This Is Not News

When I was an undergraduate and decided to major in philosophy, the department advisor asked me what I was planning to do with my future. The answer I gave bore very little resemblance to how the next ten-plus years of my life would go. Regardless, he was honest with me about the employment prospects, and lack thereof, in the field, and suggested that I strongly consider bioethics. Given the rapid change in medical science and technology, people who could help companies and governments frame and consider the ethical questions raised by new advances would most likely find themselves in demand even outside the traditional academic world. Over a decade later, it’s hard to argue with him. Prescient as he was, I wonder if he ever envisioned the blog.bioethics.net, the blog of the editors of the American Journal of Bioethics. The editors demonstrate how demanding the field is – it requires not just an ability to think deeply and critically about ethical questions, but it requires keeping up with numerous scientific disciplines and understanding the goings-on well enough to relate the questions to the research. The blog is some fascinating reading.

It’s not surprising that a major focus for the blog over the last few weeks has been the controversy over the South Korean stem cell research program, which has been rocked by an escalating seris of ethical challenges. When I first started checking out the blog, the major concern was the issue of informed consent – were the people who donated eggs to the experiments able to fully understand what they were being asked to do, and were they in a position to say no? I’ve learned in my readings on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments that informed consent all by itself is a blockbuster issue for scientific ethics. But that was only the beginning in this case, because it is coming to light that many of the results for which the South Korean team was so celebrated were fabricated. The issue hit the mainstream press a few days ago; the Philadelphia Inquirer covered it right before Christmas.

The bioethics blog has an interesting take on the controversy. In addition to commenting on the immediate issues of honesty and proper conduct, they are pointing out that United States researchers and regulators have very little ability to influence how stem cell research is conducted because they are not allow to work on any embryonic stem cells developed after August 2001. I find it a fairly compelling argument, even though I’m under no illusions that the American regulatory system is working on all cylinders lately. But I’m predisposed to agree with criticism of the research ban in the first place. If I weren’t, I doubt I’d be convinced by an argument that we should do something I think is immoral just because people in other countries are going to do it in an even more immoral fashion. Actually, when I put it that way, it kind of sounds like some of the justifications I’ve heard for torturing prisoners and violating their civil liberties, and I know I don’t find them persuasive.

Found an interesting essay on neo-pragmatism (e.g., Richard Rorty and other contemporary pragmatists) last night via my Technorati watch on references to Dewey. Head on over to Fluid Imagination to read the essay and the comment thread, into which I couldn’t help but stick my nose.

Louis Menand has written and edited a number of books about the pragmatist philosophers. I use his anthology Pragmatism: A Reader in my American Thinkers courses. Thanks to a post by Lore Sjoberg at Slumbering Lungfish, I found this terrific book review Menand has written about a book that sounds fascinating: Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? The book is the result of a long-term study of pundit predictions, and it shows that quite frequently so-called experts have no idea what they’re talking about.

Now, on one hand, this is kind of a troubling thing for Deweyan pragmatists like me. We’re all about doing empirical research and using that to make better decisions. But it’s important to note that Dewey warned that experts can quickly get cut off from the experience of the rest of society and start getting too wrapped up in their own concerns. Dewey believed in the ability of the average person to use information provided by experts to make sound decisions on their own. So Tetlock’s findings may fit with that.

Also, Menand writes that Tetlock has found that certain psychological traits can improve predictions. Don’t get wrapped up in a big idea; appreciate the complexity and context of particular situations; admit when you’re wrong; don’t fall in love with particular details. It’s a great discussion of how purely “logical” or “rational” thought is not human beings’ natural mode of dealing with the world. Our brains are wired to take certain shortcuts and use certain devices which may well be necessary given the world’s complexity, but which can often blind us to the mistakes we’re making.

Go check out the review. Well worth the read.

I refer to John Dewey and democracy fairly often, but the new and improved blog version of Not News doesn’t really have a handy explanation of what I mean. Over the next few days I hope to make a series of posts that discuss the very basics of how we think about what a democracy is, and I can think of no better starting point. When Dewey referred to democracy, he did not primarily have in mind a system for enacting policies and selecting representatives to govern society. He refers to those questions as the domain of “political democracyâ€? in The Public and Its Problems, and considers them too limited a domain to contain the entire concept of democracy. (All page citations refer to the volume of The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953 in which that book is reprinted.)

The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation. (PP 325)

Read the remainder of this entry »

Nice discussion of philosophers and cookbooks over at Ethical Werewolf. I’ve chimed in on the comments there. It’s worth a look.

Yes I mentioned Alton Brown. And Dewey. Try to contain your surprise.

