Does this mean she'll be out of the media for most of that time? If so, that would be sweet.
It seems pretty clear that her mom's a heinous person, too. No wonder she's such a spoiled brat.
Last I heard, LACJ was letting people out after they serve 7.5% of their sentences because the jails are so crowded, so we should be seeing her again in three days or so.
Still, LA County Jail, wow. Careful, Paris, it ain't no joke.
It was nice of them to give her a special hearing so she didn't have to wait in line with all the other proles.
Dunno why she didn't get community service.
Is the women's jail in suburban Lynwood the LA county jail?
4. The prosecutor wanted jail time for her. Guess his dogma bit her karma. I know, I'm banned.
IANAL, but I've been to court several times and seen the folx ahead of me get sentenced to jail for much less egregious violations of the terms of their release. If she was a working-class black guy, I doubt she would have gotten such a cushy sentence in the first place, given that she failed the field sobriety test and blew a .08.
P.S. Eat the rich!
5: Yeah, ever since all the riots at the other ones.
O Schadenfreude! Tochter aus Elysium! God, this makes my day, which is really pathetic.
She was initially treated routinely, but violated the original conditions two or three ways while also driving drunk again.
The mom sounds like a real winner.
An inarticulate apology two minutes before the lawyer says they will appeal. Classy!
This is for her own good. It would be too sad to see another famous person die in a car crash while being drunk, stoned, talking on a cell phone and speeding while not wearing a seat belt.
12: What am I to note about her thighs?
Fat, B. No rhetorical questions please.
13: Right. There are three choppers circling overhead right now and I'm hoping it's a mass celebrity suicide pact going down.
This is The Simple Life: Women in Prison, right?
I'm a bit bummed, though. A Hilton hotel is opening soon near me and I've hoped that Paris will drop by to cut the ribbon or snort coke off the sidewalk, or whatever one does to christen a new hotel.
``I get a lot of papers sent to my office so usually Elliot or my people go over things,'' she testified. ``I have people who do that for me.''
Speaking of celebrities, has the Hasselhoff vid been linked here yet?
Remember drunken celebs, don't fuck with your kids.
The Hasselhoff thing was just too sad to link. I have my limits.
Holy shit, that's sad. His daughter is a champ.
Can't imagine Wendy's is enthusiastic about the product placement.
What always puzzles me about celebrity DUIs is this: given that they're so rich, why don't they just hire someone to drive their drunk asses around?
It's sad, but he's probably been a serious asshole to have his daughter resort to this.
What's sad about it is the total gap of understanding. On the one hand, the girl really is trying. On the other, she just doesn't get it, because she's his daughter and she's only sixteen.
she will not be allowed any work release
"work release." Nice one.
19 = live footage of the NYC Armsmasher meetup
Love how the Hilton story comes complete with detailed descriptions of everyone's outfits in court.
Can't imagine Wendy's is enthusiastic about the product placement.
Now's the perfect time to churn out a quick commercial featuring The Hoff.
Cut to:
Beach, Hoff trots up in a pair of swim trunks.
"After a run on the beach, or in a drunken stupor on the floor, it's always a good time for Wendy's."
She'll totally parlay this into a sympathy-courting reality show like Lil' Kim. Because the public sucks.
14-15...I know this is the wrong, wrong comment to post here, but I, er, thought that not only did the younger Kathy Hilton strongly ressemble a friend of mine about the face but that she had nice thighs. Practically ideal, in fact, since they weren't straight up and down. This set of observations was very disconcerting to me, all the more so since the friend in questionhas a young daughter. A young, blond daughter.
I'll have to warn her, but it probably won't do any good.
I honestly thought Emerson wanted us to notice the thighs because they were hott.
Paris should totally parlay this into a women in prison movie.
She'll totally parlay this into a sympathy-courting reality show like Lil' Kim.
Did Lil Kim do that? What show?
I'm sorry and I did not do it on purpose at all,'' she told the judge
In fact, this statement shows that she is not sorry that she violated her probation. Sorry she's going to the slammer, maybe, but that's about it. You can't be sorry for doing something you didn't do on purpose.
c'mon ogged. she could get knifed just a little bit.
Knifing is too harsh, but a cat fight in the shower followed by a horizon expanding encounter with a more experienced cell mate would be cool.
more experienced cell mate
Martha Stewart!
Martha Stewart!
I so want to see this movie.
Nice schadenfreude, but Paris doesn't do it for me as women-in-prison porn. You need wide-eyed innocence to get that porno buzz. Traditions must be respected.
Winona Ryder is my girl for that stuff. She got probation, though.
Kathy Hilton really must put the burn to women who starve themselves in order to marry a rich man. She snagged a billionaire with a normal-sized body and a pretty but ordinary face.
Uh, I bet you're seriously off on the scale of her beauty regime. I'd reckon she self-mutilates in the name of beauty with the best of them.
You mean that's the anorexic Kathy Hilton in the picture? The real Kathy Hilton would weigh 350 lbs.?
I am now officially scared, rather than amused, by Eng.
Yeah, I just saw this. I like John's link better though, because I learned the words "crazian" and "gaysian" in the comments.
37: I imagine Paris is the more experienced cellmate.
Nah, that picture is 20 years old. She's just a happy fat girl with a billion-dollar nest egg and two adorable children. Paris is in the picture as a six-year old or thereabouts.
Eat your hearts out, skinny ladies!
35: Of course you can feel sorry for something you did not do on purpose.
To recycle an example from J. L. Austin's "A Plea for Excuses": "You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim, and find to my horror that it is your donkey."
I didn't shoot your donkey on purpose. (That is, the action was not intentional under the description "the shooting of your donkey".) Nevertheless, I certainly would feel sorry for shooting your donkey.
50 - I too assume that's what Paris Hilton meant.
I will make my usual grumble. Why did Austin choose a ludicrously implausible hypothetical example when entirely realistic examples illustrating the same point are easily imaginable?
Perhaps the idea is that hypothetical examples are more professional and more expert, since they're unencumbered by the emotional and contextual freight that real-life examples have. It's in some way more formal, I suppose. But then, why didn't he go all the way and just say "A does y in the belief that he's doing x. Doing y is harmful to B, so A apologizes to B, saying that he had not intended to do y."
What's ludicrously implausible about that particular example?
I'll grant that a lot of philosophical thought experiments (e.g. "fake barn country") are ludicrously implausible. But that particular example seems quite down-to-earth.
52: Austin presumably regarded it as a bit of harmless fun. In post-war Oxford it probably passed for hilarious. Even ten years later the proto-Pythons (Cambridge, but what the hell) could churn out sketches that were about as entertaining as a rather uninspired Unfogged thread and be hailed as revolutionary.
BTW, I was using that example of Austin's for something other than it's original purpose. Austin was using that example to illustrate the difference between an accident and a mistake. The lines that followed the ones I quoted:
"I appear on your doorstep with the remains and say -- what? 'I say, old sport, I'm awfully sorry, &c, I've shot your donkey by accident'? Or 'by mistake'? Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead on it, fire -- but as I do so, the beasts move, and to my horror yours falls. Again the scene on the doorstep -- what do I say? 'By mistake'? Or 'by accident'?"
How often does someone take sudden dislike to a valuable farm animal and decide to shoot it? How often do they fail to distinguish the right animal, when there are only two choices, and shoot the wrong one? The example is too jokey.
Damn, "it's" s/b "its".
I don't think I'll ever get that right.
Emerson has...rather strong feelings...about farm animals.
The example is too jokey.
Emerson has been taking lessons in humorlessness from B.
Dunno why she didn't get community service.
Probably because of this.
Martha Stewart!
Maybe Paris will learn how to crochet.
More importantly, how often does Paris Hilton take sudden dislike to a valuable farm animal and decide to shoot it? How often does she fail to distinguish the right animal, when there are only two choices, and shoot the wrong one?
All too often, my friend. All too freakin' often.
The example is too jokey. No it's not, it's a fucking joke, that's the whole point. Get yer head out yer arse.
Paris takes two outfits, an ugly one and a cute one, and asks a friend which one would look good on her. If that friend chooses the ugly one, she shoots them.
Oops, I misread 62 as saying "it's NOT a fucking joke" and was...yeah...being silly again.
Ease up, guys. Emerson just lost a donkey under pretty mysterious circumstances. A little sympathy is in order.
I think that the idea is that eventually it will be possible to deal with major, real ethical questions by analyzing them down to pure component questions, like this one, answer the component questions one by one, and then construct an answer to the real-world question. By using unreal examples perhaps the idea is to abstract out complexities, diversions, and contentious issues.
I just don't think it works. I don't see that analytic ethics since Moore or Sedgewick has actually contributed anything to ethical discourse, except to introduce new metaethical quibbles. For a lot of people, the main effect of taking an ethics class seems to be to distance them from naive but substantive ethical discourse without replacing it with more sophisticated substantive discourse. Ethics 101 does produce fun party chatter.
Well, it's not a funny joke, and why should ethical examples be jokes? Seemingly, in some departments at least, you can study ethics all year without ever seeing an ethical situation discussed which is actually something you might confront in your own life.
69 Makes two points:
a. Of course it's not a funny joke, it was made by a mid-century Oxford philosopher. It would have been a miracle if it had been funny.
b. This is possibly a true observation. If so, I suspect that's because the people who dream up these examples are scared that if they make them contingent on realistic situations, the ethical conclusions will be interpreted as relativistic by their students. But I can't prove it, so I won't argue myself into a hole.
If you guys don't stop being mean, John Emerson is going to pack up his carp and go home.
Why did Austin choose a ludicrously implausible hypothetical example when entirely realistic examples illustrating the same point are easily imaginable?
Pretty much for the same reason that ogged bans analogies. There's no group more prone to quibble about the details of an examples than a group of ethicists. If you pick a very realistic example, you increase the odds that one of them will have a bone to pick. This is also why epistemologists and others say "to &phi ."
To me the jocularity is a distancing effect, with the intention of discussing ethics without actually discussing ethics.
Heebie, what's your mailing address? I'm sure that if you had a whole smoked carp of your own your feelings about them would change.
