really just tofu?

How can we punish conjoined twins?

2009-12-31T09:37:00.000-08:00

I just read this article I found via neatorama, about the possibility of punishing one half of a conjoined twin. The set up is fairly simple, imagine a set of conjoined twins, one of them commits a crime, the other one objects and cannot stop the other twin from committing the crime. So we have one innocent person and one guilty person. But how can we punish one without punishing the other?

The essay takes it from a legal perspective, and it comes to the conclusion that we really can't punish the guilty party legally, and I think he might be right. Even morally speaking, it would be hard to justify punishing an innocent person to ensure a guilty one is punished. We built it into our laws that we'd rather have guilty people go free than innocent people go to jail. The alternative, requiring some kind of separation of the two, would be an odd kind of punishment as well. We usually don't force surgery onto convicted criminals, much less innocent people.

But this suggests that conjoined twins are legally and ethically impervious to punishment. Imagine you were the parent of a set of conjoined twins. How would you punish them if one snuck out, to the objections of the other? Put a bag over the head of the guilty party? I'm really at a loss as to how to think about this particular puzzle.

Everyday Ethics: The Flu

2009-12-30T06:42:00.000-08:00

So I'm still sick.... So what better to do than to philosophize? Aristotle really gets it right when he says that philosophy is self-sufficient, you don't really need anything to do it, health included.

So I went to the pharmacy to pick up some more meds to dope myself up with in a losing battle to make my self feel normal. I got to the register dropped it all on the little conveyor belt, and the nice checkstand lady started ringing me up.

Thats when it hit me.... She's putting her hands all over my medicine and food! Now this isn't the usual concern of where has her hands been, but rather, my hands have been all over them! Should I speak up and say something like, I have the flu, so you might want to sanitize after you get done with my purchase?
I'm very much actively avoiding other people, specifically friends and family so I don't get them sick, but what about strangers? I can't avoid this particular stranger. I need my food at the very least. Shouldn't I at least extend the courtesy of a warning to her?

If I warn her, there are two possible scenarios that I envision, and both are really not about her particular reaction strangely enough. The first is the best case scenario. She sanitizes her hands and her station, and everyone around me (the other people in line) just go about their day like normal. The second is that everyone freaks out, panicked in a media fueled hysteria about swine flu, as I plead vegetarianism and a complete lack of pork. Okay so there might be some in-between there too.

If my warning will cause more harm than good, then why should I make the warning?

I find this scenario to be an awful lot like the white lie or the "Does this make me look fat?" scenario. A truthful answer may do a lot of harm, but there is no withholding of the truth. In the flu case, I'm trying to prevent harm by telling the truth, but may inadvertently cause more harm then good by trying.

So like, many other cases, the white lie comes down to circumstances. If my wife were to ask me this question while getting ready for an important meeting, I'd tell her the truth, to save her embarrassment. But if she was just getting ready for work, where only 20-plus 3rd graders will be judging her significantly, I would tell her the lie.

So is there a high degree of possibility that significant harm will be dealt here? Sure. Lots of people go to the pharmacy for all sorts of things, including the elderly, who are more susceptible to the flu than young'ins like me. Sure there are people who might overreact, but better to overreact than to expose oneself to the flu.

So... Stay away everyone! H1N1 death will visit you if you do not heed my warnings! (I don't know if I have H1N1).

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

And happy holidays. Hope you're all feeling better than I, since I have a pretty bad cold. But that doesn't stop me from reaping presents! Yay presents!

Repo-Men

2009-12-23T18:04:00.000-08:00

Wow, this trailer looks great for Jude Law's new movie Repo Men!

Whats great about Sci-fi is that it can make such a powerful commentary on today's issues, in this case the cost of health care. When life, death, and technology collide, why does life seem to get the short end of the stick? Either its because people fear the technology, or its too expensive. In the movie's case it seems like its too expensive. Capitalism becomes a tough-sell when people's lives are at stake and others are trying to make a buck. Not that I'm not sympathetic to health care, I'm actually quite sympathetic. But at what point does the health care industry's treating people as a means to an end, become unworkable? I don't pretend to have any answers here, I just wanted to share a really cool movie trailer.

Guilty pleasures and the market

2009-12-20T11:12:00.000-08:00

I have quite a few guilty pleasures that I indulge in.... Probably the guiltiest of them all is that I love Survivor. I can't help it.... I find the show terribly intriguing in terms of the game itself. I would love to play it someday, but I doubt I ever will get the chance to.

Tonight is the finale for this fall season's Samoa show, and its definitely been one of the most entertaining series, with Russell stealing the show from episode 1. For those of you not watching, Russell is owns an oil business and is a self-proclaimed millionaire. In the first episode, he burned his teammates socks and emptied out their water canteens to make their life at camp as miserable as possible, so that they would become easier to manipulate..... And its worked. Entering the tribal merge (where the two opposing teams combine and the game becomes an individual game) Russell's team was down in numbers but through some wiley manipulation and hardwork, his team overcame an incredible numbers deficit to come out on top.

Russell was labeled the most evil player in Survivor history as a selling point for the season. In the past there have been some pretty incredible lies and broken promises, from a player literally giving another player a car and subsequently having that player voted off (the car giver), to a faked death in the family to garner sympathy favor from the tribe. I'm not sure if Russell has done anything particularly nasty to really earn the moniker of the most evil player... And to top it off, I'm not sure if evil really applies in the game of Survivor.

Gaming ethics is when participants in a "game" (widely defined... some will call business a game) can do anything they want within the rules of the game. So as long as big bankers on Wall Street don't do anything illegal, they can do anything to make money. Now in a game like Survivor, it's easy to apply gaming ethics. Do anything within the rules to win the million dollars. Lying, promise breaking, and sock burning is all fair game. Of course this only works, so long as all the participants of the game know what they are getting into. (There are rules in Survivor beyond basic rules of immunity and voting players out... Players can't physically attack each other, unless its in a defined challenge, players can't collude to win the million and then split the winnings after the game, etc.)

