Demo-kratos and other lovely concepts.

One of my favourite authors, Patrick Rothfuss, wrote an interesting blog post today. Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind (which I heartily recommend you all read) describes in his self-styled Public Service Announcement why Americans should not vote. That's right, not vote. Let's take what I think is one of the funnier parts of the open letter to the American public (i.e. the interwebbers who watch his blog) is this:

For example, I was eating dinner the other day at a local restaurant and I heard someone at a nearby table say, "I'm voting for McCain. I heard Obama's into gun control. Nobody's taking away my guns." I'm not making this up. I'm not exaggerating or paraphrasing. These words have been echoing around in my head for weeks, and it's entirely possible that I will never be rid of them. If this sounds like something that might come out of your mouth, you need to realize that you are not very smart. I'm not saying you're a bad person. I'm not saying you're evil. What I'm asking is that you consider the very real possibility that you might not be capable of casting an intelligent vote. Let repeat myself just for clarity's sake. If you're willing to throw in with one candidate based on senseless fear and "something you heard" you are not well-informed, and you shouldn't vote. Again, I'm not saying you're a bad person. What I am saying is that the fate of the nation is probably too complicated for you to deal with properly. You should stay home on election night and watch some Nascar instead. That's right. Nice, comforting Nascar.

It raises what I think is one of the most interesting problems of democracy, or with any normatively significant practice: when rights or freedoms become duties or obligations. I'm a big fan of a view towards democracy that goes like so: every citizen has a right to vote. This right is given under a certain set of expectations, namely that such a citizen has the obligation to vote, and under an expectation that they will vote in an informed manner. Unfortunately, as with most of my beliefs, this is somewhat too good to be true. It seems that of the 224 countries who have universal voting processes, only 19 of them enforce compulsory voting. And, as Pat wishes to point out, maybe that's for the best. Whether or not compulsory voting leads to more extreme political stances is an empirical question, and one I'd love to have answered. It seems that the standard intuitive response is to the affirmative, that to allow voluntary voting within a western, developed, media-dominated democratic nation does lead to a more extreme stance by those who do turn out to vote. But I'm not really sure what this means: is this skewed towards one end of the spectrum or the other? I'm not a big fan of left or right extremism, and i don't think that the answer is so simple as one lovely blogite seems to imply, that if such an extremism is symmetrical than they cancel each other out. Please people, learn to math. These are vector sums at their simplest, although I'd suspect we'd need some pretty sophisticated, high ranking Tensors to sort that shamozzle out.

Also, it should probably be made clear that democracy does not presuppose libertarian views: some reasonably rudimentary history should settle that. Go look up some wikipedia, Indian Times opinion piece guy. If we are going to take the tack that we seriously want a liberal democracy , than maybe we want to say that one of these rights we've concocted to give people is that of voting, and right does not imply obligation, etc. Maybe so. Such arguments usually rest on some pretty boring and awful construal of everyone's favourite piece of philosophical cheap shots, The Harm principle. A whole swag of dead Afghanis and Iraqis, a crushed economy, and a streak of rights defacement beg to differ with how you use your vote, people. And as the right to vote does nothing to tell us when we shouldn't exercise such a right, maybe (don't faint, libertarians) we should be empowering voters to make the decision to vote or not. That means education, which may mean government involvement. Ha! Who would have thought that in order to live free of a restrictive government in a fashion which would allow for maximum preference satisfaction, we'd need some government involvement? Aaaah, Irony.  As my good friend Adam related though, democracy is not the right to decide how you live your life, but the right to ruin how others live theirs.

Ah, a bit of a convoluted post.  I've been away too long from the blogosphere.

Public Ethics Radio

Two far more charismatic ethicists than the writers, Christian Barry and Matthew Peterson, have now launched Public Ethics Radio, in conjunction with the CAPPE and The Carnegie Council. Their first podcast interviews Thomas Pogge on his pharmaceutical incentivisation project.

Check it out.

Emo Brings Down The Russian Bear

Supposedly, according to the Blogosphere Russia is banning Emos, because they might kill themselves or bring down the Russian Government.

Well, it looks like I might have to ditch the Heavy Metal/Punk stuff that I have been holding onto for so long, and get with the real winners, Emos.

To paraphrase Bill Hicks:

A guy says, “I hate Emos,” and I said, “Why?” He goes, “Because they killed Russia.” They believe that. If I believed that the Emos killed Russia, I’d worship the Emos, ’cause shit, there’s some badasses on that team, man. I haven’t seen Russia ever, I see Emos all the time – go figure.

