E.G.

In the comments to the discussion about theism at Richard’s blog (see here), Macht is trying to defend the plausiblity of God’s existence.  Thinking about Macht’s comments led me to this argument:

1. God always acts in accordance with the correct moral code. (Assumption; a consequence of typical versions of theism.)

2. The world contains less value than it possibly could.  (Assumption; a consequence of obvious facts about the world + plausible assumptions about value.)

3. God is omnipotent.  (Assumption; also a consequence of typical versions of theism.)

4. God could maximize the amount of value in the world.  (Consequence of 3.)

5. On a consequentialist moral code, value in the world ought to be maximized.  (Definition.)

6. If a consequentialist moral code were the correct one, then God would have maximized the amount of value in the world.  (Consequence of 1, 4 and 5.)

7. But God has not maximized the amount of value in the world.  (Consequence of 2.)

8. Thus, the correct moral code is not a consequentialist one.

Do any of these premises seem false?  I suppose I might be assuming a somewhat contentious definition of "consequentialism" in line 5.  If you prefer a more nuanced definition of consequentialism, the argument might still be interesting, since it still might work to show that the theist is committed to say that a certain kind of consequentialism is false.   Otherwise, I think the argument works.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently about the conjecture that Kerry’s defeat might have been due to his lack of a compelling "story to tell" about his life and campaign.  (Timothy Burke’s post on this issue is an especially engaging one.)   

The election was, of course, quite close, so slight changes to initial conditions could have produced a completely different result.  For instance, if the distribution of cases of the flu in Iowa had been slightly different, with a few more outbreaks in key Republican counties, that might have been enough to produce a Kerry victory.  But a story of Kerry’s loss in terms of random variables like the flu is not a very compelling one.  So, after the election, Democrats began a quest in search of a compelling story to tell about Kerry’s loss.  That quest, apparently, is finally done.  As it turns out, the compelling story which explains Kerry’s loss is the story of how Kerry himself had no story.  Good story.  But is it true?

Talking about something completely different, Will Wilkinson says this about the search for stories:

Explanations are like stories, and convincing stories have characters who do stuff. The media has to tell a story, and the simpler the better. Nation-states, it turns out, are like giant people who can do stuff and make things happen. So if people are mired in poverty, what can be done! Have the League of Magical Giants sprinkle manna on the heads of the downtrodden! This is a story even a journalist can understand. However, the story where millions of individuals give small amounts of money to intermediary institutions, who administer funds to projects helping poor people on the ground . . . well, millions of people isn’t a good character, and all those different charities and institutions doing different things with their bits of money is hard to follow.

"Stories," in the present sense, render events intelligible, coherent and interesting.  Sometimes the actual events themselves really are intelligible, coherent, and interesting.  In those cases, it is at least possible to tell stories about those events which have the advantage of being true.  But when events don’t have those three qualities, we cannot tell stories about them without misrepresenting them.  The events of Kerry’s life may, as many have argued, lack one or more of those three qualities.  But perhaps the same is true of the election itself, as well.

If you’ll be in Bangkok any time soon, please look for these stools.  (Via Cockeyed.)

I’m a bit conflicted about modifying posts.  On the one hand, I sometimes find it annoying when I come back to a post I’ve already read and the author has changed it without telling us, because I’m never sure if I’m misremembering the original.  On the other hand, when I notice slight errors in my own posts, I want to fix those errors, but it seems a little pretentious to put up an "UPDATE" notice every time I do that.

I don’t know what other bloggers’ policies are, but I think the one I’ll adopt here, at least for now, is: Posts are works in progress.  If something big gets changed, I’ll note the change within the post, but I’ll routinely fix slight mistakes without any notice at all. 

I hope this policy doesn’t annoy either of my loyal readers (Limbaugh and the German guy).

An "after-school special" is/was a type of show which was shown on TV when I was a kid.  Generally, ASSes (sorry about the acronym) were designed to convince kids to do certain things.  Usually, these were things which, among adults, kids were uncontroversially supposed to do: Not lie; not steal; not cheat at school; help your younger sibling, even when you don’t want to; avoid drugs and alcohol; etc.

