I Thought This Era Had Come and Gone May 31, 2009

A prominent US abortion doctor has been shot dead at a church in Wichita, in his home state of Kansas.

Sixty-seven year-old George Tiller was killed just after 1000 (1500 GMT) at the Reformation Lutheran Church.

Dr Tiller – one of the few US doctors who performed so-called late-term abortions – had been a long-time target of anti-abortionists. His clinic had often been the site of demonstrations, and he was shot and wounded by an assailant 16 years ago.

Kansas is my home state (though you’ll rarely hear me admit it). My teen years were heavily tinted by the anti-choice violence that went on there at the time. But I admit, I was feeling pretty carefree about it all by now; feeling like those were the old days. And I bet most of my fellow pro-choice Kansans (not that there are many of us) were too. What sad news.

Does having daughters make parents more liberal? May 31, 2009

So research done in England suggests:

Having daughters rather than sons, or vice versa, can change a father’s politics.

That is the conclusion of British researchers Andrew Oswald, of the University of Warwick and Cornell University, and Nattavudh Pawdthavee, of the University of York.

… Oswald told the Telegraph newspaper this past weekend that the research “provides evidence that daughters make people more left-wing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more right-wing.”

It sounds good to me, but why would that happen?  Here’s what Oswald told the Telegraph:

Professor Oswald said that having daughters made men “gradually shift their political stance and become more sympathetic to the ‘female’ desire for a … larger amount for the public good”.

“They become more Left-wing. Similarly, a mother with sons becomes sympathetic to the ‘male’ case for lower taxes and a smaller supply of public goods,” he said.

Hmmmmmmm.  Makes it sound as thought we’ve got sex-related characterisitic dispositions that easily become political.   Should this just go along with the research showing that women have a preference for pink?

Anyone For an M&S boycott? May 31, 2009

Update: The commenters have convinced me that the word ‘boycott’ above should be replaced with ‘rant’. I guess all the marking put me in a bad and intolerant mood. (That and the sense of betrayal: they *do* have lovely fair trade T-shirts.)

Marks and Spencer Chair Stuart Rose:

He said: “Apart from the fact that you’ve got more equality than you ever can deal with, the fact of the matter is that you’ve got real democracy and there are really no glass ceilings, despite the fact that some of you moan about it all the time….He told the newspaper: “I mean, what else do you want to do, for God’s sake? Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you haven’t got?…He rejected the suggestion that working mothers face greater challenges in the workplace.
“Well, childbirth is a biological fact. Women have children; I can’t help that,” he said.
“But I know lots of women who’ve got two or three kids – Nicola Horlick is a good example – there are many girls in here who’ve got two kids who come to work.”

For more, see here. Thanks, Nicola!

I mean, is a recession REALLY a good time to insult half of your customer base?

The Sunday Cat loves Maru: Addition May 30, 2009

 Fortunately, there  are smaller boxes:

Thanks, PJ!

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Addition:  check out Maru’s blog at:  http://sisinmaru.blog17.fc2.com/

Clicking on the dates at the left can give you a lot of Maru pictures.  Thanks again, Maru Fan.

Even Philosophers like facts May 30, 2009

and some are particularly relevant and interesting to one of the important issues of the day.  So have a look at Tom Goldstein’s valuable analysis of ‘the full data set” of Judge Sotomayor’s votes during her 11 years on the court of appeals.  His conclusion at the SCOTUS Blog:

In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times.  Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred.  (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.)  She particulated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims.  Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

Accompanying the article are a number of great links.  The Blog itself is clearly going to be a voice of sanity in the weeks to come.

Sotomayor and gender May 30, 2009

Some nice analysis by Shira Tarrant here and Female Science Professor here. But you won’t need much analysis to see what’s going on with G Gordon Liddy’s rants about her possible menstruation. Yes, menstruation. (Thanks, Amy!)

Take a break from grading and remind yourself of how wonderful… May 29, 2009

students can be:

And here we are keeping them idle enough to notice and care about the squirrels.

David Brooks has it almost right: Sotomayor again May 29, 2009

David Brooks, who frequently appears as a representative of conservative views,  picks up on the idea that a judge needs empathy.  His argument is politically important and it is also balanced.  One conclusion he reaches about the need for a judge’s self-knowledge of her decision making has an almost tragic air about it, since it appears that Sotomayor’s articulations of her self-knowledge are being used against her.  (For the articulation, see this post and the discussions.)