Meta-Blogging: Simon Blackburn and his Myths

Simon Blackburn, a philosophy professor from the University professor, late last month appeared in the Times Higher Education series on academics talking "off-piste," i.e. on subjects that were beyond the realms of a) the status of higher education, or b) their primary area of expertise. Blackburn went on a nice bit of polemic, and he's caused a bit of discussion, whether it be cranky philosophers, inquisitive scientist-cum-philosophers, or (my personal favourite) being turned into a football game. As always, the comment sections are a joy to peruse.

As Catherine mentioned in the comments section of her last post, we do have those pesky things called doctoral theses to get back to, but I'll spend a bit of time talking about one of my personal favourites, Blackburn's myth #4- the myth of the scientist:

This claims that there is an expertise, science, and that people who are good at it deserve a lot of attention. This is almost wholly false. There is no such thing as a scientist, and it is a shame that William Whewell, a rather patchy philosopher (although a Cambridge man), invented the term. There are only biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and so on. These may be very bright people, but the moment one of them steps a millimetre or two outside their special area of expertise, they are no better than the rest of us.

Problems such as foot-and-mouth disease, global temperatures and badgers, to name but three, need different baskets of expertises, if indeed there are any to be had. A fortiori, there should be no such thing as The Government Scientist. A version of this myth is that something called science is a self-propelled self-governing activity of special virtue, dedicated solely to truth. This ignores the huge proportion of physical scientists who work for the misnamed Ministry of Defence, and the biological scientists who work for big pharma, trying to get around the patents on drugs that do little for the disease burden of the world but that can be sold to the rich. Scientists have one catch-all answer when confronted with such unfortunate facts, which is to claim that the critic must be some kind of relativist. This is a Berkeleian term: nobody knows what it means, but everybody knows it is bad.

I love this, because it plays in precisely with the entire point of this series in The Times. Blackburn is correct, I believe: there is a growing trend of hyper-specialisation in the sciences. But that's not enough to be an answer for us, and I'm going to separate Blackburn's initial comment regarding the non-existence of the scientist into two factors: The scientist as a taxonomic term, and the scientist as a lifestyle.

If, as some in the above articles would suggest, believe that Blackburn is referring to the taxonomy of humans into respective fields of endeavour, then it is safe to say that Blackburn has misstepped. Of course there are scientists. Blackburn's myth #1 plays strongly into this: we give the word meaning to class a certain range of endeavours: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, (some think) psychology, even medicine, and many more, plus the sub disciplines of each. Where there is the behemoth of a field of discovery called science, a way of gaining knowledge about the world termed the "scientific method," there will be scientists. In this way, the term scientist exists, but far removed from the idea of a scientist , which is far more controversial.

The second part of Blackburn's article outlines what he seems to perceive as a number of conflicting positions scientists fill in this world which eat away at the image of the scientist. I'd go so far to say that this is correct, and a little sad for the scientific enterprise. To be sure, I've met men and women of science in the true sense of the words: disinterested, sharing, skeptical, and humble. Everything Merton could have dreamed. But there aren't many, and indeed Merton has many, many critics. Scientists as a group of people are diverse: there are the near-monastic scientists who are aware that they have ethical obligations to the larger community for the trust placed upon them in their expertise. There is also a legion of science-jerks out there. And for better or worse, their skill cannot inform us on which ones they will be.

Should this idea, "the scientist," exist? I think so. When you look back on the history of the sciences, those who embody the scientist tend to achieve greatness on a level that exceeds mere publication record. They also make a contribution to the society in which they reside, and occasionally even to the world as a whole. This is not to say that they are the only ones, but their contributions are often startling. And, in line with The Times' point regarding academics talking "off-piste," the "scientists" of history were often generalists. We can't all be, because sometimes, that's not the set of tools we are born with. Some people are designed to do one thing, and do that with a skill without peer. But for the rest of us, to learn more about the breadth of the experiences in this world makes us more conscious of our place within it. And if my thesis works out, that could solve some problems within science at the moment.

This was a little off track, but hey. In summery: Blackburn's piece reeks of polemic and rant. That's cool, but he's fallen prey to his first myth: he's incited responses that don't consider the full import of a situation, but instead react based on the meaning of words. That said, he has some points worth discussing, even if he may be a little extreme at times.

Back to the thesis!