Ethics revisited

So-- as people have been delighted to point out to me-- New York Times Magazine ethics columnist Randy Cohen has been revealed to have donated money to MoveOn.org, in violation of the Times' ethics rules governing political activity by its writers.

The New York Times, Randy Cohen, ethics columnist, $585 in three donations in August 2004 to MoveOn.org, which conducted get-out-the-vote drives to defeat President Bush. In addition to the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for the Times Magazine, Cohen answers ethics questions for listeners of NPR.

Freelancers like Cohen are covered by the Times policy, which says, "Times readers apply exacting standards to the entire paper. They do not distinguish between staff-written articles and those written by outsiders. Thus as far as possible, freelance contributors to The Times, while not its employees, will be held to the same standards as staff members when they are on Times assignments, including those for the Times Magazine. If they violate these guidelines, they will be denied further assignments."

Cohen said he thought of MoveOn.org as nonpartisan and thought the donation would be allowed even under the strict rule at the Times.

"We admire those colleagues who participate in their communities — help out at the local school, work with Little League, donate to charity," Cohen said in an e-mail. "But no such activity is or can be non-ideological. Few papers would object to a journalist donating to the Boy Scouts or joining the Catholic Church. But the former has an official policy of discriminating against gay children; the latter has views on reproductive rights far more restrictive than those of most Americans. Should reporters be forbidden to support those groups? I’d say not. Unless a group’s activities impinge on a reporter’s beat, the reporter should be free to donate to a wide range of nonprofits. Make a journalist’s charitable giving transparent, and let the readers weigh it as they will.

"Those who do not cover anything, but write a column of opinion should have even more latitude. It is such a writer’s job to make his views explicit. Those donations to nonprofits will no doubt reflect the views he or she is hired to express. In evaluating such civic engagement, it is well to remember that to have an opinion is not to have a bias. To conceal one’s political opinions is not to be without them."

After MSNBC.com checked the names of Times staff and contributors on this list with a spokesperson for the Times, Cohen sent this addendum:

"That said, Times policy does forbid my making such donations, and I will not do so in the future."

Over at NRO, Douglas Kern provides commentary that manages to be almost right and yet totally nuts.

Dear Randy:

Nincompoops talk ethics. Men talk virtues. Stop being a nincompoop.

My highest law-school grade was in Legal Ethics. I achieved a stellar grade because I devised an infallible mechanism for solving any legal ethical dilemma. My mechanism was this: Remember that legal ethics is a system of rules:

1) designed by sociopaths;
2) for sociopaths;
3) to prevent public acknowledgment of their sociopathy;
4) while still allowing said sociopaths to fleece said public.

Once you realize that contemporary ethics is not morality but the clever simulation of morality, you’re halfway to qualifying for an ethics-consulting job.[...]

I’m only kidding a little about the sociopathy. By definition, a sociopath is one who can only emulate the rules and mores of society, as a sociopath never internalizes any sense of right and wrong. In a country where fewer and fewer people agree about how to determine right and wrong, the bogus pseudo-answers of ethics begin to sound more and more appealing. Put another way: As we grow more sociopathic as a society, ethics makes more and more sense.

And that’s where you come in, my fine ethical friend. Your job as a public ethicist is not to teach people how best to apply the rules and obligations of a transcendent authority, as the ethicists of old once did. That would be hard. And intrusive. And divisive. And let’s face it: “transcendent authority” carries the whiff of the red state, with all the unpleasantness (NASCAR, Wal-Mart, redundant children) there attached. Neither is your job to teach philosophy. That, too, would be hard, and unsatisfying as well; when do philosophers ever agree? No, your job is to provide just enough soothing advice to scratch that fleeting itch that your affluent readership feels when confronted with moral questions that vacuous self-serving upper class prejudices can’t immediately resolve. Forget right and wrong; the role of the modern ethicist is to move puzzled smart people from a state of mild dismay to a pleasant coma of satisfied smugness in the shortest time possible. You seek to avoid not sin, but the appearance of impropriety. But a great many virtues can appear quite improper, and a great many sins can appear quite proper indeed.

