American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, August 2008: "Evolution and Morality"

This year the ASPLP meets in conjunction with the APSA in Boston.

Panel 1
Date: Thursday, Aug 28, 4:15 PM
Author: Philip Kitcher
Paper: "Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies"
Commentators: Robin B. Kar; Jonathan Beckwith


American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Evening Reception
Date: Thursday, Aug 28, 7:30 PM


American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Breakfast Reception)
Date: Friday, Aug 29, 7:00 AM

Panel 2:
Date: Friday, Aug 29, 8:00 AM
Author: Nita Farahany
Commentators: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong; Jennifer Culbert
Chair: Jacob T. Levy

Panel 3:
Date: Friday, Aug 29, 10:15 AM
Author: Larry Arnhart
Paper: "Deep History in Biopolitical Science"
Commentators: Daniel Lord Smail; Richard Richards
Chair: James E. Fleming

Happy Independence Day!

For your viewing pleasure: No more kings!

Declaration of Independence quotes of the day

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

[...]

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

[...]

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

[...]

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:[...] For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world[...]

The Holiday season, con't

A few hours past the halfway mark between Canada Day and the Fourth, go rent Blue State. A cute little charmer of an indie comedy that has a surprising bite to it, this is tale of two Americans trying to move to Canada in the wake of the 2004 presidential election. It paints with a pretty broad brush sometimes, but it does so in a pretty equal-opportunity way (the annoyingly earnest Kerry activist, the Limbaugh-listening military family president, and O, the Canadians...) and mostly in ways that still provide humor based on recognition and on truth. And if some of the movie is more about Canadian stereotypes of Americans and vice-versa than it really is about either place, well, border-crossings are sometimes like that.

Rogue the kid from The Piano Anna Paquin really shines; I hadn't seen her in a lead role before, and while costar Breckin Mayer gets a majority of the character-establishing rat-a-tat dialogue, her character fully balances his on the strength of Paquin's acting.

To American expats in Canada, it's very funny.

Quote of the day runner-up

from Amber Taylor: "Darwin Award Playoffs Begin: Idiots make pilgrimage to site of other idiot's death; are likely to die idiotically." (Click through to see the context.)

Something I had not realized...

that greatly surprised me.

The Solicitor General filed an amicus brief in Plains Commerce Bank v Long in favor of tribal jurisdiction. (The Court ruled the other way, of course.)

That was the correct position for the federal government to take, in its capacity as trustee for Indian tribes and in line with its official policy of encouraging institution-building for self-determination. But just because it's correct doesn't mean I would have expected it.

The brief is quite good. (The SG's office hires pretty good lawyers, after all.) A pleasant surprise-- the first so far, in my reading of the case and its materials.

Quote of the day

From Julian Sanchez:

I was having a conversation with a couple friends the other night about our own ideological trajectories, and I mentioned how my attitude had shifted toward a semi-famous essay by Robert Nozick called “The Zig-Zag of Politics.” This is the one where Nozick was seen as renouncing his youthful libertarian views—though when I interviewed him in 2001, he claimed that reports of his apostasy had been much exaggerated. I used to think this was a befuddling instance of a thinker who’d made some brilliant and original arguments for the libertarian position backing away from it for some pretty poor reasons. I still think that about some of the arguments floated there: Expressing our symbolic concern for the poor is all well and good, but it is a poor justification if the means of doing so are both ineffective and otherwise morally questionable.

But one of the central ideas there—and a theme in much of his later work—was that no deductive moral or political system could embed as much wisdom as the process of deliberation and reform over time. I wrote about this a couple years back when I said, somewhat anachronistically, that Nozick viewed philosophy as a Wiki. I’m certainly the last one out there to idealize or romanticize the democratic process: It’s a field on which ignorant armies clash by night, afflicted with all the problems so familiar to public choice theorists. I suppose one way to put it is that I’ve become more of a Bayesian about politics: I cannot help but notice that lots of folks who are as smart or smarter than I have rather radically different views about what sort of polity is best, and I cannot quite bring myself to conclude that they’re simply watching shadows dance on the cave walls, while I have glimpsed the Forms. And so I don’t, these days, much find myself thinking about the specific contours of libertopia. Instead, I tend to find myself thinking in terms like: “Well, let’s push in this direction and see how it works.” You have to be careful there too, of course, since depending on the details, a government-market hybrid (say) will just give you the disadvantages of both. (See: Healthcare System, United States.) But I think this is the direction you end up pushed in if you take Hayek’s warnings about “constructivist rationalism” sufficiently seriously. On this model, libertarianism isn’t so much a final picture of a just society as a specific sort of toolkit for working on Neurath’s ship.

