by Thomas Wells

Middle age brings sometimes uncomfortable self-reflection. One thing I have realized is that I am not a particularly good person. Not evil, just mediocre. Lots of people are much better at morality than me, including many of my students. On the other hand, I am quite good at the academic subject of ethics. Good enough to teach it at a university and write papers that occasionally appear in nice journals.

Is there a contradiction between these two observations? Is there a causal relationship?

When I started studying ethics I assumed it would somehow make me a morally better person. But I never really thought through that ‘somehow’ and after 15 years I can see that my complacency was not justified. My moral achievements still derive mostly from the good habits my parents trained me in. If I am at all a better person than I was 15 years ago, that has had more to do with the good people I have been lucky enough to know than with what I have been reading, thinking, and teaching.

Some years ago, for instance, I worked through the arguments around animal rights and decided to my intellectual satisfaction that the case against eating them was completely compelling. But I still eat meat nearly every day. I did try vegetarianism a couple of times but gave up because it was too hard. Vegetarian food in every situation was always worse than the meat alternative. And I got very tired of eating cheese.

Aristotle would diagnose my failing as akrasia, or weakness of will. I characterize it in more familiar terms as moral laziness. I claim moral principles, but I am not prepared to put much effort into living up to them. In the same way, I think I want to be thin, but – practice has revealed – I am not prepared to exchange my comforts for ascetic bowls of muesli and pre-dawn running regimes. Either I don’t care about being good as much as I think I do (a motivation problem), or I am not really convinced by my own moral reasoning (a rationality problem). I think it may be a bit of both. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

How conceivable is this? Trump loses the 2020 US presidential election. But he refuses to concede, claiming that results in the swing states of Ohio and Florida were invalid due to voter fraud and crooked election officials. Fox News, other right-wing media and the Republican controlled congress go along with this. So Trump remains president until, in the words of Senate leader Mitch McConnell, “we are able to clear up this mess.” Clearing up the mess, it turns out, could take some time–even longer than it takes for Trump to fulfill his promise to release his tax returns. Law suits are brought, but guess what? By a 5 to 4 majority, the supreme court refuses to hear them.

Couldn’t happen, you say. The constitution and all that. To which I would say just two words: Merrick Garland. When the Republican-controlled senate refused to hold confirmation hearings for Garland after he had been nominated by Obama for a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, they effectively suspended–some would say “trampled underfoot”–the constitution. Nothing more clearly exposes the hypocrisy of the Republican call for judges who will “uphold” the constitution than that cynical maneuver.

I’m not saying that the above scenario is likely. But I am saying that is quite conceivable. And for anyone who cherishes conventional democratic values, its mere conceivability has to be alarming. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

Part 1 of this essay is here.

Pakistani cinema of the nineteen-sixties was active and vibrant, its death knell still a decade away. Memorable movies were made and ran for weeks—Do Ansoo, a silver jubilee hit from fifties, Heera Aur Pathar, Ghunghat, Chakori amongst others, and, of course, the great hit Armaan. Our heroes were as handsome as any—Darpan, Sudhir Santosh Kumar, Waheed Murad, Mohammad Ali—and the villains—Aslam Pervaiz,Talish—as nasty as any. Amongst the heroines were Sabiha Khanum, Nayyar Sultana, Bahar, and Shamim Ara who went on to direct films, quite a feat in the male-dominated industry. All these, including Rani, Neelo, and Zeba, the dewy–eyed beauty, traipsed through our lives, trembled and faltered and danced and sang their way into our hearts. For all the drama, the costumes and the histrionics, it was the musical score that stayed. The lyrics written by acclaimed poets, music composed by artists steeped in the classical tradition—Rasheed Atre, Khurshid Anwar, Nisar Bazmi—and sung by the greats of the times—our own melody queen Malika-e-Tarannum Noor Jehan leading the pack who kept crooning till almost her dying days, heart disease and all. We saw these pictures once, twice, as many times as we could wangle, because going to the pictures was the main thing.

Though we thrilled through the fictional lives of the stars, part of the attraction were the intermission, a much anticipated event by itself, and the trailers that ran before the main film. As soon as the velvet curtains swished together at intermission, the vendors descended screaming their wares. Pakorey, Choley, biscuits, soda-water, lemon and orange flavored, the bottles clinking and opened intriguingly by pushing the round glass stopper to the bottom. Coca-Cola would make its way to sleepy Sialkot in the mid-sixties and change our intermission lives forever. Read more »

by Dave Maier

The other day here at 3QD, philosopher Guy Elgat provided an interesting discussion of the conspiracy theory Q-Anon and some relevant philosophical issues about knowledge and rationality. In particular, he focused on a seemingly perverse response by Q-ers to our challenge to provide proof of their outlandish claims: that we “don’t have any proof there isn’t [a Q].” I had a number of reactions to this column, as well as to some of the comments from readers, but I didn’t want to dump a huge comment on the thread (plus I had to think about it), so I thought I would put my response here instead.

