From the Florida Alligator:

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs

THE LAW COULD LET STUDENTS SUE FOR UNTOLERATED BELIEFS.

By JAMES VANLANDINGHAM

Alligator Staff Writer

TALLAHASSEE — Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities.

The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House.

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

Read the whole nauseating story.

 

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From Philosophy Talk: The Blog:

Progress in neuroscience may soon make possible an age of neurocosmetology: the use of drugs to let people affect the way their brains work, so as to make them more effective, more attractive, and more like their "cognitive ideal."  A world where all the women are beautiful and all the men handsome might be bearable if boring. But would a society full of type-A’s work at all?  Can it be rational to choose to change in ways that may change who you are?  Should there be moral or legal prohibitions against healthy people messing with their own brain chemistry?

Read the whole post, then the follow ups.

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Alvin Plantinga makes the Associated Press wire in this fluff piece. Not much of substance in the article but perhaps it will inspire somebody to go pick up God and Other Minds or God, Freedom, and Evil. “I read the…
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Here’s a philosophical problem I’ve been thinking about lately.  The problem is that an ethical position I like conflicts with a metaphysical position I like.  On the one hand, human infants and adults enjoy full moral status whereas animals have lower moral status.  On the other hand, David Lewis’s view about the nature of persons is true (which is, in a nutshell, Four-Dimensionalism plus a Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity).  I don’t know if I can hold both of these positions.

First the ethics.  I think that, in typical cases, it is more objectionable to kill a human infant than it is to kill an animal, but that it is not more objectionable to kill a human adult than it is to kill an infant.  That is, human adults and human infants are on a par; animals are lower.  This is probably the “common sense” view, and I would justify it in the following (non-speciesist) way.  The main reason it is wrong to kill any sort of creature (when it is wrong), is that it deprives the creature of something very valuable.  So it is wrong (at least prima facie) to kill a dog because it deprives the dog of the life he would have enjoyed as a dog.  It is wrong to kill a human infant because it deprives the infant of the life he would have enjoyed as a person.  It is wrong to kill an adult human because it deprives him of the (rest of the) life he would have enjoyed as a person.  Notice the last two – the infant case and the adult case – appeal to the same reason, whereas the reason in the dog case is different.

So even though, we can suppose, human infants are not persons in the psychological sense, infants enjoy the same status as human adults, who are persons in the psychological sense.  This is because each has this feature: each would get to live life as a person if it were allowed to live.  (The adult, of course, already is living life as a person.)

So even though, we can suppose, human infants have a psychological profile less impressive than that of a dog, infants enjoy a status greater than that of a dog due to their potential.  Dogs will never be persons in the psychological sense.  Infants will.  So infants enjoy a higher status.  Perhaps we can look at it like this: if you would become a person in the psychological sense, then you presently are a person in the normative sense.  Your future psychological status boosts your present moral status.

Now the metaphysics.  On the Lewisian view, persons a maximal aggregates of psychologically interconnected person stages.  You are that four-dimensional spacetime worm that began when your psychology got rich enough and will end when you die.  (And maybe you’re even temporally gappy: maybe you go out of existence if you go into a coma, or even each time you sleep!  But don’t worry: you come back into existence when you wake up.)

Here’s the conflict.  On the Lewisian view, it is not the case that you ever were an infant.  Therefore, it is not the case that infants will be persons.  This is because you are not psychologically interconnected enough with the infant you think you were.  When you use the word ‘I’, you refer to a 4D being who began only when there was a kid who had an impressive enough psychology.  For analogous reasons, you will never be a corpse (even though there may be a corpse there right after you die), and you will never be a severe Alzheimer’s patient (even if one day there is a severe Alzheimer’s patient carrying around your driver’s license). 

Given the Lewisian view, I can no longer say, “killing an infant is worse than killing a dog because killing an infant deprives the infant of the future it would have enjoyed as a person, whereas killing a dog does not.”  On the Lewisian view, the infant, like the dog, never will be a person.  (Now, on the Lewisian metaphysics, there are objects that are now infants that will be persons – just take the fusion of you and the infant you think you were.  But this doesn’t seem to confer the earlier infant stage with any moral status (as I need it to).  For there is also the fusion of you and the first wheel ever invented.  Certainly the first wheel doesn’t get a boost in moral status for this reason.  (This example is due to Hud Hudson.))