To me it's no worse than physicists assuming frictionless surfaces or ideal point masses. I'll never confront a penguin on a frictionless ice shelf any more than I'll end up in cleverly painted mule land.
I know that physics is the model. I just don't think it works. Physics also factors fiction and entropy back in elsewhere in the science -- it's a whole enormous division of physics.
Cala is wrong, wrong, wrong about ethics.
Emerson is bitching about JL Austin and I'm the one being called humorless?
A present! How exciting!
Mail it to:
Carpie Geebie
216 Carpington Carp
Carpoodle, Carpathia
78crp
Cala is wrong, wrong, wrong about ethics.
How so?
Boys, boys, you're both humorless.
What's humorless about not laughing at unfunny jokes? Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe came from Oxford, and I laugh at their jokes. (Austin's jokes are not obnoxious like Limbaugh's, but they share the unfunniness.)
Mostly this is just the same old argument about the brain in the bottle at the wheel of a runaway trolley which is bearing down on a small child who, if he lives, will grow up to be worse than Hitler.
Physics also factors fiction and entropy back in elsewhere in the science -- it's a whole enormous division of physics.
Ethics factors in the rest, too. There are courses beyond the intro class, where most of the goofy examples lie.
86: It's just like econ. Intro econ is this theoretical stuff which, if taken seriously, make you into a libertarian. Reality gets factored back in (in many departments) in higher-level classes. With the result that someone who takes one class gets the unreal part.
Econ 101 and Ethics 101 are where most people stop.
But that doesn't make it the fault of ethicists or economists or physicists.
So the problem with 101 is that it's not 401?
Though since the econ 101 thread I've found arguments of the form "p is true; it's just econ 101" to be hilarious, in light of the existence of other courses.
On preview, anticipated by JE but:
The "101" level and style of every subject is annoying on threads here. If real-world factors are factored back in, re-integrated at advanced levels, show us. See how matter of fact and accessible you can be.
Yeah, but does anyone really know why Emerson was upset about the donkey thing, other than as a painful reminder of a long lost love?
Is the criticism now that we're not annotating our comments with a full bibliography?
I've long levelled that criticism against you all; I've just been too decorous to say so.
88: It's the fault of ethics as a discipline or subdiscipline that what they choose to offer to non-majors is what it is. Same as economics as a discipline.
As far as I know, physics 101 includes thermodynamics.
An interesting thought experiment: try to imagine that ethics as a discipline did what (I think) Emerson wants it to. Possible?
Been a while since I took Physics 101, but I don't think it did cover thermodynamics, and certainly not at a level where it's practical.
It just seems like a bizarre complaint that the introductory levels of any discipline are simpler than the higher level courses. It's vaguely reminiscent of creationist arguments that they've proved all of evolutionary theory wrong because they took a class in biology in ninth grade and it just seemed so absurd to think that a monkey could give birth to a human.
96:
I've never seen anybody argue that NASA must be perpetrating a big scam since clearly the space shuttle can't fly according to physics 101 arguments (I won't claim such people don't exist).
There are any number of people making equivalently ridiculous arguments based on econ 101, though.
97 is only half the problem though --- the other problem is that econ 101 isn't anywhere near as solid as physics 101, so people get in trouble with arguments that are even remaining in the scope of the 101 material.
Physics 101, with or without without thermodynamics, gives you a lot of true and often usable information. Someone with an understandinog f the relationships between mass, speed, acceleration, and power, for example, knows something. Someone who knows the relationships between watts, volts, and amps knows something.
After a year of ethics what do you know, even theoretically? I've had a fair number of ethics 101 conversations, and what people seem to have learned is not usually a basic theory, much less anything substantive, but the differences between various forms of consequentialism, utilitarionism, deonticism, emotivism, and I forget what else -- sort of a menu of metaethical frameworks. And then a lot of canned arguments about the trolleys and such.
The idea that you need to get all the way to ethics 401 before you're able to say anything meaningful about a concrete ethical situation strikes me as absurd.
I'm not sure if it's less solid, exactly. F = ma, supply and demand. Less applicable to the real world, maybe.
But it's unlikely that I'm going to run across a political situation where I can show off my knowledge of frictionless penguins, whereas pretty much the whole internet has an opinion on how the economy is doing.
Physics 101, with or without without thermodynamics, gives you a lot of true and often usable information.
Not really. Not without learning to account for everything that physics 101 leaves out.
The idea that you need to get all the way to ethics 401 before you're able to say anything meaningful about a concrete ethical situation strikes me as absurd.
Fortunately, no one's claiming that you can't say anything meaningful before ethics 401, so rest easy. Didn't FL have a post up about wanting more concrete examples for an introductory exam?
100: It is absolutely less solid in the scientific sense. That might be what you meant by less applicable to the real world; but things like economics and physics are only meaningful in the sense that they apply to the real world. Otherwise you are doing something else. The basic physics is backed up by a truly vast amount of empirical support. Very little else even in science can approach it, that way; certainly not economics.
Of course you are right about why it comes up so much more often that `frictionless penguins'. It doesn't make the arguments any good though, just more numerous.
101 a) is just wrong. There is a lot off 101 level physics that is applicable without modification, to real situations in the real world, and works very well.
This is exactly where economics 101 falls down in comparison to physics 101.
After a year of ethics what do you know, even theoretically?
One reason that comparison with physics 101 is misleading is that the physics curriculum is much more standardized: for example, at my institution the physicists teaching the intro sequence all use the same book and cover almost exactly, while everyone teaching intro to philosophy and intro-level ethics does their own thing, with the result being more variety in content. So there really isn't an ethics 101.
Someone taking my intro-level and mid-level courses (a year-long sequence) would know the following things: the content, motivations for, and most significant problems with relativism, divine command theory, egoism; the basic claims of, and attractions of, consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics; the central arguments in the literature on distributive justice, punishment, Singer-feeds-the-poor, and whatever other applied ethics topics seem fun at the moment of syllabus creation; the most significant ethical works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Mill, including textual exegesis, critical analysis, and an examination of these works' influence on contemporary debates (everything from particularism, Rawlsian approaches to justice, worries about integrity and 'moral schizophrenia...).
is not usually a basic theory, much less anything substantive, but the differences between various forms of consequentialism, utilitarionism, deonticism, emotivism, and I forget what else
At this point I'm confused. What would knowledge of "a basic theory" mean here? What would count as substantive?
Like what? My physics is old and fuzzy, but I'm remembering that most of what I learned how to do presupposed perfect spheres, frictionless surfaces, ignored wind resistance, assumed point masses. You could get *close* if you fiddled with your experimental data, maybe closer than economics , but I can't think of anything where all I needed to do was memorize the basic equation to get perfect match with the experimental results.
And I'd be ridiculous if I argued that physics 101 was false because I dropped a feather and it didn't fall at g, which seems to be about the level of most economics debates on the internet.
The tail end of my 103 is probably misleading --- I don't mean to suggest that there is anything inherently wrong with teaching econ 101 the way it is done, just in pretending the analogy with a physics stream holds much water. It doesn't.
The examples I gave of volt-watts-amps and mass-speed-acceleration-power are usable in understanding everyday life for people who work with those things. They are taught in engineering versions in tech schools and apprenticeship programs.
105: Oh, if you threw a ball in the air on a still day, you'd describe its motion with s=½at squared + v sub-zero t accurately enough for the sort of measurements you'd be likely to do. Physics 101 ballistics works pretty well even with wind resistance.
Someone who knows the relationships between watts, volts, and amps knows something.
Right, and someone who knows what Mill thinks about moral motivation knows something. Is it that it's the wrong kind of something?
usable in understanding everyday life
A lot of the material I cited is useful in understanding all sorts of phenomena. Weakness of will happens, and it's interesting to think about why; the prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix helps you understand why people end up in certain bad outcomes.
105: Physics 101 is perfectly good for most planetary motion, for some dynamics situtations (eg it is a practially good approximation to pool tables, etc. [ok not a great example, bumpers are a little complicated, moreso spin. But inelastic collisions do happen]). Sure, if you want to do stuff in the lab, it's a bit specialized because you want really good agreement, hence the low-friction tables etc. But part of this is just to make things work well in a lab. Some of the lab experiments you are likely to do don't require fiddling, and do translate well to other situations. Example: pendulums. Essentially these exact calculations allowed the development of accurate clocks (there's more too it than just the pendulum, of course, but gearing and ratchet&pawl are also phys101 physics....).
On the other hand, a lot of mechanical engineering is supported really well by physics 101 level stuff (although the calculations tend to be done in more sophisticated ways). You have to know materials properties too, but give that, it's physics 101 that tells you what a lever arm on a beam will do and the scaling properties. It tells you how to camber a road properly, even if it doesn't approximate the car traveling at 70mph on it. In fact, at low speeds it doesn't do a bad job on cars either: some standard accident forensics stuff is just physics 101: once your wheels are locked and you are going slow enough that fricition is negligable (e.g. 30mph not 100), stopping distance is really phys101. I guess this is changing
now with ABS systems.
That's just the mechanics. E&M in intro physics is perfectly valid to describe most of what goes on in your house wiring. You can understand basic speakers correctly, if your syllabus covers sound, among other things. Intro optics covers a lot of practical situations; how your magnifying glass works, why high-index glasses are thinner than normal glass. You do cover basic thermodynamics, which has pretty direct applications to hear loss in your house or apartment.
Sure, there are a lot of things that phys 101 doesn't get you too. Anything involving friction or turbulance. So no high speed vehicles, nothing that flies. You can't describe quantum effects (so much of EE is out, for a practical implication). Stat mech isn't there, so your understanding of thermo is limited. Etc. etc. etc. *but* this doesn't mean that F=ma or V=IR doesn't get you to a lot of actual useful places.
There's no controversy about watts-amps-volts. All physicists accept that formulation. Is Mill's theory of moral motivation universally accepted, or is it a point of view?
At a certain point you get to the humanistic teaching of ethics, which I think is a good thing. But analytic teaching of ethics seems to be trying to theorize it like physics, which seems like a waste of time granted the multiple disagreements about fundamentals.
