I didn’t lard up the morality discussion with a lot of examples, or aim it specifically at Sept-Oct, because I’m more interested in the topic as a whole than as specifically applied to any one particular resolution. (The whole thing is now a pdf over in the greatest hits, if you’re interested, by the way.) I wish I had put in one thing that I found in the Rawls article I posted on the Feed last week, however, the utilitarian analysis of rape, measuring the pleasure of the rapist against the pain of the victim, to which the response is, you’ve got to be kidding. The problem with academic/absolute approaches to any line of thinking is that sooner or later you’re defending something patently idiotic. But in a debate round, I must admit, I recommend that debaters prepare to argue the extremes of their position, if necessary, because this means that the major ground of their arguments must be solid to even get to those extremes.
Anyhow, starting next week we'll get back to the usual nonsense. Everyone will be back in school. O'C will have his gnomes busily churning out trophies to meet his voracious appetite for tin while he traipses through high school basement after high school basement searching for the results of the 1973 round between God Knows Who and Whatshisname. WTF will stop telling us what the campers had for breakfast, although that seemed to be the high point of their summer, to hear the Montwegians talk about it. The $ircuit folks will wonder how they're going to pay for all those extra flight surcharges in the final stretch of the enlightened Bush economy. Hillary people will not get over it, but at least they'll pretend to. And we here at Coachean HQ will continue in our dedicated program of telling you all the things that you didn't need to know, want to know, or care about after you knew it. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Morality Part 7: Deontology, consequentialism, and where do we go from there?
INHERENT RIGHT AND WRONG
Let us go back to the beginning. Human beings are rational creatures of action with free will. Human beings are also animals. Our first attempt at establishing a scheme for determining morality was through our animal feelings of pain and pleasure. We thought that if an action resulted in more pleasure than pain it would therefore be a good action, while one resulting in more pain than pleasure would be a bad action, insofar as that pleasure and pain were measured across a group. Of course, our analysis ultimately led us to a dead end, and a close reading showed many demurrals along the way, and a lot of exceptions lurking at the edges. Maybe good and bad, morality and immorality, are something else altogether. Maybe we should be asking a deeper question: Is there anything such as right and wrong in the first place, or are we just playing a jejune mental game?
Originally we defined morality as the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
With this definition, we really don’t have to have right and wrong as platonic or absolute ideas preceding action. Right or wrong are our assignments of values to action, not the recognizing within the actions of an inherent rightness or wrongness. Since humans are rational creatures of actions, analyzing our actions is a logical outcome of our rationality. Preferring some actions over others is, similarly, a logical outcome of our rationality. Since we are human, we have no choice but to perform actions. A claim that right and wrong precede the action is no different from the core religious question, is an action moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral in the first place. If the latter is true, then attempting to understand why is attempting to read the mind of God, a human impossibility. And if an action is inherently right or wrong, God notwithstanding, attempting to understand why it is right or wrong seems about as humanly impossible as reading the mind of God.
So, we have two possibilities. Either we find out what is inherently right and wrong, and assign those values to our actions, or we find out what our actions are, and assign values of right—actions we should perform—and wrong—actions we shouldn’t perform—to them. Since the former possibility is probably unattainable, we have no choice but to pursue the latter possibility. But the end result is probably the same. We are not pondering imponderables. We are pondering how to assign values to actions. We are perfectly capable of doing this. Hence, we are not simply wagging our brains in the wind. We can proceed with our analysis.
We asked ourselves earlier, in analyzing the pleasure/pain of actions, would we be analyzing the act itself, or the results of the act, and we decided that we would analyze the totality of the two. What if we break things down, and simply analyze an action in and of itself? Is this a meaningful attempt at assigning a value of right or wrong to that action?
PICK AN ACTION. ANY ACTION. IS IT RIGHT OR WRONG?
Tough problem. Since we’ve agreed that a knowledge of the absoluteness of the rightness or wrongness of an action is probably unattainable, if such absoluteness indeed exists, we have to come up with something else. And we’ve also discounted our physical reactions (pain and pleasure) distributed over the group affected by the action. So what else is there?
Well, using my rationality, I not only have it within my mental power to analyze an action as one that I should perform, or one that I should not perform, but I do so all the time. Every action I perform as an exercise of my free will is subject to my mind deciding that action should be performed. I do not act blindly. I act according to my own mental proscriptions and prescriptions.
But do I actually follow my sense of right and wrong, and only perform actions I think are right? Not always. Sometimes I evaluate an action and I decide that the action is wrong, and do it anyhow, or else I decide that it’s right, and I don’t do it. My rational evaluation of the action does not determine whether I perform the action; that determination is through my will. I am perfectly capable of deciding to do something I think is wrong. But when I do, I know that it is wrong, at least according to my analysis, and I know that therefore I am performing an immoral act.
The main question is, how do I decide, in my day-to-day life, that an action is right or wrong? Generally I pull a set of criteria from various places and measure the act against those criteria. I know what is culturally thought about a particular action or comparable actions, I know what that action is like because I’ve performed it in the past or performed similar actions, or at least considered them, or seen others perform or refrain from performing them. In other words, I have a wealth of experience, both personal and cultural, to inform my decision. Which is why we made the point about culture earlier on; the cultural component of morality can not be removed the discussion.
So, drawing on what I can think, I determine if something is right or wrong. But how do I know if I’m correct in my judgment? Well, I can’t be certain that I’m correct. But if I am convinced that something is right, I would naturally expect that others think it is right too. This is akin to Kant and the prescription that we should act according to the idea that we would want that action to become moral law. If it’s right for anyone, it’s right for everyone. There is an interplay that is hard to pin down between my drawing from the culture and my contributing to the culture, but I would clearly expect that if I think something is right, I think it is right not just for me but for everyone. Moral rules, whatever they are, should apply equally. We would imagine that anyone in our position, using their rationality as we are, would come to the same conclusion of what is right and what is wrong.
By the way, in this line of thinking, and in my rejection of utility, I am implying and accepting a universal sense of humanity and human value, a very Kantian thing to do. But I’m not really basing my logic on universal humanity, so we won’t go into it in any detail. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile area of further analysis, for another time, perhaps.
Anyhow, while we are not putting right and wrong to a majority-rule vote, we are drawing on cultural/personal experience to conclude a general rightness or wrongness of an action. We are concluding that moral laws are universal, even if we determine them as individuals, because we posit a norm to the culture and expect that norm to be, well, normal. We believe ourselves to be average moral determiners within the culture, our rationality no better or worse than anyone else’s. Regardless of our belief in a relativistic universe, we act on the basis of a relatively objective cultural norm. (This is a set of ideas disputed by Nietzsche, by the way, if you find this logic unacceptable and wish to see a counterargument.)
And what about the differences between cultures? Are we limited on a purely relativistic cultural level? Can Americans only think like Americans, or Chinese only think like Chinese? The data suggests that, while there are certainly specific cultural mores, many ideas about right and wrong either transcend culture or at the very least are a-cultural. Some actions seem to be so right, or so wrong, that all people within their cultures, drawing on their own and their culture’s experience, conclude the same as every other culture. It could be that the human animal has some moral instincts. Or, perhaps, human rationality simply always leads to certain constant decisions about the performing of certain actions. It doesn’t matter, because the end result is the same. Moral law, which we begin by determining as individuals, ultimately transcends culture in some core instances (murder, theft, incest). The question of the source of cultural morality vis-à-vis instinctual morality is another which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-tuna-fish conundrum that need not concern us in this essay.
The combination of our rationality with our experience of ourselves and our cultural experience of others, therefore, allows us to consider an action in and of itself and make a moral determination about that action, which we are free to perform or not perform regardless of its morality. Whatever it is we bring to our thinking, we bring it. We can use our rationality to say, this action is good or this action is bad. We can do it, and we do do it. If we want, we can even use a Kantian make-this-moral-law model to enhance the underlying rationality of the process. We can, it would seem, evaluate the intrinsic morality of an action. This would allow us even to make moral determinations about ourselves alone in a box. Would we want to apply our determination of right and wrong to everyone else who is alone in a box? Or for that matter, if it’s moral law, would the box even matter? We could decide that suicide is wrong, for instance, based solely on the fact that it is an act of murder, if we decided that all acts of murder except in self-defense are immoral. (Unless, I guess, you could contend suicide a version of self-defense, which would be quite a rationality-challenging twist on both concepts, if you ask me.)
Are our moral determinations really workable from this model? Have we established a test for the rightness and wrongness of actions—something curiously akin to a popularity measure when we apply the moral law idea—based entirely on the actions themselves? Can we live with the results of that test?
Unfortunately, the answer is, often, yes, and occasionally, no. Stealing would be the sort of action that would never stand up to a test of inherent morality in and of itself. Taking what does not belong to one is wrong on face. But look back at Jean Valjean’s sister’s starving family. We would probably all agree that it is morally acceptable, or at least not morally unacceptable, for Valjean to steal bread for them. Do we have to set up a paradigm that is so fluid that every single action is subject to a unique test of morality?
CONSEQUENTIALISM
(If we were being academic, I could point you to all sorts of resources covering bits and pieces of what I’m discussing here, but we’re simply relaying the results of one particular meditation on the subject of morality. You can do your own research if you want other ideas on the subject. This essay is entirely creative, and not an outline of the subject from a teacher/course perspective. Feel free to disagree on any of it. That’s what it’s here for. That, and, perhaps, to get you to think about the subject for real, rather than just as the parroting of ideas you’ve picked up along the way. This is my own trying to think about the subject for real. The result, good or bad, is what it is.)
Consequentialism is the evaluation of actions by their results. If the results are good, then the action is good, and if the results are bad, then the action is bad. It doesn’t matter what the action is in and of itself. We probably won’t be able to derive universal moral laws from a consequentialist perspective unless a particular action always has an identical result. Each action will have to be tested each time, if there is a likelihood of different results. The consequentialist is, by definition, a busy thinker.
There are many forms of consequentialist ethics, and our earlier discussion of pain and pleasure could certainly be construed as a discussion of consequentialism, although limited to certain specific principles and, as we said, including an evaluation of the action itself into the calculus. What we want to do now, different from that earlier analysis, is look at results for the test of morality as juxtaposed to looking at the actions themselves for the test of morality, which is what we did in the previous section. Removing pain and pleasure and the classic utilitarian view of morality from the picture, can we just make our judgments based on outcomes?
In evaluating the morality of actions by their results, we would have to make the judgment the same way we would make the judgment about the act in and of itself. We would draw on our own instincts and reason, combined with our own and others’ experience culturally, and make a determination. If I do X—and it doesn’t matter what X is—will the results Y be good or bad? In that case, X is good.. When evaluating the act itself, we said, If I do X, is that good or bad, regardless of the results Y. Results didn’t matter, only the act mattered. Now the act doesn’t matter, only results matter.
To be honest, evaluating the results is certainly going to be close to what we said earlier about pleasure/pain, with the same benefits and flaws. At this point we’re just stripping it down to the essentials. And the big benefit to this is that we don’t have to throw in a lot of qualifiers. If the end result of an action is good, as we perceive good (with our already problematic preconception), that is all we need to know.
Let’s look at an example, one that it relatively easy: murder. We would not evaluate murder as murder in this consequential model. We would evaluate a particular murder or type of murder. For instance, is it a good thing (or not a bad thing) to prevent someone from killing us by killing them? With a consequential model, we would probably easily answer yes. The result of our action is saving an innocent party at the cost of killing a guilty party. On the other hand, in evaluating the same act with a deontological model (which is the fancy word for evaluation of the thing itself) we could determine that all murders are wrong, which means that if all murders are wrong then so too murder in self-defense is wrong, and in this case our innocent party would die and the guilty party would live, which doesn’t jibe intuitively. But if we have to hem and haw and say some murders are right, and some murders are wrong, this does not give us much of an answer to the particular question, much less clear moral rules for the question in general. By the way, religious conscientious objectors certainly have asserted that all murders are morally wrong, so it’s not as if we’re being extreme in our choice of example. More people might think otherwise, but conscientious objection certainly seems reasonable to its practitioners (and, for that matter, is supported by US law). At least in this example, a consequentialist approach seems more workable as a test of morality than a deontological approach. But is it?
What we seem to get from a purely consequentialist view of morality is a more portable model, freely movable from action to action, allowing some leeway in our determination of morality. To the deontologist this portability might be considered moral turpitude, but it ties in to the idea above of setting up a paradigm that is so fluid that every single action is subject to a unique test of morality. The more we’ve talked about it in this essay, the more that fluid paradigm seems to be the only solution to solving the problem of morality, yet it is a solution that is not particularly helpful. We seem to be saying that no unique model of morality works in all situations, and that the subject of right or wrong, and how we perform our actions, must be subject to a mix of tests rather than a simple moral litmus paper turning blue or pink with a single dip into the test tube of action. Morality is so complicated, in other words, that there is no simple solution for it.
And that would seem to be true.
Our morality is informed by a complex web of external ideas combined with our perhaps instinctual animal natures combined with our own unique yet universal abilities to reason. The conclusion that right and wrong exist is not hard for us to accept, but the conclusion that knowing the one from the other can be tricky should also not be hard for us to accept. Unless we are willing to follow moral precepts laid down for us by others, then we are forced to take on one of the impossible challenges of rationality.
How, then, should we act?
We should think about our actions. Do they seem right or wrong? And will they result in good or bad? More often than not, right actions will resort in good and wrong actions will result in bad, and we won’t have any trouble evaluating them. But every now and then there will be actions that seem to result in contradictory moral outcomes. What do we do then?
We attempt to do the best we can.
At least, in that case, we are trying to be good. And trying to be good may be the most moral action any human being can attempt to perform.
Let us go back to the beginning. Human beings are rational creatures of action with free will. Human beings are also animals. Our first attempt at establishing a scheme for determining morality was through our animal feelings of pain and pleasure. We thought that if an action resulted in more pleasure than pain it would therefore be a good action, while one resulting in more pain than pleasure would be a bad action, insofar as that pleasure and pain were measured across a group. Of course, our analysis ultimately led us to a dead end, and a close reading showed many demurrals along the way, and a lot of exceptions lurking at the edges. Maybe good and bad, morality and immorality, are something else altogether. Maybe we should be asking a deeper question: Is there anything such as right and wrong in the first place, or are we just playing a jejune mental game?