I should probably be working on something else, but I jsut did a quick blog search for mentions of Dewey, and found a great post on the Educational Technology and Life blog. The writer, Mark Wagner, is studying educational technology out in California and has just started reading School and Society for a research project. He compiled a list of ten significant quotes with comments from him. Here’s an example:

“[When introducing real word occupations into the curriculum] the entire school is renewed. It has the a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through directed living, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community.” (p. 18) So let’s see, we’ve got project-based learning, school to industry connections, and small learning communities – maybe even professional learning communities… sounds like cutting edge 21st century educational reform to me.

Contrary to what a lot of critics may say, we don’t have the educational problems we do today because we listened to Dewey. We have them in large part because we didn’t. And so everything old is new again.

Neat story I found floating around the web, best explained in this column from the Hartford Courant. A recent study suggests that a form of Buddhist meditation actually increases brain size in several key areas, and may improve meditators’ attention and decrease age-related brain loss. This may be something I have to try for myself. If I can remember this story long enough to do anything about it.

Two interesting posts tonight up at The Ethical Werewolf, Neil Sinhababu’s blog.

Up top is a brief post about the difference between good and evil:

what makes a person morally good is her intrinsic desire for the good of others. One can be a morally good person (or for that matter, a morally good dog) with any set of beliefs whatsoever. Evil people are particularly susceptible to some beliefs — if you have some deep-seated desire to harm black people, this desire can get some wishful thinking going when combined with a desire to only harm people who do bad things, generating a belief that black people do lots of bad things. This is the belief with which your desires are maximally satisfied. What really makes you evil in this case is the desire to harm black people, not the resultant belief.

I wonder a bit about this definition. It seems to me like you can be evil without actually wishing harm on people if you don’t care at all about how your actions affect them. And people can rationalize themselves into all manner of definitions of good that justify really destructive behavior. Plus there’s the issue of the responsibility that we have to make sure that our belief about what’s good for others actually is good for others. Although under Neil’s definition that might be part of truly wishing what’s good for others in the first place.

But there does seem to be something to the notion that someone who does a horrible thing out of noble intentions is more sympathetic and less horrible than otherwise. Maybe that’s people have a hard time ascribing noble intentions to their ideological opponents.

Right under that post, Neil rather brilliantly marries philosophy of language with the mysteries of dating:

Sadly, it’s not easy to conditionally hit on somebody. Here’s a straightforward example: “If you’re interested in me, then I think you’re really cute.” This, however, amounts to actual hitting on, whether or not the antecedent is satisfied. . . .
There’s one clear problem with conditional hitting-on. It evinces the same attitudes of sexual interest that are essential to actual hitting-on. So when you try to construct a case of conditional hitting-on, it immediately becomes a case of actual hitting-on.

For better or worse, this is definitely the kind of problem only a philosopher can have.

The latest hit on my recurring Dewey search is this piece by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review Online. Despite his obvious disagreements with pragmatism, Goldberg generally does a good job of portraying the position and the critical areas of disagreement. (In another column he jokes that he is assistant treasurer of “the small club of He-Man Pragmatism-haters.”)

I do think the central point of his essay is wrong, but then I would, since I’m a pragmatist. Goldberg writes:

Am I crazy for seeing a conflict between these two views? Menand values the “realism” of Pragmatism which strips away metaphysical irrelevancies while he criticizes Kahn for failing to take into account the rich variety of moral, political, and cultural factors which prevent us from being able to predict how people will react in a calamity like nuclear war.

The problem, I think is that Goldberg is conflating “metaphysical irrelvancies” with “the rich variety of moral, political and cultural factors” in a way that he shouldn’t. A pragmatist who is realistic about the world is going to have observed the variety of beliefs people have and the ways that those beliefs motivate people’s actions. The pragmatist is then going to take those beliefs into account in any plan or prediction he or she wants to make about human behavior.

However, a pragmatist also argues that those moral, political and cultural factors can and do change, because the world is not eternally stable. And this, I think, is the part that Goldberg has a problem with, so I’m going to sidetrack myself for a second. I believe that Goldberg wants moral standards to be permanent, or at least very slow to change. He wants us to make decisions based on the things that we know are simply right, and we sure can’t do that very easily if what’s right is murky or keeps changing. And he has a point there. Pragmatists point out, though, that 1) there’s no reason to believe these absolute certainties exist, because the world sure does seem to change; 2) we’re not sure how we would know we had found them if we did find them; and 3) there seem to be a whole lot of people who are convinced that they have found them, but the certainties in question are mutually contradictory and sometimes run up against what our empirical investigation tells us about the world. (Galileo and Copernicus being two of the favorite examples trotted out on this score.)