Consider, for example, the “ethical” rule that precludes journalists (and quasi-journalists like yourself) from donating money to politicians and overt shill machines. You’ve correctly deduced that this rule is asinine. Suppose for a moment that you obeyed it. Would you feel any differently, write any differently, be biased against conservatives any differently if you kept your $585.00 instead of donating it? And would you suddenly evolve into a better, purer, more ethically unstoppable self if you gave that money to The Medusa Fund for Underprivileged Maoists in Malibu, instead of Kucinich for President? No, this rule does nothing to prevent bias. It rewards those sneaky enough to donate anonymously, or through a proxy, even as it penalizes those who make their political biases a matter of public record. Note that my infallible ethics problem-solving mechanism predicts this rule perfectly:

1) It’s easily implemented, so that even a sociopath can enforce it;

2) It’s easy to obey, so that even a sociopath can abide by it;

3) It gives the public the entirely false sense that journalists who abide by this rule are honorable and unbiased; and

4) It doesn’t prevent any journalist with even a lick of cleverness from secretly donating money to politicians and then copping a “fairer than thou” attitude from an unassailable position of serene non-involvement.


[...]
A real system for determining right and wrong requires commonly held first principles and leadership with the acknowledged authority to interpret and apply those principles. That kind of agreement is in short supply these days. In modern societies where people adhering to all sorts of creeds regularly interact in order to make money, principles and dogma will tend to take a backseat to rough ‘n ready codes of conduct – and modern ethics is nothing if not rough ‘n ready. Morality is for heroes; modern ethics is for sophisters, economists, and calculators. We tolerate modern ethics, as we tolerate sophisters, but they should both know their place, and neither should command great love or respect.

So ignore the rules, Randy, and donate away. Of course, your donation will expose you as an appalling hypocrite, and you may lose your job consequently. That’s okay. Your job is stupid. Why not write a column calling men to heroic virtue instead of cocktail-party pleasantries?

OK, in order:
1) If Randy Cohen actually knew about the Times policy and thought that somehow MoveOn.org (the PAC, not the affiliated 501c4) was relevantly like a nonpartisan charitable contribution and not relevantly like a political contribution, and didn't even wonder about this enough to ask someone, then he's dumb. When you donate to a PAC, and fill out the paperwork that gets the donation into the FEC database, you get lots of verbiage about this not being a tax-deductible charitable contribution. You're contributing directly to the election or defeat of political candidates, even though you're not contributing directly to the candidates. This is the basic distinction of American campaign-donations law. It's not hard. One may not like the rules that put PACs on one side and the Catholic Church on the other of a very bright line, but they're not hard to understand from a donor's perspective. (They may be hard for the organizations themselves to understand, in terms of what's permitted or not to groups on either side of the line.)

I don't think he's that dumb. Therefore I think he's a liar.

2) He's not, strictly speaking, a hypocrite, because-- as I kvetched about all these years ago-- his official position on the relationship of ethics to political morality is that the rules are less important than being on the leftward side. He's living up to his announced code, though of course that differs from the Times' code.

3) I agree with both Cohen and Kern that this is a pretty dumb rule. It's not as dumb as the famous case of the Washington Post editor who doesn't vote lest it prejudice him, but it's dumb. Journalists categorically shouldn't be in the pay of political actors. But how one gets from there to the rule that they should not themselves contribute to such actors is beyond me. Making the contribution doesn't add to the journalist's bias. In order to avoid (yes) the appearance of impropriety or conflicts of interest, I'd say that news (not opinion) reporters who directly cover politics and elections shouldn't contribute-- lest the donation make the reporter feel that he or she now has a psychic stake in the candidate's success. (But note it's only a psychic stake; the conflict of interest is much harder to identify than when a business reporter owns stocks.)

4) But, contra Cohen's general position and Kern's view about this case, I think that following the rules is morally important. This may make me less than manly in Kern's eyes.

[Aside: Has any good ever come from someone who feels the need to announce he's being manly? Among the defining traits of John Wayne types is that they don't talk very much, certainly don't talk about themselves very much, and basically never talk about themselves with the kind of self-reflexivity that says, 'hey, didja see what I just did? Didja see what kind of action that was? When someone tells you he's being manly, call him a poseur-- it's ok, you can use a French word, because you're not pretending to be John Wayne-- and then check to make sure your wallet's still in place.)