Originally we defined morality as the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
With this definition, we really don’t have to have right and wrong as platonic or absolute ideas preceding action. Right or wrong are our assignments of values to action, not the recognizing within the actions of an inherent rightness or wrongness. Since humans are rational creatures of actions, analyzing our actions is a logical outcome of our rationality. Preferring some actions over others is, similarly, a logical outcome of our rationality. Since we are human, we have no choice but to perform actions. A claim that right and wrong precede the action is no different from the core religious question, is an action moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral in the first place. If the latter is true, then attempting to understand why is attempting to read the mind of God, a human impossibility. And if an action is inherently right or wrong, God notwithstanding, attempting to understand why it is right or wrong seems about as humanly impossible as reading the mind of God.
So, we have two possibilities. Either we find out what is inherently right and wrong, and assign those values to our actions, or we find out what our actions are, and assign values of right—actions we should perform—and wrong—actions we shouldn’t perform—to them. Since the former possibility is probably unattainable, we have no choice but to pursue the latter possibility. But the end result is probably the same. We are not pondering imponderables. We are pondering how to assign values to actions. We are perfectly capable of doing this. Hence, we are not simply wagging our brains in the wind. We can proceed with our analysis.
We asked ourselves earlier, in analyzing the pleasure/pain of actions, would we be analyzing the act itself, or the results of the act, and we decided that we would analyze the totality of the two. What if we break things down, and simply analyze an action in and of itself? Is this a meaningful attempt at assigning a value of right or wrong to that action?
PICK AN ACTION. ANY ACTION. IS IT RIGHT OR WRONG?
Tough problem. Since we’ve agreed that a knowledge of the absoluteness of the rightness or wrongness of an action is probably unattainable, if such absoluteness indeed exists, we have to come up with something else. And we’ve also discounted our physical reactions (pain and pleasure) distributed over the group affected by the action. So what else is there?
Well, using my rationality, I not only have it within my mental power to analyze an action as one that I should perform, or one that I should not perform, but I do so all the time. Every action I perform as an exercise of my free will is subject to my mind deciding that action should be performed. I do not act blindly. I act according to my own mental proscriptions and prescriptions.
But do I actually follow my sense of right and wrong, and only perform actions I think are right? Not always. Sometimes I evaluate an action and I decide that the action is wrong, and do it anyhow, or else I decide that it’s right, and I don’t do it. My rational evaluation of the action does not determine whether I perform the action; that determination is through my will. I am perfectly capable of deciding to do something I think is wrong. But when I do, I know that it is wrong, at least according to my analysis, and I know that therefore I am performing an immoral act.
The main question is, how do I decide, in my day-to-day life, that an action is right or wrong? Generally I pull a set of criteria from various places and measure the act against those criteria. I know what is culturally thought about a particular action or comparable actions, I know what that action is like because I’ve performed it in the past or performed similar actions, or at least considered them, or seen others perform or refrain from performing them. In other words, I have a wealth of experience, both personal and cultural, to inform my decision. Which is why we made the point about culture earlier on; the cultural component of morality can not be removed the discussion.
So, drawing on what I can think, I determine if something is right or wrong. But how do I know if I’m correct in my judgment? Well, I can’t be certain that I’m correct. But if I am convinced that something is right, I would naturally expect that others think it is right too. This is akin to Kant and the prescription that we should act according to the idea that we would want that action to become moral law. If it’s right for anyone, it’s right for everyone. There is an interplay that is hard to pin down between my drawing from the culture and my contributing to the culture, but I would clearly expect that if I think something is right, I think it is right not just for me but for everyone. Moral rules, whatever they are, should apply equally. We would imagine that anyone in our position, using their rationality as we are, would come to the same conclusion of what is right and what is wrong.
By the way, in this line of thinking, and in my rejection of utility, I am implying and accepting a universal sense of humanity and human value, a very Kantian thing to do. But I’m not really basing my logic on universal humanity, so we won’t go into it in any detail. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile area of further analysis, for another time, perhaps.
Anyhow, while we are not putting right and wrong to a majority-rule vote, we are drawing on cultural/personal experience to conclude a general rightness or wrongness of an action. We are concluding that moral laws are universal, even if we determine them as individuals, because we posit a norm to the culture and expect that norm to be, well, normal. We believe ourselves to be average moral determiners within the culture, our rationality no better or worse than anyone else’s. Regardless of our belief in a relativistic universe, we act on the basis of a relatively objective cultural norm. (This is a set of ideas disputed by Nietzsche, by the way, if you find this logic unacceptable and wish to see a counterargument.)
And what about the differences between cultures? Are we limited on a purely relativistic cultural level? Can Americans only think like Americans, or Chinese only think like Chinese? The data suggests that, while there are certainly specific cultural mores, many ideas about right and wrong either transcend culture or at the very least are a-cultural. Some actions seem to be so right, or so wrong, that all people within their cultures, drawing on their own and their culture’s experience, conclude the same as every other culture. It could be that the human animal has some moral instincts. Or, perhaps, human rationality simply always leads to certain constant decisions about the performing of certain actions. It doesn’t matter, because the end result is the same. Moral law, which we begin by determining as individuals, ultimately transcends culture in some core instances (murder, theft, incest). The question of the source of cultural morality vis-à-vis instinctual morality is another which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-tuna-fish conundrum that need not concern us in this essay.
The combination of our rationality with our experience of ourselves and our cultural experience of others, therefore, allows us to consider an action in and of itself and make a moral determination about that action, which we are free to perform or not perform regardless of its morality. Whatever it is we bring to our thinking, we bring it. We can use our rationality to say, this action is good or this action is bad. We can do it, and we do do it. If we want, we can even use a Kantian make-this-moral-law model to enhance the underlying rationality of the process. We can, it would seem, evaluate the intrinsic morality of an action. This would allow us even to make moral determinations about ourselves alone in a box. Would we want to apply our determination of right and wrong to everyone else who is alone in a box? Or for that matter, if it’s moral law, would the box even matter? We could decide that suicide is wrong, for instance, based solely on the fact that it is an act of murder, if we decided that all acts of murder except in self-defense are immoral. (Unless, I guess, you could contend suicide a version of self-defense, which would be quite a rationality-challenging twist on both concepts, if you ask me.)
Are our moral determinations really workable from this model? Have we established a test for the rightness and wrongness of actions—something curiously akin to a popularity measure when we apply the moral law idea—based entirely on the actions themselves? Can we live with the results of that test?
Unfortunately, the answer is, often, yes, and occasionally, no. Stealing would be the sort of action that would never stand up to a test of inherent morality in and of itself. Taking what does not belong to one is wrong on face. But look back at Jean Valjean’s sister’s starving family. We would probably all agree that it is morally acceptable, or at least not morally unacceptable, for Valjean to steal bread for them. Do we have to set up a paradigm that is so fluid that every single action is subject to a unique test of morality?
CONSEQUENTIALISM
(If we were being academic, I could point you to all sorts of resources covering bits and pieces of what I’m discussing here, but we’re simply relaying the results of one particular meditation on the subject of morality. You can do your own research if you want other ideas on the subject. This essay is entirely creative, and not an outline of the subject from a teacher/course perspective. Feel free to disagree on any of it. That’s what it’s here for. That, and, perhaps, to get you to think about the subject for real, rather than just as the parroting of ideas you’ve picked up along the way. This is my own trying to think about the subject for real. The result, good or bad, is what it is.)
Consequentialism is the evaluation of actions by their results. If the results are good, then the action is good, and if the results are bad, then the action is bad. It doesn’t matter what the action is in and of itself. We probably won’t be able to derive universal moral laws from a consequentialist perspective unless a particular action always has an identical result. Each action will have to be tested each time, if there is a likelihood of different results. The consequentialist is, by definition, a busy thinker.
There are many forms of consequentialist ethics, and our earlier discussion of pain and pleasure could certainly be construed as a discussion of consequentialism, although limited to certain specific principles and, as we said, including an evaluation of the action itself into the calculus. What we want to do now, different from that earlier analysis, is look at results for the test of morality as juxtaposed to looking at the actions themselves for the test of morality, which is what we did in the previous section. Removing pain and pleasure and the classic utilitarian view of morality from the picture, can we just make our judgments based on outcomes?
In evaluating the morality of actions by their results, we would have to make the judgment the same way we would make the judgment about the act in and of itself. We would draw on our own instincts and reason, combined with our own and others’ experience culturally, and make a determination. If I do X—and it doesn’t matter what X is—will the results Y be good or bad? In that case, X is good.. When evaluating the act itself, we said, If I do X, is that good or bad, regardless of the results Y. Results didn’t matter, only the act mattered. Now the act doesn’t matter, only results matter.
To be honest, evaluating the results is certainly going to be close to what we said earlier about pleasure/pain, with the same benefits and flaws. At this point we’re just stripping it down to the essentials. And the big benefit to this is that we don’t have to throw in a lot of qualifiers. If the end result of an action is good, as we perceive good (with our already problematic preconception), that is all we need to know.
Let’s look at an example, one that it relatively easy: murder. We would not evaluate murder as murder in this consequential model. We would evaluate a particular murder or type of murder. For instance, is it a good thing (or not a bad thing) to prevent someone from killing us by killing them? With a consequential model, we would probably easily answer yes. The result of our action is saving an innocent party at the cost of killing a guilty party. On the other hand, in evaluating the same act with a deontological model (which is the fancy word for evaluation of the thing itself) we could determine that all murders are wrong, which means that if all murders are wrong then so too murder in self-defense is wrong, and in this case our innocent party would die and the guilty party would live, which doesn’t jibe intuitively. But if we have to hem and haw and say some murders are right, and some murders are wrong, this does not give us much of an answer to the particular question, much less clear moral rules for the question in general. By the way, religious conscientious objectors certainly have asserted that all murders are morally wrong, so it’s not as if we’re being extreme in our choice of example. More people might think otherwise, but conscientious objection certainly seems reasonable to its practitioners (and, for that matter, is supported by US law). At least in this example, a consequentialist approach seems more workable as a test of morality than a deontological approach. But is it?
What we seem to get from a purely consequentialist view of morality is a more portable model, freely movable from action to action, allowing some leeway in our determination of morality. To the deontologist this portability might be considered moral turpitude, but it ties in to the idea above of setting up a paradigm that is so fluid that every single action is subject to a unique test of morality. The more we’ve talked about it in this essay, the more that fluid paradigm seems to be the only solution to solving the problem of morality, yet it is a solution that is not particularly helpful. We seem to be saying that no unique model of morality works in all situations, and that the subject of right or wrong, and how we perform our actions, must be subject to a mix of tests rather than a simple moral litmus paper turning blue or pink with a single dip into the test tube of action. Morality is so complicated, in other words, that there is no simple solution for it.
And that would seem to be true.
Our morality is informed by a complex web of external ideas combined with our perhaps instinctual animal natures combined with our own unique yet universal abilities to reason. The conclusion that right and wrong exist is not hard for us to accept, but the conclusion that knowing the one from the other can be tricky should also not be hard for us to accept. Unless we are willing to follow moral precepts laid down for us by others, then we are forced to take on one of the impossible challenges of rationality.
How, then, should we act?
We should think about our actions. Do they seem right or wrong? And will they result in good or bad? More often than not, right actions will resort in good and wrong actions will result in bad, and we won’t have any trouble evaluating them. But every now and then there will be actions that seem to result in contradictory moral outcomes. What do we do then?
We attempt to do the best we can.
At least, in that case, we are trying to be good. And trying to be good may be the most moral action any human being can attempt to perform.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Morality Part 6: Inherency
INHERENT RIGHT AND WRONG
Let us go back to the beginning. Human beings are rational creatures of action with free will. Human beings are also animals. Our first attempt at establishing a scheme for determining morality was through our animal feelings of pain and pleasure. We thought that if an action resulted in more pleasure than pain it would therefore be a good action, while one resulting in more pain than pleasure would be a bad action, insofar as that pleasure and pain were measured across a group. Of course, our analysis ultimately led us to a dead end, and a close reading showed many demurrals along the way, and a lot of exceptions lurking at the edges. Maybe good and bad, morality and immorality, are something else altogether. Maybe we should be asking a deeper question: Is there anything such as right and wrong in the first place, or are we just playing a sophistic mental game?
Originally we defined morality as the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
With this definition, we really don’t have to have right and wrong as platonic or absolute ideas preceding action. Right or wrong are our assignments of values to action, not the recognizing within the actions an inherent rightness or wrongness. Since humans are rational creatures of actions, analyzing our actions is a logical outcome of our rationality. Preferring some actions over others is, similarly, a logical outcome of our rationality. Since we are human, we have no choice but to perform actions. A claim that right and wrong precede the action is no different from the core religious question, is an action moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral in the first place. If the latter is true, then attempting to understand why is attempting to read the mind of God, a human impossibility. But if an action is inherently right or wrong, God notwithstanding, attempting to understand why it is right or wrong seems about as humanly impossible as reading the mind of God.
So, we have two possibilities. Either we find out what is inherently right and wrong, and assign those values to our actions, or we find out what our actions are, and assign values of right—actions we should perform—and wrong—actions we shouldn’t perform—to them. Since the former possibility is probably unattainable, we have no choice but to pursue the latter possibility. But the end result is probably the same. We are not pondering imponderables. We are pondering how to assign values to actions. We are not simply wagging our brains in the wind. We can proceed with our analysis.
We asked ourselves earlier, in analyzing the pleasure/pain of actions, would we be analyzing the act itself, or the results of the act, and we decided that we would analyze the totality of the two. What if we break things down, and simply analyze an action in and of itself? Is this a meaningful attempt at assigning a value of right or wrong to that action?
Let us go back to the beginning. Human beings are rational creatures of action with free will. Human beings are also animals. Our first attempt at establishing a scheme for determining morality was through our animal feelings of pain and pleasure. We thought that if an action resulted in more pleasure than pain it would therefore be a good action, while one resulting in more pain than pleasure would be a bad action, insofar as that pleasure and pain were measured across a group. Of course, our analysis ultimately led us to a dead end, and a close reading showed many demurrals along the way, and a lot of exceptions lurking at the edges. Maybe good and bad, morality and immorality, are something else altogether. Maybe we should be asking a deeper question: Is there anything such as right and wrong in the first place, or are we just playing a sophistic mental game?