Nonetheless, there’s a problem with the core of what he says.  Let’s look at it.

He starts with an important point:

The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood. It’s based on the falsehood that this is a nation of laws, not men; that in rendering decisions, disembodied, objective judges are able to put aside emotion and unruly passion and issue opinions on the basis of pure reason.

While the falsehood is useful generally, there’s a danger that it could be employed to derail Obama’s current nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.  So it’s important to see how it is false.  Here’s Brooks’ account:

It is incoherent to say that a judge should base an opinion on reason and not emotion because emotions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain.

People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don’t know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.

Unfortunately, as Brooks should know, given the background reading his recent articles indicate, this isn’t right.  One can spend hours grading logic tests; while emotions may be involved in one’s struggle to stay focused – or even just to stay at one’s desk – you don’t need emotions to decide for you what is and what is not permitted according to a rule of logic.  As Damasio in his Descartes Error points out, someone who is incapable of living a wise practical life because his emotions and reason do not work together can nonetheless do all sorts of calculating correctly.  It is creative and/or practical decisions that are, then, according to Damasio and other researchers, in need of the evaluing guide of the emotions. 

Why, then, is the law more like creative  or practical or moral decision making – at least when we understand the latter according to theorists that allow room for emotion – than logic?  There are no doubt a number of reasons for this; among other things, it is hard to halt the decision process if one doesn’t have a sense of a good outcome.   This may be part of what Brooks has in mind when he says:

The mind tries on different solutions to see if they fit. Ideas and insights bubble up from some hidden layer of intuitions and heuristics. Sometimes you feel yourself getting closer to a conclusion, and sometimes you feel yourself getting farther away. The emotions serve as guidance signals, like from a GPS, as you feel your way toward a solution.

Another was explored explicitly in a post below:  All sorts of human concepts don’t have the precise definitions that allow a simple and dispassionate “yes or no” test for their application.  The comments on that post are well on their way to establishing we can’t even easily define “bachelor.”   Important legal terms like “cruel and unusual” have much  less chance of such definitions.

Brooks also maintains:

Sonia Sotomayor will be a good justice if she can empathize with the many types of people and actions involved in a case, but a bad justice if she can only empathize with one type, one ethnic group or one social class.

Lastly, Brooks emphasizes how important it is to be aware of the conflicting demands on one’s decisions and of the importance of knowing self-restraint.  These last two points could well make one quite sad, for we now have a Chief Justice who officially regards  himself as a totally disengaged observer, but whose decisions almost entirely side with powerful vested interests.  And we have a wonderful nominee whom many would like to derail in part because of her awareness that a judge cannot really be so disengaged.

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We’ve had a series of posts on Sotomayor that readers might want to be aware of.

Odd Bedfellows May 29, 2009

Lawyers Olson and Boies represented opposite opinions on the  2000 US presidential election.  But they are allies now on the subject of gay marriage. 

 

 

This is a soothing video to watch. 

The Need for Rape-Free Gadgets May 29, 2009

This is really important:

In the Congo, explains Eve Ensler, militias use rape to fracture communities and the threat of sexual violence to coerce slave labor to mine coltan (a colloquial name for columbite-tantalite ore) which is used to produce capacitors that power cell phones, iPods, and other gadgets.
“We create those atrocities through our consumption,” says Ensler.
She is proposing that electronics manufacturers and their customers—us—began to concern themselves with the notion of “Rape-Free” products in which the raw, mineral components of consumer electronics are traced back to sources that can be verified to have procured them ethically. (She allows that “Rape-Free” is probably not a moniker that would be comfortable plastered on boxes and signs.)

Thanks, Mr Jender.

The impartial Chief Justice, on the other hand May 28, 2009

There’s a persistent claim in the media and by pundits that the law is a set of statements from which we can impartially, if we are well-schooled and self-controlled, draw conclusions that do not in any way involve our personal beliefs and values.  Sotomayor, of course, being a woman, may not be the right sort of logic machine. 

In fact, applying the law involves both logic and something like imagination.  Interestingly, the record of the present Chief Justice reveals the role of the two in judicial decision making.

From Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

What were some of the decisions of his court that involve decisions not logically following from the law?  Well, there was the Seattle case; Roberts ruled against precedent that any consideration of race counts against equal protection.  That is, the Seattle school board’s attempt at integration was as illegal as attempts at segregation. 

In the most famous passage so far of his tenure as Chief Justice, Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Of course, history’s against him on that one, but in any case his ‘principle’ – that stopping integration will stop segregation – is a political and psychological conjecture, at best.  And in the same term:

the Justices overturned a ninety-six-year-old precedent in antitrust law and thus made it harder to prove collusion by corporations. Also that year they upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, in Kennedy’s opinion, even though the Court had rejected a nearly identical law just seven years earlier. [In] the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear, brought by a sympathetic grandmother who had been paid far less than men doing the same work at the tire company … the conservative majority, in an opinion by Alito, imposed seemingly insurmountable new burdens on plaintiffs in employment-discrimination lawsuits.

And also:

Roberts has been a consistent supporter of death sentences, and he wrote the Court’s opinion holding that lethal injection does not amount to the sort of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

Does this all just show that the court is packed with people who can’t follow logic?  Not exactly; what it tells us instead is that we cannot have a set of principles for right action from which we can logically deduce all the answers we need.    Human concepts do not work that way. 

Philosophers, who as a field have failed after centuries and centuries of trying to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for just about anything, should know this.  The best discussion of it that I know of can be found in Mark Johnson’s book, Moral Imagination.   Because of our concepts and the ways we think, justices need to apply the law in ways that go beyond simple deductions.  What forms their moral imaginations is  extremely important.  As Obama has seen.  And in fact as Bush may have realized also.

Sotomayor and Standpoint Theory May 28, 2009

Here’s a quote from Sonia Sotomayor:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

The right-wing is of course up in arms, accusing her of racism. Me, I was busy thinking “WTF? She’s a standpoint theorist? Really? That’s fascinating!”

Further research into the context of her remarks shoots down the “she’s a racist” theory, but leaves intact the possibility that she’s a standpoint theorist, at least of the sort who holds that members of certain groups may have special insights into particular issues. (Though you don’t have to be a standpoint theorist to think that.)

Those words came as part of a discussion about the importance of judicial diversity in determining race and sex discrimination cases, but they have been widely reproduced out of context.

Sonia Sotomayor May 28, 2009

I’ve been so swamped with marking, I haven’t even had time to mention the big news: Sonia Sotomayor has been nominated to the US Supreme Court! Of course, it didn’t take long for veiled and not-so-veiled racist commentaries to start. (I think I’m especially impressed by the claim that she is a Latina single mother, despite having no children at all.) Today, however, something more interesting came out: some uncertainty about her views on reproductive rights. She hasn’t explicitly ruled on the Roe V Wade reasoning, and the worries stem from these cases:

1. In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”

2. In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.

3.In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

And in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

(2) seems like the right ruling if you care about police using excessive force, which you should. (3) are clearly the right rulings if you care about reproductive rights (even the forced childbearing advocates interviewed for the article realise that this is what pro-choice person would say). Which leaves only (1) to worry about– and it may well be that the higher court ruling made this the only judgment possible. Do any of you know more about (1) which would make this more worrying?

Survey on why people move between, or leave, academic jobs May 26, 2009

This call for survey participants came to my attention – it seems to be asking interesting and important questions:

Greetings,
We are looking for participants for a study that we are conducting at Rice University. Essentially, we are trying to identify ANY faculty who have voluntarily left one academic job for another job (either academic or nonacademic).

Who fits in this criteria?
• Any faculty member who was in an academic position but left academics altogether.
• Any faculty member who left a research institution for a teaching institution.
• Any faculty member who left a teaching institution for a research university.
• Any faculty member who left a teaching or research university to go to a different and/or comparable university.

Why are we trying to identify these participants?
We are currently conducting a study at Rice University that examines patterns and trends in faculty turnover. This research is part of the ADVANCE grant and we are trying to examine, in particular, if there may be differences in the reasons that men and women leave academic institutions. Because we are trying to understand the full spectrum of faculty turnover we are interested in those who left for completely personal (non-university related) reasons as well as those who left for organizational reasons.