Anyway: this may make me less than manly in Kern's eyes. And in Cohen's it means that I'm morally deluded. But the rules are how we live with our moral and political disagreements. The rules are how we avoid case-by-case post-hoc ajudication-- the kind of ajudication that is most likely to be infected by bias. Until the day comes when everyone working on a newspaper has precisely the same political principles, because they've fallen in behind Kern's manly "leadership with the acknowledged authority to interpret and apply those principles," a news organization needs some way to know, and to provide mutual reassurance, that people with strong but divergent beliefs about ultimate political ends are all operating within the same restraints on means.

Kern is kind of right about the difference between ethics and virtue-- but completely wrong about what that means about ethics. Ethical rules tell us: don't stuff the ballot box, even when you think it's really really morally important that your guy win because of your general theory of justice. They tell us: zealously represent your client, even if you think he's scum, or get out of the way and let someone else do so, because you're a professional with expert knowledge and the client-customer has a hard time monitoring whether you;re doing a good job or not. They tell us: don't give a students bad grade because they disagree with you politically, even if you think that their political views reveal that they must be really dumb or very bad people. They tell us-- contra Cohen's advice-- not to authorize ourselves to commit workplace fraud in the service of our overarching vision of how commerce and labor ought to be organized.

That's not to say that ethics is ultimately more important than morality broadly understood. Ethics offers a particular register of morality, not the whole of it. But the ability to live on terms of fair and reciprocal cooperation with those who disagree with us is morally important in its own right. Honoring professional and contractual obligations is morally important. In denigrating ethics as the morality of sociopaths, Kern implicitly calls for the morality of narcissistic megalomaniacs-- those so sure of their own virtue and the rightness of their cause that they can't imagine the need for moral engagement with those who might disagree.

Compare and contrast

Two new blog entries on political science research on diversity.

Daniel Larison (at the new, revamped American Scene) on Robert Putnam's "Ethnic Diversity and Social Capital" research (see his Skytte Prize Lecture), showing that increases in local diversity can be "devastating" to social capital in all the affected communities; people hunker down in the face of unfamiliar neighbors, their intracommunal associational life dries up and intracommunal ones don't develop anytime soon.

Henry Farrell on Scott Page's book, The Difference, showing that under various not-too-restrictive conditions diversity in a pool of decisionmakers has benefits. Different perspectives, assuming that they're perspectives on a shared question, problem, or enterprise, can be more valuable than expertise. (Diverse agents with divergent preferences don't getthe same results.)

Note that these conclusions are entirely compatible with one another. A neighborhood isn't an enterprise association. It may be that the epistemic benefits of diversity can only be obtained in fairly artificially structured environments. (Most formal decisionmaking bodies are artificially structured environments.)

Add Putnam and Page to my reading pile; and puzzle over the implications for liberal theory and democratic theory respectively. Or else throw it out into the world and encourage a grad student to do the puzzling...

Poli sci papers

Henry Farrell has set up a new blog with abstracts and links to political science papers, kind of like what Larry Solum does for law, Brian Weatherson does (used to do?) for philosophy, and various econ bloggers do for their discipline.

Congratulations...

to Oxblog founder Josh Chafetz.

A reason to be either a textualist or a public-meaning originalist, and never an intentionalist

Bush claims oversight exemption too

By Josh Meyer, LA Times Staff Writer
June 23, 2007

WASHINGTON — The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.

An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.

[...]

Waxman and J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, have argued that the order clearly applies to all executive branch agencies, including the offices of the vice president and the president.

The White House disagrees, Fratto said.

"We don't dispute that the ISOO has a different opinion. But let's be very clear: This executive order was issued by the president, and he knows what his intentions were," Fratto said. "He is in compliance with his executive order."

[...]Cheney's office drew criticism Thursday for claiming that it was exempt from the reporting requirements because the vice president's office is not fully within the executive branch. It cited his legislative role as president of the Senate when needed to break a tie.

At a Friday news conference, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said constitutional scholars could debate that assertion.

But, she said, Cheney's office is exempt from the requirements because the president intended him to be.

Sigh. "I secretly had my fingers crossed!" is not a desriable approach to rulemaking or lawmaking. No rulemaker should have an incentive to write an unclear rule (which this was not, but which the interpretive strategy on offer here would encourage) so that later on the rulemaker can opportunistically reveal his secret "intention."

#12.

Fantastic Four 2

Wow.

That was, um, not very good.

At all.

Really, profoundly not very good.