Originally we defined morality as the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
With this definition, we really don’t have to have right and wrong as platonic or absolute ideas preceding action. Right or wrong are our assignments of values to action, not the recognizing within the actions an inherent rightness or wrongness. Since humans are rational creatures of actions, analyzing our actions is a logical outcome of our rationality. Preferring some actions over others is, similarly, a logical outcome of our rationality. Since we are human, we have no choice but to perform actions. A claim that right and wrong precede the action is no different from the core religious question, is an action moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral in the first place. If the latter is true, then attempting to understand why is attempting to read the mind of God, a human impossibility. But if an action is inherently right or wrong, God notwithstanding, attempting to understand why it is right or wrong seems about as humanly impossible as reading the mind of God.
So, we have two possibilities. Either we find out what is inherently right and wrong, and assign those values to our actions, or we find out what our actions are, and assign values of right—actions we should perform—and wrong—actions we shouldn’t perform—to them. Since the former possibility is probably unattainable, we have no choice but to pursue the latter possibility. But the end result is probably the same. We are not pondering imponderables. We are pondering how to assign values to actions. We are not simply wagging our brains in the wind. We can proceed with our analysis.
We asked ourselves earlier, in analyzing the pleasure/pain of actions, would we be analyzing the act itself, or the results of the act, and we decided that we would analyze the totality of the two. What if we break things down, and simply analyze an action in and of itself? Is this a meaningful attempt at assigning a value of right or wrong to that action?
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Morality Part 5: Moral math
PAIN/PLEASURE CALCULUS
For argument’s sake, let’s select some objectively immoral actions and see how they stand the test. Granted that I seem to be skipping past the proof to the conclusion if I say I already have some objectively immoral actions we can test, but realistically there are actions that are universally held to be wrong by all religions and all cultures. That is, certain actions have already been tested by experience and been universally accepted as wrong/bad/immoral. Stealing, murder and lying would fall into this category, or at least they would fall into this category if we specify stealing something we don’t need from someone who does need it, murdering an innocent child at random, and lying about an innocent person to cover our own guilt.
Stealing something we don’t need from someone who does need it should be a confined enough wording of a commandment against stealing to be fairly unshakeable. If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family, one might be able to condone the action. But a rich guy stealing a loaf of bread from Jean Valjean’s sister’s starving family is pretty nasty, and that’s what we’re evaluating. In terms of pain, we are inflicting a lot of pain on a number of people, in return for the rather minor pleasure of the act of stealing by the rich guy plus that rich guy’s enjoyment of the bread. His enjoyment of the bread < sister’s family’s enjoyment of the bread, so his enjoyment of the bread < pain of sister’s family not having the bread. No matter how you evaluate the math, the act of stealing the bread seems to result in more pain than pleasure, so by the (admittedly vague) measure of the calculus we’re using, it would be an immoral act.
Murdering an innocent child at random takes the act of murder and removes any chance of it being justifiable, as in, say, self-defense. The murder of the innocent child causes the pain of that death plus the pain of the loss felt by the child’s family, which is easily measurable as less than the pleasure of the presumably psychotic killer performing the action. No matter how you evaluate the math, the act of murdering an innocent child at random seems to result in more pain than pleasure, so by the measure of the calculus we’re using, it would be an immoral act.
Lying about an innocent person to cover our own guilt, like the other two examples, is worded in such a way that there can be no doubt, instinctively, that it is an immoral action. But does it satisfy our calculus? Let’s assume that a crime was committed by Person A. Person B, for some reason, was arrested for the crime and is now on trial. Guilty Person A is called as an eyewitness to the crime, and fingers innocent Person B as the perpetrator. As a result, Person B is found guilty, and punished for the crime. Person A enjoys a certain amount of pleasure, while Person B suffers a certain amount of pain. But what if the situation is reversed and the guilty Person A is arrested and the innocent Person B testifies, and Person A is found guilty and punished? Isn’t the amount of pleasure and pain identical? According to the calculus as we’ve presented it, wouldn’t the lying here give us no net surplus on either side? Sure, you might be able to dig up some extra pain, for instance the guilty conscience bothering Person A after the fact, but that’s stretching it. Take it on face, and it’s pleasure = pain. Since pleasure and pain are being churned up, we couldn’t call this amoral, but we would, with no other tools to judge by, be unable to perform the required measurement calculus on the action.
You will suggest that our example is faulty, and that is the problem. But I would reply that, even if you can find a flaw here, sooner or later we could come up with a flawless example that would lead to the same conclusion. That pleasure and pain might be undeterminable doesn’t even become an issue at the point where, even if they are determinable, we can’t see how something we “know” is patently immoral does not register as immoral when we analyze it. Pleasure and pain alone do not seem to be enough to measure the morality of the action.
What is missing in the example of the false witness? Simple enough: culpability. The wrong persons receive both the pain and the pleasure. They have not earned these results. Their pleasure and pain are not warranted.
Can we throw something into our vague calculus to cover this contingency? Can we add that the pleasure and pain must be warranted? It seems that we have no choice. But the problem is that we’re getting further and further from a workable formula for determining morality. We’ve already sailed past the indeterminate nature of some pleasure and pain, and now we’re adding that the pleasure and pain must be deserved. That’s asking an awful lot of an attempt at a simple formula. Yet we need a simple formula; a complicated, Byzantine calculus would not be particularly useful to the moral practitioner, and would only satisfy the ruminator with lots of time and, perhaps, no horse in the race.
Killing one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people, the 2008 Sept-Oct resolution, seems to succeed on the overall less pain premise but fail on the warranted pain premise. The one innocent person, by virtue of the inherent innocence, has done nothing to warrant the pain of being killed, aside from fitting the calculus of 1 < more than 1. By this logic, killing one innocent person would be immoral on face, the other innocent persons notwithstanding. The example of one innocent and totally healthy person being eviscerated for transplantable body parts for five other innocent albeit sick persons epitomizes this category: there’s a net gain in pleasure or a net loss of pain, but the one healthy person has not warranted being eviscerated.
Nevertheless, plenty of complicated situations can be evaluated through the pleasure/pain calculus. Is it moral to sacrifice your own life to save the lives of many other people? If we can assume a base of equal innocence, then this would seem to result in a net gain of pleasure over pain. If I am very old and the others are very young, it almost seems to become a mandate, given the vast amount of potential pleasure > my personal old-guy pain. And plenty of situations seem to resist evaluation through the pleasure/pain calculus. Even if we knew every single aspect, every single variable of the pleasure and pain on all sides, we wouldn’t be able to make it work unless we also included warrant in the calculation. This can, perhaps, be done, but by no math easily available to the rational person attempting to make a moral decision on the fly. And let’s face it: many moral decisions must be made quickly. Practical philosophers may not have a lifetime to choreograph all the angels dancing on the head of the proverbial pin. There is no value to tests of morality that are virtually impossible to perform.
So, pleasure/pain can be used. Sometimes, in some very clear or very simple circumstances. Sometimes, however, it does not appear as if it will work. We need to look somewhere else.
For argument’s sake, let’s select some objectively immoral actions and see how they stand the test. Granted that I seem to be skipping past the proof to the conclusion if I say I already have some objectively immoral actions we can test, but realistically there are actions that are universally held to be wrong by all religions and all cultures. That is, certain actions have already been tested by experience and been universally accepted as wrong/bad/immoral. Stealing, murder and lying would fall into this category, or at least they would fall into this category if we specify stealing something we don’t need from someone who does need it, murdering an innocent child at random, and lying about an innocent person to cover our own guilt.
Stealing something we don’t need from someone who does need it should be a confined enough wording of a commandment against stealing to be fairly unshakeable. If Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family, one might be able to condone the action. But a rich guy stealing a loaf of bread from Jean Valjean’s sister’s starving family is pretty nasty, and that’s what we’re evaluating. In terms of pain, we are inflicting a lot of pain on a number of people, in return for the rather minor pleasure of the act of stealing by the rich guy plus that rich guy’s enjoyment of the bread. His enjoyment of the bread < sister’s family’s enjoyment of the bread, so his enjoyment of the bread < pain of sister’s family not having the bread. No matter how you evaluate the math, the act of stealing the bread seems to result in more pain than pleasure, so by the (admittedly vague) measure of the calculus we’re using, it would be an immoral act.
Murdering an innocent child at random takes the act of murder and removes any chance of it being justifiable, as in, say, self-defense. The murder of the innocent child causes the pain of that death plus the pain of the loss felt by the child’s family, which is easily measurable as less than the pleasure of the presumably psychotic killer performing the action. No matter how you evaluate the math, the act of murdering an innocent child at random seems to result in more pain than pleasure, so by the measure of the calculus we’re using, it would be an immoral act.
Lying about an innocent person to cover our own guilt, like the other two examples, is worded in such a way that there can be no doubt, instinctively, that it is an immoral action. But does it satisfy our calculus? Let’s assume that a crime was committed by Person A. Person B, for some reason, was arrested for the crime and is now on trial. Guilty Person A is called as an eyewitness to the crime, and fingers innocent Person B as the perpetrator. As a result, Person B is found guilty, and punished for the crime. Person A enjoys a certain amount of pleasure, while Person B suffers a certain amount of pain. But what if the situation is reversed and the guilty Person A is arrested and the innocent Person B testifies, and Person A is found guilty and punished? Isn’t the amount of pleasure and pain identical? According to the calculus as we’ve presented it, wouldn’t the lying here give us no net surplus on either side? Sure, you might be able to dig up some extra pain, for instance the guilty conscience bothering Person A after the fact, but that’s stretching it. Take it on face, and it’s pleasure = pain. Since pleasure and pain are being churned up, we couldn’t call this amoral, but we would, with no other tools to judge by, be unable to perform the required measurement calculus on the action.
You will suggest that our example is faulty, and that is the problem. But I would reply that, even if you can find a flaw here, sooner or later we could come up with a flawless example that would lead to the same conclusion. That pleasure and pain might be undeterminable doesn’t even become an issue at the point where, even if they are determinable, we can’t see how something we “know” is patently immoral does not register as immoral when we analyze it. Pleasure and pain alone do not seem to be enough to measure the morality of the action.
What is missing in the example of the false witness? Simple enough: culpability. The wrong persons receive both the pain and the pleasure. They have not earned these results. Their pleasure and pain are not warranted.
Can we throw something into our vague calculus to cover this contingency? Can we add that the pleasure and pain must be warranted? It seems that we have no choice. But the problem is that we’re getting further and further from a workable formula for determining morality. We’ve already sailed past the indeterminate nature of some pleasure and pain, and now we’re adding that the pleasure and pain must be deserved. That’s asking an awful lot of an attempt at a simple formula. Yet we need a simple formula; a complicated, Byzantine calculus would not be particularly useful to the moral practitioner, and would only satisfy the ruminator with lots of time and, perhaps, no horse in the race.
Killing one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people, the 2008 Sept-Oct resolution, seems to succeed on the overall less pain premise but fail on the warranted pain premise. The one innocent person, by virtue of the inherent innocence, has done nothing to warrant the pain of being killed, aside from fitting the calculus of 1 < more than 1. By this logic, killing one innocent person would be immoral on face, the other innocent persons notwithstanding. The example of one innocent and totally healthy person being eviscerated for transplantable body parts for five other innocent albeit sick persons epitomizes this category: there’s a net gain in pleasure or a net loss of pain, but the one healthy person has not warranted being eviscerated.
Nevertheless, plenty of complicated situations can be evaluated through the pleasure/pain calculus. Is it moral to sacrifice your own life to save the lives of many other people? If we can assume a base of equal innocence, then this would seem to result in a net gain of pleasure over pain. If I am very old and the others are very young, it almost seems to become a mandate, given the vast amount of potential pleasure > my personal old-guy pain. And plenty of situations seem to resist evaluation through the pleasure/pain calculus. Even if we knew every single aspect, every single variable of the pleasure and pain on all sides, we wouldn’t be able to make it work unless we also included warrant in the calculation. This can, perhaps, be done, but by no math easily available to the rational person attempting to make a moral decision on the fly. And let’s face it: many moral decisions must be made quickly. Practical philosophers may not have a lifetime to choreograph all the angels dancing on the head of the proverbial pin. There is no value to tests of morality that are virtually impossible to perform.
So, pleasure/pain can be used. Sometimes, in some very clear or very simple circumstances. Sometimes, however, it does not appear as if it will work. We need to look somewhere else.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Morality Part 4: Pain and pleasure
MAKING MORAL CHOICES
Humans, as rational creatures of action with free will, can both choose what to do and analyze what they are doing.
Morality, as defined earlier, is the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do. But how can we tell the difference?
There is a number of possibilities for any given action. It can be good, it can be bad, or it can be indifferent. Since humans are animals, one thing we can say with certainty is that, like the dog in the parable of the pup, while the explanation for the difference between right and wrong may elude us, we are, as literal animals, aware of the difference between pain and pleasure. We can, at an elemental level, equate good with pleasure, bad with pain, and indifferent with neither. This is a good starting point for our analysis.
Moral is equated with pleasure
Immoral is equated with pain
Amoral is equated with indifference
Problem: If we look at actions only insofar as they relate to a single individual, we may not ever be in a realm of even remotely objective morality, at least if our test is going to be pleasure and pain. An individual in a box, able to perform either pleasurable or painful actions, could perform the former and forego the latter without ever venturing into what we would seriously consider as the moral sphere. If our test is going to be pleasure and pain we should look to a number of individuals, where the model is easier to analyze, and see how an action affects not just the performer but how it affects other individuals as well.
Morality measured by pleasure and pain, therefore, is morality analyzed across the members of a group, and not a single individual. Since humans are social animals, this method of analysis appears to be relevant. With luck, our study will also provide a measure for the morality of hermits. We shall see.
So we are dealing with how the actions of one individual affect not only that individual but also other individuals. All the individuals who are a party to the action on either end need to be considered. Taking either the actor or the acted-upon out of the equation makes it a partial equation of no value. We need to analyze how everyone is affected by the action.
Moral is equated with pleasure
Immoral is equated with pain
Amoral is equated with indifference
Question: Is it the action itself that is equated with pleasure or pain, or the result of the action? A painful action can lead to pleasurable results, and vice versa.