So I no longer have a justification for my view that killing an infant is worse than killing a dog.  What should be revised – my ethics or my metaphysics?

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Duke is holding its annual conference in April. I highly recommend it! They have extended their deadline for abstracts.

"Duke Center for Philosophy of Biology
Fourth Annual Conference on recent work in Biology and Philosophy

The Evolution of Cognition: Niche Construction, Culture, and Environmental Complexity
April 23-24, 2005, Duke University, Durham NC

NOTE NEW DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS BELOW.

This conference aims to investigate the roles that niche construction, cultural evolution, and environmental complexity play in shaping the mind.  The conference will address these and related questions:  How, and to what extent, has niche construction (organism-produced environmental change) played a role in the evolution of cognition?  Is niche construction a kind of cultural transmission or should it be viewed as something distinct?  What are the cognitive preconditions for cultural evolution?  How is being a cultural species likely to affect the direction or rate of cognitive evolution?  How do organisms restructure their environments to simplify or otherwise alter a problem domain?  What role has environmental complexity played in the evolution of mind?  What is environmental complexity and how does it determine fitness differences in interaction with cognitive capabilities, niche construction, and culture?

Speakers will include Peter Godfrey-Smith (Harvard, ANU), Peter Richerson (UC Davis), F. John Odling-Smee (Oxford), and William Wimsatt (University of Chicago).

Please register for the conference by sending an email to mabrams(AT)duke.edu

No registration fee is required.

The conference will include contributed papers in sessions of 30 minutes including questions.  If you would like to give a contributed paper on the evolution of cognition, cultural evolution, niche construction, or another topic relevant to the conference, please send a 300 word abstract with your name and affiliation to Marshall Abrams at mabrams(AT)duke.edu by APRIL 1, 2005.  Decisions about acceptance will be made by April 4.  PLEASE NOTE that the deadline for submissions has been extended.

Conference posters and more details will be available at http://www.duke.edu/philosophy/bio/.

Conference Organizers: Marshall Abrams, Stefan Linquist, David M. Kaplan, Grant Ramsey

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It turns out that opposition to evolution comes not only from evangelical
Christians but also from Orthodox Jews.  Does anyone have anything they can
post on Muslims or members of other world religions?

From the NYT:

March 22, 2005
Religion and Natural History Clash Among the Ultra-Orthodox
By ALEX MINDLIN

It was early January when the posters went up in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem’s
largest ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, and they signaled the start of a bad
year for Rabbi Nosson Slifkin.

Twenty-three ultra-Orthodox rabbis had signed an open letter denouncing the
books of Rabbi Slifkin, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli scholar and science
writer. The letter read, in part: "He believes that the world is millions of
years old - all nonsense! - and many other things that should not be heard
and certainly not believed. His books must be kept at a distance and may not
be possessed or distributed." Rabbi Slifkin, the letter-writers continued,
should "burn all his writings."

Fundamentalist Christians have long championed a literal reading of the
Bible that suggests the planet is thousands of years old, rather than
millions. But the denunciation of Rabbi Slifkin has publicized a parallel
strain of thought among ultra-Orthodox Jews, a subset of the Orthodox Jewish
community that is deeply skeptical of modern culture, avoiding television
and the Web and often disdaining college education.

Rabbi Slifkin has made a career of reconciling Jewish Scripture with modern
natural history. He teaches a course in biblical and talmudic zoology at
Yeshivat Lev HaTorah, near Jerusalem, and gives frequent lectures, sometimes
wearing a boa constrictor along with his black hat and jacket. With nine
books to his name at age 29, he is a young up-and-comer in the sober world
of Jewish scholarship.

The controversy surrounding him has pitted Jews who are skeptical of science
against their more cosmopolitan brethren, who may follow ultra-Orthodox
traditions but hold jobs as doctors or teachers. "My sense is there are
literally tens of thousands of people who are upset about the ban," said Dr.
Andrew Klafter, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the
University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, who is ultra-Orthodox. "I’m
very, very puzzled by it."