I get the impression that since the QAnon business is sheer madness, and thus not philosophically interesting, what interests Elgat about it is instead the apparent parallel, epistemically speaking, with the historically much more substantial question of whether God exists. (For instance, he notes that religious believers pull this same epistemic-leveling move, in discussion with atheists, as do Q-ers with us.) I find this a bit misleading, or at least confusing, and I think that in the Q case we should be a bit more choosy about what exactly the content of their controversial belief is, even if we sacrifice that potentially interesting parallel. (In fact I think religious faith is a much more complex phenomenon than simply “belief in God,” to which proofs of this or that are pretty completely irrelevant; but let’s leave God out of it entirely for now.)

Elgat’s argumentative strategy, in any case, is to assimilate the Q-er to the Cartesian skeptic, both of whom issue seemingly impossible challenges to prove them wrong: in the one case, that Q exists; in the other, that we are brains in vats and are thus massively deceived about “the external world” outside our senses. In each case, in Elgat’s telling, the challenger’s conclusion, should our proof fail, is that we thus are “in an epistemological stand-off” and must acknowledge that “since I cannot show you I am right and you cannot prove me wrong, I am perfectly within my rights, so to speak, to continue to believe in whatever I choose to believe.”

Elgat has two responses to this. Read more »

by Michael Liss

My dad was a pharmacist. He had an old-fashioned store (including an actual soda fountain and stools) and some of the old-fashioned tools of the trade: scales and eye-droppers, spatulas and ointment bases, graded flasks and beakers, amphorae, and his mortar and pestle.

Pharmacy was a bit more of an art in those days and doctors often wrote prescriptions that had a little eye of newt in them. This could make Dad cranky, as they took time and counterspace, but I suspect that, secretly, he liked doing them. He would bring out the mortar and pestle (sometimes with a Remington’s Practice of Pharmacy), and, for all intents and purposes, he could have been an herbalist for a Pharaoh, so old was the tradition of combining exotic ingredients and using time and pressure until the desired potency and texture was achieved.

I have been thinking about that mortar and pestle the last few weeks. They remind me of how just the simplest set of tools, coupled with accumulated knowledge and craftsmanship, can produce something useful and even essential. And, they make me wonder whether, in this insane age, where ignorance and even falsehoods are celebrated and experience scorned, there is anything at all they still have to teach.

Last month, I attended the 16th annual conference of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society. The topic was “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Trump: Jobs, Wages, Trade, Growth, Health and Satisfaction.” The organizers made a real effort to include views from across the spectrum, although it’s fair to say a majority were not Trump supporters. Nevertheless, the overall tone was cautious and analytical, rather than hypercritical. These are serious people (including three Nobel Prize winners), all literate and classically trained, and all share a deep understanding of the laws of economics, and a vast knowledge of data and historical trends.

There is no way I can do justice to a day of such intense sobriety, so I’m going to take a shortcut. Trump is not like anyone in their collective experience. Read more »

Justicia

fickle thing with scales

she’s blind sometimes, but often
lifts her blindfold just enough
to appraise a man’s cache of melanin,
holes in shoes, shuffle in gate,
accent, religious state and what he owns
of cars and houses: she aligns her scales
with power’s weight under which she
also slouches

in this ruse, Justicia,
with a wink beneath her blinders,
tips her scales with sleight of hand
as covertly as she’s able
to hide the fixes of her minders
financed under tables

Jim
10/11/18

by Anitra Pavlico

I have been a practicing Stoic for a few years now, with lulls here and there. Stoicism provides a compelling framework for living in a purposeful and ethical way. The question in my mind is, is it perhaps a little too compelling? In other words, not much fun?

One obvious response is that a philosophy of life is not supposed to be fun. It is supposed to give us tools for how to approach living, how to structure our thoughts and goals. Any enjoyment of life may proceed if it does not entail harm to others or ourselves, but it is not an explicit concern of a philosophy whether we enjoy life or not. In fact, it seems pleasure is more likely to conflict with one’s particular philosophy or creed than conform to it or peacefully coexist with it. Or maybe that is just what my experience with Stoicism leads me to think. I have started to realize that perhaps Stoicism is not for me–at least, not all of the time. Maybe on the weekends, I can take a mental vacation from Stoicism and switch camps to Epicureanism.

* * *

Epicureanism and Stoicism at first glance appear to be as different from one another as two philosophies can be. For the ancient Stoics, virtue was the supreme goal of life; Epicureanism, meanwhile, holds that the aim of life is pleasure.

Stoicism’s main focus on virtue, or aretê, is a noble goal, one that envisions us maximizing our wisdom, our fortitude, our generosity toward fellow humans, and the temperance of our desires. It can give an idle mind a direction and impetus. To pursue virtue, there are certain mental tricks we keep in mind, such as that there are some things that are under our control and other things that are not. We should concentrate on the former, which includes our thoughts, words, and deeds. To everything else, we should be indifferent–including pleasure. Read more »

by R. Passov

Tony: “Yeezy dropped.”                 

Big Tony: “Naw…For Real.”

“Yeah for real. But I’m not going there. Mass produced. For real, thirty-thousand in just New York alone.”

“For real?”

“I’m telling you. That’s how they did it.”

Tony gives me the rundown.

