Higher (priced) Education

04 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Education, Ethics

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I see that the Board of Regents for the University of Iowa have acted (as such boards seem to universally act these days) in complete disregard of the faculty and students at the university, and appointed a businessman with no real background in education as the President of the university.

You can be confident — if, indeed, not absolutely certain — of two things. First, the new University President Bruce Harreld, who was previously senior vice president at IBM, will be drawing an enormous salary. The second is that he will treat the university as a business, faculty as employees, students as customers, and education as a commodity. In other words (and I would be delighted to be proven wrong in this) he will be ideologically committed to the ongoing degradation and destruction of higher ed.

Oh Ashley …

30 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, Ethics, Objective Morality

≈ 3 Comments

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Ashley Madison Hack, Critical Thinking, Ethics, objective morality

Schadenfreude – the pleasure one takes at hearing about or seeing other people’s troubles – is not a viable standard for ethical evaluations, even when the people whose troubles we are rejoicing in are the absolute scum of the earth and deserve all the things, and even worse, that are happening to them. Feeling good about other people’s troubles, quite aside from indicating a rather profound flaw in one’s character (a flaw a great many of us suffer from), is logically – and therefore morally – vacuous; it is a form of the argumentum ad misericordiam, and therefore patently fallacious. But more than just the logical issues involved, I want to spend some time considering the ethical dimensions attached to schadenfreude, specifically as these relate to the recent Ashley Madison hack. Continue reading →

Tortured Logic

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, Ethics, Martin Luther King, Objective Morality

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Morality, Torture, Utilitarianism

So, the Senate’s report on torture has come out. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, as singularly despicable a human being as has ever crawled out from under a rock, assures us that this program was approved at the highest levels. Is a crime a crime if Important People decide not to call it such? For example, the excuse given by one active participant in the CIA’s blatant torture of prisoners (conducted without regard for the prisoners’ guilt or innocence – to say nothing of basic human decency – and the repeatedly demonstrated FACT that such methods never produce reliable information; more on this momentarily) was that three out of four past Attorneys General of the United States had approved of the practices.

As Jon Stewart points out in the previous link, the three were all Attorneys General appointed by the Bush administration, which administered the programs of torture as a matter of policy orchestrated at the highest level. Stewart’s approach – via satire and such humor as one may bring to bear in the face of our public complicity in crimes against humanity – to the contrary not withstanding, his argument nevertheless bears appreciation. Continue reading →

Until It Bleeds – Until It Burns

07 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Ethics, Ferguson, General Philosophy, Race

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being human, Ferguson, Morality, Race

The predictable, self-righteous clucking by privileged White commentators of various stripes that followed especially upon the Ferguson rioting (which followed upon a grand jury result that shows every sign of having been aggressively manipulated so as to avoid, even preclude, any indictment of the White cop who killed an unarmed Black teenager) betrays a level of willful obtuseness that is truly beyond all measure. Add to this now the similar refusal to indict in the Garner case in Staten Island, and the shock and outrage in minority communities has reached levels not seen since the 1960’s. This rage continues to leave many people – almost entirely White people, and regardless, almost certainly members of some significantly privileged collection of people – completely dumb-founded as to the reason why this rage is fulminating in so many minority communities, a rage that often expresses itself blindly in violence. Why are black people, especially, so angry? Why do they lash out so violently at their own communities? These respective cases went before their grand juries, and when presented with all of the evidence, the grand juries said that there was not evidence enough for an indictment. Isn’t this how the system is supposed to work?

But that, of course, is precisely the problem: that IS how the system is supposed to work. The system IS supposed to dismiss the value of minority, especially black, lives. Because the system that we live in is one of monstrously institutionalized racism in which black people can be safely viewed as not even human by people who insist that this is not a problem. Yes, the system “worked.” Such “working” is the moral catastrophe of our age.

I wish to make two points here, the first is quite patently clear, while the second and longer point will be far more problematically speculative. Point #1 is that, while rioting – which is not at all the same as civil disobedience – is almost certainly not helpful, it is understandable. The second, far more speculative, point is an approach toward such an understanding that I’ve not seen suggested elsewhere.

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Ethics, Pedagogy, and Process

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Ethics, Martin Luther King

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Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Ethics, Martin Luther King, moral laws

This entry is a follow-up to The Road To Hell, insofar as it concludes with an outline of Edgar Sheffield Brightman‘s Moral Laws. Brightman, as I noted in that earlier post, is the man that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King went to Boston University to study under for his (King’s) Ph.D. On this account alone, Brightman is one of the most singularly influential figures in American thought. So it is more than a little disturbing that he is not given a single mention (to say nothing of an article) in either of the main online encyclopedia’s of philosophy. But leaving that travesty aside, I thought it might be useful to embed the outline of Brightman’s argument in a larger discussion about the nature of philosophical ethics. Specifically, how ought one teach it (note that that “ought” is itself an ethical imperative), and what ought one to teach? As usually happens, these questions are not unrelated.

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The Road To Hell

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Gary Herstein in Critical Thinking, Ethics, General Philosophy

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Critical Thinking, Ethics

In case you don’t know, the above mentioned stretch of pavement is not laid down with brick or asphalt. Rather, it is paved with “good intentions.” I “intend” to have a few words on the subject; I hope they are “good.” If our intentions are good, and we are lucky, we hope things will turn out well. After all, our intentions were in the “right” place, so what more could one ask (much less require)? But this rhetorical question brings us to the very heart of the problem: “luck” is not a method, and “hope” is not a plan. By justifying ourselves on nothing more than our intentions (and our hopes for luck, as far as they go), it is arguably the case that what we really “hope” to do (if we are lucky) is completely separate ourselves from any responsibility for the consequences of our actions. However, let us not assume that things are quite so simple in either direction. Permit me to savagely gloss a few classical ideas from moral philosophy. Continue reading →