More horrible natural disasters, in Chile and likely more to come from the tsunamis. We know some of our readers are in Chile, and we’re thinking of you. (If you’re able, let us know how you’re doing.) One place you can go to make a donation is the Red Cross website. (Thanks, JJ.)
Admirable Goal, Unfortunate Side-Effect – What to Think? February 28, 2010
A reader contacted us recently to ask for help in thinking through a quandary: what to think, how to feel about an institutional policy that has good goals/intentions, but happens, because of other factors (social, economic, etc), to be gender-imbalanced in practice. I think it’s a good thing to think about, because I think it actually comes up a lot in academia (and outside)– evening seminars that are followed by dinners are great for departmental cohesion and free exchange of ideas, for example, but surely the women in the department are going to be at least slightly less able to participate. Another example comes from the reader I mentioned:
The College is located in a region where homes are very expensive, and thus most faculty are unable to afford to buy houses. The College wants faculty to live close to campus so as to be better able to participate in the life of the College (and let’s just assume this is a worthwhile goal, which I think it is). But the College is also located a significant commute away from any urban centers where non-academic jobs are likely to be, and so anyone with a partner who has a non-academic job will find it difficult to live near campus. As a matter of fact, a much higher percentage of the women faculty are in this situation than the men faculty. The College is now exploring a housing policy that will help faculty achieve home ownership by providing them a significant financial benefit when
they buy houses, but only if they buy within a tight radius to the College. Many of the women faculty, who are in “split commute” situations, live well outside this radius in areas where housing in equally if not more expensive. (Expanding the radius slightly, even doubling it, won’t really make a difference.) So this significant financial benefit will end up being non gender-neutral.
So, what do we think? What ought we think? And more to the point, I suppose: What ought we do?
‘Hook-up culture’ isn’t the problem February 27, 2010
writes the ever-awesome Kate Harding.
From where I’m sitting, the problem that needs solving isn’t hook-up culture, but the intense pressure on girls and women to focus on getting and keeping a guy, rather than on getting and keeping whatever they want.
And along the way, she provides some excellent examples of what Langton calls ‘locutionary silencing’: girls and young women failing to say what they want, or to ask what their partners as individuals want (having read all those articles telling them what “boys/men” want). Which, by the way, also leads to some locutionary silencing of the boys/men, whose desires are assumed to be only for beer, steak and cheap sex. (Or whatever.)
CFPL Origin(s) of Design in Nature February 26, 2010
Gordon, R., L. Stillwaggon Swan & J. Seckbach, Eds. (2011). Origin(s) of Design in Nature.
Dordrecht, Springer.Deadline: 10 September 2010
Abstract: There is a large gap in our understanding of how organisms create themselves. There is also much to learn about how mindedness arose in some of these organisms through evolution. We are eager to identify fruitful ways of framing a discussion informed by
both science and philosophy that will shed light on the questions of design in living
systems. Specific questions include: How does the genotype produce the phenotype?
What is the role of the environment, including the physics of the universe, in this
process? How does the development process change over time, leading to the evolution
of organisms? Which natural processes or pressures led to the development of cognitive
functions in some of these organisms? We intend to take a fresh and interdisciplinary
look at the science of the origins of life, design, and mind in evolution, the source of so
much conflict and confusion impacting the public.
If you’re interested, or want to learn more, contact Liz Stillwaggon Swan,liz.swan AT ucdenver.edu.
Psychological violence a crime in France February 26, 2010
Reports here and discussion (in French) here on the new law passed in France, which identifies psychological violence as a criminal offence:
Politicians from the left and right supported the passing of a law which singles out “repeated” verbal actions intended to hurt the victim’s rights and dignity or their physical or mental health. As well as a jail sentence, offenders could be ordered to pay a fine of up to €75,000 (£66,600).
When I first heard about this (on the BBC world service news show last night) there was criticism of this law as ‘empty law making’ – critics claimed that it would be hard to in fact prosecute and get convictions, and the law was likely therefore to be ineffective.
Even if so, it didn’t seem to me to be empty law making – such a law could help reinforce that such psychologically abusive forms of behaviour are unacceptable, or might help individuals subject to such abuse feel reasonable in seeking help…
I also thought there were some philosophically interesting/troubling parts to the law (as it is reported). Why the focus on what the perpetrator in fact intends, rather than on what effects could be reasonably forseen? Why ‘repeated’ verbal actions – could not a one off insult or threat be seriously damaging? Why only verbal actions – might gestures or other behaviour be psychologically abusive?
Any thoughts…?