Answer: It cannot simply be the action itself that we must test. It must be the total sum of the pleasure and/or pain of both the action and its consequences. An action and its consequences, in this measurement, cannot be separated from one another, or more to the point, although they may be evaluated separately, it is the sum of the two that is the whole test of pleasure/pain.
Since humans are animals with comparable biology, it seems reasonable to assume that they have similar concepts of pain and pleasure. Perhaps a single individual might have switched circuits, but groups of individuals tend to agree. This does force us to consult the culture, unfortunately, but let us make the assumption that reasonable people will choose similarly: that test of a “reasonable person” is a traditional one in some legal circles, and it should be good enough for us.
So, we will test an action in its entirety on the group involved according to a generally accepted schema of pain/pleasure, to determine the morality of an action. If it causes a net increase in pleasure for the group, we will deem it a moral action. If it causes a net increase in pain for the group, we will call it an immoral action. And if it causes no effect, it is amoral.
Humans, as rational creatures of action with free will, can both choose what to do and analyze what they are doing.
Morality, as defined earlier, is the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do. But how can we tell the difference?
There is a number of possibilities for any given action. It can be good, it can be bad, or it can be indifferent. Since humans are animals, one thing we can say with certainty is that, like the dog in the parable of the pup, while the explanation for the difference between right and wrong may elude us, we are, as literal animals, aware of the difference between pain and pleasure. We can, at an elemental level, equate good with pleasure, bad with pain, and indifferent with neither. This is a good starting point for our analysis.
Moral is equated with pleasure
Immoral is equated with pain
Amoral is equated with indifference
Problem: If we look at actions only insofar as they relate to a single individual, we may not ever be in a realm of even remotely objective morality, at least if our test is going to be pleasure and pain. An individual in a box, able to perform either pleasurable or painful actions, could perform the former and forego the latter without ever venturing into what we would seriously consider as the moral sphere. If our test is going to be pleasure and pain we should look to a number of individuals, where the model is easier to analyze, and see how an action affects not just the performer but how it affects other individuals as well.
Morality measured by pleasure and pain, therefore, is morality analyzed across the members of a group, and not a single individual. Since humans are social animals, this method of analysis appears to be relevant. With luck, our study will also provide a measure for the morality of hermits. We shall see.
So we are dealing with how the actions of one individual affect not only that individual but also other individuals. All the individuals who are a party to the action on either end need to be considered. Taking either the actor or the acted-upon out of the equation makes it a partial equation of no value. We need to analyze how everyone is affected by the action.
Moral is equated with pleasure
Immoral is equated with pain
Amoral is equated with indifference
Question: Is it the action itself that is equated with pleasure or pain, or the result of the action? A painful action can lead to pleasurable results, and vice versa.
Answer: It cannot simply be the action itself that we must test. It must be the total sum of the pleasure and/or pain of both the action and its consequences. An action and its consequences, in this measurement, cannot be separated from one another, or more to the point, although they may be evaluated separately, it is the sum of the two that is the whole test of pleasure/pain.
Since humans are animals with comparable biology, it seems reasonable to assume that they have similar concepts of pain and pleasure. Perhaps a single individual might have switched circuits, but groups of individuals tend to agree. This does force us to consult the culture, unfortunately, but let us make the assumption that reasonable people will choose similarly: that test of a “reasonable person” is a traditional one in some legal circles, and it should be good enough for us.
So, we will test an action in its entirety on the group involved according to a generally accepted schema of pain/pleasure, to determine the morality of an action. If it causes a net increase in pleasure for the group, we will deem it a moral action. If it causes a net increase in pain for the group, we will call it an immoral action. And if it causes no effect, it is amoral.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Morality Part 3: Culture
THE OTHER NUMBER ONE SOURCES OF HUMAN MORALITY
A problem with our attempting to take a purely rational view of a subject is that our rationality is far from pure.
Our minds do not exist in a vacuum, a raw organic computer full of hard-wired operating instructions but without any data, and cannot operate as such, no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise. We are, rather, creatures of society. We live within cultures, and on top of that, we have long maturation periods. That culture that we live in, even removed from religion, affects our rationality.
Keeping with the “raw organic computer” metaphor, culture affects the data in our mental machine, and it could even affect the processing instructions. Culture can be compared to a computer operating system, one that is powerful enough to potentially rewire the motherboard. The raw organic computer can run any of a variety of operating systems, each of which totally takes over the computer, making it a very different sort of machine for doing pretty much the same thing regardless of the operating system, just as with real computers. The operating systems Vista and Leopard and Linux all can connect to the internet or run a word processing application, but they each do it differently, with some aspects being done more easily and efficiently in one than the other, some being easier to learn, more malleable, whatever. Cultures are the same thing. Some are easy and welcoming, some are dense and closed, but they all contain the instruction set for individuals to live within a certain society, and they are in total albeit often subtle control of much that we consider individual behavior. The play of society and the individual, or culture and personality, is complex. No individual within a culture is without that culture, to torture a phrase. Culture is a part of the individual from the moment of birth, if not the moment of conception.
The first connection of the individual personality to the group culture is through the individual’s parents. This is where the long maturation period comes in. It is the parents, who are already enculturated, who are the first agents of the enculturation of the child. The parents themselves are already a part of the culture, transmitting that culture to the child. The child is very much like the dog in the parable of the pup, following whatever distinctions the parents make between good and bad behavior. The first thing the child learns about right and wrong is from the parents, which once again raises the question of where the parents/masters get it from. For the child, the source for the parents doesn’t matter, however, because the child, a not yet fully rational actor, will simply follow (or not follow) the instructions of the parents. Doing the right thing is not found in doing the action itself but in following the parents’ instructions, as doing the right thing for the dog is not found in doing the thing itself but obeying the master.
So it is easy to find the authority for children’s morality, which resides in the parents. It is similarly easy to find the authority for religious morality which resides in the revelations of God. But is there morality attached to culture aside from religion? If not, then the parents are simply channeling the morality of their religious training to their children, and in fact, this is the usual case. But there can be more to morality in culture than the purely religious. This too distracts us from our quest for a rational approach to morality, but can only be ignored at peril to our entire analysis, which is why we’re addressing it now.
Culture comprises all the common practices of a large group. For ease of analysis, we can equate a culture with a polity; let’s say we’re talking about an island nation, with a single state government. This island, separated from the rest of the world, has its own language, its own religion, its own music, its own art, its own history. Self-governed, it has its own laws. All of these, and more, contribute to the island’s culture, and that island’s culture, in turn contributes to the conceptions of morality of the island’s inhabitants. Another island nearby, with any variations on its practices from the first island, might have totally different conceptions of morality. Life is complicated, and rich in detail. Island A might be monogamous while Island B is polyandrous. Each would consider the other’s form of marriage immoral, but within the native culture, that form is the norm.
The preceding paragraph posits law as a part of culture, and therefore a determinant of morality. Law can also arguably be viewed as codified morality, that is, the legislated and enforced morality of a society. Personally I find this model inadequate to explain all law, but certainly some laws are exactly that. A law that claims that murder is illegal would be hard to separate from a cultural sense in the polity that murder is wrong. And certainly law is the result of a rational process of analyzing right and wrong in that a legislature of some sort has had to envision and describe that particular illegal act. But the morality of law is another footnote to this discussion, interesting perhaps, but not germane to pure rational analysis of right and wrong. Pursue it on your own time.
So we now have two gorillas in the morality room. The first is religion, but we’ve already explained how religion and moral philosophy can be compatible. Separating culture and moral philosophy may be more difficult, in that any attempt to rationalize anything by any individual is an attempt made within that individual’s culture, and therefore congruent with that culture’s “operating system.” How can I know if I’m not merely rationalizing my own preexisting cultural norms?
The short answer to that is, I can’t. But what I can do, as much as possible, is apply rational thought to morality on a cross-cultural basis. Whatever our conclusions are, they must be as valid in India as Guatemala as Japan as the USA. Since this is not intended as a cross-cultural analysis, and will not compare ideas from culture to culture, we will have to take our neutrality, to some degree, on faith. But as we have already explained, human beings are often, perhaps always, creatures of faith, so we do not ask for more than can be given. If at any point our analysis, because of its cultural bias, becomes too parochial, we should be taken to task on it. The promise is that, to the best of our ability, we will try to avoid that bias. It is not a hundred percent possible, but we can get close. And an understanding of morality that is close to perfect is only slightly less good than one that is completely perfect. We do not seek to prove absolutes in a short essay. We are simply trying to understand a few difficult ideas, to provide a meaningful framework for future inquiries.
A problem with our attempting to take a purely rational view of a subject is that our rationality is far from pure.
Our minds do not exist in a vacuum, a raw organic computer full of hard-wired operating instructions but without any data, and cannot operate as such, no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise. We are, rather, creatures of society. We live within cultures, and on top of that, we have long maturation periods. That culture that we live in, even removed from religion, affects our rationality.
Keeping with the “raw organic computer” metaphor, culture affects the data in our mental machine, and it could even affect the processing instructions. Culture can be compared to a computer operating system, one that is powerful enough to potentially rewire the motherboard. The raw organic computer can run any of a variety of operating systems, each of which totally takes over the computer, making it a very different sort of machine for doing pretty much the same thing regardless of the operating system, just as with real computers. The operating systems Vista and Leopard and Linux all can connect to the internet or run a word processing application, but they each do it differently, with some aspects being done more easily and efficiently in one than the other, some being easier to learn, more malleable, whatever. Cultures are the same thing. Some are easy and welcoming, some are dense and closed, but they all contain the instruction set for individuals to live within a certain society, and they are in total albeit often subtle control of much that we consider individual behavior. The play of society and the individual, or culture and personality, is complex. No individual within a culture is without that culture, to torture a phrase. Culture is a part of the individual from the moment of birth, if not the moment of conception.
The first connection of the individual personality to the group culture is through the individual’s parents. This is where the long maturation period comes in. It is the parents, who are already enculturated, who are the first agents of the enculturation of the child. The parents themselves are already a part of the culture, transmitting that culture to the child. The child is very much like the dog in the parable of the pup, following whatever distinctions the parents make between good and bad behavior. The first thing the child learns about right and wrong is from the parents, which once again raises the question of where the parents/masters get it from. For the child, the source for the parents doesn’t matter, however, because the child, a not yet fully rational actor, will simply follow (or not follow) the instructions of the parents. Doing the right thing is not found in doing the action itself but in following the parents’ instructions, as doing the right thing for the dog is not found in doing the thing itself but obeying the master.
So it is easy to find the authority for children’s morality, which resides in the parents. It is similarly easy to find the authority for religious morality which resides in the revelations of God. But is there morality attached to culture aside from religion? If not, then the parents are simply channeling the morality of their religious training to their children, and in fact, this is the usual case. But there can be more to morality in culture than the purely religious. This too distracts us from our quest for a rational approach to morality, but can only be ignored at peril to our entire analysis, which is why we’re addressing it now.
Culture comprises all the common practices of a large group. For ease of analysis, we can equate a culture with a polity; let’s say we’re talking about an island nation, with a single state government. This island, separated from the rest of the world, has its own language, its own religion, its own music, its own art, its own history. Self-governed, it has its own laws. All of these, and more, contribute to the island’s culture, and that island’s culture, in turn contributes to the conceptions of morality of the island’s inhabitants. Another island nearby, with any variations on its practices from the first island, might have totally different conceptions of morality. Life is complicated, and rich in detail. Island A might be monogamous while Island B is polyandrous. Each would consider the other’s form of marriage immoral, but within the native culture, that form is the norm.
The preceding paragraph posits law as a part of culture, and therefore a determinant of morality. Law can also arguably be viewed as codified morality, that is, the legislated and enforced morality of a society. Personally I find this model inadequate to explain all law, but certainly some laws are exactly that. A law that claims that murder is illegal would be hard to separate from a cultural sense in the polity that murder is wrong. And certainly law is the result of a rational process of analyzing right and wrong in that a legislature of some sort has had to envision and describe that particular illegal act. But the morality of law is another footnote to this discussion, interesting perhaps, but not germane to pure rational analysis of right and wrong. Pursue it on your own time.
So we now have two gorillas in the morality room. The first is religion, but we’ve already explained how religion and moral philosophy can be compatible. Separating culture and moral philosophy may be more difficult, in that any attempt to rationalize anything by any individual is an attempt made within that individual’s culture, and therefore congruent with that culture’s “operating system.” How can I know if I’m not merely rationalizing my own preexisting cultural norms?
The short answer to that is, I can’t. But what I can do, as much as possible, is apply rational thought to morality on a cross-cultural basis. Whatever our conclusions are, they must be as valid in India as Guatemala as Japan as the USA. Since this is not intended as a cross-cultural analysis, and will not compare ideas from culture to culture, we will have to take our neutrality, to some degree, on faith. But as we have already explained, human beings are often, perhaps always, creatures of faith, so we do not ask for more than can be given. If at any point our analysis, because of its cultural bias, becomes too parochial, we should be taken to task on it. The promise is that, to the best of our ability, we will try to avoid that bias. It is not a hundred percent possible, but we can get close. And an understanding of morality that is close to perfect is only slightly less good than one that is completely perfect. We do not seek to prove absolutes in a short essay. We are simply trying to understand a few difficult ideas, to provide a meaningful framework for future inquiries.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Morality Part 2: Religion
The parable of the pup tells us a number of things, and raises a number of questions. The most important issue is the determination of right and wrong for the dog. The dog in the parable is a mechanical actor, following orders (or not following orders) blindly. The dog has no internal sense of right or wrong, although no doubt the dog does have an internal sense of pleasure and pain. If the dog were to act on its own, most likely it would act in favor of pleasure rather than in favor of pain. The point is that the dog is not a rational actor: the dog acts on instinct alone until its actions are modified by a master. And even obeying a master is, for a dog, instinctual, tied into its roots as a pack animal. Humans have been able to domesticate dogs because domestication is congruent with canine instincts. Humans have not been able to domesticate rattlesnakes because domestication is not congruent with pit viper instincts.