I owe Dan one; he wanted to go see Ocean's 13 and I dragged us to FF2 instead.

Even knowing nothing about O13, I'm willing to say that that was an error in judgment.

At the margin

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen-- who I'll get to hear talk about his culture and arts trilogy later this week-- blogs about his favorite things Quebecois. He also has an interesting marketing experiment for his new book.

Rorty colloquy

There's been some lively, serious, and very sophisticated discussion of Rorty, of the relationship between his political theory and his general views on philosophy, and of his stance toward religion and pluralism over the past few days. It's been spread across several places, some of them non-obvious (Damon Linker bounces from a TNR online article to Matt Yglesias' site to Open University), so here's a roundup.

Damon Linker
Matt Yglesias
Linker
Yglesias
Linker
Will Wilkinson
John Holbo
Wilkinson
Russell Arben Fox
Patrick Deneen (hey, look! Patrick started a blog. I hadn't known.)

Lots of good stuff therein.

French higher education

I posted before about the new Paris School for Economics and the changes that it might bode for French higher education.

Without any explicit connection drawn to that institution, some new developments, from the Chronicle.

Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to overhaul France's flagging higher-education system is one step closer to reality, after his conservative Gaullist party swept to victory in the first round of National Assembly elections last weekend.

Presenting his plan as part of an ambitious package of economic reforms, the newly elected president of France has pledged to allow universities greater autonomy, giving them leeway to exercise more control over admissions and their budgets and to impose some tuition fees. He has said he will pump billions into higher education, increasing universities' operating budgets by 50 percent over the next five years, and has proposed the creation of a new independent agency to oversee research and higher-education institutions.

Most French universities are public and, like much of France's vast public sector, are subject to extensive bureaucratic oversight and strict labor protections. Overcrowded, underfinanced, and poorly equipped, even renowned universities like the Sorbonne have slid down international-rankings tables.

"It's a catastrophic system," the Sorbonne's president, Jean-Robert Pitte, said of the situation now. Universities like his are bloated with students who enroll simply for lack of alternatives, he said, and their ranks are winnowed only by failure and withdrawal. At the master's-degree level, Mr. Pitte said, his university compares favorably with international rivals, but the costs are debilitating. "The problem is that French universities lack the means to compete and are functioning in a two-tier system," he said, referring to the gulf between the elite grandes écoles, which have long been the training ground for France's political and business leaders, and the universities.

Of course, not everyone's on board.

Students, however, have vociferously opposed many of Mr. Sarkozy's ideas, arguing that they run counter to France's egalitarian ethos.

The main national student union complains that students have been excluded from the political discussion of higher education and that the government is barreling ahead too quickly with its agenda.

"The objective of the reforms must be to permit university access to the largest number of students and to guarantee everyone success", the union said in a statement. [Italics mine-- JTL]

Old fogie watch

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Devlin wrote an elegy for the tie clip at Slate. It made me a little sad, but I knew he was right; the tie clip is disappearing. It's seen as a too-dressy affectation, even though it serves a useful purpose.

But now Matt Yglesias informs us that "these days few young people wear watches because we're all used to checking the time on our cell phones," a fact that "most older people don't realize." I certainly didn't. A commentator on the thread that follows points to this Daniel Gross article (also at Slate) that confirms the trend with sales numbers.

As I say in comments there: I don't get it. I thought the wave of the future was for my Treo to shrink down and get incorporated into my watch, so I could continue to tell the time with a quick glance but could also do so with my e-mail and calendar.

Instead, it seems like the wave of the future is to return to the pocketwatch-- a bigger, harder-to-get-at, uglier pocketwatch. Do you people really unclip your phone from your belt or reach into a pocket every time you want to check the time? Why isn't that less convenient than just wearing a watch?

In both cases I think there's something aesthetic lost, but I know that over time what was aesthetically pleased and dressy changes, often in the direction of the more-practical. But in both cases the change seems to me less practical than the status quo ante.

A great teaching story

...from Princeton. Those are some lucky students; wish I could take the class...

A request for help

Blogger insists on automatically generating my permalinks incorrectly. The URL for my post on Rorty is

http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2007_06_03_archive.html#2695670152246089618

but when you click on the permalink "5:57", what comes up is

http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2007_06_03_archive.html#2695670152246089618#2695670152246089618

(that is, the material after .html that specifies where on the archive page to go is duplicated)

and as a result, people are always directed to the top of a page filled with whitespace. Does anyone know how to fix this, short of abandoning blogger for a grown-up provider?