Canada Day viewing

What else could it be?

The holiday season

If I've counted correctly, today is halfway between Jean-Baptiste and American Independence Day, which means it's time to go watch Les Invasions Barbares, "The Barbarian Invasions," the widely-honored (including with the best foreign-language film Oscar) Quebec film about death, reconciliation, and retrospective wisdom ("Was there an 'ism' we didn't worship?") that also happens to include some very telling bits about the Quebec health care system and the importance of the exit option into the United States.

Holiday season viewing recommendation #2

We're now halfway between Jean-Baptiste and Canada Day, so get thee to a video store and rent the greatest mismatched-buddy-cop movie about federalism ever made, the sublime Bon Cop, Bad Cop.

More to come!

Plains Commerce comes down

This actually happened yesterday, but I was offline.

The most important Indian Law case of the year came down yesterday, and it was disappointingly but unsurprisingly ugly. In Plains Commerce Bank v Long, a 5-4 majority further restricted tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indians and non-Indian businesses on reservations. The supposed exception to the non-jurisdiction rule that jurisdiction can apply when the non-Indians enter into consensual commercial relations with the tribe or its members appears to be a dead letter.

As I discuss in this paper, the court has been narrowing tribal jurisdiction over non-members on reservation lands for some thirty years, and in counterproductive, destructive ways.

The decision was written by Roberts for the five conservatives. Ginsburg wrote for the dissent. (It's a "concurrence in part," but the part is not the important part.)

Bad news. More commentary to come.

In the meantime, see this post at Turtletalk.

In my view, there are several things to take from this ruling:

1.) We have been reassured that the Montana exceptions, while available in theory, will never be applied, and that tribes can forget about exercising any jurisdiction, no matter how great or small, over non-Indians on fee lands;

2.) We have also been reassured that non-Indian litigants are at a significant advantage against tribes and tribal citizens. Non-Indian parties can choose to litigate in tribal court, at a low-cost, and seek a positive outcome. If they get a desired outcome, it’s game over. If not, they get a second bite at a fresh apple, because they can take their claims to state or federal court and argue that the tribal court has no jurisdiction over them.

There's more. As I put it in the "Perversities" article linked to above:

After twenty years of Montana progeny, the exceptions appear vanishingly small. No unified Supreme Court majority has ever agreed that any regulation fell into either one. Circuit courts have followed the same general rule. The second exception has never been found to be satisfied in a court of appeals. Besides the Tenth Circuit’s finding in favor of the Navajos in Atkinson, later reversed, the consent exception has been triggered twice at the circuit court level, both times on the Ninth Circuit. A non-Indian filing a cross-claim against a fellow defendant in a reservation court does consent to that court’s jurisdiction in that case, and so falls under the first Montana exception —a seemingly minimal proposition that had nonetheless not been accepted by a panel of the court two years before —and a non-Indian contracting to carry out tribally-licensed bingo operations on a reservation is subject to the tribe’s bingo regulations. And the second exception is interpreted without any “aggregation analysis;” that is, the particular non-Indian’s particular activity must imperil the tribe, and it will not suffice to show that many non-Indians engaged in the activity many times over would do so. As one District Court judge asked rhetorically,

What does it mean to have the "ability to enact and be governed by its own laws" if the Navajo Nation cannot extend the scope of its own laws to protect the very lives of its own police officers on its own lands, and in its own courts? When does the exception for "conduct [that] threatens or has some direct effect on the political integrity, the economic security, or the health and welfare of the tribe" apply?

Yesterday "vanisingly small" got yet another step closer to "vanished."

Bonne fete nationale!

And a good Jean-Baptiste. This kicks off the holiday season: Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July in the space of 10 days (along with the Jazz Festival, of course).

"My advisor hates me."

Karen Head, in THe Chronicle:

Graduate students have no idea how to actually work with — or even talk to — their advisers.

Generally the scene in my office goes something like this: A student arrives and collapses into a chair with a great exhalation, followed by silence. When I ask if there is a problem, the fidgeting begins. Then the student lurches forward (almost falling out of the chair) and, in some cases, begins to cry. Invariably, the conversation begins with some form of the following statement: "My adviser hates me."

When I ask why the student thinks so, I hear any number of explanations. Among the most common:

* My adviser offers me no direction or advice.

* He is a micromanager.

* She doesn't support me.

* He doesn't think my work is up to standard.

* She never talks to me.

* He forces me to do extra work.

* She is never around.