109: I think it's wrong to cast it in a `know something' vs. `don't know anything' light. I think you could argue successfully that after any intro course material, people know something that is `useful to the real world'. At least I'd hope so.
The specific problem with some economics examples probably comes from physics envy, but it is a claim that the sorts of things you `know' are both `known' in the same sense as the physics 101 examples, and with the implication that they *generalize* in the same way. For econ at least, this simply isn't true. I have no idea how the latter property holds up in many disciplines. The former, however, is very nearly unique to physics (even amongst the sciences) and has a lot to do with the types of knowledge that physics goes after. The systems are simple enough to learn some pretty strong things about.
I think we touched on this before, ages ago, but isn't a difference that an Ethics 101 class has to be a 'History of Ethics 101' or a 'Review of Theories of Ethics 101', whereas Physics 101 is just the physics. Calling it Newtonian mechanics is unimportant -- at the introductory level, there aren't any rival theories of mechanics. But there's no level of ethics simplified enough that you can get to formulations on which everyone agrees -- the most basic level of the subject is characterized by doubt and disagreement. So you can't teach neutral Ethics, only a summary of the thinking of ethicists.
John, however, seems to be claiming that ethicists claim to be teaching some sort of neutral Ethics when they actually just summarize the teaching of ethicists. I don't know anything about ethics, so I have no idea how true this is.
113, 111: what I mean by 95 is that we don't, in fact, have sufficient agreement about correct normative theories to (responsibly) teach a class called 'the correct answers to your ethical questions.'
111: I'm not sure what "humanistic ethics" is or what it would be to teach it. But what's interesting about attempts to systematize our thinking about moral questions (say, by advocating for a normative theory) is that it comes out of what you might call the objective purport or truth-apt pretensions of moral discourse-- that is, the features of everyday thought that suggest that, at least, we think of ourselves as *trying to get things right* when engaged in moral deliberation. It's not clear that we can make good sense of what we're doing without taking that on board while, at the same time, acknowledging how the failure to agree on "the foundations of ethics"-- a failure that one can't understand without knowing the material I cited in 104-- is an impediment to thinking of ethics as like physics. (This is why the "universally accepted" vs. "point of view" false dichotomy rankles.)
And to continue talking to myself, maybe that's the problem Emerson has with jokey examples. If you're taking courses in ethics with the goal of developing your own ethical thinking, rather than of becoming a historian of ethical thought, the important thing to be learned in a course called Review of Theories of Ethics 101 is which theories are right, or useful. And if that's your goal, you're probably going to get more out of real world examples than pushing fat men in front of trolleys.
114: ethicists claim to be teaching some sort of neutral Ethics
that can't be the complaint, because part of the complaint is that 101 gives you a little of this theory, a little of that theory, and so on.
Cross-posted with the last two.
110: All I'm really committed to here is that it's wrongheaded to judge an entire discipline's usefulness based on misapplications of its lowest level course. I would be wrong if I argued against evolution based on the second law of thermodynamics or that the moon landing was impossible because rockets couldn't really fly. "I'm never going to run across a situation where there are two donkeys in the field and I shoot the wrong one" seems on a par with "It's not like I'm ever going to BE on a frictionless ice shelf."
But there's no level of ethics simplified enough that you can get to formulations on which everyone agrees -- the most basic level of the subject is characterized by doubt and disagreement. So you can't teach neutral Ethics, only a summary of the thinking of ethicists.
I don't think this is quite right. There are introductory level Business Ethics classes and introductory level Applied Ethics classes, and introductory environmental ethics classes and introductory bioethics classes. And most of then use everyday examples. Ripped from the headlines, even.
Emerson's problem seems to be that he read a book on the introductory levels of systematizing ethics (i.e., what are the principles), where there isn't a lot of consensus, and was surprised when it didn't yield him practical answers on how to live his life.
I guess that's perhaps a fair criticism, but I'd probably put in the same category as people who take an introduction to poetry course and are startled that they haven't been taught how to be Dante. Or that their church history course didn't convert them.
117: How's this. Physics 101 deals with simplified situations -- perfectly spherical masses moving frictionlessly -- because it's well enough understood that one can truly say that what's been abstracted away is unimportant to understanding the theory. (And in many areas, it's unimportant in terms of getting a practically useful right answer -- the abstracted situation will get you close enough to the real world situation for all reasonable purposes.)
In ethics, on the other hand, simplified, abstract thought experiments are different, because we don't have a broadly agreed on and well understood theory saying what the unimportant features of an ethical situation that can be abstracted away are. Without such a theoretical justification, there's an argument that idealized examples are as likely to be misleading as instructive, and that we would be better served by trying to apply ethical theories to situations that are as real-world realistic as possible.
"Didn't yield him practical answers on how to live his life."
Isn't that what ethics is supposed to do? Isn't that fairly integral to the definition of "ethics"? Many analytic philosophers sneer at that expectation, but why?
Beyond that, my objection was stronger: "Didn't yield, wasn't intended to yield, and couldn't possibly have yielded practical answers."
A lot of this is the secularity problem: any attempt to teach substantive ethics starts to seem like advocacy. Students want to learn subject matter thay don't want to be told how to live their lives. But substantive ethics tells you how to live your life.
probably going to get more out of real world examples than pushing fat men in front of trolleys
It is not clear to me why this would be true. If you want to examine general principles, it seems most helpful to examine them in hypothetical situations where the facts are crafted to test the principle at issue and eliminating the messiness of real life, which is always complicated.
we would be better served by trying to apply ethical theories to situations that are as real-world realistic as possible.
Except that the real world is complicated, and most real situations involve lots of different facts and contingencies that make it hard to focus on the particular principle you want to discuss.
If you're taking courses in ethics with the goal of developing your own ethical thinking
Yes, but if you do that you need to have views about what the right and wrong acts are, no? And to do that, you have to come to terms with the fact that features that often travel together in common cases (aiming at positive outcomes, achieving positive outcomes, acting from good intentions, acting in conformity with such-and-such rules) come apart in the hard cases, which is part of the point of looking at the goofy cases.
The thing is, we don't, collectively, know which theories are the right theories. Thinking that this makes them not worth thinking about is sort of like saying that philosophy is pointless because it's philosophy.
You see, if the formalization and hypotheticalization of ethics had come up with powerful results the way the same methods did with physics, I wouldn't be kvetching. But it doesn't seem to me that theorization has led to a payoff.
I'd be in favor of a case-study method of teaching ethics, with carefully selected plausible, real-world cases. (Not all real-world cases are unmanageably messy.) But avoiding jocular hypothetical cases.
122: My point was (and I'm not committed to its rightness, I'm kicking ideas around) that without a really solid ethical theory, you can't craft a meaningfully simplified fact pattern without being likely to lose crucial information making the whole endeavor meaningless. You can do that in physics, because you know what's important, but you don't have the theoretical basis in ethics to tell you what the vital information is.
Isn't that what ethics is supposed to do? Isn't that fairly integral to the definition of "ethics"?
John, I'm getting more confused as this discussion goes on. What would Emerson's ethics 101 look like?
I'd be in favor of a case-study method of teaching ethics, with carefully selected plausible, real-world cases.
Sorry, cross-posted. Wouldn't the same theoretical problems come up here as elsewhere? How would this help with the real problem?
Hmm, hijackers are using an airplane to kill civilians in buildings. Oh, look, the fat man in the cave case!
125: Most of the ethical examples everyone loves to pick on start with a real-world problem: is there a distinction between killing someone and letting them die? One person says yes, and the other person says no, and we're off. Note, though, that when we ask that sort of question, we're not asking immediately what we should do, but what principle should decide it?
One way we might find a principle would be to create an example where none of us had an immediate personal stake and see what our intuitions are. And we're doing that because considering the real world situation didn't help because it was very confusing. (And when there is one, most philosophers ime will jump on the real-world example. Schiavo case -- good talking points!)
I don't see what's baffling about the idea that ethics "yields practical answers on how to live your life." It seems truistic. Engineering, for example, shows you how to build things. Isn't ethics a practical, normative study?
I would start by brainstorming (perhaps on my own, outside class) the ten most likely ethical problems most students would be likely to confront in their lives, and then do case studies related to those.
But then the discussion isn't impoverished by a lack of factual background. Maybe the personal history of the hijackers is important, maybe the particular building is -- if you start picking at the problem and a factual thread would be useful, it's there in a real world problem. The fat man in the cave has no history and no individuality, and that may damage the analysis.
The fat man in the cave isn't a case study. The hijackers in the plane is.
I'd be in favor of a case-study method of teaching ethics, with carefully selected plausible, real-world cases.
Note that you'd still have the same problem as soon as you tried to generalize from your carefully selected real-world case to other situations.
You can't generalize from real-world cases to other real-world cases. The case-study method is an alternative to trying to find a general theory.
John, my point is that the fat man is the sort of case you think is bad, but it's structurally identical to the hijacker case: in both the big question is whether it's permissible to intentionally kill the innocent in order to prevent the deaths of those innocents plus additional innocent people. So fine, I switch to your favored case, and we have the same class discussion.
Isn't ethics a practical, normative study?
Is it? All your arguments seem to assume that it is, but I don't see that that's self-evidently true. Not every academic discipline is practical and normative, of course. And, again, I don't know anything about ethics.
133: really? Prediction: clever student X will say, Professor Emerson, you said this about case 1, and that about case 2. How are these consistent? What lessons should we learn from these cases, given that no two real-world situations are identical?
You can't generalize from real-world cases to other real-world cases. The case-study method is an alternative to trying to find a general theory.
(I do love stirring a pot and then going away till it boils) How would you approach trying to find a general theory without reference to the real world.
133: So you'll end up with an ethics that doesn't generalize at all, which I think makes you even less practical than the academic ethicist.
134: And you don't have to spend class time talking about someone's feelings about Arabs or 9/11 or how they can't talk about it because they knew someone or how it's not wrong to kill Muslims. &phi .
I don't think that it's at all a good idea to teach ethics to glib, shallow, silly freshman, and that's a lot of them, with joke examples, even if they're formally the same as real-world examples. I don't see any advantage in switching to the jokes.
Teo, do you see a problem with asking why ethics must be normative?