However, when it comes to Wall Street, there are people who will be affected by the game that don't know that they are playing. 401Ks and people's retirement funds are at stake. Now, one can argue that these people are in fact part the game players, and if they don't know the rules, tough cookie. But, there are very clear examples of people who do not participate in any way in the stock market game, but still get affected by it, and the current economy is a prime example of it.

So how do we stop the exploitation of the "game" of Wall Street at the risk of harm to those who don't want to play the game? Regulations. We build it in to the rules of the game, that one can't do this. Of course this is met with massive resistance, since the free market is what, in many ways, made America so incredibly successful.

But in reality, our markets today have not been free for a long time. In fact, many economists point to the relaxation of regulations on the market that led to the real estate crisis which led to the credit crisis. President Obama's call for Wall Street to be more responsible (and I'm not talking about bonuses here), is a hopeless call into the void, like asking the players of Survivor not to lie. If we really want to avoid another financial crisis with the same root causes of this one's, we must regulate the market more heavily.

What is art?

2009-12-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

Amanda Palmer, siren extrodinaire, put this up on her blog today.

Here's my response:
Great song!

But I think you're wrong. Well... maybe not entirely. We can't say that everything is art, otherwise the term becomes meaningless. Words get their meaning from the fact that they differentiate things. I don't think you're saying anything can be music here... the issue is pop music. Is it art? Sure, since its not just a random assortment of sounds.

But typically when people say something is art, more is conveyed. We elevate something to a higher level of admiration when we say something is art. For example some people might say that Michael Jordan play basketball is art. That says something beyond that he's just good at playing basketball.

So when we say things like Lady GaGa is creating art, which I think is true, some people think that we're saying its good, because its art.

You're an artist Amanda... So lets try this out.... If you write a song, and you think it sucks, would you say that you created art? Are all products of creativity art? I'm hesitant to say that EVERYTHING you produce is art, (although I'm a big fan).

So lets make a distinction... "art" for all the products of creativity, and Art for particularly meritable products of creativity (this doesn't mean that all works of Art will make us feel happy or are beautiful).

***I should really point out that I'm not sure if AP is really saying that everything is art, but its a common enough statement that I felt like it should have been addressed first. I said she wasn't in my comment, but I just want to re-emphasize for clairty's sake.

Finals

2009-12-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

So yesterday was the last of my final exams. I'll be grading most of today, and hopefully be done with that by the end of the day. But I thought I'd share my first final of the morning story.

The first final of the day was my intro to philosophy course, and I grabbed my stack of exams, looked it over, it looked right just glancing at it. I went to class, passed out the exam, and then a student comes up and says that he thinks its the wrong exam. I look at it again, and sure enough, its my modern philosophy exam. So I run back to my office.... no luck. I must have printed up two copies of my modern final!

So I had to project the exam on the screen from my USB drive. But I hadn't updated my USB drive in a while, so the exam on the USB drive, was a bit out of date, and included stuff on the exam that wasn't supposed to be on the exam. Psh....

But they made it through the final, and I gave everyone some free points as a mea culpa. It's the first time that anything like that has ever happened to me. Hopefully it'll be the last. But for a moment, my class was incredibly excited about not having a final. :)

Drops in the ocean

2009-12-16T09:07:00.000-08:00

To those who believe that drops in the ocean acts, (acts that have a relatively small effect in the grand scheme of things) are pointless.

Sure in the grand scheme of things, only one person really got their dinner for free still... but the effects of one couple's actions truly can have huge reverberations, especially in this internet age.

A peek in to the future

2009-12-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

So I've been rolling a few ideas around in my head for a while now, because I need to write a chapter for a book I'm co-editing (For those of you who are curious).

I've got a few ideas, but I'm not sure which idea I'm going to run with, or if I'm going to need to mash a few of these together. But one I've been thinking about is why bad things are so bad, and good things not nearly as good as bad things are bad.

It might be easier to think of this in terms of money, assuming that money is a good thing. The more money that we have, the less useful it becomes. If I have a million dollars, I can satisfy all my needs, and desires... Getting another million then won't make me nearly as happy as the first million, because the second million would only be going to satisfy more whims and fancies, not necessities or basic comforts. This is known as the declining marginal utility of money, but I think this can be applied to happiness in general. At some point, we reach a pleateau of happiness. Any happiness beyond that is just excessive happiness.... not that we don't want it, but we're already happy. I think this is what Epicurus was trying to aim for in his aim for satisfaction, and in some ways, what the buddhists aim for in relieving suffering.

On the other hand, bad things, don't diminish in badness as you get more of it. Quite the opposite really, they become more tragic and induce more suffering as we pile on the misfortunes. So lets call this the Syngeristic Compounding of Suffering (can anyone come up with a better name for this?). It's synergistic in that it creates more suffering than the sum of its parts, it only happens when "bads" are compounded upon each other (this can be taken in many different ways... they don't have to be compounded next to each other in time necessarily).

This explains why we might want to pass laws that protect minority rights, since minorities in our society are already suffering harms in terms of discrimination. To compound that harm with being victimized in a crime, just makes the crime worse. Maybe a good analogy would be being punched. If I punch you in the same spot twice, its worse than if I punch you twice in different spots. If I had the choice between victimizing two people, it would be worse to victimize the person who was already beaten up, than the one who was not.

I think this would explain why sometimes we believe that it would have been better for X never to have had happened in our lives, even though it leads to a better state of affairs in our lives. Take Cindy Sheehan for example. I'm pretty confident in saying that she would be happier had her son not died than died, even though because he died, she has had doors and opportunities open up to her that she could have never imagined before (and lets simply stipulate that these are good things). Although this is one instance of harm to Sheehan, it is compounded with all of the harms that we experience in life overall and perhaps compounded with the injustice of the war that he was fighting.