These shows were unintentionally funny for at least two reasons.  First, the characters were "anti-developed."  The characters were not individuals, and weren’t supposed to be.  They were supposed to represent generic types: "the nerd," "the cool kid," "the drug-pusher," etc.  I think kids thought it was funny to see a living person (an actor) so completely absorbed into an immediately recognizable archetype. 

Second, the aim of these shows was comically transparent.  You knew after just a few minutes watching what vice or virtue the show would address, and you knew that everything that happened for the rest of the episode would be designed to make you see things exactly as the show saw them, and to do exactly what the show wanted you to do.

I don’t know if these shows ever had much impact on kids’ behavior.  I doubt many kids who already were in the habit of lying, or cheating, or whatever, were persuaded to change their ways.  But if, by some chance, someone hadn’t already told you that lying, cheating, etc. were wrong, these shows at least served the purpose of letting you know that that was the general consensus, at least in the adult world.

Many movies in the "mainstream independent" category (i.e., movies which have achieved relatively wide success without being produced and/or distributed within the "traditional hollywood" system) have adopted the ASS model.  I call these "Sundance After-School Specials" ("Sundance" being the entity which often distributes, promotes, or is otherwise involved with these movies).  The main difference between a regular ASS and a Sundance ASS is that Sundance ASSes generally advocate patterns of behavior which are "progressive."  So, for instance, rather than trying to get you to refrain from doing things like stealing, these movies try to get you to refrain from doing things like harassing the lesbian couple next door.  But the main characteristics of regular ASSes remain: anti-developed characters standing in for types; transparent pedagogical purpose behind every plot-point; etc.

Some people ridicule Sundance ASSes, presumably for the same reasons that they ridiculed regular ASSes when they were kids.  But I think watching an ASS-style movie can be interesting.

Here’s an example people use in philosophy sometimes.  Suppose I shine two flashlights at the wall, making two disks of light appear.  Suppose that, by moving my left hand, I move one disk toward the other, making the first disk "collide" with the second.  I immediately move my right hand, causing the second disk to move away from the first.  This creates the appearance that the "collision" of the first light-disk "caused" the second one to move.  A child might be fooled into thinking that this appearance is reality — that the first disk of light really did cause the second one to move by colliding with it.  An adult knows that the child is wrong — that the real cause of the motion of the second disk lies in the movement of the flashlight in my right hand.

Movies are like that, usually.  Plot-event B follows plot-event A, and we’re asked to believe that there’s a causal relation between them.  There is, of course, no causal relation there; "plot-event A" is only a series of frames of light flashing on a screen, and such a thing cannot cause anything.  But a movie "works" when the viewer is able to enter a state of mind in which she somehow "believes," or imagines, or whatever, that event A is really happening, and has a genuine causal relation with the events that follow it. 

Many people think this effect is nowadays very difficult to achieve.  Early movie audiences, people say, were naive.  For instance, supposedly people on one early occasion jumped out of their seats when footage of a fast-approaching train was shown.  But modern audiences are thought to be wise and jaded, so movie-makers must work very hard to get audiences to enter that child-like state of mind required for a movie to "work."  But the facts suggest otherwise.  Mainstream movies are now more implausible than ever.  I think that by growing up watching movies and TV shows, people have learned to enter the requisite state of mind at will.  Movie-makers no longer have to work very hard to get audiences to suspend disbelief, because audiences have trained themselves to do that on their own.

All this holds for non-ASS movies.  Non-ASS movies are designed to create the illusion of real, specific people really carrying out specific actions and really speaking.  But that’s easy, I claim, now that audiences have trained themselves to conspire with the movie in creating that illusion.  What do ASS movies do?  In a sense, ASS movies do exactly the opposite of this.  An ASS character, for instance, isn’t supposed to be anything remotely like a real, specific person.  ASS characters are, as I say, types.  Indeed, everything about an ASS movie is a type.  The actions which ASS characters perform, for instance, aren’t supposed to be concrete doings; they’re supposed to be types of actions — actions which the movie hopes you (and everyone else) will perform or not perform.  When Billy refuses to take drugs in an ASS, for instance, you’re supposed to ignore Billy; Billy’s completely irrelevant.  What you’re supposed to see is yourself, or your friend, or indeed anyone and everyone, refusing to do the same thing in the same type of circumstance.  Or rather, you’re supposed to see yourself and everyone else ought to refuse to do the same thing in the same type of circumstance.  In this way, an ASS-style movie adds a whole new, and kind of weird, layer to the experience of movie-watching.  This layer means ASS-style movies don’t "work" in the usual sense — and that’s what makes them funny — but I think that’s also what can make them interesting to watch sometimes.