I would start by telling them that that's the problem with ethics, and that ethical thinking involves a lot of that kind of thing. But without asserting general laws, it would be possible to say, for example, that in two different cases, many other things being different, you're both dealing a situation where A has an advantage over B because of superior knowledge.
History, law, and medicine all use case-study methods. This isn't a wild and crazy idea.
You can find common factors between two cases. You just don't try to come to a general unified theory.
What's interesting about this conversation is that it mirrors positions that people have *within philosophical ethics*.
I'm out the door right now, but I'll come back to this. For now, I'm puzzled about how we're going to move from common factors between cases to practical conclusions without dealing in things that look an awful lot like-- principles! And maybe Emerson thinks rough-and-ready principles good, systematic theory bad, and then I try to remember what I used to know about the particularism debates to argue that consistency pressures present in everyday moral thought push us toward something very much like a general theory in virtue of our need to provide justifications for our normative conclusions. (For example, common factors will push in one direction some times, another direction in other cases, and we should be able to say why, on pain of looking seriously ad hoc. But doing that means moving closer to a general theory.)
History, law, and medicine all use case-study methods.
And I'm pretty sure all of them end up trying to unify their studies into a theory.
Life is seriously ad hoc, FL. That's what case study methods are all about.
Physics isn't ad hoc. If ethics weren't partly ad hoc, there'd be more agreement than there is; it would be more like physics. Anyone who wants to can generalize to cases up to a general theory, but the different people who do that will come up with different general theories.
Teo, do you see a problem with asking why ethics must be normative?
Not really, no. Obviously it lends itself to normative study more than most other disciplines, but why couldn't we just define the object of study as what makes actions good or bad (whether we analyze that through case studies or general principles is immaterial) without bothering to figure out how to apply what we learn in real life?
Can we all agree that physics is sui generis among academic disciplines and no other area of study (except maybe math) can hope to emulate it? Comparisons to physics strike me as pretty pointless.
Well, yes, we could, but we could paint ourselves blue too. It seems that the burden of proof is on someone who claims that the study of ethics should be non-normative.
I can understand that a historian or a philosopher might make a non-normative study of ethics, but that study shouldn't be called "ethics". It would be like a historian or a philosopher doing a detached study of political discourse; to do that is not to do politics, and to do a non-normative study of ethics is not to do ethics.
119: Certainly I agree. Problems with economics as a discipline shouldn't be directed at it's 101 courses. It's worth nothing though that flaws in the 101 material as it applies to `real world' situations is perfectly good to dismiss the majority of arguments a non-economist is likely to run into, day to day, it seems.
145: That's probably sensible. Maths is in an entirely different territory, and shouldn't be thought of as a science.
I can understand that a historian or a philosopher might make a non-normative study of ethics, but that study shouldn't be called "ethics".
Okay, so if FL et al. rename their discipline you would no longer have a problem with what they do?
Every science has its frontiers and its murky areas, but there are enormous areas of biology, chemistry, and even the earth sciences that are more agreed-upon than ethics is.
The reason I harp on the science comparison is that I think that a lot of ethical formalization, theorization, and argumentation (including the jokey hypothetical examples) are motivated by the attempt to make ethics more properly theoretical and scientific.
The main social function of college ethics is to teach Ethics 101, and when I look at the profession that's one of the main things I think of. Economics has several other important functions, but Econ 101 has a powerful effect on American life. If someone takes only one course in a field, I think that that course should have some positive value for them.
I am not aware of any serious criticisms of physics, biology, chemistry, or geology 101 on a par with the ones I make of econ and ethics.
145: Well, chem and big chunks of bio do pretty well for themselves on that front. They don't have as simple a firm theoretical underpinning, but they do have a similar level of rigor.
I don't know anything about advanced econ or philosophy classes, but it does seem like physics is a terrible comparison. Biology would be a better one.
You can take Bio 101 alone, and all your life you have some vague belief that all our bodily traits are based on the 50%/50%/25%/etc. probability of inheriting "the bald gene" or "the tall gene" or "the gene for chronic back pain" from one or other of your parents, and then gradually start to believe that it's possible to do something like "discover the gay gene". Mendelian inheritance applies to whether you have one or the other slightly different version of a given protein. It hardly ever applies to anything you can detect with the naked eye.
I haven't heard the words "recessive" or "dominant" since the first semester of my freshman year in college. I suspect they are not concepts that correspond to an objective reality.
I am proud and happy to be in a threesome with Emerson and Labs.
If they leave a space open for someone else to teach ethics, sure. A lot of my bitch with analytic philosophy is the opportunity cost. They take up a lot of space others could be using.
I am not aware of any serious criticisms of physics, biology, chemistry, or geology 101 on a par with the ones I make of econ and ethics.
What's the serious criticism? That a normative ethics class tried to talk about the sorts of things that could establish norms, and didn't use an example you found compelling? There are other areas besides normative ethics.
I mean, seriously, I can't figure out how your proposed ideal class would differ practically from anything offered now. Your students would talk about the Schiavo case or whatever real-world one you thought was suitable, some would agree, some would disagree, no one would make any generalizations, and chances are, no one's life would be transformed in the course of a semester.
I'm not sure what you're wanting out of an introductory ethics curriculum.
It's ironic that Emerson's good point--the examples typically used in analytic ethics classes are stupid and alienating--has been lost in the search for a principled difference between that and what he'd rather see.
Anyway, I was all primed to agree with Emerson, but my objection isn't really to the examples, but to the fact that ethics has come to mean something like "solving ethical puzzles," as opposed to thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to live a good life, what it means to be happy, etc. You know, ethics. Or is that meta-ethics these days? And if y'all are asking all these questions, great, I take it back and will give to your favorite analytic philosophy charity.
I don't see your, FL's and Teo's bafflement.
For me this all goes back to something I read by Richard Velleman, who apparently is well-respected in the field (or maybe the other Velleman). He stated that a professional ethicist, when faced with an actual ethical situation, would decide no better and no worse than anyone else. He apparently had completely disjoined the theoretical and the practical study of ethics, and also saw no connection between ethical understanding and personal character. As I remember, he said that Dworkin thought the same way.
That raised red flags for me. If a theory is as disconnected from practice as that, what good is the theory? I had this mental image of the Marquis de Sade (a very bright fellow) teaching ethics to Gandhi (not a sophisticated metaethicist) and flunking him.
So what I think is that ethics should not be disconnected from practice that way, and that what students take away from the class be comething other than joke examples about pushing fat men in front of trains.
Just musing here now, but I thought the most ethically sophisticated argument about why we shouldn't torture people was Jim Henley's: because we're the fucking United States of America. In my ideal ethics class, we'd try to unpack that, to understand what it could mean, what it means to be an American in this sense, etc. One big advantage of that approach is that I think it tells you a lot about how to behave in other situations that don't seem at all similar to Abu Ghraib.
Furthermore, any ethical system that tells us that we shouldn't beat up cantankerous old men is wrong on its face.
Ogged means any ethical system that tells us that we shouldn't beat up cantankerous old menpeople is wrong on its face.
Musing some more: students in an intro ethics class should become conversant with concepts like "dignity," "respect," "decency," "honor," "goodness," and the like. I only took a couple of analytic classes, and that almost fifteen years ago, but these things were far removed from what we were doing. Maybe things have changed.
Of course, the problem is that that would be hard. Who is Professor X to say she's an authority on dignity or goodness? She can be an authority on what other people have said about it, but without an objective check, it's hard to imagine such an ethics class that wouldn't be presumptuous.
But the idea wouldn't be to come up with the definition of any of those things, but to be able to think with them. Just knowing that there's such a thing as "dignity" can affect how you behave.
I don't know. A metaethics class I know of donated to OxFam.
But in general, I'd be suspicious of any one-semester course that said "If you take my course, you'll know how to make all the right decisions", or of a philosopher who said, "Yes, I am better at making moral decisions than everyone else because I work on normative ethics." Wouldn't that be incredibly arrogant?
Yes, if you take an introductory normative ethics course, you'll probably learn introductory normative ethics material. If you want the applied ethics course or the environmental ethics course or the bioethics course or the business ethics course or the metaethics course, I'd suggest signing up for one of them.
160: Ogged, are you Dinesh D'Souza?
163: Well, I guess I think that people should come out of a normative ethics class better equipped to function ethically, and you don't. So we disagree. And you believe that the definition Ethics 101 "Introductory Normative Ethics" are carved in stone, handed down by our ancient forefathers, and it's just silly to criticize them, and I don't. And you believe that the whole intellectual enterprise of analytic ethics contributes soething to ethics, and I'm quite doubtful that it does.
I'm off to swim, heathens. Remember, work the body, then go to the head.
"And you believe that the definition Ethics 101 "Introductory Normative Ethics" are carved in stone, handed down by our ancient forefathers, and it's just silly to criticize them, and I don't."
Man, strawman factory's working overtime today. I think it's quite fine to talk about what should be in an introductory ethics course to make it 'better', and I don't think any thing's been set in stone or silly to criticize; but I haven't seen a suggestion from you that would substantively change how introductory ethics is taught. You've suggested a change in some examples. Big deal; most of the profs I know don't limit the discussions to fanciful examples. You also want to argue against generalizing. Look at that, there's a school of normative ethics that agrees.
But I do think it's wrong to expect a class that says "here we are going to talk about what sort of principles we can develop to systematize our behavior" to replace years of ethical training taught by parents and society. It shouldn't be the only course offered in ethics, and shouldn't be offered as The Last Word on anything having to do with ethics, but in my experience it rarely is.
John, are you claiming that taking an ethics course should make one a better person?
Without trying to systematize, let me repy to some of Emerson's points.
As a practical matter, I think it would be professionally irresponsible to teach a course along Emersonian lines, for at least two reasons: (a) it presupposes a controversial normative ethical view, and at the intro level teaching live philosophical controversies is better than telling students about one's enormously controversial view as though it's the standard position; (b) it's a good idea for intro classes to teach material that will come up in future courses, so if a student leaves the course knowing nothing about the disagreement between, say, virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists, and why people hold these views, that student has been shortchanged in a way that will impact future classes.