So why would Sheehan trade a better life for a less good life? The question forces us to compare the declining marginal utility of happiness and the synergistic compounding of suffering together. This comparison, by its very nature is always going to favor eliminating the SCS, rather than in favor of the DMUH. When people chase after happiness, attempting to maximize their happiness, they inevitably compound their suffering. Thus we get the paradox of hedonism.

I think this is telling of how we should go about living happy lives. Epicurus and the Buddhists are right.

Emotions

2009-12-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

Okay first watch this movie:

EMBED-Wife Cries Over Return of the Jedi - Watch more free videos

Isn't she adorable? (no she's not my wife and no thats not me).

This just got me thinking about emotions, how little control we have over them, and how much they influence our actions and behavior.

I'm sure the lady in the movie wouldn't want to be feeling so emotional over every movie that she sees (I'd hate to see her after watching Titanic). She can't help it. Emotions simply happen to us, whether we'd like to or not. Now, normally this isn't too much of a problem, except when they begin to cross moral lines. I'm happy at a funeral, I'm sad at a birthday, or I fall in love with someone who isn't my significant other (I'm thinking about you Tiger).

But if we can't control these emotions, then why do we get blamed for them? I usually say that it doesn't make sense to hold people responsible for acts that they have no control over, but that doesn't mean there isn't any kind of room for moral evaluation here. Typically, morality comes in three categories of things that we evaluate: Actions, Consequences, and Agents. Kantianism evaluates actions, Utilitarianism evaluates consequences, and virtue theory evaluates agents. Now, not being a product of free will, emotional actions shouldn't play much of a role in Actions or Consequences (unless the act is simply motivated by the emotion rather than the emotion itself... slight distinction. Cheating is motivated by an emotion, falling in love with someone else is just the emotion itself).

So what can we say about people's character who have the incorrect emotional response? Are they insensitive or hypersensitive? Is that really a character flaw? I think it is, depending on what the kind of sensitivity that we're talking about.

Ultimately, I think at the root of ethics, there requires a kind of moral sensitivity that people can have to varying degrees. Its what makes people care about doing what is right, interested in discovering the reasoning behind moral judgments, and makes morality intrinsically valuable... Its a kind of "taking pleasure in." Typically, people call it conscience, righteousness, moral superiority, etc. But this is something that should be fostered... Less we be too insensitive that we don't care about ewoks dying, or Anakin never being with his son.

Christmas is a time of giving

2009-12-14T09:36:00.000-08:00

Its that time of year when people start giving each other gifts, then start thinking about the needy around the world as well. This is something that we should all truly think about more often than just around the holiday season, but since people are thinking about it now, may I point you towards one way that we can help the impoverished around the world: Giving Poo.

One of the ways that we indirectly impact the impoverishment of others around the world is through our consumption of petroleum. Petroleum, although most americans think of it as a source for gasoline, is made into fertilizers for farmers around the world. In fact, most of the famine in the world is not caused by inclement weather or pests, but rather economics. When oil prices spike, farmers are unable to puchase fertilizers, reducing crop yields, and consequently causing famine.

Now petroleum based fertilizers aren't the best way to farm, but it is practical because its cheap. We can help reduce poverty and essentially subsidize more ecologically responsible farming by purchasing manure for third world farmers. Two birds one stone!

Will the real Nietzsche please stand up?

2009-12-13T07:40:00.000-08:00

If you've been following the comments, in my last vegetarian post, my friend Gary brought up Nietzsche. And no offense to Gary, but I think he has Nietzsche a bit wrong. So here's my interpretation of Nietzsche, tempered a lot by Robert Solomon's What Nietzsche Really Said.

Nietzsche is a virtue theorist. He's telling us that there is a particular kind of character that we should be developing, and he calls it the Ubermensch. Now this is not within reach of everyone, only a few people have what it takes to become this. So how does one try to achieve this character?

Unlike Aristotle, Nietzsche doesn't know what the Ubermensch is like, because the Ubermensch is beyond human. We must transcend our human natures to become more than what we are. He says that at best we can contrast it with the Last Man and say what he is not. He is not a follower, he is not a sheep, he is not a person who disappears into the comfort of conformity. Essentially, the Ubermensch must be authentic, in the existentialist sense. Someone who will be genuinely themselves, not renting their lives out to a kind-of-life.

But this is not enough to become the Ubermensch. The Ubermensch is a creator as much as he is a destroyer of old values. Overcoming the traditional christian, and Aristotelian ethic, the Ubermensch must then forge a new system of virtues. This system of virtues and values will be a life affirming one, instead of a life denying one. Life-affirming for Nietzsche is to embrace the Will to Power. Power, not being literally strength, but an intensification of life.

Probably the best analog to the Will to Power is art. Art is an intensification of beauty or expression, and even better, it is the result of a creative re-invention of the world. Nietzsche wants us to all to become works of art. But like all works of art, not all of them are going to be great. There will be lots of mediocre works of art, and none of those will be the Ubermensch. But the fact that people are trying to be works of art, is better than those who are purely satisfied with what they are.

Works of art force us to re-evaluate ourselves, and the world that we live in, through the artist's lens. This is how the Ubermensch is to be viewed, in terms of generating new values. His is a work of art so masterful, that it creates a new movement in the artworld entirely. It necessarily means that the Ubermensch is inspirational in character, but not purposefully, otherwise he just becomes another preacher. But through the strength of his character, people will want to imitate.

So what would Nietzsche say about eating animals? Absolutely nothing, just like Aristotle says nothing on the subject. His ethic is one of character development, not of evaluation of actions. And even if there was something to be said by Nietzsche about animals, he would tell us to disregard it, because he is not the Ubermensch, and merely following in Nietzsche's footsteps would necessarily mean that you're a sheep, never striving for authenticity. Perhaps the only thing we can say about Nietzsche and vegetarianism would be this: If it is a creative re-interpretation of the world for you to eat or not eat meat, then it is good.

