LCR: Dilbert Logic

CD, LCR: Blogging This Week

Those of you who are game to continue blogging are welcome to do so this week. Consider it an opportunity to make up a little lost ground if you have been less than diligent at any point earlier in the semester.

CD: Further Reading

A couple of articles in the current issue of the New York Review of Books (available in the library, or online for a small fee) speak usefully to claims in Chenoweth and Stephan.
One, on the American Revolution (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/was-big-revolution-1775/), lends some specificity to the claim that the successful violent insurgency "...was preceded by a decade of parallel institution building, nonviolent boycotts, civil disobedience, noncooperation, and other nation-building methods" (p. 222).
The other, reviewing several books on Germany in the second world war (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/hitlers-logical-holocaust/ -- this one is available free online), details the way in which the destruction of social and governmental institutions preceded mass killing, helping to explain why the holocaust as such was largely confined to Eastern Europe. This somewhat obliquely speaks to Chenoweth and Stephan's observation that "Genocidaires are only as powerful as the henchmen and underlings who carry out their orders" (p. 221).

Updating Thoreau

Regarding the questions about moral purity we have been discussing in class and on blogs, here is an excerpt from this week's "The Ethicist" column in the New York Times Sunday magazine:
I learned that a local business, which I patronize perhaps twice a month for lunch, has been in trouble for employing undocumented workers. I’m not sure what to think of the ethics of that, though the illegality is clear. I’m wondering whether I have any ethical obligation as a citizen and customer to stop going there. LAURIE HURSHMAN, NEW HAVEN, CONN.

It’s true that employing undocumented workers is illegal, and it’s possible you don’t wish to be involved with any organization that breaks the law. But this kind of law operates outside the boundaries of traditional ethics. Obviously, this is not true for all laws: if murder were somehow legalized, killing innocent people would still be morally wrong, based on an ingrained belief in the sanctity of human life. But this is a different kind of statute. If the laws governing undocumented workers were suddenly reversed, it would be seen merely as a policy change. Some people would agree with the modification and others would not, but both sides of the argument would be almost entirely political. Undocumented workers take potential jobs from U.S. citizens, but who is to say citizenship is a moral justification for employment?

Undocumented workers don’t always contribute to the tax base, but they also put themselves in a precarious, unprotected position where they can be underpaid in cash, to the nefarious benefit of the employer. An illegal immigrant can’t legally work at a restaurant to support his family, but his 16-year-old son can, if he happened to be born here. There are contradictions on both sides. You admit you’re “not sure what to think” about this restaurant’s employment practice, which is an acceptable way to feel about an issue that lacks a straightforward moral answer; you’re aware of the illegality, but those laws apply only to the owner and the workers (not the consumer). So if you can’t personally isolate why it’s ethically wrong, there’s no reason to stop eating there.

But let’s take this further. Let’s say you thought about this problem deeply and came to the conclusion that it was unethical for restaurants to employ undocumented workers. This prompts one of the more difficult questions in modern living: Is it wrong to contribute — in any way — to businesses or organizations that contradict your ethical beliefs? There is a mode of thinking that insists that it is and that living ethically requires us to assess every day-to-day decision through the prism of its impact on the wider world. But what that entails in a practical sense is pretty unreasonable, unless “living ethically” is the only thing you care about. To do so would paralyze every moment of every day and consume you entirely. For example, let’s say you view military drone strikes as unethical (an issue far graver than restaurant employees). The U.S. government regularly conducts drone strikes. Does this mean that you should not support any business that pays federal taxes (and thereby provides support for military activities)? Does it mean you should not pay income tax because that makes you part of the problem? Does it mean you need to consider every single extension of the government, weigh their ethical merits against your own and then decide whether you still support the idea of living in America? These are all interesting questions to ask yourself while eating at this restaurant.

CD: Chenoweth & Stephan on Values

After reading King, Gandhi, and others who undertake change through nonviolent action, as well as a number of philosophers who think about it deeply, it is interesting to notice the different intellectual style these political scientists bring to the issue. While they are not uninterested in morality -- noting for example that one reason nonviolent movements can gather more active supporters is that so many people have moral qualms about participating in violence -- they treat morality simply as another sociological fact, and studiously avoid making any value-claims themselves. They seem to be arguing that their objective analysis shows nonviolent action to be superior for one reason only: that it tends to be more effective.

Powerful as such reasoning seems on the surface, in its vigorous avoidance of any (subjective or objective) assessment of the rather different values underlying violent and nonviolent choices of method, it feels oddly dissociated from the intentions that motivate most campaigns. This work might well encourage people to undertake nonviolent campaigns who would otherwise be doubtful of its efficacy, but it's hard to see how it can inspire the sort of commitment to nonviolence that Gandhi thought was so important.

LCR: Alan Turing and Deductive Logic

This year is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the British logician and cryptographer who cracked the Nazi "Enigma" code and almost certainly shortened WWII, perhaps by several years. Turing happened to be gay, and after the war was persecuted for it, which probably led to his death by accidental poisoning (or suicide, as some people think). Here is a short article on the role of deductive logic in his work, and its under-appreciated value for biomedical research.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32942/title/Opinion--Think-Like-Turing/
An excerpt:
"Even though all deductive conclusions are logically implicit in the premises, they are not necessarily obvious, and they can require immense intellectual effort to generate. For example, in order to successfully decipher encrypted Nazi dispatches, Turing and his WWII colleagues had to make virtually every deductive inference permitted by the information in hand, what I call “maximum deduction.” As an ideal, maximum deduction is of potential relevance to today’s biomedical researchers, as deeper reasoning could help avoid fruitless lines of investigation while pointing to previously unrecognized but potentially valuable experiments. But as cognition expert Daniel Kahneman recently noted, rigorous reasoning is energy-intensive and the default choice for many individuals is to minimize cognitive effort.  Biomedical investigators frequently fail to make all of the inferences that are possible with the data available to them, whether derived from their own investigations or from studies by others."

CD: Raz on legal protest

I'm struggling with Joseph Raz's analysis of the right to civil disobedience, and a piece of what's bothering me shows up in this paragraph:  "Liberal states do not make the legitimacy of political action dependent on the cause it is meant to serve. People may support political aims of all complexions. But the right to political action is circumscribed in such states by limitations as the form of the permissible actions. Given that we are used to thinking in this way of lawful political action, it is only natural to extend the same approach to unlawful political activity."
But this seems seriously to miss the point. The "form of the permissible actions" is, precisely and reductively, a legal form. Illegal action, by definition, departs from legality, so it seems to me we really would be correct to hold it to a different, and presumably higher, moral standard. Thoughts?