What can you do to help?
If you fit the criteria listed above, please consider participating in this survey. The survey takes 15-20 minutes to complete and is located at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=AZLp0HbOdJSY97nrZ6pePA_3d_3d  The survey has been approved by Rice University’s Institutional Review Board and if you have any questions about it, you are welcome to email the study director (Mikki Hebl) at hebl at rice dot edu

Credit Where It’s Due May 26, 2009

Recently, we’ve mentioned plenty of instances of conferences where, at first glance, you’d get the impression that only male philosophers work in that area. Which is what makes it all the more satisfying to draw attention to this up-coming workshop where half of the contributers are women, and the topic is in the kind of area that we might ordinarily think is male-heavy. I don’t know if this is intentional, but it seems to good to be accidental. I recall that its organiser, Dan Lopez de Sa, has commented here in the past and suspect he’ s paid some attention to this issue. So, credit where it’s due. Bravo!

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Workshop on Vagueness and Metaphysics, Barcelona, 25-26 June 2009

Provisional Program

Thursday 25 June

10.00-11.30 Iris Einheuser (Duke): ‘Vague Objects: A Conceptualist Account’

12.00-13.30 Dan Korman (Illinois): ‘Restricted Composition without Sharp Cut-Offs’

15.00-16.30 Elizabeth Barnes (Leeds): TBA

17.00-18.30 Benjamin Schnieder (Phlox): ‘Reasoning with ‘Because”

Friday 26 June

10.00-11.30 David Barnett (Colorado): ‘Vague Entailment’

12.00-13.30 Delia Graff Fara (Princeton): ‘Would Interests have Agents?’

15.00-16.30 Ofra Magidor (Oxford): ‘Strict Finitism and the Sorites Paradox’

17.00-18.30 Ross Cameron (Leeds): ‘Truth-Making and Determinacy-Making’

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Good, bad and disgusting news, w/ update May 25, 2009

The good news is that Oxford elected Ruth Padel the Oxford Professor of Poetry, thus making her the first woman ever to hold the post.

The bad news is that she  dished her rival for the post by alerting some journalists to his reputation for sexual harassment.

And the disgusting news (in a possibly UK use of  ‘disgusting’) is what people are saying about the import of the allegations; e.g., Clive James’ remark:

“She would be wise to recuse herself and ask for the whole thing to begin again. Derek Walcott is unlikely to be a menace to young women at the age of 75, but he would have delivered an extremely good series of lectures.”

Among the allegations against Walcott:

The dossier [circulated in Oxford before the voting] included pages from a 1984 book, The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus by Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, which details the sexual harassment claim made by a Harvard student against Walcott. The student claimed Walcott took her for an after-class coffee, saying to her: “I don’t want to talk about poetry,” and going on to proposition her.

The dossier also included a 1996 allegation by Nicole Niemi, a member of Wal­cott’s creative writing class at Boston University. Niemi sued Walcott for alleged sexual harassment and “offensive sexual physical contact”, demanding $500,000. They reportedly settled out of court.

What really is going on when we say that if one is getting too old to harass students, then past incidents are irrelevant to one’s holding such a prestigious appointment?  And has James not heard of dirty old men?

It would, of course, be quite different if the charges of harassment were  denied, but allowing them to be possibly right but no longer relevant  is, well, something like disgusting.  Or at  least it invites the question of how one  is thinking of sexual harassment.  Allegations of child abuse don’t fade away when one is no longer  in contact with children; stealing from friends remains a blot even if one is no longer nimble enough to cover one’s traces.    Harassment, however, leaves one’s character in tact  – at least if  one forswears viagra? 

Clearly, it’s late and I should quit with that last thought!

UPDATE:  R. Padel has resigned the professorship.  See comments 13 and 14 below for lnks.

The Sunday Anteater May 24, 2009

I can’t figure out how to embed this video! But anyway, here is a new friend for the Sunday Cat: a Sunday Baby Anteater. Aw.

Isn’t that disgusting! May 23, 2009

Disgust and its Disorders, by Olatunji and McKay, arrived yesterday and nearly immediately I received answers to two puzzles I had, even though the puzzles didn’t motivate my getting the book.