Here's where I'll interject and say that I think its far more sheep like to simply continue eating meat, than to be a vegetarian. But, only be a vegetarian because of authentic reasons. Likewise, be a meat-eater for authentic reasons. If you can authentically say that it doesn't matter how you get your taste buds to tingle with pleasure, then by all means, eat meat (according to Nietzsche). I can't authentically do that because I care about others' suffering.

TED talks: Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs

2009-12-09T16:10:00.001-08:00

I love T.V. I probably watch way more than I should. One of my favorites is Dirty Jobs, and I remember watching the episode that he's talking about here, and thinking, "There has to be a more humane way of doing this." Maybe there isn't...

What to Tell Vegetarians: A response

2009-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine pointed me to this blog post today, a response to people who advocate vegetarianism. So I thought I'd post a friendly response to the points made in the post. I'm not sure if the post reflects the blogger's views, or Harvey Ussery's position... I think it's Ussery's though, so I'll direct them at him.

The first part of the blog post is about the subject experience of killing animals. I rarely bring this up, only because, well... its subjective. Some people might be thrilled and invigorated by killing animals, others not so much. But ultimately, this point is moot. If something is immoral, its not because people enjoy it or do not enjoy it. Clearly, people enjoy lots of immoral things, and don't enjoy things that are perfectly morally permissible (like going to the dentist, or cleaning the toilet).

So it's not whether or not someone has killed the food that they eat, but whether or not they can choose not to eat the food that they eat. This is something we can all clearly do. I don't take the "moral high ground" because I don't kill animals. I take the "moral high ground" because I don't participate in activities that lead to the unnecessary suffering of animals (raising them in factory farmed conditions).

The next point is where Ussery is right on the money. He writes:

Where you and I probably disagree most is this: While no one would claim that the wolf is being immoral when he catches and eats the rabbit, you probably assume that for me, a human being, eating meat is merely an option which I (selfishly) choose by preference—and I could just as easily satisfy my dietary needs with a strictly plant-based diet. Well, I do not see my eating of animals as merely optional. Based on extensive research on the matter, I believe that animal proteins, and especially high quality fats (and the fat-soluble vitamins they either contain or enhance), are essential for optimal health. Thus “kill and eat” is as imperative for me as for the wolf.

I think Ussery is making two points here. First, that its okay for animals to eat other animals, so consequently I can eat animals as well. Second, that eating animals are essential for optimal health.

First: Yes, animals do eat other animals, but this isn't a moral act because animals can't reason morally. And even if they can reason morally, carnivorous animals MUST eat meat in order to survive, since they cannot derive all of their nutrients from plant sources by themselves. Being held morally responsible for our actions implies that we can do otherwise. In the case of animals, they can't do otherwise because their biology prevents them, and because they can't reason to the alternatives if they can do otherwise.

But probably more importantly, I don't think that we should determine our morality based on animals' actions. Animals sometimes eat their young, rape, males of many species kill babies to encourage females to reproduce again with them, etc..

Second: Animals are not required for optimal health of the human body. There are 8 essential ammino acids that the body needs to survive (12 non-essential). All of them can be found from plant sources. But Ussery's argument isn't about survival... Its about optimal health. If vegetarians can't reach optimal health because of their diets, then we might have reasons to be omnivorous.

Unfortunately, Ussery's argument fails on that level as well. Brendan Brazier was featured not too long ago on Oprah. He is a Triathlete, holds a couple of course records, and is a vegan. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is easy to be in optimal health, espescially as a vegetarian, but it is possible. Besides, reaching optimal health is difficult for most people, even on a diet with meat included.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that suggests eating meat prevents us from reaching optimal health. Heart disease is the most common killer of Americans, and it is largely attributable to an excess intake of cholesterol which is not found in plants, only animal sources. The American Society for Clinical Nutrition published an article in 2003, that indicated that vegetarians live significantly longer lives than non-vegetarians.
Ussery points out that as a backyard farmer, he treats his animals much more humanely than the factory farmers. This I can agree with. But since backyard farming is impractical for most people because of the time commitment, or because of laws or space availability, those that cannot raise their animals themselves must rely on mass producers to get their meat, which means that the lives of the animals, the point that Ussery wants to focus on, is probably a dismal one.

Finally, Ussery turns the question back to the vegetarian:

...let me return your personal question with one for you: What is the percentage of the food on your table, year round, that you produce yourself, or that you buy face to face from producers you know personally, so you also know how that food was produced, and at what cost to living beings? My estimate is 85% for my own table. If you have not a clue where your vegetarian fare was produced, by whom, at what cost to other players in the local ecology, including economically oppressed humans—then do not dare presume a moral superiority based on the fact that I do indeed kill animals in my backyard, in the context of a way of food production which is most of all about regeneration, about healing, about ensuring an agricultural base “unto the seventh generation.

I confess, I don't know where most of my vegetables come from. But where my food comes from doesn't make that much of a difference, ultimately speaking. Sure there might be ecological costs with industrialized farming, but the fact is, its is almost infinitely easier to get environmentally responsible raised crops than humanely treated meat at the local grocery store.

The heart of Ussery's question here is this: Am I a perfectly moral person? If I'm not then I can't proclaim that Ussery is a engaging in questionably moral behavior. I'll admit, that I'm not a perfectly moral person. But that doesn't mean that I can't point out other people's moral flaws. And I would hope others would do the courtesy to me to point out my own moral short comings, so that I can attempt to correct them.

When it comes to food, we really only have two present choices, an omnivorous diet, or a vegetarian diet. I think there are plenty of reasons for saying the vegetarian diet is the more ethically responsible, healthy diet than the omnivorous one. Does that make a person a morally bad person for eating meat? I don't think so, but I think we can be better people by not eating meat.