* He doesn't like women/men.

* She gives me all the lousy jobs.

* He likes the other lab members better.

Often those reasons cannot be substantiated in any way other than by vague feelings. If that is the case, I insist that the students take time to consider whether their complaints are rational or a reflection of the stress-filled environment that is graduate school.

Since all graduate students are accustomed to doing research, I require them to produce some evidence. Once we have actual evidence, we can determine cause and, perhaps, change the effect.

Generally my next question is whether the students have ever discussed the problem directly with their advisers.

I am no statistician, but I would say the odds are near 100 percent that they have not. I have a better chance of winning the lottery than finding the situation otherwise.

It seems that while most graduate students expect to be the center of their mentor's universe, those same students do absolutely nothing to develop a professional relationship with that adviser.

One of the most important aspects of going to graduate (or professional) school is, in fact, learning how to be a professional. I sympathize with graduate students because it is easy to get lost in the roles they must balance. Graduate students are just that: students.

But they also may be engaged in solitary research (in which they are the foremost expert on a technique or issue). They may be autonomous lecturers responsible for teaching a large number of undergraduates. In those cases, the graduate students are already acting as professionals in their fields — and usually expect to be accorded a level of respect appropriate to such professionalism.

Oddly, though, that confident, professional persona seems to crumble when the graduate student is in the presence of a dissertation adviser. The fear of the adviser's disapproval is so strong that the student will not ask questions — about anything.

At times I feel as if my job is to demonstrate a profound grasp of the obvious. For example, I might tell a student, "You really must schedule a meeting with your adviser to discuss why all of this extra work is an impediment to the progress you are expected to make on your dissertation."

My suggestion is generally received with disbelief: "I can do that?"

Not only can you do that, you must. Your adviser is probably not even aware there is a problem. You and your adviser must develop a relationship that encourages communication. As a graduate student, you need to understand that you are responsible for setting your own professional goals. Your mentor has many other responsibilities in addition to advising you (and not just you; most advisers have several graduate students for whom they are responsible).

Your adviser may not be ignoring you so much as being busy with his or her own research, committee work, teaching, or tenure case. Conscientious graduate students set goals and design a work plan complete with specific to-dos and a timeline. They schedule appointments to evaluate (or re-evaluate) their progress, even if the adviser doesn't suggest it.

Ultimately, you may have to accept changes in your plans based on your adviser's needs and expectations. However, part of earning professional status means learning to negotiate — especially about your own work goals.

Advisers, especially the ones most inclined to micromanage, need to allow (and even force) their graduate students to take more responsibility for creating a plan to get through the degree program in a timely manner.

Those of you who are advisers need to remind yourselves what it was like to be a graduate student and anticipate problems. You have a responsibility to meet with your graduate students frequently enough to develop a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

A New Hampshirite Remembers George Carlin

A sentimental favorite of mine among all the great bits by the late, great George Carlin, from "What Am I Doing In New Jersey?", ran:

The most dramatic license plate of all has to be New Hampshire's, which says [solemnly] "Live Free or [Sam Kinison voice] DIE!!!"

Well, I'm certainly not going to move there. I get just a little nervous in any state where they mention death right on the license plates.

On the other hand, Idaho says [goofy old man voice] "Famous potatoes."

I guess those are the two extremes in thought.

It would seem to me that somewhere in between "Live free or die" and "famous potatoes" the truth lies. Probably it's a little closer to "famous potatoes."

For more on Carlin, see Marty Beckerman at Reason; and Kevin Smith.

Taylor wins Kyoto Prize

Political theorist, McGill emeritus professor, and winner of last year's Templeton Prize, and lately co-chair of the Quebec commission on reasonable accommodation has won this year's Kyoto Prize.

The prize, which is often referred to as the "Japanese Nobel", consists of a gold medal and 50 million yen ($470,765) in cash.

"I'm very, very honoured and I still haven't quite gotten over it," Taylor said.

"I feel there must have been some mistake, but I'm honoured to think that I place on a par with those other people that have won this award," including German thinker Jürgen Habermas.

The award citation follows.

Construction of a social philosophy to pursue the coexistence of diverse cultures

Dr. Charles Taylor is an outstanding philosopher who advocates "communitarianism" and "multiculturalism" from the perspective of "holistic individualism." He has constructed and endeavored to put into practice a social philosophy that allows human beings with different historical, traditional, and cultural backgrounds to retain their multiple identities and to live in happiness with each other.