In the days after the ban, Rabbi Slifkin’s publisher and distributor dropped
the three books mentioned in the open letter. He himself lost several
speaking engagements and saw his own rabbi pressured to expel him from his
synagogue. "He was crushed," said a friend, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, a
professor of Jewish law and ethics at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "Do
you know what it’s like to walk through the street and see posters branding
you a heretic?"

Three of Rabbi Slifkin’s books, published from 2001 to 2004, were singled
out in the letter or in related materials: "Mysterious Creatures," "The
Science of Torah" and "The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax."

Predictably, the banned books have become hits. A copy of "Science of Torah"
recently sold on eBay for $125, or five times its cover price. And Rabbi Gil
Student, whose company, Yashar Books, has taken over the distribution of the
other two books, said he had done a year’s business in a month selling them.

Rabbi Slifkin’s books seek to reconcile, rather than to contrast, sacred
texts with modern knowledge of the natural world.

But in the process, he has sometimes cast a critical eye on those texts. In
"Mysterious Creatures," Rabbi Slifkin discussed fantastic animals mentioned
in the Torah and the Talmud - among them, the unicorn and the phoenix - and
suggested that, in reporting their existence, Jewish sages might have relied
on the erroneous writings of ancient naturalists.

He gently debunked the claim, found in a medieval text, that geese grow on
trees, explaining that it was "based on the peculiar anatomy of a certain
seashell." And he examined the Talmudic doctrine that lice, alone of all
animals, may be killed on the Sabbath because they do not sexually reproduce
- a premise now known to be false.

In "The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax," Rabbi Slifkin examined the difficult
separation of animals into kosher and nonkosher, and discussed apparent
exceptions and contradictions to the claims of Jewish law. (The aardvark and
the rhinoceros, for example, meet one test for being kosher but not
another.)

And in "The Science of Torah," he took a scientist’s eye to the Torah.
Evolution, he wrote, did not disprove God’s existence and was consistent
with Jewish thought. He suggested that the Big Bang theory paralleled the
account of the universe’s creation given by the medieval Spanish-Jewish sage
Ramban. And Rabbi Slifkin wrote, to quote his own later paraphrase, that
"tree-ring chronology, ice layers and sediment layers in riverbeds all show
clear proof to the naked eye that the world is much more than 5,765 years
old."

The latter statement was particularly galling to the rabbi’s critics, who
support a literal reading of Genesis that they say puts the earth’s age at
5,765.

The rabbis who signed the letter denouncing Rabbi Slifkin are widely
respected Torah authorities; one of them, Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, 91, is a
leader of Israel’s United Torah Judaism Party and one of the most respected
scholars in Orthodox Ashkenazi Judaism. As a result, the letter has had
repercussions far beyond the congregations of those who signed it. Rabbi
Slifkin’s publisher, Targum Press, and his distributor, Feldheim Publishers,
have stopped carrying the books. Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox outreach
organization, has removed most of his articles from its Web site.

Revered though they are, however, most of the rabbis signing the letter are
not known as community leaders or public voices; only one of the Americans,
for example, sits on the eight-member Council of Torah Sages at the head of
Agudath Israel of America, an influential national Orthodox organization.
Rather, they represent the most unworldly segment of the ultra-Orthodox
community, in which learning is prized and contact with the secular world,
including secular education, is shunned.

The letter against Rabbi Slifkin is not the only recent outburst against
science among the ultra-Orthodox. Last November, during the annual
conference of Agudath Israel, Rabbi Uren Reich, the dean of Yeshiva of
Woodlake Village in New Jersey, said, "These same scientists who tell you
with such clarity what happened 65 million years ago - ask them what the
weather will be like in New York in two weeks’ time."

Many science-minded ultra-Orthodox Jews say it is spiritually wrenching to
see leaders they revere endorsing views they oppose.

Rabbi Adlerstein of Loyola said: "I know rabbis, I know teens in yeshivas
who were on the verge of quitting" when the letter first came out. "They
look at themselves in the mirror and they say, ‘What have I been
representing?’"