Because a dog is not a rational actor, we do not consider it a moral actor. Since it cannot make a moral determination for itself, its actions are amoral, even though from the perspective of the master certain of those actions are “good” and certain of them are “bad.” Realistically the master knows that these are trained behaviors, guided by the master’s desires, rather than conscious choices on the part of the dog. Because of the dog’s pack animal instincts, it presumably does not even choose to follow or not follow its master’s training: it’s instinct is to perform as a member of the pack, following the rules set down by the leader. When it does what the master wants, it is only following its own instincts.
AN ADDITIONAL FACT ABOUT HUMAN BEINGS
As we have said, human beings are, among other things, creatures of action. We do things. We perform actions.
Among those other things, we are creatures of thought. We are rational beings. We can think about our actions. We can choose to perform, or not to perform, those human actions that are voluntary (as compared to, say, having blood pumped by our heart, which is involuntary as long as we don’t terminate our own existence, which is certainly possible, but merely a footnote to the discussion). This ability to think is referred to as rationality, and the possession of this ability, combined with our nature as creatures of action, means that we are rational actors. Human beings are both creatures of action and creatures of reason.
As creatures of reason, we are able to think about our actions.
Let us return to the parable of the pup for a moment. One of the questions that remained unanswered was why the master selected some actions as right and some actions as wrong. Without answering that question, let’s look to a comparable situation of the master and the dog in the human model.
THE NUMBER ONE SOURCE OF HUMAN MORALITY
At the moment, we are doing our best to analyze morality from a neutral, objective position. From this position, a little research in the field will bring back to us the realization that the question of what is right and what is wrong is often approached by humans not as a question of rational consideration of various actions but as a subject of spirituality. Human beings, in addition to being rational creatures of action, are often, perhaps always, creatures of faith. By faith we mean the ability to hold as true ideas and concepts that we cannot define rationally; this is not necessarily religious faith, although religion, often by its own admission, does fall into this category. The religious person does not need to “prove” the existence of God; the religious person accepts the existence of God on faith. No proof is needed, or else something other than traditional proofs are accepted as warrant enough for belief. And even the non-religious person holds beliefs in things for which proofs are impossible or at the very least difficult and elusive.
Religion is a complicated subject and the point of this essay is not to question religious beliefs which, by their very nature, are beyond questionability. Nevertheless, religion is important to the moral philosopher because so many people derive their moralities from their religion. Many religions, including those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, have moral laws given by divine revelation. These are literally the laws of God. God has said that certain actions are good, and certain actions are bad. The authority for this version of morality is ultimate. The rightness or wrongness of human actions is made clear, or at least clear enough for the scholars of the religion to establish individual analysis of smaller acts (e.g., self-defense) in the light of broader strictures (“Thou shalt not kill”). The point is, many of us—perhaps most of us—derive our sense of right and wrong, our morality, from our religion.
Which takes us back to the parable of the pup. As we said, one of the questions that remained unanswered was why the master selected some actions as right and some actions as wrong. If you’re willing to accept that the model of God and human is comparable to master and dog, then the question can also be posed regarding God. Why has God selected some actions as right and others as wrong? This leads to a classical conundrum: is an action right or wrong because God says it’s right or wrong, or are actions inherently right or wrong and God is simply pointing out to us which ones are which? This is probably not answerable, whereas the master and dog metaphor does seem resolvable: the master determines, for whatever reasons, what is right and wrong for the dog, and while many, many masters might agree, there is no reason why they all would. Some people might raise their dogs with radically different rules from other people. It’s up to the master. The dog will follow the rules, whatever they are. Humans, on the other hand, even believing that a rule is God’s rule, can choose whether or not to obey it. Part of our inherent rationality, our minds, is the ability to use them. This ability to act on our thoughts is our will. In the religious context, this is often referred to as free will.
Human beings are rational creatures of action, which implies the possession of free will to make choices about which actions to perform. Many of us have faith in a religion that provides us with a moral framework for making those choices. But the faith does not answer the unanswerable question: Is an action right or wrong because God says it’s right or wrong, or are actions inherently right or wrong and God is simply pointing out the difference to us? Whichever way religion answers this unanswerable question, the question of what is right and what is wrong can become a subject of analysis outside of a religious context. If an action’s morality is inherent, then we can attempt to figure out why. And if an action’s morality has been determined by God, then we can attempt to figure out why. A rationalist approach need not conflict with religious belief.
Which brings us back to our moral philosophy square one, that we are rational creatures of action. We are able to analyze our actions and we have demonstrated that even a belief in a religious morality to determine what our actions ought to be does not obviate the use of our reason to do that analysis. I think it is important for the moral philosopher to understand the importance of religion and address it as we have here before addressing pure rationalism. But I think we are now on safe ground going forward, and we are almost ready take that purely rational view of the subject. As soon as we address one other important reality.
Because a dog is not a rational actor, we do not consider it a moral actor. Since it cannot make a moral determination for itself, its actions are amoral, even though from the perspective of the master certain of those actions are “good” and certain of them are “bad.” Realistically the master knows that these are trained behaviors, guided by the master’s desires, rather than conscious choices on the part of the dog. Because of the dog’s pack animal instincts, it presumably does not even choose to follow or not follow its master’s training: it’s instinct is to perform as a member of the pack, following the rules set down by the leader. When it does what the master wants, it is only following its own instincts.
AN ADDITIONAL FACT ABOUT HUMAN BEINGS
As we have said, human beings are, among other things, creatures of action. We do things. We perform actions.
Among those other things, we are creatures of thought. We are rational beings. We can think about our actions. We can choose to perform, or not to perform, those human actions that are voluntary (as compared to, say, having blood pumped by our heart, which is involuntary as long as we don’t terminate our own existence, which is certainly possible, but merely a footnote to the discussion). This ability to think is referred to as rationality, and the possession of this ability, combined with our nature as creatures of action, means that we are rational actors. Human beings are both creatures of action and creatures of reason.
As creatures of reason, we are able to think about our actions.
Let us return to the parable of the pup for a moment. One of the questions that remained unanswered was why the master selected some actions as right and some actions as wrong. Without answering that question, let’s look to a comparable situation of the master and the dog in the human model.
THE NUMBER ONE SOURCE OF HUMAN MORALITY
At the moment, we are doing our best to analyze morality from a neutral, objective position. From this position, a little research in the field will bring back to us the realization that the question of what is right and what is wrong is often approached by humans not as a question of rational consideration of various actions but as a subject of spirituality. Human beings, in addition to being rational creatures of action, are often, perhaps always, creatures of faith. By faith we mean the ability to hold as true ideas and concepts that we cannot define rationally; this is not necessarily religious faith, although religion, often by its own admission, does fall into this category. The religious person does not need to “prove” the existence of God; the religious person accepts the existence of God on faith. No proof is needed, or else something other than traditional proofs are accepted as warrant enough for belief. And even the non-religious person holds beliefs in things for which proofs are impossible or at the very least difficult and elusive.
Religion is a complicated subject and the point of this essay is not to question religious beliefs which, by their very nature, are beyond questionability. Nevertheless, religion is important to the moral philosopher because so many people derive their moralities from their religion. Many religions, including those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, have moral laws given by divine revelation. These are literally the laws of God. God has said that certain actions are good, and certain actions are bad. The authority for this version of morality is ultimate. The rightness or wrongness of human actions is made clear, or at least clear enough for the scholars of the religion to establish individual analysis of smaller acts (e.g., self-defense) in the light of broader strictures (“Thou shalt not kill”). The point is, many of us—perhaps most of us—derive our sense of right and wrong, our morality, from our religion.
Which takes us back to the parable of the pup. As we said, one of the questions that remained unanswered was why the master selected some actions as right and some actions as wrong. If you’re willing to accept that the model of God and human is comparable to master and dog, then the question can also be posed regarding God. Why has God selected some actions as right and others as wrong? This leads to a classical conundrum: is an action right or wrong because God says it’s right or wrong, or are actions inherently right or wrong and God is simply pointing out to us which ones are which? This is probably not answerable, whereas the master and dog metaphor does seem resolvable: the master determines, for whatever reasons, what is right and wrong for the dog, and while many, many masters might agree, there is no reason why they all would. Some people might raise their dogs with radically different rules from other people. It’s up to the master. The dog will follow the rules, whatever they are. Humans, on the other hand, even believing that a rule is God’s rule, can choose whether or not to obey it. Part of our inherent rationality, our minds, is the ability to use them. This ability to act on our thoughts is our will. In the religious context, this is often referred to as free will.
Human beings are rational creatures of action, which implies the possession of free will to make choices about which actions to perform. Many of us have faith in a religion that provides us with a moral framework for making those choices. But the faith does not answer the unanswerable question: Is an action right or wrong because God says it’s right or wrong, or are actions inherently right or wrong and God is simply pointing out the difference to us? Whichever way religion answers this unanswerable question, the question of what is right and what is wrong can become a subject of analysis outside of a religious context. If an action’s morality is inherent, then we can attempt to figure out why. And if an action’s morality has been determined by God, then we can attempt to figure out why. A rationalist approach need not conflict with religious belief.
Which brings us back to our moral philosophy square one, that we are rational creatures of action. We are able to analyze our actions and we have demonstrated that even a belief in a religious morality to determine what our actions ought to be does not obviate the use of our reason to do that analysis. I think it is important for the moral philosopher to understand the importance of religion and address it as we have here before addressing pure rationalism. But I think we are now on safe ground going forward, and we are almost ready take that purely rational view of the subject. As soon as we address one other important reality.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Morality Part 1
Let’s start with some broad, generally acceptable concepts.
Human beings are, among other things, creatures of action. We do things. We perform actions.
Morality is the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
Not all human actions are necessarily assigned a moral value. Some actions we perform are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, prescribed nor proscribed. We refer to these actions as amoral, or not in the sphere of morality.
These broad, generally acceptable concepts are our starting place as moral philosophers. Moral philosophy encompasses so many spheres of thinking that the fact that we can come up with any starting place at all is rather surprising. Everything we’ve said so far would be agreed to by the Pope, Freddy Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, and Manny Kant, not to mention Moe, Larry and Curly. I would venture that even Shemp, after squinting his eyes a bit and thinking, would concur that, so far, so good.
But, honestly, we haven’t gotten very far at all. All we’ve done is define morality in a most neutral fashion, trying to shake from it any presuppositions about right or wrong per se. At this point our goal is merely knowing what it is we’re talking about.
BEHOLD THE PARABLE OF THE PUP:
Dogs are, among other things, creatures of action. They do things. They perform actions.
Dogs that are domesticated have human masters. A human master often assigns a value of good to some of a dog’s actions, meaning that these actions are those that the dog should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that the dog should not perform. The human master says that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do. Good actions for dogs might include sitting, or staying, or pooping outdoors. Bad actions for dogs might include biting, jumping on the bed or pooping indoors. The determination of good and bad is entirely up to the master.
Dogs might be trained to do good things by a system of rewards, and trained not to do bad things by a system of punishments. But not all canine actions are necessarily assigned a moral value by a master. Some actions a dog performs are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, prescribed nor proscribed. Sleeping in the backyard under a tree, chewing on a bone, drinking water, could be actions a master does not assign a value to.
In the parable of the pup, the dog does not determine right and wrong. This determination is done by the master. The master reveals to the dog which actions are good and which actions are bad.
How the master decides which actions are right and which actions are wrong is not seen in this parable.
THUS ENDS THE PARABLE OF THE PUP
Human beings are, among other things, creatures of action. We do things. We perform actions.
Morality is the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
Not all human actions are necessarily assigned a moral value. Some actions we perform are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, prescribed nor proscribed. We refer to these actions as amoral, or not in the sphere of morality.
These broad, generally acceptable concepts are our starting place as moral philosophers. Moral philosophy encompasses so many spheres of thinking that the fact that we can come up with any starting place at all is rather surprising. Everything we’ve said so far would be agreed to by the Pope, Freddy Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, and Manny Kant, not to mention Moe, Larry and Curly. I would venture that even Shemp, after squinting his eyes a bit and thinking, would concur that, so far, so good.
But, honestly, we haven’t gotten very far at all. All we’ve done is define morality in a most neutral fashion, trying to shake from it any presuppositions about right or wrong per se. At this point our goal is merely knowing what it is we’re talking about.
BEHOLD THE PARABLE OF THE PUP:
Dogs are, among other things, creatures of action. They do things. They perform actions.
Dogs that are domesticated have human masters. A human master often assigns a value of good to some of a dog’s actions, meaning that these actions are those that the dog should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that the dog should not perform. The human master says that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do. Good actions for dogs might include sitting, or staying, or pooping outdoors. Bad actions for dogs might include biting, jumping on the bed or pooping indoors. The determination of good and bad is entirely up to the master.
Dogs might be trained to do good things by a system of rewards, and trained not to do bad things by a system of punishments. But not all canine actions are necessarily assigned a moral value by a master. Some actions a dog performs are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, prescribed nor proscribed. Sleeping in the backyard under a tree, chewing on a bone, drinking water, could be actions a master does not assign a value to.
In the parable of the pup, the dog does not determine right and wrong. This determination is done by the master. The master reveals to the dog which actions are good and which actions are bad.
How the master decides which actions are right and which actions are wrong is not seen in this parable.
THUS ENDS THE PARABLE OF THE PUP
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Do as we say, peasant; it's better than the Cauliflower Democrat; word games; an order of tin; yes, there really are musicians whose name starts w/ I
Somehow O’C got to be listed as spiritual adviser (or something like that) of UPenn. I’m jealous (not that I gave UPenn any advice, spiritual or otherwise). Of course, when you think about it, O’C and I are pretty big on telling people what we think they ought to do, whether they credit us or not. It would be better if everyone just naturally figured things out the way we would, but that just doesn’t happen. Considering that O’C and I disagree about a lot of things, for example, how many hours an award ceremony should run, it is remarkable that we agree on most substantive issues. Our agreement, that of a megalithic program and a pebble program, coming from totally different perspectives, tends to mean that our spiritual advice is pretty good. So if either of us ever wakes you up in the middle of the night and tells you to put more doughnuts in the judges’ lounge, this is advice that you should probably follow. Right after you call the police and report a break-in, that is.