Rorty Remembrances

Via Kieran, Richard Rorty has died.

I saw Rorty in action, I believe, four times, three in debate-ish settings. He was an extraordinary speaker, so I count myself lucky.

He and Michael Sandel formed a two-man APSA panel just as Democracy's Discontent was coming out, and Rorty was a dazzling commentator-- appreciative of the book and more generous to it than many commentators, but also jabbing at it with an incredibly effective rapier. I remember having the sense that Sandel was standing still, very earnestly, and Rorty was dancing around him, amusing himself to no end.

But that was nothing compared with the Rorty-Habermas debate at... Loyola University of Chicago, I think (might have been DePaul, but I think it was Loyola) some ten years later. It's famously true that the great theorist of communicative action is not the most effective communicator in person, particularly but not only in his nonnative English. He's a brilliant writer but simply not an effective public speaker. They were debating the obvious stuff: is there truth, including moral truth; can we know anything by reason; is Kantian enlightenment the way forward or an intellectual dead end. The official topic was in there somewhere, but it was basically just Rorty and Habermas doing their respective things about moral truth, moral knowledge, and the history of philosophy. In a packed, overheated room, Habermas' under-his-breath speaking style filtered through his accent and speech impediment added up to an absolutey soporific effect. There was probably no full sentence that I caught entirely, and there were whole paragraphs that I missed entirely. Yet I understood enough to know that he was making hard, important arguments that I found persuasive. Rorty, on the other hand, was a performer par excellence. Even at that stage when he was turning away from post-modernism I found the argument pointlessly nihilistic; but he was just dazzling to watch. Habermas made me wish I'd just sat home and read one of his essays. Rorty did anything but.

The third quasi-debate setting was the only one in which he met his match. It wasn't even really a debate. It was Rorty's Dewey Lecture at the University of Chicago Law School. The Dewey Lecture is an annual event there, but the pragmatist Dewey is a particularly important figure for the pragmatist Rorty. And Chicago Law is home to another famous pragmatist of a different sort, Richard Posner. So Rorty's Dewey Lecture on "Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress" was something pretty special. But if anyone in the world is not nonplussed by argumentative fancy footwork, it's Richard Posner, and Posner's very calm shrug of a question seemed to me to stop Rorty in his tracks.

The one time that I saw Rorty speak that I don't think of as having been a debate was a lecture at Chicago, giving the core of his "no Plato, no Kant, no Truth, and that's OK" position as it existed by then, and discussing its relationship to literature. If the basic position about moral knowledge still seemed to me entirely unsatisfying, I must say that I found the discussion of moral knoweldge and literature fascinating, deep, and even moving. It reminded me of what I had found best in Rorty's writings; he as capable of great insights beyond the headline projects of demolition.

I know he's often compared with Stanley Fish, but I have the sense that that's unfair to both of them, treating their 'there's no such thing as' positions and their wittiness as constitutive of their intellectual lives. In my view he was a one-of-a-kind figure, and he'll be missed.

See also John Holbo:

I got to meet the Great Man once. He came through Singapore in 2003 (I think it was). He gave a talk that was stock Rorty stuff - novels better than philosophy - but then was quite lively and responsive, i.e. saying things I hadn’t heard him say before, in the Q&A. And great fun at lunch.

In my experience, there are two ways Great Men respond to strong critics, in Q & A. 1) By not listening. 2) By being willing to concede ‘yes, of course, your fundamental critique of my position seems to have considerable force’. Then, five minutes later, they are back to saying whatever it was they were saying before. Rorty was definitely the latter sort - which is, I think, better than the former sort.

Yep, that's right. (John's usually right.) When I saw Rorty perform he definitely offered the latter sort of answers. The Dewey Lecture linked to above was filled with that kind of Q&A, as I recall.

Ha!

This is a good one; I hadn't seen it before. Via Heidi Harley at Language Log:

Reader Émilie Pelletier writes in to say,

Your post on Language Log today reminds me of something I read in Morvan Lebesque's Comment peut-on être Breton? I don't remember the exact words, but he was mentioning the big support France was giving, in the 1970's, to French-speaking Quebecers so that they could speak their own language. When Bretons said to the French government that their own situation was very much like that of Quebecers, the French authorities' alleged response was: "But noone is preventing you from speaking French!"

