How can we punish conjoined twins?

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.  :)