Zack, the Banana Republican, is down at Drexel with either too much time on his hands or too much computer access. His contribution to the evaluation of whacking the innocent was to provide the assorted Sailors with a schema for whacking the various shades of the guilty. If he doesn’t watch out, he may get drafted. (I do like calling him the Banana Republican though. It has a certain ring to it…)
CP and I are finishing up our first game of Unscrabulous. The nutty point distribution almost renders the scoring moot (but I only say that because he beat the crap out of me), but mostly I like it (and its predecessor) because I like having games to turn to for a few minutes’ break now and then. HoraceMan’s attempt to pull me into the legit Scrabble app was a total bust; as I’ve said before, it simply doesn’t run. Anyone on my wavelength who wants an unscrab game, where points don’t matter much, can feel free to challenge me. (Maybe we can channel the Banana Republican’s energy/access surplus.)
CP is promising that maybe about the beginning of Sept tabroom.com will be ready for Bump. I need to make one last run through the invite before considering it ready for primetime. I’m also planning to put in my trophy order this weekend. And on the rest-of-the-tournaments front, I’ve put signup databases up for the Sailors for everything through Manchester.
And I’m up to the letter I in my iTunes cleanup. But I still have about a hundred or two albums to rip. This has become my life’s work. Why I ordered the DS version of Civilization eludes me completely. There are just not enough hours in the day.
Zack, the Banana Republican, is down at Drexel with either too much time on his hands or too much computer access. His contribution to the evaluation of whacking the innocent was to provide the assorted Sailors with a schema for whacking the various shades of the guilty. If he doesn’t watch out, he may get drafted. (I do like calling him the Banana Republican though. It has a certain ring to it…)
CP and I are finishing up our first game of Unscrabulous. The nutty point distribution almost renders the scoring moot (but I only say that because he beat the crap out of me), but mostly I like it (and its predecessor) because I like having games to turn to for a few minutes’ break now and then. HoraceMan’s attempt to pull me into the legit Scrabble app was a total bust; as I’ve said before, it simply doesn’t run. Anyone on my wavelength who wants an unscrab game, where points don’t matter much, can feel free to challenge me. (Maybe we can channel the Banana Republican’s energy/access surplus.)
CP is promising that maybe about the beginning of Sept tabroom.com will be ready for Bump. I need to make one last run through the invite before considering it ready for primetime. I’m also planning to put in my trophy order this weekend. And on the rest-of-the-tournaments front, I’ve put signup databases up for the Sailors for everything through Manchester.
And I’m up to the letter I in my iTunes cleanup. But I still have about a hundred or two albums to rip. This has become my life’s work. Why I ordered the DS version of Civilization eludes me completely. There are just not enough hours in the day.
Monday, August 18, 2008
The new spinach
Rubin tells me beets are the new spinach. I, for one, find this terribly perplexing. But I will adjust accordingly.
Catholic Charlie has sent out the tentative schedule for next season (wisely excluding Bump from his list), prefatory to the 9/6 moderators’ meeting. This is yet another indication that Fall is almost about upon us. O’C tells me that the WTF hardcore is beavering away at researching Sept-Oct, which I would imagine is tantamount to figuring out why beets are the new spinach. I mean, you can read the odd utilitarian, I guess, or the odd utilitarian critique, but that seems like something of a mug’s game. Arguing this one is going to be tough, and rather elemental. The beauty of this topic is not in itself, but in its application, especially with novices, and beyond that with anybody approaching philosophy as a relative beginner. Understanding morality—and I mean understanding the complications, not solving it—is a good preparation for understanding a lot of things. Rationality, relativism, deontology, consequentialism (regularly misdefined as teleology), utility, categorical imperatives, spinach: all of these could come up in the discussion. If you were sitting around knowing nothing about philosophy, but wanting to create it, you would start with these ideas, even if you didn’t know what they were. Except of course for spinach. There, you would have to start instead with beets.
A small dinghy of Sailors is down in Philadelphia being instituted, so I have no idea who will turn up at tomorrow’s chez. Tik (pronounced teek) has been sharpening his teeth in expectation, however. He does love the taste of fresh debater. Anyhow, maybe we’ll end up discussing the draft more than that poor dead theoretical innocent. I have to admit I’m less prepared for that, at least insofar as lately researched facts are concerned. The legendary team of Peanut Butter and Termite will, no doubt, already be ahead of me though. I’m looking forward to hearing them out.
And I guess I should sign up for the Roll (AKA the Kaiser) and the Albino Bagel (as in, the home of, and it’s absolutely true, and if you don’t believe me, sign up for Manchester yourself and when you get there help yourself to one of their amazing albino bagels, which are these rather scary pasty white things that look as if they’ve evolved at the bottom of the dark and deep ocean; all they need is a pair of unseeing eyes to complete the image). Of course both will be mostly placeholder entries, but that’s okay. I figure about 6 novices this year at the point of the Albino, and a goodly load of experienced Sailors at the Roll, because what else will they be doing that weekend? I guess I could look to see if anyone’s signed up, but that would be cheating.
Catholic Charlie has sent out the tentative schedule for next season (wisely excluding Bump from his list), prefatory to the 9/6 moderators’ meeting. This is yet another indication that Fall is almost about upon us. O’C tells me that the WTF hardcore is beavering away at researching Sept-Oct, which I would imagine is tantamount to figuring out why beets are the new spinach. I mean, you can read the odd utilitarian, I guess, or the odd utilitarian critique, but that seems like something of a mug’s game. Arguing this one is going to be tough, and rather elemental. The beauty of this topic is not in itself, but in its application, especially with novices, and beyond that with anybody approaching philosophy as a relative beginner. Understanding morality—and I mean understanding the complications, not solving it—is a good preparation for understanding a lot of things. Rationality, relativism, deontology, consequentialism (regularly misdefined as teleology), utility, categorical imperatives, spinach: all of these could come up in the discussion. If you were sitting around knowing nothing about philosophy, but wanting to create it, you would start with these ideas, even if you didn’t know what they were. Except of course for spinach. There, you would have to start instead with beets.
A small dinghy of Sailors is down in Philadelphia being instituted, so I have no idea who will turn up at tomorrow’s chez. Tik (pronounced teek) has been sharpening his teeth in expectation, however. He does love the taste of fresh debater. Anyhow, maybe we’ll end up discussing the draft more than that poor dead theoretical innocent. I have to admit I’m less prepared for that, at least insofar as lately researched facts are concerned. The legendary team of Peanut Butter and Termite will, no doubt, already be ahead of me though. I’m looking forward to hearing them out.
And I guess I should sign up for the Roll (AKA the Kaiser) and the Albino Bagel (as in, the home of, and it’s absolutely true, and if you don’t believe me, sign up for Manchester yourself and when you get there help yourself to one of their amazing albino bagels, which are these rather scary pasty white things that look as if they’ve evolved at the bottom of the dark and deep ocean; all they need is a pair of unseeing eyes to complete the image). Of course both will be mostly placeholder entries, but that’s okay. I figure about 6 novices this year at the point of the Albino, and a goodly load of experienced Sailors at the Roll, because what else will they be doing that weekend? I guess I could look to see if anyone’s signed up, but that would be cheating.
Friday, August 15, 2008
It must be 8/15; it sounds roughly like David Lee Roth (eewwww!); "Luke, I am your mother-in-law"
Morality? I have died and gone to heaven! I’m not sure about the topic per se in terms of arguability, but I never really care about that all that much. What I’m interested in is, in September and October, the training of the newbies, and since I’ve already moved morality up in the Cur to a prime early placement, this is rather a divine coinkydinky. Plus it gives me stuff to bloviate on in general here. PF being on the draft could possibly be prefatory, in brainstorming terms, to the comparable LD topic for the new season, although it seems a little less satisfactory as an LD topic than as a PF topic. In PF one can look at the practical situation of the army we have and the battles we are fighting, whereas in LD one must look at an underlying principle in support of defending the polity, and from that perspective it’s a lot harder to see a reason against it, aside from prioritizing saving one’s one neck over saving one’s society’s neck. Anyhow, that’s a possible, and the other is in the here and now. This will be fun. I’m scheduling a chez meeting for Tuesday. Welcome back, Jolly Tars.
I can’t believe how many songs I have, after finding and presumably identifying all my music, that remain unidentified. My list of untitleds is astounding. I am still hours away from the clarity of poddishness that I seek, although I have to admit that this clarity wasn’t exactly present before the crash. Plus there’s still a lot of music to rip to get back to a loaded position, a long and tedious process. At least it’s not fulltime, like the porting of cassettes into mp3s, but it’s also not plunk, plunk, you’re done. And the automatic acquisition of album art is a curious business. 90% of the time it works. 5% of the time it finds nothing. And 5% of the time it finds some really weird thing that bears no relationship to what you were looking for. Anyhow, iPod updating has become my main hobby. Don’t even get me starting on alphabetization by first name.
O’C texted me that he mistakenly wore his Howard the Duck costume for the opening of Star Wars: The Inanimate Cartoon. This is not a faux pas as bad as his wearing his Liberace costume to the opening of Indiana Jones and the One Sequel Too Many (or Rocky 8 as some people call it). But still, it does show a sad inability to get the cosplay closet organized correctly. We all do need to get our minds back on the debate business. Summer has obviously gone on for too long.
I can’t believe how many songs I have, after finding and presumably identifying all my music, that remain unidentified. My list of untitleds is astounding. I am still hours away from the clarity of poddishness that I seek, although I have to admit that this clarity wasn’t exactly present before the crash. Plus there’s still a lot of music to rip to get back to a loaded position, a long and tedious process. At least it’s not fulltime, like the porting of cassettes into mp3s, but it’s also not plunk, plunk, you’re done. And the automatic acquisition of album art is a curious business. 90% of the time it works. 5% of the time it finds nothing. And 5% of the time it finds some really weird thing that bears no relationship to what you were looking for. Anyhow, iPod updating has become my main hobby. Don’t even get me starting on alphabetization by first name.
O’C texted me that he mistakenly wore his Howard the Duck costume for the opening of Star Wars: The Inanimate Cartoon. This is not a faux pas as bad as his wearing his Liberace costume to the opening of Indiana Jones and the One Sequel Too Many (or Rocky 8 as some people call it). But still, it does show a sad inability to get the cosplay closet organized correctly. We all do need to get our minds back on the debate business. Summer has obviously gone on for too long.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Signing up; printing up; loading up
So, we’re signed up for the Pups, including even some Speecho-Americans. And I’ve opened business for Sailors to consider getting on a roll (i.e., signing up for the Kaiser) and will shortly offer them the Exchester-Mansex (that doesn’t look right) todo at the end of October. And I volunteered (for reasons that elude me) to be a vigilante for Rippin’ (that doesn’t sound right either). I kept coming up with all sorts of reasons not to do it, but none of them convinced me. And I do so desperately need more to do.
I spent most of today cursing IT for their mis-building of my MacBook Pro. By the end of the day I could do most everything except print Quark files; needless to say, the Day Job being, uh, editor, the ability to print stuff is sort of germane. The guy who knows everything is, of course, on vacation, and I’m working with the guy who knows the guy who knows everything. In the corporate environment, they usually don’t give you the rights to do much on your personal machine, which I understand, having been in a position of dealing with users myself back in the deep, dark past, but that means that I’m beholden to people who have other things to do, while I also have other things to do, but it requires that they do my thing first. It’s a mug’s game. (On the other hand, Mac people, most apps will run fine out of directories other than applications, but don’t tell anyone I told you this…) I do like the big screen though. Doesn’t make much sense for anything other than a desktop replacement, really, given its heft, except maybe for the occasional jaunt, but it’s nice to be able to fit more stuff on the screen more easily. If I were so inclined, I could watch Howard the Duck in CinemaScope; the good news is, I am not so inclined.
Phase one of rebuilding the MegaPod—centralizing the library—is done, and I now have about half of what I used to have loaded up. And so begins the laborious but curiously interesting task of choosing CDs to rip and then ripping them. Too many Beach Boys last time. Who are the Bottle Rockets? All of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, or just the stuff on the Byrds’ greatest hits set? As you can see, I’m up to the Bs. In rock. My CDs are sorted by rock, world, jazz/cabaret, classical, shows and Christmas. And alphabetically within categories. Which is probably why I like random shuffles on the iPod: it’s the antithesis of what I’m used to.
You’re going to love the musical portion of the Bump welcome podcast…
I spent most of today cursing IT for their mis-building of my MacBook Pro. By the end of the day I could do most everything except print Quark files; needless to say, the Day Job being, uh, editor, the ability to print stuff is sort of germane. The guy who knows everything is, of course, on vacation, and I’m working with the guy who knows the guy who knows everything. In the corporate environment, they usually don’t give you the rights to do much on your personal machine, which I understand, having been in a position of dealing with users myself back in the deep, dark past, but that means that I’m beholden to people who have other things to do, while I also have other things to do, but it requires that they do my thing first. It’s a mug’s game. (On the other hand, Mac people, most apps will run fine out of directories other than applications, but don’t tell anyone I told you this…) I do like the big screen though. Doesn’t make much sense for anything other than a desktop replacement, really, given its heft, except maybe for the occasional jaunt, but it’s nice to be able to fit more stuff on the screen more easily. If I were so inclined, I could watch Howard the Duck in CinemaScope; the good news is, I am not so inclined.
Phase one of rebuilding the MegaPod—centralizing the library—is done, and I now have about half of what I used to have loaded up. And so begins the laborious but curiously interesting task of choosing CDs to rip and then ripping them. Too many Beach Boys last time. Who are the Bottle Rockets? All of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, or just the stuff on the Byrds’ greatest hits set? As you can see, I’m up to the Bs. In rock. My CDs are sorted by rock, world, jazz/cabaret, classical, shows and Christmas. And alphabetically within categories. Which is probably why I like random shuffles on the iPod: it’s the antithesis of what I’m used to.
You’re going to love the musical portion of the Bump welcome podcast…
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The wacky hipster from Weimar gets a double word score from the Pups while drinking caipirinhas in Po'keepsie
I now have a new MacBook Pro at the Day Job. My goal is to have a new MacBook Pro that does everything my old PowerBook did. Some people call me a dreamer. But then again, some people called Nietzsche a great bongo player. Draw your own conclusions.