Layout Change

2009-12-09T11:23:00.000-08:00

Man its been awhile since I've edited HTML.... so much so that it seems like eveything in the Blogger template is greek to me. I never really learned anything beyond basic HTML, but sometimes, thats enough. So what I did, was changed the width of the main column so my posts are now wider, and shorter rather than skinnier and longer. This might make the blog look funny to some people, but really it would only look funny to those at a 640x420 resolution. If you're running at that resolution, then might I make a friendly suggestion to change it to 800x600, at the very least. It'll give you more desktop space, and things will look nicer!

Let me know if anyone is having problems viewing the blog.

The End of the World

2009-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

There are some thought experiments that are so common, that it rarely is thought of as a thought experiment, but rather an argument in itself. Its the end of the world, and you and someone else are the last people on the planet.

Usually, the someone else is terribly unattractive, or there are other circumstances that affect your desire to procreate with the other person. But the scenario itself suggests that there is some kind of obligation to continue the human species, since in normal circumstances you would never want to engage in activities that would lead to reproduction with this other person.

So do we have an obligation to continue the human species?

I'm not sure that we do. Typically, when we speak of future generations, we're speaking about an abstract population that will very likely come into being. But, in end of the world scenarios, the future generation will come into being only based on our present actions. Just as I, an individual, have no particular responsibility to have children (arguably, I have some kind of responsibility not to have children because of the state of the environment, and the fact that I live in an industrialized nation... but thats for another time.).

Now I'm a firm believer in context, and in the situation of being the last members of my species, I may have a particular duty to continue the existence of the species. But to say that, implies I have an obligation to the human species as a whole. What kind of obligation is that, and why doesn't it appear on an individual basis in normal circumstances?

The hypothetical position that I am in, is quite akin to the position of God before creation. Before creation, God has really no obligations except to himself and to his species (assuming he has a species). Now to place God into our scenario, he would have to be the last of his species. Does he have an obligation to bring into existence creation? To say that he would have an obligation to himself, is odd. Obligations to oneself are essentially promises to oneself. In any promisory relationship, the person the promise is made to, can release the promiser from the promise. E.g. I promise my wife to take her to the movies, and she's not feeling up to it. So she releases me from the promise. But, if I'm making promises to myself, then I can release myself from the promise. I promise myself that I will exercise today. But I'm not feeling it, so I release myself from the promise. Have I broken the promise? Only if I didn't release myself from the promise and broke it, but why would anyone do that?

So back to the end of the world. I don't have an obligation to myself to continue the existence of the world, and I don't think I have obligations to non-existent people, otherwise I might have an obligation to procreate my children (which I don't believe I have, and I don't think most people believe that they have as well). Its not an obligation to myself (those are meaningless), but it could be one to the species.... but the species consists of myself and the other person. So I have an obligation to myself and the other to procreate. If the other has a similar mindset as myself, then we can release ourselves from the obligation, and not reproduce.

This isn't about Tiger

2009-12-02T09:16:00.000-08:00

This is entry isn't about Tiger Woods, or whether his infidelity is our buisness or not.... I think thats a purely a subjective matter. Some people are interested financially, emotionally, or whatnot in Tiger's life and so they in a sense care. Clearly some people care, and some people don't... And whether or not he has a right to privacy on this particular issue is also not easily answered, since he is a public figure and public figures naturally give up some of their privacy rights by the fact that they are public figures (not to say that they have no privacy rights at all.... just some.... what those are exactly, I'm not terribly sure.)

What I want to talk about is infidelity in general. Clearly, there is something wrong with it. I think at the very least we can say it is a broken promise, assuming that there was a promise of fidelity, which is pretty common between most monogomous couples.

However, I think most people enter into the promise without a full understanding of the difficulties of monogomy. Whether humans, or more specifically men, are evolved to be monogomous or to play the field is really rather irrelevant. People have to make a decision, and this decision is not a genetically determined one (lest there be a gene forcing people to pick up phones and call mistresses or a gene that compells people to engage in a tryst... And some would argue that it is the case, but I'm pretty sure they would be on weak scientific grounds. And if they are correct, then we might need simply concede everything to genetic determinism.)

So if we acknowledge the difficulty of monogamy, what then? I think when we recognize the difficulty of what most people are commiting themselves to, then we must be more lenient when they fail. Few would question the character of an individual who fails to climb Mt. Everest. But many are quick to pass judgment on people, public figures especially, when they fail in monogamy.

No doubt, Tiger is morally blameworthy for his actions. But the real question is how much does this really tarnish his moral character? The easier it is for us to resist a particular temptation, the more we can rightly judge the person to have a tarnished or vicious character. It is easy for us to resist killing people, typically, so when one fails to resist, s/he has a particularly tarnished character.

A quick ethical puzzle

2009-12-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

I've been pretty busy lately with grading and such, so here's a quick ethical puzzle for you to chew over.

Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough aren't you're average couple, both are deaf, and obviously they are gay. But they wanted a child anyways, so they actively sought out a sperm donor to help them conceive a child. However, they also wanted their child to be deaf, so that their child would be able to experience the rich culture that deaf culture provides them.

There is lots of anecdotal evidence that suggests that hearing children of deaf couples tend not to be able to relate as well to their parents as deaf children to deaf parents, since they can experience the world in a way that their parents can't, and consequently don't share the same unifying experiences of the deaf community.

On the other hand, these women are actively bringing about a child with a disability (is deafness a disability? Some argue that it isn't). Is this any more responsible than actively drinking during a pregnancy to get a baby with Fetal alcohol syndrome, because they really like children with FAS?

I'd love to hear what you guys think, so please comment!!

Everyday ethics: The bathroom

2009-11-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

So I was thinking about the things that we do everyday, that arn't exactly earth-shattering moral dilemmas, but have a significant moral component to them. What do we do in these circumstances? And there are a plethera of them. So I'm going to try to work them out here on my blog, under the label everyday ethics. I'm not the first person to think about these by a long shot, but I doubt that there are tons of scholarly articles on them (but in all honesty, I haven't checked).