I think Emerson is using "normative" in a nonstandard way. Ethics is normative in the sense that it makes evaluative claims, says things about obligations, value, etc. This is not the same as, say, being a practical guide to how to live, in the Wm Bennett sense. This is a misleading conflation, because Emerson thinks, rightly, that ethics is a normative discipline, and, wrongly, that ethics in the analytic tradition is non-normative.
what it means to live a good life, what it means to be happy, etc. You know, ethics.
Christ, Ogged, I teach an entire course on this, and at least some of these questions come up in most classes.
because we're the fucking United States of America.
This is terrible as it stands. To make it a better, more interesting argument, we'd need to think about the US and...oh, look, claims about inalienable rights. Theory! John Locke! And all that.
better equipped to function ethically, and you don't.
Yes, I saw this article in the Journal of Straw Studies. Functioning ethically means more than acting in particular ways, because acting ethically requires reflection on reasons for action, right-making features, and so on. The academic study of ethics isn't sufficient, but it covers the sorts of reasoning that are necessary for ethical action.
I saw this article in the Journal of Straw Studies.
May I please steal this?
That said, why does acting ethically require one to be reflective? Seriously. I suppose that strictly speaking "ethics" means a set of reasoned principles, which would require reflection; but in the casual everyday way people speak, "ethical" merely means "right," and surely one could act rightly without thinking about it one way or t'other.
b, fair point. On an individual occasion, sure, doing the right thing might be non-reflective, and in some cases conscious reflection would be bad.* But given the difficulty of ethical questions and the extent of real disagreement about values, a responsible agent has to reflect on values from time to time; without critical scrutiny, you're just taking on cultural baggage uncritically, and if you ended up acting rightly it'd be a miracle.
*See the endless debate about Bernard Williams and "one thought too many."
I'm so not going to look into any endless debate about a field that isn't my own, sorry.
I'd agree that practically speaking a kind of automatic unreflective ethics is likely to be kind of haphazard. But I think you're underestimating the likelihood that, to speak in really casual terms, some folks are just basically pretty damn good people.
Now, of course, if you get into broader discussions about, say, the ramifications of X or Y act historically (say, being a 19th-century settler in Nebraska who treats individual Indians as human beings but nonetheless is part of a larger destructive movement, or being a 17th-century sailor who was pressganged into transatlantic exploration and colonization), then it probably is impossible to behave ethically, because you'd have immediate ethical principles that would inherently contradict larger ones. But I'd suppose that to be true whether or not one was reflective.
Aristotle what I actually think is a good point* about being a naturally good person: that without reflection and study it's hard to get the virtues right, because some of our natural and well-intentioned inclinations can go bad without the addition of practical wisdom. Easy examples: being too "kind" or generous when the hard truth is called for, or failing to temper justice with mercy, or whatever. Being a pretty good person means getting some critical distance on one's inclinations-- not that it requires reading the collected works of anybody.
*totally kidding.
I'll go along with that, but critical distance needn't necessarily be reflective. Anyway, your proffered example is kind of consequentialist, isn't it?
wait, which example? the kindness and generosity ones? I don't think they're consequentialist. (Good ethical reasoning might take consequences into account sometimes without being consequentialist. Not that that's a bad thing. I can say that now that baa isn't around so much.)
The being "too kind" when hard truth is called for, yeah. Called for by what?
I can go along with the idea that X can take consequences into account sometimes without necessarily being consequentialist as a whole, okay. But in a specific situation, surely doing that would be, in a limited sense, consequentialist.
Though we joke, being a consequentialist isn't incompatible with being reflective.
More seriously, if there is value to doing ethics, it's not going to be in providing a laundry list of situations, even carefully selected realistic ones, with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on each. There's just too many situations and too many variables, but even if that weren't the case, ethical training should be about more than being able to spit back the right answers. It's going to be about developing the sort of person who is able to reflect and make ethical decisions (and izzums that a little virtue ethics, Labsy, why yes it is!) based on those reflections.
Called for by the reasons that would motivate an ideally virtuous agent, of course. In this case, telling my enthused but hopeless student that a career in philosophy just isn't in the cards, for example-- considerations of the student's well-being are decisive here, though they might not be elsewhere.
if there is value to doing ethics . . . It's going to be about developing the sort of person who is able to reflect and make ethical decisions
Wow. Do you really want to base the existence of your discipline on a claim like this? It sounds to me suspiciously like the moldy idea that the point of liberal arts education is to Make Us Better People.
Oh, no, I base the existence of my discipline on the fact that if you want to be a university with a top five department, philosophy is one of the easiest disciplines in which to buy up a lot of top people.
Seriously, who said anything about justifying its existence as an academic discipline? I just don't think that the value of ethics is measured by how many students become philanthropist monks, but by whether they've been taught to think a little bit. Sorry if that's too moldy, but what else is it supposed to do, cure cancer?
178: Hm. So the ideally virtuous agent's primary concern is for the student's ultimate well-being? How does that really answer my examples of, say, the Indian-friendly settler? It sounds like you're assuming that "ultimate" means "over time," rather than, say, what Cala might mean if the study of ethics makes people better ethical agents--albeit poor ones.
180: Teaching people to think is fine; arguing that doing so is going to some how make them "better" is what I have a problem with.
103
I don't agree with this, Econ 101 also contains a lot of stuff with useful real world applicability.
129:
Isn't ethics a practical, normative study?
No. As FL, I think, said, your sense of normativity is a little off. Ethics takes a set of data: how people behave, how they attempt to reason about and justify their ethical, or merely behavioral, decisions; and attempts to fit a theory to the data. Color me analytic for putting it in this way.
Eh, I'm coming close to suggesting that ethics is the study of normativity. An unformed thought, though.
I would start by brainstorming (perhaps on my own, outside class) the ten most likely ethical problems most students would be likely to confront in their lives, and then do case studies related to those.
I haven't read this thread very closely, and I see that this has been addressed to some extent, but:
Good lord, Emerson, back off a second: the course you propose sounds (sorry) like a community college course or something. I take an ethics course in order to become a better person?
This is why I hated teaching ethics. Too many students walked in with this expectation.
I'm reminded of those standard scenarios in which one says at a cocktail party that one studies philosophy, and is greeted by a round of: Oh, what's your philosophy of life?
But I am being irreverent. And repetitive.
113
I agree with this, Ethics 101 is going to be like a comparative religions introductory class. So it is not going to tell you how to live your life.
And as the equivalent of an atheist I have doubts about the value of the whole field of study.
if a student leaves the course knowing nothing about the disagreement between, say, virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists, and why people hold these views, that student has been shortchanged in a way that will impact future classes.
Not that I want to sign up for the whole Emersonian critique, but you see that this is a circular justification, right?
This is terrible as it stands. To make it a better, more interesting argument, we'd need to think about the US and...oh, look, claims about inalienable rights. Theory! John Locke! And all that.
You're freaking me out, company man. Are inalienable rights the only way to talk about what went wrong at Abu Ghraib? Not that that's your claim, but it seems strange to me to think that the best way to explicate something as powerful as "because we're the fucking United States of America" is a close reading of Locke. Yes, that's part of it, but nothing in Locke gets you to the pride in doing the right thing that gets people to actually do it, rather than know it.
I take an ethics course in order to become a better person?
Of course you do. Rather, of course it ought to be the case that things should be such that you would. The fact that the academy has backed away from trying to do this is a problem.
And now I'm going back to enjoying my Saturday. Have fun in your century of decadent decline, heathens.
this is a circular justification, right?
That mustard is spicy, my boy-- I see that the justification depends on the holism of professional practice, indeed I do, and I take that to be a reason. Oh, wait, you'd say it's grounded in praxis and weird facial hair.
187: Jesus, you *are* Dinesh D'Souza.
You're not going to think mustard jokes are funny when I use it instead of butter.
as powerful as "because we're the fucking United States of America"
Oi, this thread makes me want to throw in the towel. The problem is that making this claim isn't conversation rock bottom for many people. Ourselves included, I take it. And that means we need further justification before our spades are turned.
B, that's a long and complicated answer, and I'm grading. I postpone my Aristotle discussion until another time.
189: Finally, someone notices.
You've all been behaving morally, haven't you? There's nothing that sickens me more than virtually everything.
we need further justification before our spades are turned
Of course we do, but it's an actual ethical stand that's pretty clear, so it's a great place to start. Anyway, you should throw in the towel and become a lawyer or something; you're corrupting the young.
Sorry to tell you about your wrongness and then leave, Cala, but you're wrong because ethics doesn't tell us what to do.
Ethics takes a set of data: how people behave, how they attempt to reason about and justify their ethical, or merely behavioral, decisions; and attempts to fit a theory to the data. Color me analytic for putting it in this way.....
Good lord, Emerson, back off a second: the course you propose sounds (sorry) like a community college course or something. I take an ethics course in order to become a better person?.
I understand that the first paragraph is a description of how ethics is normally taught. I just don't think that it's the best way. To my mind, the incredulity in the second paragraph speaks for itself -- yeah, ethics is supposed to make you a better person, by definition, so studying ethics should make you a better person.
I don't think that my use of "normative" is perverse or unidiomatic. I think that the imperatives of secularity, objectivity and detachment have ended up mandating the non-normative teaching of ethics.
People should pay a little attention to teaching by case study, as is done in law and medicine without an attempt at a single unified overarching theory. And the methods of history, which works best by case studies and tends to go wrong when its theorized. There shouldn't be such incredulity about the case study method.
At times I've thought that we've gone far enough in the direction of secularity that we live in a post-ethical age. A lot of people seem to resent being held ethically accountable, and a lot of people seem to govern their lives entirely by self-interest plus prudence, or even self-interest without much prudence. So attempts at real ethical instruction might be rsented, whereas trolleycar parables are sort of amusing.
You know, I've spent a total of 10 minutes in my pedagogical career talking about the trolley problem.
Aristotle what I actually think is a good point* about being a naturally good person: that without reflection and study it's hard to get the virtues right, because some of our natural and well-intentioned inclinations can go bad without the addition of practical wisdom.