Hey, what about WOMEN’S intuition? With Update February 25, 2010
Another one for the Gendered Conference Campaign. Sigh. (Thanks, FEAST-L!)
Conference Announcement
Intuition, theory, and anti-theory in ethics
Edinburgh, July 3-4 2010Registrations are now open for this conference. Our speakers are:
Talbot Brewer (University of Virginia)
John Cottingham (University of Reading)
Jonathan Dancy (University of Reading/ Texas)
Brad Hooker (University of Reading)
Edward Harcourt (Keble College, Oxford)
James Lenman (University of Sheffield)
Tim Mulgan (University of St Andrews)
Michael Ridge (University of Edinburgh) & Sean McKeever (Davidson College, NC, USA)
Tom Sorell (University of Birmingham)
Sergio Tenenbaum (University of Toronto)
Alan Thomas (University of Kent)
UPDATE: Apparently Amelie Rorty has just agreed to speak at the conference.
Tech Support Barbie February 25, 2010
The new doll is decked out in black spangled leggings and a lime-green fitted tunic patterned with binary code, worn under a slinky waistcoat, with saddle-stitching detail. The ensemble is topped off with the requisite hot-pink accessories: glasses, watch and shoes. To emphasise her innate “techiness” she carries a pink laptop and sports a Bluetooth headset.
No word yet on where the rest of us can get lime-green fitted tunics patterned with binary code. So disappointed.
Protect Academic Free Speech February 25, 2010
Alexander Bird writes to Philos-L:
You may be aware that Simon Singh is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association and that the consultant cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst is likewise being sued by American firm NMT Medical for publishing trial results and comments on a product they manufacture. In addition there are other cases, in other academic fields, where publishers (including Cambridge University Press) have pulped books or withdrawn publications as a result of the threat of libel, the expense of which means that it is too costly even to defend indisputably well-evidenced research. (One immediately thinks of Mill’s argument for free speech in this context and the cost both to academia and to the health of individuals of restricting critical comment.)
The threat to academic freedom and to free speech more generally is clear. The issue is all the more important when we, in the UK at least, are being pressured into ensuring that our research has economic and social impact. That such impact will be rewarded in the distribution of QR (research-related university funding) provides a clear incentive to universities to produce research that will be helpful to industry and government, and, correspondingly, to avoid research that is critical of those potential partners in ‘impact’.
Please consider signing this petition. (It’s open to non-UK folks as well.)
Inequality: Our brains don’t like it February 25, 2010
So says a recent study.
the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person’s head, rather than the poor person’s…
“In the experiment, people who started out rich had a stronger reaction to other people getting money than to themselves getting money,” Camerer explains. “In other words, their brains liked it when others got money more than they liked it when they themselves got money.”
I find myself wondering: if this is right, why is it that societies in fact work out the way that they do? There are clearly a huge range of factors that play out in the real world which aren’t present in the experimental setting. Does anyone out there know more about this research?
Childhood mental illness February 25, 2010
This sounds fascinating and important. And the quote below offers a good critical thinking exercise too!
A hundred years ago it was rarely diagnosed in children. In the intervening timespan the number and type of diagnoses have exploded. Moreover, the number and type of treatments have also exploded. The favored treatment usually involves powerful medications with serious side effects. Big Pharma has made a fortune from these medications and is constantly searching for new variations to patent and sell.
I’m talking about childhood cancer, but I bet you thought I was talking about childhood mental illness. After all, everyone in contemporary society knows that childhood mental illness is over-diagnosed, that drugging children is the preferred method for dealing with the normal problems of childhood, and that normal children are being treated with powerful psychotropic medications simply because they are quirky and authentic.
That’s what Judith Warner (author of “Perfect Madness”) thought, too, when she sold a proposal back in 2004 for a book that would explore the over-diagnosis of mental illness and over-treatment of children with psychiatric medication…[S]he came to write a book that is 180 degrees opposite of what she initially intended. It happened because she talked to parents and psychiatrists and looked at what the medical literature actually shows.
Pacific APA hotel boycott February 24, 2010
Workers at the St. Francis in SF have asked that the public boycott the hotel, which is where the upcoming Pacific Division meeting is scheduled. The University of San Francisco has stepped in to provide an alternative location for sessions, and a list of non-boycotted hotels one might choose.
All the needed information is available on this web site. I understand that the last time USF provided such a service, it was very successful. Having visited the campus recently, I can vouch for its being a much more pleasant place than any downtown hotel.
Thanks, JT! And thanks to USF.