“Sometimes, Nike drops four or five pairs in one day, five in a week. A shoe like Jordans, every two to three weeks. Sometimes they drop a pair from ten years ago.” Tony tells me he’s set to get notified 15 minutes in advance of a drop. His credit card is stored. If he wants the shoe, it’s his.

I ask how many shoes he has and what he thinks they’re worth. “Just the ones that don’t fit in my closet I’d say is $20 to $30 thousand right there. With the shoes in boxes, $100 grand.”

How do you know? “If I want to see what their worth I go to Flight Club NYC. Online or their store in the City. Folks come all the way from London to buy the $20k Yeezy’s.” Read more »

by Bill Murray

Hyvä asiakkaamme,
Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa.
Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa
Ja savuttaa sisään.

Dear customer,
Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment.

Now wait a minute. We might need that fireplace in Lapland in December. Just now it’s three degrees (-16C) outside. The nice lady couldn’t be more sympathetic, but they just manage the place. Fixing the fireplace requires funding that can’t be organized until we are gone.

She promises we’ll stay warm thanks to a magnificent heater, a sauna and the eteinen, one of those icebox-sized northern anterooms that separate the outside from the living area. I have fun with the translation, though. I imagine that fool Ethän has busted the damned fireplace again.

• • •

Welcome to Saariselkä, Finland, where it’s dark in the morning, briefly dusk, then dark again for the rest of the day. The sun never aspires to the horizon. Fifty miles up the road Finland, Norway and Russia meet at the top of Europe.

But look around. It’s entirely possible to live inside the Arctic Circle. It takes a little more bundling up and all, and you need a plan before you go outside. No idle standing around out there.

There are even advantages. Trailing your groceries after you on a sled, a pulkka, is easier than carrying them. There’s a word for the way you walk: köpöttää. It means taking tiny steps the way you do to keep your balance on an icy sidewalk.

Plus, other humans live here, too, and they seem to get along just fine. Infrastructure’s good, transport in big, heavy, late model SUVs, a community of 2600 people, all of them attractive, all of whom look just like each other.

I imagined “selling time shares in Lapland” was a punch line, but it’s an actual thing. A jammed-full Airbus delivered us from Helsinki, one of three flights every day to Rovaniemi. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Zeal Greenberg is one of the most amazing men I’ve ever worked with. I emphasize “worked with”.

I’ve discussed Disney’s Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 over dinner with Steve Martin. I took Malcolm Forbes’s photo with one of his fans, who then took a photo of me and Forbes. He and his motorcycle club, the Capitalist Tools, were at the Americade rally in Lake George on July 4th weekend. And I once told Sheldon Glashow (physics Nobel 1979) I thought that physicists’ search for a “theory of everything” was ill-conceived and a bit hubristic – I didn’t see that their theory of everything would help much with the problems that most interested me. Unfortunately the meeting we were attending started before I was able to explain myself and, alas, we didn’t get back together afterward.

I didn’t WORK with these folks.

Met them, chatted with them, but I never collaborated with them on a common project. I worked closely with Zeal for years early in the millennium.

I’m tempted to say that you couldn’t imagine a stranger and more unlikely pair. But that’s not true. Of course you could. But still… I’m a Ph. D. and rather Old School WASP in my sense of self-presentation. Zeal never went to college, started out as a schmatta salesman, and lives and breathes sales and marketing. But we had a common desire, to change the world. I was happy to help him pursue his vision. Read more »

by Evert Cilliers aka Evert Eden

It was the most riveting TV of the 21st century.

And why?

Because we saw two American faces under the greatest strain.

Something you only see acted out in the final moments of some grand fictional drama. Something Eugene O’Neill might’ve written.

But here it was for real: an actual live event starring two actual live humans.

How do you think you would have acted under such trying circumstances? Who do you think showed most clearly that admirable Hemingway quality of “grace under pressure”?

Let’s explore.

There was the face of the woman.

Doctor Christine Blasey Ford.

Polite, modest, personable, reasonable, soft-spoken, civic-minded, rational, scientific (“hippocampus”).

And so female: accommodating, seemingly fragile but steely, and terribly anxious to please.

“Collegial” as she put it. And doing her best to be, in her own words, “more helpful.”

She was other-directed: how can I help you? Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

Three years ago I posted on this site “California Dying” about my experience in working for an assisted-dying bill in that state. That bill passed and while it has been involved in litigation by its opponents on a tactical issue of whether it was  the right type of issue for a special session of the legislature, it is anticipated that it will survive intact. Since I have a residence in California I am eligible for such assistance should I need it.

Since I live the other six months in Illinois I am now working to achieve a similar result in that state. Medical Aid in dying is now legal in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, Hawaii and DC. It is legal In Montana in the sense that physicians are immunized from prosecution as long as they have patient consent but there is no regulatory system in place. It is the law in all of Canada.

Another important development is that a number of state medical societies are shifting from the AMA’s stated opposition to assisted dying, to a neutral position.

In 2015 the California Medical Association shifted to a neutral position.

“CMA has removed policy that outright objects to physicians aiding terminally ill patients in end of life options. We believe it is up to the individual physician and their patient to decide voluntarily whether the End of Life Option Act is something in which they want to engage.” Read more »