HoraceMan, TSWAS, may have started a Scrabble game with me with on the new EA app on Facebook. Or maybe not. It’s his turn but it’s my move! The app works about as well as my new MacBook Pro. For that matter, the app works as well as Nietzsche used to play the bongos. The Scrabble app on my iPod isn’t much better. What Hasbro needs to do is find some hungry young programmers, maybe a couple of brothers, and go through the back door…
Tomorrow is Yale registration. Hoop-de-damned-do, in the immortal words of Clarence Thomas. I don’t have enough Sailors to man a dinghy through the Sea of Pups, but then again there are just enough to require another adult with a vehicle. Sigh.
And O’C is already ordering the peanut butter sandwiches for his Vassar RR. I’m not quite sure how he gets away with curried tofu from a place called Babycakes. This may all be a bad dream. He and I do seem to be zeroing in on our assault of a nice Brazilian restaurant in NYC for his Jake RR, on the other hand. Which is making me wonder, how many RRs does this guy run? How many RRs does this world need? Doesn’t anybody ever go to school anymore?
HoraceMan, TSWAS, may have started a Scrabble game with me with on the new EA app on Facebook. Or maybe not. It’s his turn but it’s my move! The app works about as well as my new MacBook Pro. For that matter, the app works as well as Nietzsche used to play the bongos. The Scrabble app on my iPod isn’t much better. What Hasbro needs to do is find some hungry young programmers, maybe a couple of brothers, and go through the back door…
Tomorrow is Yale registration. Hoop-de-damned-do, in the immortal words of Clarence Thomas. I don’t have enough Sailors to man a dinghy through the Sea of Pups, but then again there are just enough to require another adult with a vehicle. Sigh.
And O’C is already ordering the peanut butter sandwiches for his Vassar RR. I’m not quite sure how he gets away with curried tofu from a place called Babycakes. This may all be a bad dream. He and I do seem to be zeroing in on our assault of a nice Brazilian restaurant in NYC for his Jake RR, on the other hand. Which is making me wonder, how many RRs does this guy run? How many RRs does this world need? Doesn’t anybody ever go to school anymore?
Monday, August 11, 2008
Untitled track (09) by unknown artist in the [null] folder
It happens to everyone eventually, I guess. You plug your perfectly good iPod into your computer and it tells you that it has to go back to square one to restore and you’re going to lose all your data and you have no choice but to restore if you ever want to connect again and, of course, no reason for this is given. Seeing that two minutes prior to this event I was happily listening to the MegaPod untethered to Little Elvis, you can imagine my chagrin. Now, if my MegaPod weren’t twice as big as Little Elvis in the memory department, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem, but because of this limitation, I’ve always done manual syncs. Which meant, of course, that like any law-abiding musical citizen, I had mp3s scattered around on a couple of remote hard drives and some backup disks, plus a whole bunch of ripped CDs from which I’d never bothered to keep copies of the rips.
I have had a busy weekend.
The bottom line to all of this is that I am centralizing my iTunes library on one remote hard drive, where it can all fit comfortably. I am manually moving files to that location, and tapping iTunes on the shoulder and pointing it out, a process that will take about three or four more hours. And I am re-ripping a bunch of disks, but mostly putting in different disks, since this is a perfectly good opportunity to shake things up a bit. In the future, when everything I have is backed up to within an inch of its life, I will never have to worry about this again. It has been quite the drag, needless to say. Take my advice, young Skywalker. Back up your @^#%$* music, because some day, for no reason, your iPod will restore, and if you were in a situation like mine, without a straightforward sync, you will be in trouble.
We live in an amazing world, where the iPods are bigger than the computers. Or at least they were for a while. Most people nowadays wouldn’t have this problem. Or maybe they would. Whatever. It is, to put it mildly, terrible annoying.
I have had a busy weekend.
The bottom line to all of this is that I am centralizing my iTunes library on one remote hard drive, where it can all fit comfortably. I am manually moving files to that location, and tapping iTunes on the shoulder and pointing it out, a process that will take about three or four more hours. And I am re-ripping a bunch of disks, but mostly putting in different disks, since this is a perfectly good opportunity to shake things up a bit. In the future, when everything I have is backed up to within an inch of its life, I will never have to worry about this again. It has been quite the drag, needless to say. Take my advice, young Skywalker. Back up your @^#%$* music, because some day, for no reason, your iPod will restore, and if you were in a situation like mine, without a straightforward sync, you will be in trouble.
We live in an amazing world, where the iPods are bigger than the computers. Or at least they were for a while. Most people nowadays wouldn’t have this problem. Or maybe they would. Whatever. It is, to put it mildly, terrible annoying.
Friday, August 08, 2008
If this keeps up they're going to be rethinking that five grand a pop...
You know you’re in the summer doldrums when O’C is earning his $5m for articles on what you hope the next topic is going to be. I, for one, simply can’t stand the excitement. I do like seeing the Rippin’ symbol all enlarged like that, though. Reminds me of John Cleese not being a Mason.
I am in the final throes of next year’s plans for the ingestion of news by the Sailors. I will obviously not suggest that people not read the Times as a matter of course, but I will no longer (futilely) require it, or at least (futilely) strongly recommend it. That’s a mug’s game. While I don’t feel in any way differently than I have in the past about the McLuhanesque connection of medium and message—I strongly believe that how stuff gets into our brains affects the stuff itself actually in our brains—I have seen too much data indicating that, well, high school students simply aren’t reading the newspaper, nor are most of them going to read the newspaper. On the other hand, an online expectation is reasonable. My biggest issue has always been the loss of serendipity when one no longer browses the physical paper, but there is certainly other serendipity out there, and let’s face it, what we really need is the core of the current events cannon, not the flakes around the edge.
So I am at the last steps of figuring the plan. I have the Feed pretty much the way I like it, having removed everything but what I think a debater ought to at least glimpse at. This is a combination of articles about rights and identity politics, philosophy, constitutional law and subjects that are perennial in LD resolutions. When the topics are live, I will add germane articles directly concerned with them (both LD and PF). What remains is a final determination of what to do with general news, which I have so far kept to a minimum. Is it enough to suggest that people simply read Today’s Paper at the Times site? Or should I add that material to the Feed? Or create another feed entirely? In aid of keeping both the Feed and my life manageable, I’m tending to the first option. But, as I say, the next week or two I’ll be studying this in depth.
Oh, yeah. One more thing. I am doing this via the Mid-Hudson League site and not my own. I see this as being more than just for Sailors, although they will be the ones I expect to use it unfailingly. So, when I get run over by a bus (the one driven by RJT in a fit of road rage as she heads down to the Meadowlands to give you know who a piece of her Wisconswegian mind), others could conceivably take up the mantle in my absence. Or for that matter collaborate now. I’m nothing if not a community kind of guy.
I am in the final throes of next year’s plans for the ingestion of news by the Sailors. I will obviously not suggest that people not read the Times as a matter of course, but I will no longer (futilely) require it, or at least (futilely) strongly recommend it. That’s a mug’s game. While I don’t feel in any way differently than I have in the past about the McLuhanesque connection of medium and message—I strongly believe that how stuff gets into our brains affects the stuff itself actually in our brains—I have seen too much data indicating that, well, high school students simply aren’t reading the newspaper, nor are most of them going to read the newspaper. On the other hand, an online expectation is reasonable. My biggest issue has always been the loss of serendipity when one no longer browses the physical paper, but there is certainly other serendipity out there, and let’s face it, what we really need is the core of the current events cannon, not the flakes around the edge.
So I am at the last steps of figuring the plan. I have the Feed pretty much the way I like it, having removed everything but what I think a debater ought to at least glimpse at. This is a combination of articles about rights and identity politics, philosophy, constitutional law and subjects that are perennial in LD resolutions. When the topics are live, I will add germane articles directly concerned with them (both LD and PF). What remains is a final determination of what to do with general news, which I have so far kept to a minimum. Is it enough to suggest that people simply read Today’s Paper at the Times site? Or should I add that material to the Feed? Or create another feed entirely? In aid of keeping both the Feed and my life manageable, I’m tending to the first option. But, as I say, the next week or two I’ll be studying this in depth.
Oh, yeah. One more thing. I am doing this via the Mid-Hudson League site and not my own. I see this as being more than just for Sailors, although they will be the ones I expect to use it unfailingly. So, when I get run over by a bus (the one driven by RJT in a fit of road rage as she heads down to the Meadowlands to give you know who a piece of her Wisconswegian mind), others could conceivably take up the mantle in my absence. Or for that matter collaborate now. I’m nothing if not a community kind of guy.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Publishing 101; Morality 101
The uninonymous Rob suggests in a comment that perhaps there aren’t enough people out there to support The American Debater primarily because the VCA is so small. I’m not sure I follow that logic. And I will point out that the VCA is small compared to some things, but not compared to others. I mean, I’ve got enough soldiers to suggest that, while we can’t necessarily attack Rippin’ full-on, we could do pretty good in a sneak attack, at night, if they forgot to lock the back door on their way out. I’m sure WTF gets much bigger numbers than I do, but that’s because so many people can’t get enough of who’s taking what course from whom at their camp. But above and beyond even that, there are quite a few debaters out there in the country who are served by the problematic Rippin’ to some extent or other but not by any of us bloggers, who represent a rather special niche with collateral interests if not quite convergent opinions. There are thousands of debaters in the country, and a niche publication could be successful on one or two counts, namely, selling advertising and/or selling magazines. All commercial publishing works this way. If someone wants to sell something to the audience being reached, they pay the publication for advertising space. If someone likes the content being published, they buy the publication. Sometimes you make all your money on one side, sometimes you make it all on the other, but usually you make it on a combination of the two. This model works for print, and versions of it are being adopted by web-based publishers. Of course, on the extreme ends are books, which are all content and no ads, and the Pennysaver, which is all ads and no content. Anyhow, I trust that the TAD folks have been working on their marketing plan, and aren’t simply walking off the publishing plank, so to speak. As for Uninonymous Rob’s suggestion that those of his recently graduated ilk ought to be courted by the publication, mebbe, mebbe not. The market would appear to be people in the game, not people who used to be in the game. Focused marketing is very important for a publication, especially starting out. Debating debaters looks like a good start; anyone else would come later. Of course, TAD can correct me if I’m wrong on this.
I made the mistake of going into a pretty good bookstore last night, and emerged weighted down and way less flush. A book I didn’t buy that they had was Moral Clarity, because I was already too far committed to other stuff, but I thumbed through it and it looked great. In the next Amazon order, probably. I’m enjoying The First Word immensely, but I do have to admit that as much as I enjoy theories of linguistics, lately my mind has been circling a lot around issues of morality. The concept of right and wrong, of ethical action, keeps taking me deeper and deeper into issues of epistemology and ontology where I don’t particularly want to go, but at the point where you begin defining terms, i.e., Point A, it’s hard to get around the subjectivity of existence. Nevertheless, if you wish to outline moral imperatives of any sort, no matter how minor, then that subjectivity must be gotten around. The relativistic universe is a difficult one to navigate. I may start writing some of this stuff up, possibly in aid of a podcast. We’ll see.
I made the mistake of going into a pretty good bookstore last night, and emerged weighted down and way less flush. A book I didn’t buy that they had was Moral Clarity, because I was already too far committed to other stuff, but I thumbed through it and it looked great. In the next Amazon order, probably. I’m enjoying The First Word immensely, but I do have to admit that as much as I enjoy theories of linguistics, lately my mind has been circling a lot around issues of morality. The concept of right and wrong, of ethical action, keeps taking me deeper and deeper into issues of epistemology and ontology where I don’t particularly want to go, but at the point where you begin defining terms, i.e., Point A, it’s hard to get around the subjectivity of existence. Nevertheless, if you wish to outline moral imperatives of any sort, no matter how minor, then that subjectivity must be gotten around. The relativistic universe is a difficult one to navigate. I may start writing some of this stuff up, possibly in aid of a podcast. We’ll see.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Business as unusual; tabroom.com follies; goodbye Loquitur, hello Big Jake
I feel as if we have fallen into the rabbit hole and I didn’t even know we were chasing the rabbit. Things at the Day Job are, to put it mildly, complex, and will be for the foreseeable future, meaning that I go home and sort of veg out, which for me translates into watching an hour of something or other on TV and then mindlessly adding album art (I just did the Hs) to my iPod (which I must do manually because I do not believe it is John Lennon but Lennon, John, because who the hell looks for artist by first name other than Jobs, Steve?) while culling Feed articles and sussing Wordscraper, where HoraceMan, TSWAS, and I already have about 10,000 points and we’ve only played one word each.
I seem to have a rather small but comfortable group heading to the Pups, registration for which begins next week, so time is running out. I’ve already been on tabroom.com this season, setting up the first-timers’ event at Scientology High School. Last year we ran JV divisions in addition to first-timers’, which I’m sort of reluctant to do again because we’re expecting a pretty big bang for the novice buck doing this event in New York rather than in Westchester. Eliminating anything in a preexisting template on tabroom (I started with last year’s first-timers’) brings you to a failsafe screen only a CP could have created, telling you you’re about to do something idiotic but, hey fella, you’ve been warned. In my case, he’s added an additional message, pretty much telling me that I’m about to end forensics in our time if I proceed with my usual, devil-take-the-hindmost ways. Very clever. This guy needs another night job.
I am saddened that Loquitur is going on hiatus. I can understand the concentrating on the new project, but I hate to see a good old project go by the boards. Maybe they can incorporate the content of Loquitur into the magazine, which would solve the problem. Topic analysis by the very best topic analysts, the ones involved in living the topic, is too good an idea to die an untimely death.
And speaking of podcasts, I have begun taking notes for what I am sure will be a classic. I’ve done Lexington, and I’ve done Yale, neither of which can hold a candle to Big Jake in terms of pure melodrama. If nothing else, what other tournament can claim rights to “Indiana Jones and the Search for O’C’s Hidey-Hole”? Already there has been high drama and low comedy, and so far all we’ve had is pre-registration. Let the games begin!
I seem to have a rather small but comfortable group heading to the Pups, registration for which begins next week, so time is running out. I’ve already been on tabroom.com this season, setting up the first-timers’ event at Scientology High School. Last year we ran JV divisions in addition to first-timers’, which I’m sort of reluctant to do again because we’re expecting a pretty big bang for the novice buck doing this event in New York rather than in Westchester. Eliminating anything in a preexisting template on tabroom (I started with last year’s first-timers’) brings you to a failsafe screen only a CP could have created, telling you you’re about to do something idiotic but, hey fella, you’ve been warned. In my case, he’s added an additional message, pretty much telling me that I’m about to end forensics in our time if I proceed with my usual, devil-take-the-hindmost ways. Very clever. This guy needs another night job.