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It seems now that theater owners are censoring what goes on the silver
screen, and evolution is out!   The Wedge is working!   I forecast that
within five years, Congress will insist that the NSF give money to work on
Intelligent Design.  Impossible you say?  This is a country where forty
million people do not have health care insurance, but where the President
will fly back in the middle of the night to sign a bill to hook up Terry
Schiavo.  These are dark times and it is an obligation - and an honor - for
those of us with philosophical training to use it for the common good.  The
conservative right is absolutely correct.  There are moral values at stake
here.

What follows is taken from the NYT:

A New Screen Test for Imax: It’s the Bible vs. the Volcano
By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: March 19, 2005

The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.
Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to
show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the
earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict
biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry
say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few
dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a
few can have a big impact on a film’s bottom line - or a producer’s decision
to make a documentary in the first place.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say
that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the
distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage," which depicts
the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to
clusters of galaxies; "Galápagos," about the islands where Darwin theorized
about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," an underwater epic about
the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from
vents in the ocean floor.

"Volcanoes," released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science
Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen
science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers
oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. He said theater
officials rejected the film because of its brief references to evolution, in
particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the undersea
vents.

Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and
History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing it to
a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax theaters.
Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while some
thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I
really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I
don’t agree with their presentation of human existence."

On other criteria, like narration and music, the film did not score as well
as other films, Ms. Murray said, and over all, it did not receive high
marks, so she recommended that the museum pass.

"If it’s not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy,"
she said, "from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation" to
show it.

In interviews, officials at other Imax theaters said they had similarly
decided against the film for fear of offending some audiences.

"We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public," said
Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a
commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium. Her theater had not
ruled out ever showing "Volcanoes," Ms. Buzzelli said, "but being in the
Bible Belt, the movie does have a lot to do with evolution, and we weigh
that carefully."

Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of
Montreal, whose company made the film, said officials at other theaters told
him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it had
"evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian community"
or because "the evolution stuff is a problem."

Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the
financing of "Volcanoes," said he understood that theaters must be
responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that a
science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate
documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution.
"It’s very alarming," he said, "all of this pressure being put on a lot of
the public institutions by the fundamentalists."

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After reading this  interview in which Rev. John Paris, a bioethicist at Boston College, discusses the Terry Schiavo case, I began to wonder about the absence of philosophers in public discussions of ethical issues.  The Schiavo case raises all the issues that are the stock in trade of the contributors (and many of the commenters) at PEA Soup: the value and purpose of life, the moral obligations among family members, the significance of personal autonomy, moral disagreement in a pluralistic society.  And that just scratches the surface.  But it’s frustrating to see that of all the talking heads that emerge when an issue like this leaps to public attention, none are philosophers.  (I’m not blaming us here at PEA Soup; CNN hasn’t called me to comment, and I’m assume that’s true of my fellow PEA Brains as well!)

Oh, you might see Penn’s Arthur Kapan pop up once in a while, and some well-known philosophers have had their moments in the media sun (cave?) over the past decade or so (Nussbaum testifying about the Colorado gay rights legislation, the ‘Philosophers’ Brief’ on assisted suicide).  But the media will turn to religious leaders, medical professionals, heads of lobbying orgnizations, elected officials, and the usual cavalcade of self-appointed media experts before they would think to contact those with professional training in how we might think through ethical issues.  And of course, much of the public discussion is exactly what we in the philosophical ethics community try to avoid: shrill, uninformed, careless, hasty, pointlessly argumentative, lacking in nuance.

So: Why?  Are we in the academic community at fault?  Why doesn’t philosophy have a better public face? (I’m thinking in particular of ethics, which seems the most ‘practical’ of philosophical specialties — when would metaphysicians get called to comment on some burning punlic controversy?)  I’m aware there’s an APA committee for this issue, but I’d like to hear people’s thoughts on this topic.

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I recently attended the annual conference of the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, which is the regional umbrella for the American Academy of Religion, American Schools of Oriental Research, Association for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Society of Biblical…
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The eleventh Philosophers’ Carnival is at the only official blog of Clayton Littlejohn. Prosblogion is represented by Imran Aijaz’s post Religious Ambiguity & The ‘Exclusivist’ Picture….
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