Harvard Political Theory Conference for Grad Students

CALL FOR PAPERS


Harvard University

Graduate Student Conference in Political Theory

November 30--December 1, 2007


The Department of Government (FAS) at Harvard University will host a conference for graduate students in political theory and political philosophy from November 30-December 1, 2007. Papers on any theme or topic within political theory--from the history of political thought to contemporary normative and conceptual theory--will be considered. Roughly seven papers will be accepted.


Each presentation should last no longer than 45 minutes, so please limit your paper submission to 20 double-spaced pages. Please format it for blind review: the text should include your title but also be free of personal and institutional information; and a separate cover page should include your title, a brief abstract (100 words max.), and your name, e-mail address, and institutional affiliation.


The keynote address will be given by Professor Joshua Cohen (Stanford); a Harvard faculty member will deliver opening remarks; and discussion panels comprised of Harvard faculty and graduate students will accompany each accepted paper. Time permitting, each presenter will have a chance to answer questions during a general discussion period after each panel discussion.


Food and housing will be provided by the Government Department and its graduate students. Unfortunately, Harvard will not be able to provide funds for transportation.


Submissions are due via e-mail (in PDF) on August 31, 2007. Acceptance notices will be sent on September 30, 2007. Papers will be refereed by juries composed of current graduate students in the Government Department at Harvard.


Questions, comments, and submissions] should be sent to:


.


For more information, please visit the conference Web site at:


http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~tontipl/theorycon07.html.

As of today...

The Red Sox have their greatest division lead they've ever had at this point in the season; and they're 13.5 games ahead of the last-place Yankees.

The loonie is at its highest value in thirty years.

Something's gonna go south any second now. I rather hope that I'm wrong about what it will be.

Update: Well, the budget passed, tax cuts intact; the government didn't fall, so there'll be no new election and no immediate risk of a Pequiste victory; and the loonie is even higher.

We're doomed! The other shoe is sure to drop at some point...

Good health news

Four cups of coffee a day associated with a 40% reduction in the incidence of gout; six cups associated with a 60% reduction. Hat tip: Gary Farber.

Previous items in this series:

"More and more studies have linked coffee consumption to a number of health benefits, including a reduced risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, gallstones, colon cancer and potentially heart disease."

"Researchers have found strong evidence that coffee reduces the risk of several serious ailments, including diabetes, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver."

It seems increasingly likely that I'll live for centuries. But that probably depends on my not eating too much of the national food of my new home province, newly discovered by the New York Times.

When I was thirty-five...

it happens to have been a very good year. Between last May and this May, lots of good news for deserving people. A selection:

Current and former graduate student division:
Yasmin Dawood defended her dissertation on "Judicializing Democracy: Power, Politics, and Constitutional Design," and was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics.

Leigh Jenco defended her dissertation on "Individuals, Institutions, and Political Change: The Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao," and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Political Theory Project at Brown University.

Emily Nacol was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Political Theory Project at Brown University.

Jennifer Rubenstein was appointed as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia. Her article Distribution and Emergency was published in the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Galit Sarfaty was a Fellow of the Safran Center for Ethics at Harvard and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School.

As was already noted, at APSA best dissertation awards were given to Joon-Suk Kim and Deborah Boucoyannis.

One more to come here soon, I hope-- not finalized yet but in the works since before my birthday, so it'll count! [Update: It's official now. Victor Muniz-Fraticelli has been appointed Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at McGill University.]

Former advisor division: Chandran Kukathas was appointed to a Chair in Political Theory at the London School of Economics.

Family member division:
As was formally announced today, Shelley Clark was made Canada Research Chair in Youth, Gender and Global Health at McGill University.

Mazel tov all around!

Piled Higher and Deeper...

has been on a roll lately.

The geography of grad school
Chinese food in grad school
Business cards in grad school
The moment of triumph of completing grad school
The inevitable conversation with a loving family member
And grad school summarized.

Once again, I'll pair PHD links with links to Professor Rojas' newest posts onrules for grad student life:
choosing the rest of your committee; money, and choosing your topic.

Enough blogging; back into the depressing depths of US Code Title 25.

In memoriam

Eugen Weber.

Huh?