Over at PEA Soup, Michael Cholbi has a post on particularism’s apparent failure to meet the second of my two "demands."  I expect his post will generate some interesting discussion, so you should periodically check out the comment thread there.

"Freedom," like so many other philosophically-significant ideas, is an idea which most of us use to explain and describe events in our daily lives.  But freedom differs from some other such ideas in an important way: Freedom is employed in descriptions and explanations specifically concerning human beings (and, occasionally, some non-human animals).  We routinely bring up "freedom" when we talk about persons’ intentions, or persons’ moral responsibility for their actions, or persons’ plans for the future; we don’t mention "freedom" when we describe or explain non-persons or inanimate objects, such as landslides, planets, or machines.

"Persons" are, therefore, the "wellspring" of the notion of freedom: they are what make the notion of freedom occur to us in the first place.  As a consequence, a philosopher who wants to understand freedom is likely to return again and again to this wellspring in order to shape and guide her approach to the subject.

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Certain moral and political issues capture the attention and the imagination of the masses.  A partial list of those issues: Abortion, public health care, public schooling, government welfare, environmental policies and restrictions, sex and violence in the media, gay marriage, euthanasia, stem cell research — just to name a few.

It’s not immediately obvious why these issues are so interesting to so many people.  To be sure, some of these issues directly concern large numbers of people.  Lots of people have kids in the public school system, for instance, so that might explain the prominence of discussions about public schooling in the media.  But I don’t think very many people are in a position to be affected by stem cell research, or government welfare programs, or even (for many people) abortion.  Yet these topics are routinely discussed in the same newspaper opinion columns and on the same TV talk shows as is the public school system.  As I see things, the "hot button" issues with which our culture concerns itself seem almost to have been chosen at random.  What do they all have in common except that they are all vigorously disputed in public forums?

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When I was in high school, I was a BBSer.  Here’s a description of the origin of BBSing:

With the advent of the home computer in the 1970’s there arose a hobby known as BBSing. This was the beginning of a great electronic community which met and exchanged ideas over what today is called cyberspace. Before the internet became accessible to the common person, computer bulletin boards were connecting large amounts of people to others in their local community. BBSes (as they are nicknamed) operate by allowing people to connect to another person’s home computer via the local telephone lines. Since this was usually a local phone call, it was as free as calling your neighbor up to chat about the weather. Most early computer bulletin boards were run
as free public hobbyist systems and they operated on great state of the art BBS softwares like C64, Fido, Opus, Seadog, GBBS and MTABBS. The C64 ran on Commodore 64 machines, MTABBS ran on TRS-80’s, GBBS ran on Apple machines and Fido, Opus and Seadog ran on the early IBM 8088’s.
(From this article by a person called Fire Escape.)

By the time I entered the world of BBSes, Commodore 64s were long gone; I BBSed on a 386SX with a 2400 baud modem, and most of the BBSes I called used software called WWIV, which I think most people pronounced as "wiv."

Fire Escape, as you’ll see if you follow the link, goes a little overboard in her nostaligic reconstruction of the lost world of BBSes.  But I think that there was something neat about BBSing which I have not seen recaptured in the various modes of communication I’ve found on the internet.  I remember BBSes as spontaneous, disposable, personality-oriented streams of consciousness: Topics changed rapidly, but each "sub" repesented a months- or years-long conversation among the same cast of characters.  I think in this way BBSes resembled Golden Age comic books, which were written, consumed and then discarded in rapid succession — even though over the years a continuous narrative emerged.

Visit 1 or 2.