E.G.

Over at The Bellman, Zwichenzug has a good post responding to my abortion argument.  Here are some thoughts.

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John Ku, a grad student at Michigan, has a nice abortion argument on his webpage.  You can find it here (click on the "abortion" button you’ll see near the top of the page).  Its conclusion is that abortion is not murder.  I don’t have much to say about his argument, other than that I think it works, and that I think its result is conveniently compatible with the result of the "precautionary principle" I’ve advocated.

I haven’t been reading blogs as long as some people have, and am sure I’ve discovered only a small fraction of the good blogs out there.  Most of the blogs I read regularly are listed in the sidebar.  In comments, please expand my repertoire by listing a few of the blogs you like.  Blogs of any kind are welcome.  Feel free to mention your own blog.

I considered making a similar post asking people to list their least favorite blogs.  This could be amusing, but it may also be cruel.

At midnight, Turkey introduced a new currency.  It is less funny and more useful than the old currency.  From the Guardian:

"Under the old system monthly salaries were counted in billions while even the shortest taxi ride could set clients back five to 10 million.

"With budgets quoted in quadrillions, bureaucrats faced the mind-boggling task of trading in figures that frequently challenged electronic calculators. The Turkish gross national product is estimated at around 424 quadrillion lira, or 424,000,000,000,000,000."

Those days are over now.  Hopefully.  Good luck, Turkey!

Consider two demands:

1. A moral theory must be able to accommodate many or most of our deeply-held, commonsense intuitions.  If a moral theory tells us to do something we feel strongly we ought not do, then there is something wrong with the moral theory.

2. A moral theory must be capable of surprising us.  That is, it must be able to tell us something we would not have been able to know prior to taking up a systematic approach to moral questions.  If a moral theory cannot do this, we should abandon it; and if no moral theory can do this, we may as well abandon moral philosophy and just listen to our consciences, which is easier, faster and (in terms of opportunity cost, anyway) cheaper than doing ethics.

Is it possible for one and the same moral theory to answer both of these demands?  At first glance, it seems unlikely: I cannot confirm something you already believe and, in the same breath, surprise you.  In this post, I’ll offer a tentative answer to this question. 

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I like Nina Hagen.  Here’s a nice Nina Hagen video.

UPDATE: The second link is now broken.  If anyone happens to find another site with Nina Hagen videos, please leave word in comments. 

Consider the following story:

Anna is driving her truck at night along an unlighted, winding road.  She turns a corner and suddenly, 50 feet ahead of her, she sees a dark mass.  She thinks she sees it move.  It is about the size of an adult human being, but it could just as easily be a tree branch or a wounded deer.  Anna has to decide whether to slam on her brakes (and risk spinning out of control) or to lay on the gas and drive over the thing, whatever it is.

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Ignore the harmful phenomenon of grade-inflation, which is pushing us toward a de facto pass-fail system.  Even assuming the minimum level of performance required for an A were not steadily creeping downward, the ABCDF system is still bad. 

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I was given a copy of A Mencken Chrestomathy for Christmas.  So far and for the most part it is about as amusing as it was claimed it would be.

At the end there’s a collection of "Mencken sententiae."  I think some of these nicely capture kernels of truth (e.g., "Tombstone–An ugly reminder of one who has been forgotten").  Others confuse me and don’t seem to capture much of anything. 

So for this, my very first post, I present four perplexing sayings from HL Mencken: 

1. Fame — An embalmer trembling with stagefright.

2. Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.

3. How little it takes to make life unbearable…A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman’s laugh.

4. Man weeps to think he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

What, if anything, are 1-4 are supposed to be getting at?