Democrats Seek No-Confidence Vote on Gonzales

A vote of no confidence has a technical meaning in parliamentary systems; it seems strange to me to borrow that term for a nonbinding "we're not happy with you" Sense of the Senate resolution. It makes perfectly good literal sense-- I don't have any confidence in Gonzales either-- but comes across as an attempt to borrow very serious language from other constitutional systems for an action that's meaningless in the U.S.

Has this ever been done before? Has either house of Congress ever passed something it called a "no-confidence" resolution?

Update: Asked and answered. Thanks to Professor Markell for the pointer.

Recommended reading

1. Omar at orgtheory on "the germanic and french political culture traditions and the titles of classic social theory books."

while joking around with a friend in grad school we noticed that a lot of German classical social theory work were always about something and something else (i.e. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), while the titles of a lot of the classic (Durkheimian) works were only about a single unitary process (i.e. Suicide). In retrospect, I now see that Jepperson’s typology provides the crude basis for a “reflection theory” sociology of knowledge account (as in that classic work in the French tradition Primitive Classification) as to this anecdotal observation: in the Germanic tradition, the cosmological order is conceptualized as a “clash” between two highly culturally elaborated and distinct structural orders (state and society); in the French tradition only a “single” collective order exists. This follows if we believe that totemic classifications are simply reflections of society, and if in science concepts are just totemic classifications.

Thus, the Chomskyian “deep structure” for the title of a work in the Germanic tradition will be:

Concept 1 and Concept 2

The corresponding French deep structure is simply:

Big single concept

2. Tyler Cowen on the late Alfred Chandler, and links and obituaries from there. Chandler's Visible Hand was, when I first read it as a junior in college, probably the most challenging and engaging work of social science I'd ever read; it did a great deal to convince me about the complexity of the empirical social world, and the dangers of trying to force that reality into analytical and conceptual categories derived from normative theory.

3. Back at orgtheory, Fabio on your dissertation family.

Mine, I think: Jacob Levy -> Amy Gutmann -> Judith Shklar -> Carl Friedrich [the founder of the ASPLP, as it happens] -> Alfred Weber. (I can't actually tell from wikipedia whetherwas Friedrich's undergraduate or graduate advisor, but in the absence of any further knowledge I'll put him on the tree.)

Michael Walzer was also on Gutmann's commitee (and might have been chair, I'm not certain); I think Walzer studied under Sam Beer.

If we extend through the rest of my dissertation committee, through Jeremy Waldron I reach Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz, and thence Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart; through George Kateb, Herbert Deane.

Discuss amongst yourselves

I submit that 1997-98 was the best year ever for genre/ geek TV.

Season 2 of Buffy, the traditional choice for best season of that show.
Season 5 of X-Files, the last great season of that show before it all went to hell.
Season 6 of Deep Space 9, which I think was the best single season of any Star Trek show, ever.
and Season 5 of Babylon 5, the denouement of one of the finest SF shows ever.

In the background, Hercules, Xena, Stargate SG-1 Voyager (ugh), and Highlander were on the air as well.

1996-97 had the same shows on the air except for Stargate, with strong seasons of X-Files, DS9, and B5, but only half a season of Buffy-- and Season 4 of Lois and Clark, which saddles the year with demerits.

If you just go by shows on the air, there's something special about 2000-1, when Buffy, Angel, Farscape, X-Files, and the good season of Dark Angel were all on the air, along with Voyager (ugh) and Xena in the background. But it was Season 8 of X-Files, which stank up the joint beyond redemption. The following year added Alias and Enterprise, but: Season 9 of X-Files, and Dark Angel went from good to... not good.

There are people who think that Battlestar Galactica is so much superior to any other SF show in history that we're currently living in the golden age. But BSG's time on the air has corresponded with, er, Smallville?

Update: Yes, I forgot about Veronica Mars and Lost, neither of which I've seen but both of which seem to count in favor of the BSG era.

No, I didn't forget about Charmed for any of the eras; I only tried to.

Quote of the day: "History is the tool of skeptics."

“History cannot be expected to solve the core analytical puzzles of political or economic theory. But it has its hour when the long-expected solutions of social and political science fail to materialize. History is the tool of skeptics. It helps us to ask better questions. More precisely, it can help us avoid repeating some questions again and again, running in circles unproductively."

Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 156.