My reading of 1114a30ff is that there's no such thing as the naturally good person in a strict sense. But maybe you mean to be referring to 1144b7ff (likening someone with an excellent character but without intellectual excellence to a strong body which stumbles)?
Right, I don't teach things that might bother people; that's why I do singer on famine relief.
You know, I've spent a total of 10 minutes in my pedagogical career talking about the trolley problem.
Dude, you're never going to get tenure.
(I've decided that this is the thread in which Labs and I will have our big falling out.)
It's the old natural/full virtue distinction, but I'd have to check the text, not knowing the numbers off the top of my head.
that's why I do singer on famine relief
Yeah, but he's extreme enough and the topic far enough removed from most people's lives that it doesn't make much difference if you teach Singer.
It's the latter, then.
I see we've moved on from 136 but I don't think there needs to be the slightest problem answering the clever student.
Ogged, that's such a cop-out. I'm calling Homeland Security. (It's not far removed, insofar as the upshot is "what you do is wrong.")
(It's not far removed, insofar as the upshot is "what you do is wrong.")
But it is far removed in the sense that Singer isn't very convincing and also in the sense that you don't actually expect them to behave differently.
I don't know the numbers off the top of my head either; that's why I keep volume two of The Complete Works of Aristotle close by at all times.
People should pay a little attention to teaching by case study, as is done in law and medicine without an attempt at a single unified overarching theory. And the methods of history, which works best by case studies and tends to go wrong when its theorized. There shouldn't be such incredulity about the case study method.
I think a big part of the frustration here is that it's not clear what this would look like, or, more accurately, it's hard to see how it would square with all sorts of things that look really important to the task at hand, from making sense of the demand for consistency to the teaching of the historically influential texts (kant and mill: lots of general principles, theories, arguments, etc.). I agree, it'd be fun to work through some interesting actual-world cases, but I don't think I'd be doing my job well if that's all I did, and I don't think it would benefit students more than what I do now.
What do you take the benefit your students receive to be, anyway, Labs? I apologize if this is asked and answered; I haven't read the whole thread.
Law school and med school both feature case study, but both are definitely "professional school", with the decreased status, higher salary, you pay them rather than they pay you, and lack of emphasis on research. I don't think that this is a coincidence.
Also, from what I understand, in both law and medical school once you get the degree you have to spend a lot of time and effort to actually learn skills relevant to your career (bar-bri or residency).
There's no real reason that philosophy couldn't change to be more like that, but it's not a minor change.
I don't think that an exclusively case study method would work either, but the use of actual cases rather than hypothetical ones, or plausible hypothetical cases rather than jokey ones, would enormously improve teaching.
A lot of actual post-ethical people take for granted forms of self-serving behavior which wouldn't pass muster according to any ethical theory except some of the hard core Randian ones.
187:
Rather, of course it ought to be the case that things should be such that you would [take an ethics course in order to be a better person]. The fact that the academy has backed away from trying to do this is a problem.
ogged, you're being a bit dense. The academy hasn't backed away from this.
Rather, you're being stubborn. Ethics courses are like any others in philosophy: intended to provide critical thinking skills. We can fast-forward people toward thinking in terms (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics) that it'd otherwise take them years, eons to come to on their own.
What's to fault with that? A well-taught intro ethics course provides terms for discourse. It can blow people's minds. So many tools with which to think, so little time.
shit, mang. If you want students to be taught what was wrong about Abu Ghraib, (a) that's not merely ethics, it's political science, and (b) it's Applied Ethics.
Of course, I can't separate ethics from political theory in the first place.
It's taken me long enough to actually post this while dinner is made that the conversation has moved on. Surprise.
Ben, I've constructed an abstract formulation of my pedagogical effectiveness that might enlighten you.
It's applied ethics if you want to teach students that Abu Ghraib was wrong. What was wrong about it seems to be right up normative ethics' alley.
Which is the student and which is you?
I think that all ethics should be applied ethics. I think that if ethics isn't practical and normative, nothing is.
My argument in this thread commits me to topping, does it not? On that note I flee.
AAAH. NORMATIVE ETHICS AND METAETHICS ARE NORMATIVE DISCIPLINES.
Ogged, you're on crack, and you are going to end up banning Labs because this whole "we're the fucking US of A" is exactly the same reasoning torture apologists use.
Yes, some people do the right thing because they take pride in doing so. They also do the wrong thing because they take pride in doing so. They also rationalize all sorts of bullshit in order to retroactively take pride in it. This approach you're advocating for is great for raising kids, but shit as an intellectual discipline.
216: Wow. It's a good thing you're naturally a good guy, John, or else you'd be one evil motherfucker.
In academic ethics I see the same objectified distancing I see in non-normative social science. It's the objective discussion of the normativity.
Ethics takes a set of data: how people behave, how they attempt to reason about and justify their ethical, or merely behavioral, decisions; and attempts to fit a theory to the data.
That's a description of a non-normative discussion or normativity.
221:
That's a description of a non-normative discussion or normativity.
Yes, it is.
I'm not seeing the problem here. How would one discuss normativity normatively?
This is just completely bizarre at this point. Normative behavior, and thinking, is fact. We talk about what we should do, we engage in pressures upon one another.
I've lost track of what you want out of what you mean by normativity.
This: In academic ethics I see the same objectified distancing I see in non-normative social science.
Okay, yes, some philosophical ethics may resemble social science. I take your point. So sue us. Not all of it is, and frankly, what seems to be an insistence that philosophical ethics be like a friggin' religion course is, um, it's never going to go down. Never. We do not teach people what to think.
How would one discuss normativity normatively?
One could say something like "deontology is right and one ought to be a deontologist", as opposed to "deontology properly models our supposedly pre-theoretical intuitions about right and wrong".
I understand that the point of view I oppose is impregnably institutionalized. I just don't agree. I wouldn't expect a Catholic to be receptive to arguments about the Virgin Birth, either.
We do not teach people what to think.
IE, you do not teach ethics. You teach meta-ethics, or you teach history of ethics, or sociology of ethics, or something. Ethics tells people what to think! That's what ethics is.
What I mean about normativity is the actual meaning, whereas you and Labs have constructed an angels-son-the-head-of-a-pin transubstantiated view allowing you to teach nonethical ethics.
I wouldn't expect a Catholic to be receptive to arguments about the Virgin Birth, either.
I would. And if they weren't I'd think they were a bad Catholic.
Face it, B, Mary was banging someone. Don't buy the hype.
I'm quite willing to agree that she was. You forget that I think it's all metaphorical anyway. Ain't no reason she couldn't bang someone and still remain pure in thought and deed.
But my point was that a lot of Catholics over the years thought about that whole virgin birth thing in order for it to become doctrine, and any Catholic who failed to recognize that would be a fucking idiot.
Next, John Emerson complains that his linguistics class didn't improve his Spanish.
B, you're very pro-banging and want to be Catholic too, so you're an easy sell. But I expect the next half-billion Catholics to be harder to persuade. I'll tick your name off my roster, though.
SB, shouldn't a Spanish class improve your Spanish?
225:
You're trying to make me mad now, right?
No, that's what I've been trying to say all along. the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin applies mostly to Labs all-caps above, though.
Wait, is this an etymological argument? Accept that there are two things called "ethics".
I think it's more an extension of McCumber's Time in the Ditch argument that anglo philosophy deliberately backed off teaching substantive ethics in order to stay viable during the red scare.
Ain't no reason she couldn't bang someone and still remain pure in thought and deed.
Uh, from the Catholic point of view, if you're banging someone outside of marriage, then you're not "pure in thought and deed."
Yeah. Two things called ethics, one that's taught and one that isn't. People who take the one that is taught learn little about the one that isn't.
You heard it here first: the Immaculate Bang.
McCumber sez that "the aim [of the book] was to ask some questions, not to prove a thesis"; anyway, shouldn't we wonder about the other departments, too? (Couldn't they have taught a substantive McCarthyite ethics?)
238: Perhaps she and Joseph were secretly married and had plighted their eternal troth to each other but hadn't been able to undergo the earthly "marriage ceremony" yet.
What are they?
At a minimum, the academic discipline, and Emerson's preferred set of rules for being a good person.
Terms of art, wow.
I'm so happy that this discussion is in the Paris Hilton thread.
I'm pretty sure that whatever cosfm-ethics might be, it couldn't be an academic discipline.
It seems reasonable to think that a class called "Ethics" would leave people more likely to be ethical. Don't people justify requiring humanities classes on the basis of how it may not benefit people to learn about some esoteric subject, but the classes instill values like critical thinking, open-mindedness, and the ability to detect incoherence?
Terms of art, wow.
Stoned, eh?
SB, it's nice of you to give me personal possession of one of the two definitions of the word ethics. I'd call the two "normative" and "objective" ethics.
"Non-normative" social science is not terribly controversial any more, and to a degree it's institutionalized. To me putting ethics itself in that same framework is very peculiar indeed, which is why I harp.
I could understand a case that substantive ethics can't really be taught in a secular university, since in the absence of consensus that would be advocacy. On the other hand, all actual ethical views end up in advocacy, by definition.
It goes along with my idea that maybe we live in a post-ethical society, since the particular ethics anyone has is optional and can be customized to their needs as long as they don't get caught breaking the law. A purely private ethical belief strikes me as not an ethical belief.
It seems reasonable to think that a class called "Ethics"
Why? It doesn't seem reasonable to think that day-traders would be good at billiards, because they know a lot about "momentum".
There are two complaints here. One, "omg they stole the name 'ethics'". Two, "kids these days don't learn not to kill people". The first of these is laughable.
Wow, the two definitions of the word must be almost entirely unrelated.
Maybe you should change the term of art, and call it "Ethicalistism" or something.
It is long past time for ethicists to reclaim the word "queer."
Customized oak savannah fuel model, John. You must have taken one of those other forestry classes if you don't know that.
One of the only things that could make this thread more annoying would be if it were regularly interspersed with pictures of star-nosed moles.
I could understand a case that substantive ethics can't really be taught in a secular university
It's more that substantive ethics, as I understand you to mean it, couldn't support a research program. What room is there for inquiry in a pat list of rules for being a good person?