Fascinating transformation February 24, 2010
We had an extensive and remarkably cordial discussion with the founder of a Facebook site devoted to jokes about punching women. That site has now been transformed. Those jokes are still there, but rather hard to find– what’s prominent, and all over the place, is anti-domestic-violence messages, and links to relevant resources. They now clearly see it as part of their mission to change the minds of people who think that domestic violence is acceptable.
It’s fine to tell a joke, and it’s fine to be offended by that same joke or to laugh, But it’s not fun to think it’s just a joke. Imagine this, If for every 3 people who joined this group 1 person thought it was real, then there are 10,000 people who believe domestic violence is acceptable, If just one of those people change their mind because of this group, then we’ve done more than ever imagined.
Admittedly, this is a somewhat unusual way to try to get an anti-domestic-violence message out. And many of us probably still have problems with it. But it is an improvement. (And maybe it *is* a good idea to have a site that offers domestic violence jokes then bombards the viewer with anti-domestic-violence messages. It may be a good way of reaching people who might not otherwise be reached.) However, I think it’s worth giving credit where it’s due: to Lekan, who made these alterations, and also to all of you who joined in the discussion that brought this about. (I say this even though I still think the jokes are hate speech. An interesting question is whether, in full context, surrounded by anti-violence messages, they can still be seen as legitimating violence.)
It’s worth noting also, though, that the some of the original site’s fans are not well pleased by this development and have set up a new version. (Thanks, T and Bakka!)
Finally, girls can use microscopes! February 24, 2010
Another in our series on breakthrough products, the microscope set for girls!
On the one hand: Hurrah for girls using microscopes!
On the other hand: Do girls really need a special pink microscope?
On the third hand (I’m special): Anything that helps girls think they can do science is surely good. And maybe the pink microscope helps break down that “science is for boys” stereotype?
(Thanks, Jo!)
Stanley Fish on “secular reasons:” Name the Fallacy February 23, 2010
How should we decide issues about abortion, same sex marriage or the permissibility of abortion? Can we do it without appealing to religion or at least higher powers? Looking at a the recent book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, by Steven Smith, Fish says in today’s NY Times:
It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.
So it looks as though secular thought cannot provide us with any normative assessments. We need religion! Thus:
If public reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?”
So values apparently have to come from something higher or prior to oneself. And, Smith and Fish maintain, one person who clearly saw this was Hume:
Smith does not claim to be saying something wholly new. He cites David Hume’s declaration that by itself “reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question” …
Mind you, what Hume actually said - Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them – doesn’t exactly serve Fish’s purposes. Still, that’s a detail. And, of course, Hume also had very strong words for texts that weren’t truths of reason or matters of fact. Something about burning them. But no matter, we’ve got enough for the conclusion:
But no matter who delivers the lesson, its implication is clear. Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
Anyone want to have a go at evaluating Fish’s argument here? I think I see one large fallacy, and perhaps there are more. What do you think?
And, wouldn’t it be nice if the higher powers that get invoked actually thought women’s decisions about their bodies are at least as sound as those groups of men want to make for them?
Depression, Serotonin, and the Reliability of high-class journalism February 23, 2010
Let me say at the start that I take very seriously the idea that many things we count as “mental disorders” may be in large part the result of society’s finding ways to express pain. There may be a sense in which they are not “real” the way a burn or a burst appendix may be real, for example. But I also think that there may be a very genuine underlying pain and that, more generally, some so-called mental problems can ruin lives. Further, I’m pretty sure some lives have been saved from ruin by medication. I hope this counts as a nuanced take on the issues addressed below.
The topic of discussion is an article in the current New Yorker. It is by Louis Menand, and it is on the current state of psychiatry.
——————————
I take it that the New Yorker is undeniably a high-class publication. Among other things, it is supposed to have really good fact checkers. So what should one say about the following quote?
There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals.
I think Menand’s comment is really difficult to understand, but it seems to imply that the fact that people feel better is not indicated by the scientific evidence. Well, that’s not the evidence I saw coming from many, many journals. If that’s what he was saying, it is startlingly false.
Having heard of the article because of Dan Weiskopf’s tweet, I went on the web to my university library’s Web of Science and decided to search for “depression” and “serotonin” in the titles. And what I found were thousands of articles on depression and serotonin. A lot of them were about gene-evironmental interactions, and quite frankly beyond my understanding, though almost all of them seemed to be looking at the positive correlation between serotonin irregularities and depression, along with other ‘mobidities’. So after wading through about 30 abstracts, I went over to Academic Search, where I expected to find less technical articles. Representative of what I was reading is this from (Pharmacology; 2010, Vol. 85 Issue 2, p95-109, 15p):
Serotonin (5-HT) is a monoamine implicated in a variety of physiological processes that functions either as a neurotransmitter or as a peripheral hormone. Pharmacological and genetic studies in humans and experimental animals have shown that 5-HT is important for the pathophysiology of depressive disorders. The 5-HT system is thus already a main target for the therapy of these diseases.