So my first entry... I work at a community college and I know I'm not alone in finding public bathrooms kinda gross. But when you're on campus all day, you really don't have other options, and when you have to go you have to go. But to the point, usually one has choices on where one goes... and there is inevitably the handicapped stall. A wide open stall, about the size of my home bathroom. There's something nice about not being enclosed in metal all around, inches from yourself.

But the handicapped stall is for handicapped people, and I'm not handicapped. Should I use it? I think there is a pretty good analogy with handicapped parking spaces. They're the closest and thus most desirable parking spaces. Many people kind of fume about the fact that the spaces arn't utilized very much sometimes, and so whats the harm in utilizing them when in all likelihood nobody will be inconvenienced by it?

However, the problem is the occassion when someone will be inconvenienced by it. The fact that the other stalls are so narrow make it difficult for handicapped people to use them. Its difficult to turn myself around in them, let alone a wheelchair. Occupying the stall may be nice for myself, but it would be akin to putting a locked belt on a handicapped person. We all know the sensation of NEEDING to relieve ourselves, and anything that gets in the way is just that much more painful. Add to the discomfort the fact that one is disabled, and the stall that they would be able to utilize with more ease than the stall that they would have difficulty using is occupied, it seems like an unfair burden to place on handicapped people.

Most people are fairly good about not using the handicapped parking spots (mostly because there are fines involved, but also because most people are good people). But I wonder how many people use the handicapped stall when given the option. I know I used to do it. Then, one day a handicapped person came in while I was occupying the stall... I felt like a pretty big ass, for a skinny vegetarian.

A farce?

2009-11-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

Its been making headlines and blog posts everywhere.... a Belgian man has been fully conscious and paralyzed for 23 years, and treated as if he was in a vegetative state....

But then, in comes James Randi, saying its a farce, nothing more than facilitated communication, using a kind of high tech ouiji board.

I had my doubts when I first heard the story... How could a completely paralyzed man communicate with us? Apparently its as simple as holding his hand and guiding it along a keyboard.

But if this part is a farce, and I would be inclined to agree with James Randi here, how do we explain the brain scans that say that he is in fact conscious and responsive to stimuli....

I'm terribly confused about this particular case. But one thing is for sure, if we keep scanning vegetative people's brains, we would eventually find more seemingly vegetative people with active brains. So what do we do about these cases? How do we care for those who are conscious and fully "locked-in" (assuming such a condition exists)?

In my ethics course, when we discuss euthanasia and quality of life, it quickly becomes apparent that its a highly subjective thing. Some might think that a quadrapalegic life is not worth living... I think that if I had a helping spider monkey and was able to watch Lost, then life would still be worth living.

But the problem with "locked-in" people is that they cannot voice their desires, except with perhaps a brain scan. But brain states aren't exactly equivalent to yes and no answers. So even if they are fully conscious, I think it might boil down to an excrutiatingly cold-hearted utilitarian calculation. Does the locked in patient provide friends and family more joy than not?

Fish

2009-11-25T09:46:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Science Friday on my ipod, (I'm pretty behind on listening to it so its a couple weeks old) today and was struck by what Sylvia Earle had to say about eating fish. She said something to the affect of the fish that we eat would not be eaten if they lived on land. For example, Tuna can live up to 20-30 years, and are a top predator in the oceans. We would not imagine raising for food lions, tigers or bears, for example, but we will eat tuna.

Her point was that its ultimately unsustainable for us to eat tuna and many other fish (orange roughy she says can live to 200 years old) that we eat on a regular basis. The kinds of foods that we do eat, cattle, chickens, and such take very little time to mature and are low on the food chain (they only eat plants). We should seriously consider eating lower on the ocean's food chain as well... if not stop eating from the oceans all together.

I think there is something to be said about what she's advocating here. This is significantly different from how we eat terrestial animals. We usually farm them and only hunt them occasionally. Ocean animals are almost exclusively hunted, and in mass quantities, and only farmed occasionally. When I was a demi-veg I would advocate hunting, since factory farming is much worse than hunting. But when it comes to the oceans, perhaps aquaculture is the way to go? (It probably isn't the way to go because of the pollution that they create, not to mention the possible suffering that is inflicted on the animals.)

Either way, I think I've found my winter break read.

Why I am not a Demi-vegetarian

2009-11-23T16:01:00.000-08:00

A demi-vegetarian is a person who eats little meat and is conscious about where they get it, trying to minimize the suffering of animals. Peter Singer calls it Compassionate Omnivorism. I think thats a mouthful, so I like to call it demi-vegetarianism like R.M. Hare. I was a demi-vegetarian for about 4 years before I converted to being a full vegetarian (with the exception of gelatin.... man you just can't get away from that stuff).

Michael Pollan really turned me into a vegetarian, contrary to his own thesis. In the Omnivore's Dilemma he goes out of his way to show us that there are humanely treated animals. I don't disagree. However, he points out that the industrial organic machine of Whole Foods isn't much better in terms of animal treatment. I agree.

So our alternative is to find the humanely treated meat.... But how exactly do we do that? Its rather impractical (at least for me) to research all of our food options to discover the treatment of the animals. The farm that Pollan features in his book, he also points out will not ship any of their meat. So if I want the idyllic farm setting that Pollan describes in his book, I think I have to go to Pensylvania to get it, which is impractical for me, considering I'm in California. The alternative was of course humanely treated meat. Whole Foods might be a place where the typical demi-vegetarian would shop. But Pollan's description of the industrial organic machine wasn't much better than the standard factory farm. Sure things would be organic, but organic doesn't equate to humane, and when producing food at the scale that Whole Foods demands, its difficult to imagine that the food would indeed be truly humane.