Why? It doesn't seem reasonable to think that day-traders would be good at billiards, because they know a lot about "momentum".
If people thought that momentum had something to do with billiards, and day traders were the only ones who knew anything about momentum, that situation would be worth pointing out, wouldn't it? I don't think Emerson's complaint is risible at all: if there is more than one active conception of what ethics is, but you everyone teaching the stuff subscribes to only one of them, it's legitimate to note that that's what's going on. It's one of those situations where the genus has the same name as one of the species, and everyone talks as if the species were the genus. It leaves those who want to talk about other species looking foolish.
"It leaves those who want to talk about other species looking foolish"
Such as, e.g., the humble star-nosed mole.
What room is there for inquiry in a pat list of rules for being a good person?
It will be objected: both of those authors are putting forward a more general theory from which the particular traits listed could perhaps be separated. No doubt! But it doesn't seem unreasonable to, to be unoriginal, start from the that and move to the because on its basis.
"What room is there for inquiry in a pat list of rules for being a good person?"
Which is why nobody studies the Talmud.
It's one of those situations where the genus has the same name as one of the species, and everyone talks as if the species were the genus.
Yes, this is a much better description of it. Point taken.
It leaves those who want to talk about other species looking foolish.
But Emerson doesn't just want to talk about the other species, he wants to argue that the other species is the real ghostbusters genus. Nobody disagrees that crazy-old-spittle-flecked-man-ethics isn't valuable.
b-wo probably gave better examples.
I'm considering taking a wanking class so as to inspire chaste thoughts.
Anyway, if the answer to the question quoted in 257 really is "none" (and it would have to be none, because "very little" would still support a lot of researchers), you'd think that would have repercussions for normative ethics. Whether there's none because it's impossible to come up with rules (or anything else; why should it be rules?) or because it's utterly trivial (let's include here the case where you can't specify in any way in advance what is to be done, but you think that everyone really knows anyway, or something), why continue with NE at all? Either you'll never know if your theory is descriptively adequate at all, or there's no point to having a theory at all.
I don't really understand what SPBP is saying here. I mean, if you are studying the two books linked in 257, which I presume is one of the things you do in Ethics 101, you are preparing yourself to analyze your own notions of what "ethics", and therefore "ethical behavior", consists of.
That is, unless it's an intro class, taught as a historical survey consisting of memorizing a bunch of terms.
Actually the Talmud's a much better example than boring ol' Hume.
I'm arguing that when college students go into the only ethics class in the school and find that it's what I call objective ethics rather than what I call normative ethics, they're not being silly. Regardless of what Brian Leiter's philosopher's union says.
"are disappointed when they find"
I think there are more problems created by thinking that the job of introductory ethics classes is to mold the students into the ethical view the prof thinks is correct than would be solved. (You hate the trolley problem that much that you'd rather skip straight to the indoctrination? Did an analytic philosopher kill your pony?)
Here I thought the criticism of the strawprofs forcing their students to believe what they believe was a criticism, not a mandate. But even if that's what we're supposed to do -- one semester of ethicslist isn't going to undo 18 years of training. Gimme the kids when they're four, I say.
You wouldn't take a university course on How You, Personally, Can and Should Behave in Accordance with the Nicomachean Ethics.
Nor How to Be a Better Jew. Unless it's a yeshiva.
Gimme the kids when they're four, I say.
Atta girl!
I confess that when I considered taking an Ethics class, I was imagining that it would involve a lot of the professor asking "What would be the ethical thing to do in this dilemma, Brad?" and then Brad's response would be critiqued for leaps of logic and inconsistencies, and he would explain how it fits in with a larger set of principles.
Possibly because I was a lot close to taking a Bioethics class than one in the philosophy department.
I should leave this to Cala. I'm going to get the bends coming up from this far out of my depth.
Substantive ethics wouldn't be indoctrination. That's always the accusation. It wouldn't be a set of rules to memorize either. It wouldn't have to necessarily be dogmatic. But it would consistently zero in on actual ethical situations which might occur in the real lives of the students, rather than distancing itself from actuality. And it could even be somewhat open ended, but it wouldn't be required simply to list points of view.
You wouldn't take a university course on How You, Personally, Can and Should Behave in Accordance with the Nicomachean Ethics.
Of course not; such a course would only be useful to someone too young to be in a university. (And actually, if there were a course called "How to Achieve Psychic Harmony", I'd be interested.)
Isn't the point Emerson is trying to make that for some things, studying the thing just doesn't make you good at the doing the thing? And should we be surprised at that? There are classes in thingsdoing and there are classes in thing thingyness.
More to the point.
University of Pennsylvania, ben.
Anyway, SB, is the problem that what Emerson wants wouldn't support a research program, or that students wouldn't take tendentiously-named courses?
Emerson, you're losing me a bit with your 272. Sometimes it sounds like you want a substantial revision to how ethics is taught, other times it sounds like you just want them to use better example.
I had thought Emerson was complaining that meta-ethics pretends to somehow dispense with normativity, but then he started advocating casuistry or whatever. Confusing.
My guess is that when someone takes a generic college ethics class, if they like the class most often they end up distancing themselves from whatever naive ethics they had when they entered the class, and that when they come unethical, they rarely go out more ethical.
I'm boggled at the incredulity I'm getting here. I'd probably end up being willing to concede that normative or substantive ethics may be unteachable in a secular university, for the same reasons that actual religion is unteachable, because universities are secular, quasi-governmental institutions, and because America is ethically pluralist the way it's religiously pluralist. But people seem to think that the reasons are deeper and more philosophical than that.
269: I got something out of my ethical training!
272: I don't know what to say. Real world examples get used all the time! Torture used to be a crazy example, but lookit that, the real world went and served it up. Divine command theory -- easy to teach! Debates about consciousness and end-of-life! Hello, Terri Schiavo! Hello, personal examples!
Assuming you're not just wanting nebulous lists to memorize or for each student to come up with whatever rules makes them happy...both you and ogged are describing situations I've seen in actual philosophy classes by actual philosophers. Actual ethicists dislike some of the crazy examples, too! And the two books ben linked: read in philosophy classes, by students! I'm not sure what the complaint is any more, because your substantive ethics class looks pretty close to what FL described, except that he teaches them some terminology.
What philosophy class did you take that you hated so much? Did Thomson teach it? Were there health pebbles and trolleys?
277: His rhetorical technique is to employ an unreliable narrator.
281: the platonic dialogue, but without Socrates?
Using a case-study method with real-world examples relevant to students' actual lives would amount to a substantial revision of the way ethics is taught. making it less easy for students to distance themselves from the topic would be a very substantial change.
Health pebbles?
I know someone who thinks trolley problems are useful.
Is that really all you're saying, John? In that case, I'd refer to Labs' 197 and say that you're probably criticizing a strawman, or at least an outdated real man.
282: Mm hm. The "R. Kelley's Trapped in the Cave" of philosophical reasoning.
283: No, really, it wouldn't. It is already being done. It's actually not all that uncommon to use real-world examples where you can. Been to talks that discussed amniocentesis and torture (uh, not the same talk.)
284: Inverse of the trolley problem. Instead of diverting a trolley onto a victim, you divert a health pebble which is floating towards them on a current away to another person, so the person who would have gotten the health pebble dies.
This case-study method could also be used to teach law students. I think Emerson is onto something, people.
Ah, what you mean is "health pellet", as found in Mega Man games. You could also talk in terms of "hit points".
285, to be fair, that straw man has largely been using the name "Standpipe Bridgeplate".
So was I not entirely wrong in my assumption in 270?
OK, how many philosophy departments do trolley-problem fat-man-in-cave lifeboat ethics? None, some, or many? When contemporary ethics bleeds out into the larger world, either through former students or in online discussions by pros, that's what I usually see. And above Parsimon seemed contemptuous of junior-college-type students who hope for their ethics class to tell them anything useful about how to live their lives, and I've heard that opinion expressed quite vigorously by pros in the field. Many pros seem to have nothing but contempt for the very idea of a "philosophy of life", which they seem to think of as a form of folk superstition unworthy of any attention.
I'm not sure what you mean, Cryptic Ned. Would your prof expect you to be able to back up your assertions with more than the axioms of your intuition? Probably. Would he encourage you to see whether your views were consistent? If he was any good.
Would he berate you for having a different opinion on the first day? I don't know, was the guy an asshole?
The best ethics class I took was one where the prof mostly let the students debate each other, stepping in to sort out confusions or proposing arguments for them to attack. Some trolleys, some real world examples, mostly just people arguing back and forth.
I'm going to get the bends coming up from this far out of my depth.
I think I've found a new catchphrase.
I actually got into a conversation yesterday about this very topic -- practicality of ethics courses, in comparison with physics -- with an ethics prof. I sent her a link to the thread a few hours ago, but I suppose she's too busy living a better life (or grading) to argue the position here.
It's not as though trolly-car scenarios have zero application to actual problems one might face. Maybe the issue is that actually being an ethical person entails making yourself do things you don't want to do, and that is a very different skill from identifying, in the abstract, what one should do.
295 to the entirety of every thread but this one.
Wait, there was an econ 101 thread?
291: The trolley problems are practically canon by this time, largely because historically, there was a time when there were lots of examples of this type (I think this sort of move-mongering moved over to agency), and they're good at teaching, or helping to teach, some of the general moves in philosophy, because they are very simple and are good practice. They have their place. So does talking about 9/11, or moral dilemmas they're likely to face. They're not mutually exclusive.
But as FL said, he spends about ten minutes in his class talking about them. I hadn't read the trolley problem till graduate school, and I'd studied ethics.
That was my reaction too, slol, but no one pointed it out to me.
So, Ben, let's talk about econ 101.
I had the trolley problem in my one philosophy class, which was a philosophy of the mind class, taught by a guy who appeared to be a rising young superstar, although how would I know. It was in one of the many lectures that veered into sociology (58% of ordinary people want to kill the fat man, but that goes down to 25% of people with this or that neurological disorder. That tells us that this part of the brain is crucial for something or other)
I thought it was an Yglesias post lamenting the state of economics debates.
an Yglesias post
There are blogs other than this one?