I am saddened that Loquitur is going on hiatus. I can understand the concentrating on the new project, but I hate to see a good old project go by the boards. Maybe they can incorporate the content of Loquitur into the magazine, which would solve the problem. Topic analysis by the very best topic analysts, the ones involved in living the topic, is too good an idea to die an untimely death.
And speaking of podcasts, I have begun taking notes for what I am sure will be a classic. I’ve done Lexington, and I’ve done Yale, neither of which can hold a candle to Big Jake in terms of pure melodrama. If nothing else, what other tournament can claim rights to “Indiana Jones and the Search for O’C’s Hidey-Hole”? Already there has been high drama and low comedy, and so far all we’ve had is pre-registration. Let the games begin!
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
The American Debater, and other pastimes
Last night I couldn’t get myself to do anything useful aside from downloading some photographs that looked a lot better while I was taking them, but my personal inertia seems not to be shared by others. The debate world is definitely chugging along like gangbusters.
A while ago I heard from Mahesha Subbaraman of Loquitur about a project he was planning, with which he is now going public. His idea is for a magazine, The American Debater, devoted to high school debate, specifically LD and PF, with a mix of articles about topics, tournaments, tactics, etc. There are, after all, quite a few debaters out there, and while he may not get the same numbers we here at the Day Job generate, there is no reason why he can’t make a going concern out of it. He’ll begin with a website, then if that works out, progress to print (although I wonder if he couldn’t perhaps prosper as a website completely). He may be nuts, but he also may be on to something. There’s certainly room for more material for the community. There’s WTF, of course, but they act more as a communications arena than anything else, plus they have a clearly defined commercial aspect as an underpinning (which, I hasten to point out, I believe they handle quite honorably; O’C wouldn’t be one of my best friends in debate if I thought he was some sort of shyster, unless of course he was cutting me in on the take). There’s NFL, but as far as I know no one has yet been able to figure out their website, although I have noticed that when I click for something specific, I often get some random thing that is almost as good; I’d love to have a talk with them about web semiotics/heuristics some day. Then there are a few of us independents (although to be honest, I’m the only one I know of who publishes with any regularity, much to the dismay of the VCA who would be happy to see me take more days off, but then again I’m a logorrheic kind of person, at least in print). And then there’s the whole vast universe of people who are very interested in this very demanding activity who are being served by none of the above, or at least only marginally served. If you’re interested, you should contact MS; he’s still looking to fill positions both of the web design and editorial persuasions. I think he’s looking to go live in the Fall.
And speaking of Rippin’, apparently the Gods of Wisconsin are looking to have people write up topic analyses for the coming season. I opened the email and gaped at it for a second, then closed it and marked it as unread. As the World’s Worst District Chair, I should get some sort of dispensation from this sort of thing, but as an admitted logorrheic, I’ve got no one to blame but myself. Still, I do tend to be about as extended as I can get, since there is in fact a Day Job already, but I’ll think about it. The more people I can confuse with a misreading of a topic, the happier I will be.
A while ago I heard from Mahesha Subbaraman of Loquitur about a project he was planning, with which he is now going public. His idea is for a magazine, The American Debater, devoted to high school debate, specifically LD and PF, with a mix of articles about topics, tournaments, tactics, etc. There are, after all, quite a few debaters out there, and while he may not get the same numbers we here at the Day Job generate, there is no reason why he can’t make a going concern out of it. He’ll begin with a website, then if that works out, progress to print (although I wonder if he couldn’t perhaps prosper as a website completely). He may be nuts, but he also may be on to something. There’s certainly room for more material for the community. There’s WTF, of course, but they act more as a communications arena than anything else, plus they have a clearly defined commercial aspect as an underpinning (which, I hasten to point out, I believe they handle quite honorably; O’C wouldn’t be one of my best friends in debate if I thought he was some sort of shyster, unless of course he was cutting me in on the take). There’s NFL, but as far as I know no one has yet been able to figure out their website, although I have noticed that when I click for something specific, I often get some random thing that is almost as good; I’d love to have a talk with them about web semiotics/heuristics some day. Then there are a few of us independents (although to be honest, I’m the only one I know of who publishes with any regularity, much to the dismay of the VCA who would be happy to see me take more days off, but then again I’m a logorrheic kind of person, at least in print). And then there’s the whole vast universe of people who are very interested in this very demanding activity who are being served by none of the above, or at least only marginally served. If you’re interested, you should contact MS; he’s still looking to fill positions both of the web design and editorial persuasions. I think he’s looking to go live in the Fall.
And speaking of Rippin’, apparently the Gods of Wisconsin are looking to have people write up topic analyses for the coming season. I opened the email and gaped at it for a second, then closed it and marked it as unread. As the World’s Worst District Chair, I should get some sort of dispensation from this sort of thing, but as an admitted logorrheic, I’ve got no one to blame but myself. Still, I do tend to be about as extended as I can get, since there is in fact a Day Job already, but I’ll think about it. The more people I can confuse with a misreading of a topic, the happier I will be.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Tick, tock, tick, tock...
Things seem to be happening fast and furious all of a sudden. One minute I’m bemoaning the summer doldrums, and the next minute the Goy is handling half a dozen tournaments and Peanuts is demanding a chez meeting and I’ve signed up a bunch of tentative Sailors for Big Jake and I’m thinking it’s time to update the Bump invite. Whatever happened to summer?
I must say, I am going to miss these debate-free weekends. I get Friday afternoons off, and we’ve been making the most of them, going into Manhattan for this or that, traveling around the ‘burbs soaking up culture. In fact, I’ve soaked up more culture this year than most other years put together, while still playing fairly decent (for me) golf. I am negotiating perhaps getting out of town rather than participating in one of the upcoming Fall MHL events; I might have a chance to visit the Mouse, and that’s sort of hard to pass up, although when we get around to looking at costs we may think differently. Reading about everyone’s abridged summer vacation plans for this year in yesterday’s Times makes me rather thankful that we got our licks in early. Flights are now costing twice what they were in the spring. The NDCA is worrying about the cost of traveling with tubs (at $50 a pop) and thinking, quite appropriately, that the time has come for the total acceptance of polician PCs. Sure, one can cheat, but you don’t need a PC to cheat. They just enable PC cheating. I would rather live in a world where our expectation of high school debate teams is a general sense of honorableness rather than a general sense of malicious ambition at all costs, and I don’t think I’m far wrong in that expectation, or far different from most other people. For that matter, I don’t even think it would be terrible if, at some future date, accessing data beyond the immediate computer (short of asking your coach, now what?) would be all that terrible, given the world debaters live in. The legendary/mythical cloud does make one wonder where we are going with knowledge per se: the epistemology of the plugged-in universe, so to speak. In any case, put the higher costs of travel into the mix with the likelihood of budget cutbacks, and a lot of people are going to be a lot closer to home in the coming year. Fortunately for the northeast, we have plenty of debate already at all levels, so provided we don’t lose funding completely in a program, we’re okay. For other more isolated areas, it won’t be so easy to survive. Lowering fees sounds good on paper, but when most of your fees go to progressively higher priced custodians and food-service outlets and hired judges, there’s just so much you can do. But, I guess we will muddle through, one way or the other. We always have.
I must say, I am going to miss these debate-free weekends. I get Friday afternoons off, and we’ve been making the most of them, going into Manhattan for this or that, traveling around the ‘burbs soaking up culture. In fact, I’ve soaked up more culture this year than most other years put together, while still playing fairly decent (for me) golf. I am negotiating perhaps getting out of town rather than participating in one of the upcoming Fall MHL events; I might have a chance to visit the Mouse, and that’s sort of hard to pass up, although when we get around to looking at costs we may think differently. Reading about everyone’s abridged summer vacation plans for this year in yesterday’s Times makes me rather thankful that we got our licks in early. Flights are now costing twice what they were in the spring. The NDCA is worrying about the cost of traveling with tubs (at $50 a pop) and thinking, quite appropriately, that the time has come for the total acceptance of polician PCs. Sure, one can cheat, but you don’t need a PC to cheat. They just enable PC cheating. I would rather live in a world where our expectation of high school debate teams is a general sense of honorableness rather than a general sense of malicious ambition at all costs, and I don’t think I’m far wrong in that expectation, or far different from most other people. For that matter, I don’t even think it would be terrible if, at some future date, accessing data beyond the immediate computer (short of asking your coach, now what?) would be all that terrible, given the world debaters live in. The legendary/mythical cloud does make one wonder where we are going with knowledge per se: the epistemology of the plugged-in universe, so to speak. In any case, put the higher costs of travel into the mix with the likelihood of budget cutbacks, and a lot of people are going to be a lot closer to home in the coming year. Fortunately for the northeast, we have plenty of debate already at all levels, so provided we don’t lose funding completely in a program, we’re okay. For other more isolated areas, it won’t be so easy to survive. Lowering fees sounds good on paper, but when most of your fees go to progressively higher priced custodians and food-service outlets and hired judges, there’s just so much you can do. But, I guess we will muddle through, one way or the other. We always have.
Friday, August 01, 2008
The first weekend in August and there's still plenty of summer left. Good or bad?
The Sailors wish to field a Pfffft team they are calling PB&J. Students of the breed know well that this in inaccurate and will not do. Peanut Butter and Termite, however, is perfectly acceptable. Look for PB&T at a tournament near you!
I’ve decided not to register for Big Jake. Who needs the aggro? I think I’ll spend that weekend spelunking. Of course, by doing so I run the risk of bumping into O’C in his hidey hole. Some things you just can’t escape.
I do love the way people are announcing their registrations earlier and earlier. Obviously Jake isn’t till the end of October, so how does one seriously register for it with anything other than dummy names (except for Peanut Butter and Termite, which are real names)? Lakeland has beat O’C at his own game, sending their invite through the NDCA listserver yesterday, for a tournament the end of February. Maybe it’s just that people are getting antsy, thinking about the new season. That I can understand, especially as, night after night, I move through the curriculum. Last night I got to the part where I break it to the newbies that they have to wear suits to tournaments and look like little lawyers. Most of these people haven’t worn a suit ever in their lives, unless they belong to a family of undertakers, and even there I think the casual look has taken over; I can imagine a funeral director’s memoir entitled The Pallbearer Wore Cargo Shorts. Or homey pants, those droopy things that are supposed to be urban chic but are mostly just updates of the Dead End kids. Whatever. I know: you don’t read this blog for fashion tips. (Although you should, but we just won’t go there: can I interest you in yet another pair of L. L. Bean chinos?)
Last weekend we visited Kykuit, the estate of the Rocky Fellows a little south of HenHudLand. Good old Nelson collected enough sculpture to rank this joint as high as any I’ve seen in that category: you name it, you’ll see it on the grounds somewhere. Mostly modern stuff, of course, in keeping with Nellie’s main interest, although there are a few older pieces. Plus there were paintings, tapestries, and the main house itself. The tour was not cheap, and I’m probably not alone in thinking that they should have at least handed out memorial dimes at the end of it. This weekend we’re off to MOMA to see the prefab houses and the Dali exhibit, including Destino, his never-released Disney collaboration. Dali was quite the star in his day, and there’s a great book on his 1939 World’s Fair exhibit that paints him as an extremely sought-after celebrity. Of course his best-known film work is Un chien andalou, but there’s also the great dream sequence in Spellbound, not to mention all the Dali-inspired work that MGM used to pump out without his participation. Surrealism does have its charms… We may also head down to the Bronx to see Henry Moore at the botanical gardens. And grab some grub on Arthur Avenue. You know something? I’m starting to enjoy this summer more and more. This must be what normal people do when they’re not off gallivanting to tournaments every weekend. If you happen to know any normal people, would you ask them for me?
I’ve decided not to register for Big Jake. Who needs the aggro? I think I’ll spend that weekend spelunking. Of course, by doing so I run the risk of bumping into O’C in his hidey hole. Some things you just can’t escape.
I do love the way people are announcing their registrations earlier and earlier. Obviously Jake isn’t till the end of October, so how does one seriously register for it with anything other than dummy names (except for Peanut Butter and Termite, which are real names)? Lakeland has beat O’C at his own game, sending their invite through the NDCA listserver yesterday, for a tournament the end of February. Maybe it’s just that people are getting antsy, thinking about the new season. That I can understand, especially as, night after night, I move through the curriculum. Last night I got to the part where I break it to the newbies that they have to wear suits to tournaments and look like little lawyers. Most of these people haven’t worn a suit ever in their lives, unless they belong to a family of undertakers, and even there I think the casual look has taken over; I can imagine a funeral director’s memoir entitled The Pallbearer Wore Cargo Shorts. Or homey pants, those droopy things that are supposed to be urban chic but are mostly just updates of the Dead End kids. Whatever. I know: you don’t read this blog for fashion tips. (Although you should, but we just won’t go there: can I interest you in yet another pair of L. L. Bean chinos?)
Last weekend we visited Kykuit, the estate of the Rocky Fellows a little south of HenHudLand. Good old Nelson collected enough sculpture to rank this joint as high as any I’ve seen in that category: you name it, you’ll see it on the grounds somewhere. Mostly modern stuff, of course, in keeping with Nellie’s main interest, although there are a few older pieces. Plus there were paintings, tapestries, and the main house itself. The tour was not cheap, and I’m probably not alone in thinking that they should have at least handed out memorial dimes at the end of it. This weekend we’re off to MOMA to see the prefab houses and the Dali exhibit, including Destino, his never-released Disney collaboration. Dali was quite the star in his day, and there’s a great book on his 1939 World’s Fair exhibit that paints him as an extremely sought-after celebrity. Of course his best-known film work is Un chien andalou, but there’s also the great dream sequence in Spellbound, not to mention all the Dali-inspired work that MGM used to pump out without his participation. Surrealism does have its charms… We may also head down to the Bronx to see Henry Moore at the botanical gardens. And grab some grub on Arthur Avenue. You know something? I’m starting to enjoy this summer more and more. This must be what normal people do when they’re not off gallivanting to tournaments every weekend. If you happen to know any normal people, would you ask them for me?
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