So why care about this? Unfortunately, severe depression, panic disorder and social anxiety disorder run in my family. We are not here talking about some shy people. Rather, we are talking about people who will stay away from all social gatherings, or people who sit in movies and can’t hear the movies because they think their bodies are being so noisy. In fact, most of my relatives are ordinary, fairly cheerful people, but then there NN, who had for some time a life blighted by severe depression. Until around the mid-80s, most psychiatrists NN saw believed what the New Yorker article is suggesting; anti-depressants may not be exactly a placebo, but they really shouldn’t have much of a role in mental health. So, because people move around and so on, NN saw three different doctors for severe depression and a pattern eventually became clear. Severe depression then pills then recovery then tapering off then horrible breakdown. Of course, it would be said that the breakdown was due to the failure of the previous psychiatrist, but to recover, pills were prescribed. And once NN recovered, tapering off started, to be followed by severe breakdown, etc. NN was typically impaired for most of a decade, since we need to add that since no one really believed in the pills effectiveness, he didn’t get the dose he needed.
Severe depression is very, very horrible, and it can include quite disordered thinking that too often can lead to suicide. It is very alarming that Menand article will reinforce the beliefs of the doctors whom NN saw and who are probably still practicing.
But what is Menand going to say to someone like NN, who is a very gifted, creative artist who has put his life back together finally? He does consider people just like that:
The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds! It’s the position of Andrew Solomon, in “The Noonday Demon” (2001), a wise and humane book. It’s the position of many of the contributors to “Unholy Ghost” (2001) and “Poets on Prozac” (2008), anthologies of essays by writers about depression. The ones who took medication say that they write much better than they did when they were depressed. William Styron, in his widely read memoir “Darkness Visible” (1990), says that his experience in talk therapy was a damaging waste of time, and that he wishes he had gone straight to the hospital when his depression became severe.
This is his comment:
What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead?
I’d say that counts as changing the topic. However, perhaps we should say that the article has many topics. One is whether we should try to medicate ourselves out of the human condition, with its ordinary pains, even the very severe ones. What I am concerned about, though, is NN and others like him, who still are fortunate if they can get adequate treatment. Their state is not simply ordinary; it is more horrible than humans should have to endure, though hospitals have had, and do have, many who do. We do not need an article that appears to say no scientist thinks pills are a good response to depression.
Blue Collar Men and Childcare February 22, 2010
We noted a while ago the statement by historian of marriage Stephanie Coontz that 20% of working class men do more housework/childcare than their wives. So we should be prepared for this anecdote from the NY Times “Metropolitan Diary”:
It was a damp and cold morning on the Hudson as the ferry made its way to Lower Manhattan. As the large brawny deckhand, clad in a hefty blue anorak, a knit cap hugging his head, closed the sliding exit door, he continued a very intense discussion with his co-worker, a fellow of similar build and dress. Both were right out of central casting as Exhibit A for life on the docks.
Eavesdropping, I was hoping to be treated to a colorful story about a dramatic recovery, or some other novel talk of the sea. The beginnings of their conversation were promising.
Big burly sailor No. 1, authoritatively: “It’s a struggle, but you will know when they are ready. Just wait.”
Big burly sailor No. 2: “But that’s the question: How do you know when they are ready?”
I strained to listen closely over the noise of the engines.
Big burly sailor No. 1: “You lift them up and put them on the potty and tell them that’s where big girls go.”
Big burly sailor No. 2, incredulously: “And after that, no more diapers? It’s that easy?”
Knowingly, big burly sailor No. 1 took the time to share his strategy and to explain that it was not that easy.
Sailors discussing potty-training techniques — who would have guessed?
Special Issue of Phil Papers on Rape February 22, 2010
This may be old news to some, but I just noticed this special issue of Philosophical Papers, on Rape and its Meaning/s.
And it’s free to access at the moment.
Philosophical Papers, Volume 38 Issue 3 2009
Rape and its Meaning/s
Introduction: Meaning/s of Rape in War and Peace
Louise du ToitExploiting the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body: Rape as a Weapon of War
Debra BergoffenA New Epistemology of Rape?
Lorraine CodeRape and Silence in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Graham St. John StottIn Defense of Self-Defense
Ann J. CahillA Heinous Act
Don Berkich
Saudi women allowed to argue cases in court February 21, 2010
A bit of progress… (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)
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