So I've heard, but every time I try to go somewhere else, I hit F5!
As much as I'm happy to see Paris go to jail, the whole thing fills me with dread. Paris going to jail = media circus = TV news shows wasting even more time on stupid Paris Hilton gossip instead of the really important stuff going on in this country. This will just give Cheney and friends one more scandal they can slip past the public without them noticing because they were so busy with trivial tabloid crap.
231: Actually my best Catholic friend--who went to Notre Dame, for crying out loud, and who is and always has been active in her church--would say the same.
238: Nonsense. Unless you want to define "Catholic" extremely narrowly. In which case you're also going to make silly statements like "no Catholics use birth control" and "no Catholics have abortions."
Gimme the kids when they're four, I say.
Actually current child development theory suggests that by that point a lot of their internal sense of justice might be pretty well developed.
current child development theory as I understand it filtered through popular books about child development theory, that is.
Nonsense. Unless you want to define "Catholic" extremely narrowly. In which case you're also going to make silly statements like "no Catholics use birth control" and "no Catholics have abortions."
I meant Catholic as in the Catholic Church, not Catholic as in "somewhere, someone who self identifies as Catholic." IIRC, the church still regards outside of marriage banging as sin, which kind of conflicts with the characterization of "pure in thought and deed."
But Catholics /= the Church. Even my pretty straight-laced Catholic dad, for instance, would say that extra-marital sex is wrong, but would also say that single mothers (for instance) are not ipso facto impure. In fact, I've heard him say as much. And it's not uncommon for practicing Catholics to feel the same way and to invoke Mary while doing so.
My mom argues in this same godamn fashion with regard to Mormonism. She's forever using positions that I don't necessarily disagree with, but that aren't actual Mormon doctrine, as if we were talking about The Church of Mom, rather than LDS theology.
not Catholic as in "somewhere, someone who self identifies as Catholic."
Anyway, this phrasing implies that, for instance, Catholics who have abortions are an anomaly. But the fact is that Catholics have abortions in the same proportion as everyone else. So yeah, "Catholics" think abortion is wrong--if you go by doctrine. If you go by what real Catholics--not just "someone somewhere who self identifies as Catholics" do, we're no different than anyone else. If you go by what real Catholics say, we're slightly different, but no, we don't all think abortion is wrong. And I suspect that Catholic attitudes towards extra-marital sex are even less strict. Shit, when we got married, the priest rather deliberately made a point of not noticing that we shared an address. He didn't give a shit, and neither did we--and we didn't pick him specifically, he was simply the priest assigned to Mr. B.'s military base.
What the Church officially teaches isn't a good window onto what Catholics believe except in a kind of general sense.
Theology? Even Catholic theologians disagree with official Church teachings/doctrine sometimes. Some of them get excommunicated for it, true. But then, there are a lot of Catholics who think excommunication is stupid, too.
#50: What the guy in the donkey example is really sorry about is not the act of shooting; it's his carelessness in failing to make sure which donkey he was aiming at. And his decision not to make sure before shooting was intentional: He consciously decided to fire without checking.
In effect, he's saying, "I'm sorry I was so careless and did not make sure which donkey I was shooting," not "I'm sorry I shot your donkey." He's sorry that his carelessness resulted in the wrong donkey being shot, but he can't be sorry for shooting it in the same way that someone can who intentionally meant to kill the other guy's donkey, and now sees the error of his ways.
To get away from donkeys and back to Paris Hilton, she was simultaneously saying she was sorry for violating her probation, while also saying she didn't mean to do it. She can be sorry for failing to confirm the terms of her probation before driving, but she can't be sorry for the act of driving per se if she genuinely believed she was entitled to do so. To be meaningfully sorry in this context, she would have to have said something like, "I know what I did was wrong, and I'm sorry I did it."
In effect, she was trying a weaselly, "I'm sorry for what I did, but I didn't mean to do it" tactic, simultaneously apologizing for and denying moral responsibility for her act. You hear this kind of stuff from corporate spokesmen and politicians all the time (e.g., "I'm sorry if anyone was offended, but I didn't mean to offend them"), and it drives me nuts.
GB, that sounds a bit like Antony Flew's No True Scotsman Fallacy.
"No one can be sorry for something she didn't do on purpose."
"But people apologize, and profess sorrow, for unintentional consequences of their actions all the time."
"Ah, but no one can TRULY be sorry for something she didn't do on purpose."
What strikes me as slightly weaselly about the corporate/political apology is not the disclaimer of intent to offend, which is usually true, but the use of the passive voice: "I'm sorry that you were offended" vs. "I'm sorry I offended you."
That said, it would be a good thing in general if apologies were offered more often, and they would be offered more often if we could accept them more easily. (Of course, an apology, even a sincere one, shouldn't get Hilton off the hook for probation violation.)
It's not a No True Scotsman fallacy. There is a real difference between being sorry for conduct that had an unintended result, and, and being sorry for intentionally causing that result. Hilton is saying she is sorry that, as a result of her purported failure to correctly understand the terms of her probation, that she unintentionally violated them. This is very different from saying that she's sorry for intentionally choosing to disregard terms that she understood quite well indeed.
Actually, let me correct myself. Hilton is saying that she is sorry that she failed to correctly understand the terms of her probation, a failure that had the unintended consequence of her violating those terms.
By saying she did not violate her probation terms "on purpose", she is expressly denying that she decided to ignore the court's ruling. She's copping to the lesser charge of being an idiot, instead of the far graver charge of being a scofflaw. Hence, her apology was not sincere.
GB, I don't think our positions are terribly far apart here, other than I don't think there's any great difference in feeling sorry for something you did intentionally vs. feeling sorry for something you did unintentionally. No greater than the difference between Scotsmen who put sugar in their porridge and Scotsmen who don't.
It seems to me now that you simply left an unstated assumption out of 35. What you meant was, "No one can be sorry for something she did unintentionally, if (she knows that) she in fact did it intentionally." Your unstated assumption was that Ms. Hilton knew she was violating the terms of her probation when she did, and so her apology must be insincere.
That one little area in which we don't agree is really the crux of the whole matter, though, isn't it? In one case, Hilton is saying, "I'm sorry I misunderstood you, Judge," and in the other, she's saying, "I'm sorry I decided to ignore your ruling, Judge." Two very different things, and not analogous at all to taking one's porridge with or without sugar.
But it's possible to feel sincerely (even deeply) sorry for both misunderstanding instructions and deliberately flouting them. And it's only your (probably correct) assumption that Ms. Hilton did not misunderstand the terms of her probation that entails that her apology is not sincere.
But a sincere apology for misunderstanding instructions is just as much an apology as a sincere apology for deliberately flouting them.
OT: Zadfrack, I'm intrigued by your having posted comments from a blackberry, using "opera mini" whatever that is. Can you give me a step-by-step explanation how I might gain this power? The email address works.
316: Catholicism isn't decided by majority vote, though, so gswift's characterization's pretty much on. According to Catholicism, abortion, birth control, extramarital sex are all wrong. According to Catholicism, many Catholics are sinning. No use pretending that the religion doesn't really hold what it holds and teaches what it teaches just because most Catholics ignore it.
323: I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here. Of course you can apologize by using the word "sorry" for something you didn't intend to do, and it can be sincere. "I'm sorry; I didn't know." Perfectly fine locution. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spill my hot coffee on you, it was an accident." Also works. Paris could be being perfectly sincere in what she's saying, apologizing for acting badly due to imperfect knowledge.
She probably isn't sincere, but it doesn't seem to follow from her grammar.
325: Direct your Blackberry's built-in browser to m.opera.com to install it.
If Emerson's position is that there oughtta be a class on how to live decently, fine, write up a proposal and send it to the curriculum committee. I'm not sure it's a philosophy class per se, but it might be a useful experience for students.
If Emerson's position is that "ethics 101" ought to be that class, I think that's wrong. What I do in intro-level ethics comes out of a long tradition: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill...were trying to grapple with some hard philosophical problems about morality, and what I try to do is present those basic problems (what grounds morality? what reason do I have to be moral? what determines the content of moral requirements? are these judgments objective, and how so?) along with some historically and currently important answers, a stab at why people would be tempted to these answers, their problems, and so on. And yeah, we talk about cases and applied ethics topics so students can see how large theoretical disagreements will affect how a careful thinker will come down on capital punishment or abortion or whatever.
But addressing questions like this comes out of a long intellectual tradition, and I feel pretty confident that when I teach these topics what I'm doing is philosophical ethics.
Emerson: "how many philosophy departments do trolley-problem fat-man-in-cave lifeboat ethics? None, some, or many?"
That's too ambiguous to answer. Not that many articles are written about this stuff; lots of people know about these examples and use them to illustrate interesting problems. Do I sometimes rely on goofy "chop Chuck" cases instead of ripped-from-the-headlines examples? Of course, because I have five minutes to illustrate vividly why consequentialism has a hard time making sense of intuitive constraints on permissible action. You might think this is a stupid issue to talk about in class, but so far I'm not convinced. And, as Cala and I have been saying, there's a lot of straw in the contention that all we do is throw up goofy cases and Gettier each other.
326.1: I think our different approaches to this come from being two different kinds of Catholics. I'm not saying Catholicism is majority vote; I am saying that the idea that Catholicism = church doctrine isn't one that all Catholics buy, and that therefore the assertion that folks who aren't following or don't believe everything that Vatican puts out aren't "real" Catholics is extremely glib.
327- three cheers for zadfrack!
(Posted from Brock's blackberry.)
Woohoo! Blackberry commenting. Thanks, Zad!
Unfogged and crackberry seems to me to be a bad development.
It's all about the commute, man.
to be fair, that straw man has largely been using the name "Standpipe Bridgeplate".
This is regrettably true. Sorry, folks.
How many actual philosophy professors do we have amongst the Unfoggedtariat? FL, Helpy-Chalk, and Parsimon? Does Husband X ever comment here?
And two current philosophy PhD students, right? w-lfs-n and Cala. Any others?
(And one philosophy grad school dropout with his ABD, viz. me.)
And one philosophy grad school dropout with his ABD, viz. me.
Me too, actually. Didn't intend to mislead.