The  answers came with a list of national variations in disgust elicitors; that is, in a list of things people in various countries find strongly disgusting.  I’d love to know what our readers would say about these.

Somethings are  found disgusting in all countries; e.g., feces.  But the distinctive ones that drew my attention were these:

Netherlands:  cats, dogs, drug users (!)

United Kingdom:  drunks, rude people

So first of all, I had noticed that the few men I know from Holland can speak of cats the way many people speak of rats.  I could not understand why these actually quite nice people did that, and now I guess I can say that it’s a cultural thing.

Another thing I could not understand was the use in England by liberal educated people of the term “disgusting” to describe reasonably clean individuals.  Perhaps it’s understandable that one might find someone covered in bodily excretions disgusting, but a rude student?  I thought perhaps it was one of those odd terms that start to be used in a different context to mean something else, like ‘pitiful’ to mean ‘inadequate’ (which might be  more an extended use than a metaphor?).  But it seems that taking the words literally might be quite right:  In the UK, rude people may be found  literally disgusting.

So what do you think? 

And now an anecdote from a  scene in Whole Foods.  Personae: me with  Tarry in a cat carrier in my cart; curious woman peering at him.  Me:  please do look closer if you want.  He’s a snow-shoe.  She: O!  A snow-shoe rat?

Tarry and I thought she was rude and disgusting.

Bad Gender Science in the News May 23, 2009

In today’s guardian, Ben Goldacre, author of the column ‘Bad Science’ reminds us, as usual, to think critically about medical stories in the news. In particular today, he explains the bad science behind two recent sex-specific news stories: “Man Flu is not a Myth: female hormones give women stronger immune systems” (Daily Mail and BBC) and “Smarter Girls have Far Better Sex Lives” (Sun, Mirror, Mail). Both of these stories are apparently covered this week on the NHS’s Choices website, and are, to put it briefly, complete rubbish. Goldacre reminds us

People are interested in finding out about this stuff, for their own health and interest, yet they are routinely fed nonsense by the media. When you mention the web, journalists pretend it’s full of bloggers making stuff up. In reality, there are medical research charities, academics, universities’ press releases, NHS Choices, etc. These organisations might want to think more confidently: with figures like 6 million visitors a month, they are now credible publishers, on a subject where information matters.

*Update: I’ve just realised that the “Behind the Headlines” section of the NHS Choices web site is the bit that Goldacre is talking about. It looks excellent. Here’s a link directly to it.

Pole Fitness Classes? May 23, 2009

Reader Seagull has sent us this very interesting query:

A group of academics sent a letter to their university’s vice chancellor objecting to the presence of “pole fitness” classes being offered to staff and students in the campus sports centre. Our argument was that a university campus is not an appropriate place for a “fitness” activity which is an offshoot of the sex industry and a manifestation of the mainstreaming of raunch culture which objectifies women. We argued that we had a right to a working environment which enshrined respect for women, and we felt the university’s reputation could be damaged if the press got wind of the fact that we offer courses in pole dancing.

We received a reply from the university’s management which argued that there is nothing remotely sexual about “pole fitness” which is an entirely legitimate and beneficial exercise activity. This was accompanied by considerable documentation from various national fitness and exercise organisations which sang the praises of this wholesome health-benefitting activity which was so far removed from its sleazy pole-dancing roots that our suggestion that it might not be appropriate caused much hurt and incredulity among its practitioners. The most disturbing aspect of the response was the utter inability of the university management and the fitness organisations to understand our concerns about the promotion of raunch culture on campus.

We would therefore be really interested in this blog’s readership’s views on this, specifically,

1. How widespread is “pole-fitness” and other manifestations of raunch culture on university campuses, and how widely does it receive such strong endorsement from management, sporting bodies and fitness organisations?

2. Has anyone else tried to raise concerns about this, and if so, what was the outcome?

3. Does anyone have any strategies for how we could effectively challenge the mainstreaming of raunch culture?

4. Can anyone point us to academic studies or data that could help us show our university why raunch culture of this kind is harmful to women?

5. Finally, is there any point in fighting this fight? Perhaps “pole fitness” has become so mainstream that challenging it is futile and harms the feminist movement/s my making us look like strident old-fashioned harridans out of touch with the modern world?