He has criticized the atomistic view of the self, the conception of the human being grounded in the human sciences of naturalistic tendency such as methodological individualism and behaviorism, and tried to establish a "philosophical anthropology" on a foundation of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and language-game theory. In his view, human beings are "self-interpreting animals" that act with a sense of value and purpose: human beings articulate everyday feelings and moral intuitions in language and act according to their own evaluation of goals and values. He criticizes modern utilitarianism for leaving value judgments to the feelings and preferences of the atomistic selves and argues against it that human beings are the "situated selves" that are embedded in the fabric of social relations. In other words, it is through webs of interlocution that human beings develop identities and acquire frameworks within which they determine for themselves what is good, what is valuable, what they should do, and what they are for or against.

Having made extensive studies of the philosophy of Hegel, which are widely regarded as the best contemporary work on the philosopher written in English, Dr. Taylor delved back into the thought of Rousseau and Herder. He then adopted Gadamer's notions "fusion of horizons" and "history of effects" to situate his own thought in a historical context and has built a convincing social theory. Drawing on the concept of "recognition," which is a key to his philosophy, he contrasts the "dialogical self" with the "monological self" and offers "freedom in situation" in place of "absolute freedom." Human beings can flourish only if their identities are recognized by others and, accordingly, he stresses the importance of bonds with community and sense of community as a necessary condition for the realization of liberalism emphasizing individual autonomy.

The concept of recognition is at the base of Dr. Taylor's multiculturalism as well. Identity-formation in modern society is sometimes rooted in a distorted recognition, and this often results in self-repression and in a subsequent struggle aimed at a revision of "self-representations" projected upon by others. Dr. Taylor argues that "it's reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect, even if it goes along with much that we have to abhor and reject." In putting forth this principle, he has provided rational grounds for the dignity of human beings living a deep diversity and for their demands for recognition.

In his native Canada, Dr. Taylor is also involved in political activities campaigning for the recognition of collective rights of minority groups to preserve their cultural identities. He has been seeking a way to overcome Eurocentrism and to reach for genuinely global values, paying due attention to the specific conditions of non-Western societies. He has invariably aspired to a society resting on mutual recognition, where each member strives by mutual efforts through dialogue for a better understanding and for changing the narrow frameworks of understanding with the realization that the space occupied by him/her as a self within the whole "story" of mankind is quite limited and he/she is in no possession of an absolute standard for judging the relative merits of various cultures. Dr. Taylor is a prominent thinker who has pointed the future course for us through his own life, envisioning the future in which diverse, heterogeneous cultures peacefully coexist upon mutual recognition.

"May equality live long and prosper."

Impending nuptials for George Takei.

I'm going to live forever, part 73 of a continuing series

More good news about the nectar of the gods.

Harvard School of Public Health researchers looked at coffee drinking and the risk of dying from heart disease, cancer or any other cause. They found that people who drank more coffee were less likely to die during 18 years of follow-up in men, and 24 years of follow-up in women.

And the effect was strongest in women: those who drank two to five cups of coffee a day were up to 26 per cent less likely to die than abstainers - mainly because of a lower risk of death from heart disease.

Women who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee daily were 25 per cent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than "non-consumers."

Those who drank more - four to five daily cups of coffee - saw their odds fare even better, to 34 per cent reduced risk.

Researchers found similar patterns for men, but the numbers didn't reach statistical significance, meaning they may be due to chance.

The team found no association between coffee drinking and dying of cancer in either gender.

"Previous studies had been inconsistent. Some of them found that coffee increased the risk of total death and others found just the opposite," says Esther Lopez-Garcia, the study's lead author.

Published in this week's Annals of Internal Medicine, the new study suggests that "coffee drinkers can be reassured that coffee doesn't increase the risk of death," says Lopez-Garcia, of the department of preventive medicine and public health at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.

Showing something of an excess of scholarly caution,

Lopez-Garcia isn't recommending people drink more coffee to live longer. "It's too early to say coffee is beneficial for health," she says.

It's not too early; it just feels that way because you haven't had enough coffee yet!

Festival season

A selection of the events in my neighborhood over the next ten days is here (warning: a photograph of a rude hand gesture is part of the festival's logo) and here. That's just within walking distance, before the Jazz Festival starts, and not including the fireworks competition, or the regular performances here.

And it's the season to eat from Jean-Talon...

Update:
Went out a little while later and saw people advertising for the Fringe Festival-- two young women, maybe Japanese, wearing mime makeup and outfits that might have been Swiss milkmaid costumes and might have been French maid costumes, doing a synchronized song-and-dance routine.

Elsewhere

Today at the Chronicle: a very interesting and engaging Russell Jacoby article about Paul Piccone, founder of the journal Telos.

