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 20.6.02
18.6.02
17.6.02
Raphael, a traveler who has been to Utopia, says this in a discussion of the English judicial system: "If you do not find a remedy to these evils [poverty and social disruption caused by enclosure of pastures] it is a vain thing to boast of your severity in punishing theft, which, though it may have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient; for if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?"
Bork is criticizing modern liberalism, and laments (for the moment as a passing reference in a long list of signs of moral decay) the decreasing importance of self-restraint to Americans. My first reaction, seeing as I'm a liberal (a radical, if Prof. Figueroa is to be believed), was to ask why self-restraint was inherently good. Self-restraint means denying yourself happiness, and as a utilitarian I propose that happiness is the highest goal. But then I realized that I do in fact consider self-restraint to be a virtue. One of the highest virtues, in fact. I admire people who keep kosher not because I think there's anything inherently good in never mixing meat and cheese, but because of the self-discipline it requires. You've probably guessed the resolution -- self-restraint is good because it allows us to deny a little happiness now in order to obtain more happiness later. I quickly saw it too, but then I started to think about what it meant. Self-restraint is not a virtue because it's a good situation. It's a virtue because it leads to a good situation. The nature of self-restraint, wih its clear separation of means and ends (a separation that's often more rhetorical device than reality) makes explicit the theme of the concept of virtue. Virtues are skills. That idea resonated with me because of an observation I had made about my aspirations in life. When I look back at what I'm most proud of, it's not the things I did, it's the things I was able to do. My set of commentaries is not as important as the fact that I can write a reasonably well-argued assessment of an issue. The Potato God Worship Center, My Apology, and debitage are not as important as the knowledge of HTML I gained in building them. The same holds true when I look forward at what I'd like to do with my life. My list of goals doesn't have entries like "go skydiving" or "own a nice house." It has entries like "speak Uzbek" and "play jazz piano." Which leads to the conclusion that virtues aren't everything. You (you plural, as utilitarianism teaches us that one's own happiness is no more valuable than another's) need to balance being virtuous with benefitting from virtue.
Vote now on the Taliban website. It's not a bad website design-wise, although they could use a tutorial in the <title> tag.
16.6.02"We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do - we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world. In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. The president's spokesperson warns people to "watch what they say". Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed. The so-called Patriot Act - along with a host of similar measures on the state level - gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised, if at all, by secret proceedings before secret courts." This article highlights the difficulty of questioning the government's tactics since September 11. The administration has been very shrewd in walking the line where what it does isn't blatantly wrong (as far as public opinion is concerned), but pushes us to places that we ordinarily wouldn't go. The military tribunals are a great example. When they were first announced, the details were vague, with ominous portents about the rights that could be denied to prisoners. The administration left the plan vague long enough for civil libertarians to solidify their arguments about the potential abuses that could occur. Then details were released that indicated that many of the rights that could have been taken away were not. Opponents were left looking like paranoid overreactors, and those on the fence said "ah, it's not so bad" and allowed the plan to go forward. Then you read something like this: They Heard It All Here, And That's The Trouble "I accuse the media in the United States of treason. I do not understand the media's agenda here. This country is at war. Do you honestly believe that such stories and headlines, pointing out our vulnerabilities for Japanese and Nazi saboteurs and fifth columnists, would have been published during World War II? Terrorists gather targeting information from open sources and field surveillance. What other sources do they have? Do they have a multibillion-dollar intelligence community with thousands of employees? Do they have telecommunications satellites to intercept communications?" The writer is a member of the Department of State and, while there is a disclaimer at the bottom, I find it hard to believe that nobody else in the department shares his zeal for censorship. He seems to dimly realise the real function of reporting on the nation's vulnerabilities -- to inform the people of our weaknesses, so that we can address them. But he waves it away by proposing a sort of secret hotline to report security holes that the media uncovers (as if any reporter is going to put in the effort on a story that will only be read by a few bureaucrats), with reporters to be rewarded with Soviet-style honor desgnations like "Homeland Security Gold Stars". And really, there's something incredibly Soviet about the whole thing. The philosophical basis of the Soviet system was the idea that the people should trust the state to act in their best interests. The philosophical basis of democracy is that the people themselves monitor the condition of the nation. Censorship gives the nation an incentive to hide its weaknesses from its enemies and from the people at risk if the enemies find out about them anyway. Freedom of information gives the nation an incentive to face up to its problems. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War (and left its successor states with a mess to clean up) by pretending to be stronger than it was.
"In the long tradition of the scientific loner, Dr. Wolfram, a freelance physicist known among his colleagues for his abrasive and self-aggrandizing ways, has yanked the spotlight onto a strikingly counterintuitive idea — that the universe is really just a big computer, something that can best be described not by analyzing equations but by trying to figure out what kind of software it runs." I'm nowhere near qualified to judge the scientific merit of the idea, especially based on one New York Times report. What I find interesting is how clearly this idea demonstrates that the hypotheses of science are tied to the sociocultural setting they arise in. Darwin is the best example -- evolution, particularly the strictly competitive version that he proposed, parallels the prevailing philosophical ideas about the sovereignty of the individual, and the beneficial effects of allowing individuals the freedom to pursue their own interests. The fact that other researchers have proposed ideas similar to Wolfram's only makes it clearer that new models and forms of explanation are often imported from other realms of life, not created out of pure induction (or inspired by Quality). |
It seems somehow very wrong that I just had to explain some basic HTML to two of my bosses in nationalgeographic.com (specifically the font color tag).