It forced me from considering my self a compassionate omnivore, to what I really was, a-hope-and-faith-in-the-compassion-of-people-who-are-saying-they-are-compassionate-to-their-animals-and then-trying-to-turn-a-profit omnivore.

Consider the analogy of clothing. If you were vehemently against sweatshop labor, and you found a label that said that it was not made in a sweatshop, and bought it on faith that it was not from a sweatshop, even though it was in fact from a sweatshop. Would you be any better than the person who was not conscious of buying their clothes from a sweatshop? Maybe in terms of character you would be... But good characters want to ACTUALLY do good things, not seemingly good things.

Peter Singer spoke at Stanford last year about compassionate omnivorism, advocating it. I asked him how it we could actually get that kind of meat, and he replied that it was simply readily available*. I don't buy it. It strikes me as being naively trusting in a network of suppliers that have never earned my trust, and have been shown time and time again that they don't deserve our trust.

There can't be a middle ground on this until the meat industry is willing to make food production transparent. Only then can we really be assured that the animals we're eating are humanely treated, and a middle ground, demi-vegetarianism, becomes reasonable. Until then, the argument for demi-vegetarianism is a good one, but not one that is practicable by the majority of people.

*I'm simplifying my question and his response for the sake of brevity here.

Sex worker revealed to be a scientist

2009-11-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

Belle de Jour, one of the UK's first blogs to reach celebrity status, has revealed herself to be a scientist working in cancer epidimeology. The intresting part is that Belle, was the pseudonym for her blog about her time as a prostitute.

One of the typical objections against legalizing prostitution, is that women who turn to prostitution are usually turning to it out of financial hardships. This is the case of Brooke Magnati, turned to prostitution when she was working on her Ph.D. She got paid £300 an hour and was able to make ends meet with that. However, the fact that she was in financial hardship, makes it more difficult for people to argue that she was fully consenting party. Rather, she was coerced by her circumstances. Had she been able to land a better job, she would have not turned to prostitution. So it sounds like prostitution is simply a kind of exploitation on the poor.

I'd be pretty confident in saying that not all prostitutes turn to their profession because of financial hardships, although the vast majority do. But even if that is the case, is this really a kind of exploitation of the poor? Exploitation, it seems to me, would require two things, someone in a time of need, and in this case Magnati would qualify, then taking advantage of that circumstance in an unfair way. Price gouging after a hurricane would be an example of exploitation of disaster victims. But in Magnati's case she was a very well paid call girl. At current exchange rates (which I know are significantly different from when she was a call girl) £300 equates to about $500 US.

Some prostitutes are clearly exploited, being paid only a fraction of that for their services. Part of her ability to charge such a high price is no doubt due to her attractiveness, and I'm assuming that she doesn't have any particularly specialized skills (she mentions that she wanted to something that wouldn't require a lot of training) beyond what an attractive person's typical experiences would net her.

I think what I'm suggesting here is that prostitution should have a sort of minimum wage. All prostitutes need to be paid X, in order for clients not to be exploiting them. From there, the market can determine whether particular prostitutes get paid more for features, skills, and services that they have or are willing to offer.

Geo-engineering 2

2009-11-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

So what are the biggest problems with Geo-engineering? The biggest objection is the unforeseen effects that may occur from our tinkering with the environment. If we put up lots of dust in the atmosphere to block out the suns rays, what might that do to various ecosystems around the world? Humans have a notoriously horrific track record on being able to predict the consequences of their actions on the environment.

Ideally, we would be able to conduct experiments to help determine the effects of some of our actions. The Mt. Pinotubo eruption in 1991 has provided some pretty concrete data on the effects of large sulfur dioxide injections into the upper atmosphere. Some of the results were a 1 degree cooling of global temepratures for a year afterwards, rainfall changes around the world, and a weakening of the ozone layer. Of course its the first effect that most people are now currently interested in, but the second effect, of affecting rainfall amounts could have enormous effects to certain parts of the world as well, essentially causing droughts in one part of the world, and flooding in others.

But if we look at the trade-offs that we are dealing with, global warming will also cause similar changes to microclimates around the world. Arn't we really trading one kind of flooding and drought for another? Both are man-made problems. Currently, the first world nations do little to assist others for the negative impacts of global warming on other nations, and legally challenges have mostly failed. However, with active geo-engineering, it would be much more plausible that legal actions would succeed.

On top of that, assuming that we become rather good at geo-engineering, or that we decide to engage in different kinds of geo-engineering, we might have impacts on local microclimates, rather than around the world, or we might become very good at manipulating the weather at other places. Recent CIA reports released indicate that the US military tried and was relatively successful at increasing rainfall during the Vietnam war, which slowed down supply lines to the Viet-cong by muddying up roads. If we begin manipulating weather in a global manner, one could possibly foresee that we happen to cause droughts in the middle east, and increase rainfall in perhaps the breadbasket, or in central California. We're probably far away from being able to manipulate weather on that level, however.

The philosophical problem is that these arguments rest on the precautionary principle. We ought not do X because of the possible outcomes of X. If we don't really know the outcomes of X and we have reasons to believe that ABC might be the consequences of X, then as a matter of prudence we shouldn't do X (assuming ABC is undesirable). It sounds like a pretty reasonable principle, but ultimately it rests on an appeal to ignorance. If I don't do X, the potential consequences are DEF, in this case global warming and all the potential consequences of it. The precautionary principle cuts both ways, and gives us no reason to act one way or the other. But if I don't do X, then I must do not X. Anything I place as alternative options for X, say reduce carbon emissions and let things work out naturally, also suffer from the precautionary principle problem.

So if the precautionary principle doesn't give us a solid reason not to engage in geo-engineering, and from the reasons in my last post we should consider engaging in geo-engineering, the arguments seem to favor engaging in geo-engineering. First world nations would simply have to accept the (legal) responsibility of the fall out of geo-engineering, whereas they have been able to escape the (legal) responsibility of global warming for the most part.