Link fixed: "What It Means To Be A Pluralist."

Sorry about the earlier link that only went to an abstract. "What It Means to Be A Pluralist," the paper I'll be giving tomorrow at the Walzer conference, is now online.

While I've mentioned this one before, it turns out to be thematically closely related, so I'll also note my essay about David Miller's new book, "National and Statist Responsibility."

Now online

My paper for the "Justice, Culture, and Tradition" conference next week, What It Means To Be A Pluralist. Comments welcome.

Michael Walzer has made great contributions to the appreciation of both moral and cultural pluralism in political theory. Nonetheless, there are ways in which Walzer's arguments appear anti-pluralistic. The question of this essay is: why is there so little pluralism in Walzer's political theory, or why does its pluralism run out so soon? Focusing on Spheres of Justice and "Nation and Universe," it examines the effect of Walzer's nationalism/statism on his theory, and the constraints his theory faces in considering multiculturalism or political pluralist regimes such as federalism within a state.

For academic pop culture consumers of a certain age

Timothy Burke on G.I. Joe.

A slap in the face: a tale of the Brezhnev Doctrine

While I don't agree with all of it, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission Report is a very thoughtful, judicious, impressive document-- extraordinarily so, given the circumstances of its creation.

And the ink wasn't yet dry on it when the Charest government made clear how thoughtfully it would treat the the report's analyses and recommendations. It rushed to the National Assembly and introduced a unanimously-approved quickie resolution affirming that the crucifix would not come down off the Assembly's walls.

Bouchard and Taylro spent months, at the request of the Charest government, trying to conceive and describe a balance among the various rights, responsibilities, and identity claims at stake in the accommodation debate and related disputes. Their proposals rested in part on an "open secularism," a secular state that was not as reflexively anti-clerical or Jacobin as post-Quiet Revolution Quebec has sometimes been. One of the most prominent obstacles to that is the very public symbol of a non-secular Quebec that is the crucifix on the QNA walls.

Charest defended the crucifix as embodying 350 years of Quebec history, though it does no such thing. It was erected in 1936 by Duplessis, who more than any other politician embodies the Francoist Catholic-corporatist regime of the bad old days when members of minority religions were actively persecuted in Quebec.

The immediate rejection of the crucifix's removal is an obvious attempt by the government to escape any political fallout from the commission it appointed in its rush to survive the ADQ's challenge before the last election. Insofar as the commission made recommendations that depart from already-existing majority sentiment, it will be ignored. This was always likely, of course, but it did not need to be expressed in quite so obnoxious a manner. Bouchard and Taylor (and the taxpayers, and the hundreds of people who took part in the process) could be forgiven for wondering today why they wasted their time. Surely one of the things that we've learned in thinking about religious accommodation is that symbols matter, and the symbolic import of yesterday's action coulnd't have been clearer. Charest slapped Bouchard and Taylor in the face in exchange for their months of service.

But the graver slap to the face is to religious minorities. What they have learned is that questions of religion and politics remain ripe for demagoguery in Quebec. Any possible steps taken as a result of the report that will protect their religiou freedom will be slow, painstaking, reluctant, and potentially voted down in the QNA by the two opposition parties. Kirpans, turbans, hijabs, and kosher and halal food all apparently raise difficult questions that require careful government consideration even after the commission has done its work. The crucifix requires no such careful consideration. In short, religious minorities who might have been hoping for the unlikely outcome that the commission's report would be taken seriously now know better. The message from the Charest government to them is a variant on the old Brezhnev Doctrine: What's ours is ours, what's yours is negotiable.

CTV appearance

My CTV appearance last night is online.

I was a little bit longwinded; I was also a little bit angry, because on my way to the studio I heard the news that the Charest government had rushed through a unanimous resolution insisting that the crucifix would remain on the National Assembly walls. I never expected it to come down, but I though the government would have the decency to ignore unpopular or difficult recommendations rather than deliberately hanging the commissioners out to dry. I'll have more to say on that in the next couple days.

Commission report reactions

I'll be answering reader questions about reasonable accommodation tomorrow starting at 3 pm at globeandmail.com . Questions can be sent in advance or during the session.

I'll be on CBC Newsworld tomorrow afternoon, apparently. I'll be taping an interview not long after the 12:30 press conference that unveils the report; not sure when it will air.

Update: I'll also be on CTV tonight, probably between 7 and 8 pm.

Update: The globeandmail.com link above (now fixed) remains good even though question time is now closed; the questions and answers are all there (and my typing fingers are tired!)