Geo-engineering

2009-11-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

You may or may not have heard of geo-engineering, but its increasingly becoming the buzzword around environmentally concerned people. Some are radically against it, and others are all for it.

The concept is simple enough. The environment is in trouble because of human activities, and so we should do something about it.... Now most environmentalists agree on that point, but most people have only suggested "negative" actions, that is we should reduce our pollution that we are putting into the environment. If we can cease adding additional carbon into the atmosphere, then problem solved.

However, others contend that its a little too little too late for that. Instead, we need to engage in geo-engineering, actively make the environment cooler or actively remove carbon from the environment, or both. Carbon collectors have been proposed that would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but most agree that its probably not enough. Other geo-engineering ideas include putting reflective mylar on glacial sheets to reflect light and consequently cool them off, launch millions of tiny mirrors into space to reflect some of the sun's rays, or even possibly launching missles into the atmosphere to release chemicals or dust that would obscure the sun's rays.

I don't think all of these ideas are very good, and some may in fact cause more harm than good. But it strikes me as the correct approach to global warming. Negatively reducing our carbon emissions would rely on "natural" processes of the environment to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere. I think of this rather analagously to relieving a tension headache by simply removing what is causing the tension. Sure it will work, but it will take plenty of time and things may get worse before they get better. On the other hand, we can take a pain reliever, that would actively help make the pain go away, and in situations where we can't instantly remove the stressors triggering the tension headache, it may be the only solution.

Similarly, we can't instantly eliminate our carbon emissions. There simply isn't the political will or the social organization to make that happen. But a dual approach can buy us more time in combating the global warming problem.

Now this isn't the only issue that is raised by geo-engineering. There are some serious consequences and risks we have to consider if or when we decide to engage in geo-engineering. I'll address some of those tomorrow.

More identity puzzles

2009-11-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I've been thinking about identity a lot lately.... But here's another puzzle:

I think what makes a person a mother at the very least is making a long-term commitment to caring for a child. This allows us to cover all kinds of motherhood that doesn't involve biological reproduction. Some people want to call pregnant women mothers, others, mothers to be. Depending upon the commitment level, my definition would classify the ones who want to deliver mothers, and those that don't not mothers.

It would also classify certain people as non-mothers that many would want to call mothers, like people who give up their babies for adoption. I'm willing to live with this.

So whats the point of defining motherhood? It strikes me as a puzzling kind of social identity. E.g. I think my mom is still a mother, even though she doesn't directly care for me still (in the child rearing sense). But what if I and my brother were to die today? Would she still be a mother? I'd like to say yes, since I would have called her a mother even though she's not directly caring for me still.

But the harder problems are cases where the mother has a stillborn baby. Is she a mother? Under my definition yes. I suppose, others might want to take issue with that.

Motherhood doesn't seem to go away easily once it is assigned. Contrast that with other social identities like being a student, or an adolescent. Even fatherhood I think is significantly different from motherhood (although I haven't quite formulated a definition for that yet).

I'm not sure if my concept of motherhood is really robust enough either.... ambivolent mothers still seem like mothers to me, and I could imagine a mother who never makes long term commitments and simply reaffirms a short-term commitment over and over until her child turns 18, then kicks them out, deciding not to renew the commitment.

Ultimately, I find this case intresting because its another one of those cases in which we utilize a label or word without really understanding what it means in the fullest sense. I think Socrates would be proud of my questioning.

Mereological Identity

2009-11-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

I love XKCD! And today's comic strikes that perfect balance between sentimentality and philosophy.

Clearly father is a spatio-temporal continuity theorist of identity. If the aggregate breaks up, then its GONE. But daughter is something like a mereological theorist of identity, if you're made up of the same parts, you're the same, or in this case.

I have to give it to father here, since daughter's notion is almost incoherent. If she is an organ donor, and she continues to exist after her death, then she could exist in multiple places after she is dead, since she has multiple organs that could be donated. Even worse, her organs are made up of things like tofu chicken nuggets and vegetarian tikka masala (I imagine she's a vegetarian). So SHE really is just donating some soy protein to others.

If she would exist after death, then the same can be applied to what makes up her organs. She could continue to exist just as easily as checking the cannibalize box on her driver's license.

What your state doesn't have a cannibalize box?

Dogs are worse than SUVs

2009-11-04T17:38:00.000-08:00

According to this article here, dogs have a larger carbon footprint than an SUV, largely due to their diet. Now, one of the many arguments that people use to argue for vegetarianism, is that it is less taxing to the environment. Michael Pollen says that a vegetarian in a Hummer has a smaller carbon footprint than a meat eater in a Prius. I think the research is pretty conclusive about the heaviness of meat in a diet.

However, since dogs and cats are obligate carnivores, they will consequently have a larger carbon footprint on the earth, than say myself, a vegetarian. Should I get rid of my two cats?

There's some scoffing in the article where Williams-Derry says that a dog would have to eat twice as much as a human does.... But I'm not sure if the math works out, since most people don't eat mostly meat, whereas most dogs do eat mostly meat. Compare a person on atkins to a dog, sure the person will have the bigger footprint. But the average american with all of the carbs included, I think would be equal to a dog's carbon footprint solely in food consumption (assuming a relatively large dog not those things that people try to pass as dogs that resemble more like rodents).

Whats keeping me from getting rid of my cats, besides that they're abnoxiously cute and lovable, is that the carbon argument is only one piece of a larger argument against meat. I'm primarily concerned with the cruelty that is involved in factory farming. I'm also concerned about the carbon cost of meat, as well as my vegetables, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the carbon cost is secondary to many other important concerns (only begrudgingly secondary).

Dogs also help people appreciate the environment more, I think. When people have fun with their dogs, its often at a park, in nature, etc, and at the very least helps us feel empathetic with other animals, which is lacking in the other spheres of animal interaction.

But it does give me serious pause. Maybe I shouldn't get a replacement cat when my cats inevitably die.