So pragmatists are OK with the idea that our beliefs and practices have to change and evolve over time. They want to encourage people to critically examine their own beliefs and practices and see which ones have good reason for being there and which ones might actually work against us. They can say that we need to take certain beliefs and attitudes into account in our current planning even while they try to convince people not to have those beliefs and attitudes anymore. They acknowledge that there will be unintended and unforeseen consequences of this process, which is why the process is continual – a good solution to a problem in 1950 may have to be revised in 1970 and again in 1990, and a pragmatist is OK with that. At a fundamental level, I don’t think Goldberg is – he just doesn’t see the world that way. But it’s a fair debate to have.

On the other hand, Goldberg also tosses this in:

Under the influence of Dewey, the Pragmatists championed “experimentalism” which sought to treat every human endeavor like a laboratory experiment. Dewey transformed American education entirely and we live with the results today.

The first sentence is, I think, a too-harsh exaggeration. Dewey wanted us to make use of the method of science, but not treat each other as lab rats. As for the second sentence: I really wish I had gone to school in the world where everyone was following the Deweyan model of having students play an active role in the learning process. I spent twelve years sitting in desks listening to teachers lecture while my fellow students asked, “Will this be on the test?” and “What am I ever going to do with this?” I think I would have had more fun in that other world.

Update: Roy at alicublog is considerably less charitable to Goldberg than I am. I’m willing to cut Goldberg some slack on the conflation I mentioned above because I’ve seen that mistake made so many times. There must be something about believing in absolute metaphysical certainties that makes people unable to understand the people who don’t.

I have a customized layout over at Google News. It’s a great feature. I give Google a set of search terms, it generates a continually updating page of results from its database of news and commentary sources across the web.

Among the terms I track with this feature is “John Dewey.” And what I have discovered is that there is some serious hatred for Dewey in the world of conservative commentary. Or at least, hatred for some mythical version of Dewey who is somehow responsible for so much that has gone wrong with America in the last century. From time to time I’ll call attention to examples of this phenomenon.

And today I found a rather good example, the ironically-titled “Liberals Need Remedial Reading Classes “. The author, Tom Brewton, claims that the only legitimate source of morality is from some kind of metaphysically transcendent source – that standards for morality must come from someplace higher than human beings, and that these standards must be absolute. He criticizes atheistic believers in social justice by saying:

In an atheistic, secular world, the only factors are material forces, and by definition, therefore, metaphysically-based morality simply cannot exist. Thus, if the leader decrees that creating the New Soviet Man requires slaughtering a few million land-owning farmers, so be it. There are no rules of secular “morality� to stop it.

John Dewey’s atheistic and secular philosophy of pragmatism made this explicit. Dewey lectured at Columbia University in the early part of the 20th century that there can be no such things as moral standards, because Darwin had “proved� that everything is continually evolving. Thus, the only standards of conduct must be whatever gets for you what you want.

Now here’s the thing: Dewey definitely disputes Brewton’s claim that moral standards have to be absolute, or that they have to come from a transcendental source. Brewton could probably find and provide half a dozen quotes suggesting this before he finished breakfast. So if that’s going to be the field of dispute, fair enough. But Brewton goes overboard in mischaracterizing the positions of pragmatists such as Dewey.

In works like Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey explicitly criticized Marxist philosophy for focusing on economics and the material world. In Art as Experience he discussed the nature of emotionally and aesthetically satisfying experiences.

As for “whatever gets for you what you want” as the only moral standard, I wish I knew where Brewton were getting this. In The Quest for Certainty and the 1932 edition of Ethics (which Dewey co-wrote), Dewey talks about the difference between what is desired and what is desirable. The best analogy here is to the difference between what is eaten and what is edible. I am capable of going upstairs and swallowing a healthy dose or six of shampoo. That doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing for me to consume, or that consuming it is in any way beneficial to my continued existence. It may have been eaten, but it’s not edible.

Dewey argues that values work the same way. There are things we want, but getting them isn’t good for us. The trick is to figure out what these things are. Dewey argues that we can make a lot of progress on that front via reason, the same way we can figure out whether or not I should swallow that shampoo. And Dewey, who frequently criticized Stalin, would be one of the first to say that ” slaughtering a few million land-owning farmers” is pretty high up on the not-desirable list.

Now, like I said, saying that we can rationally investigate the world to determine moral standards is very different than saying that moral standards are permanent and eternal and have been revealed to us by religious figures and our social traditions. You might read books like Democracy and Education and The Public and Its Problems and not agree on the standards Dewey believes he has worked out. But that’s a very different argument than saying he has no standards at all.

Oh, and Brewton also tosses in this chestnut:

That’s akin to John Dewey’s progressive education via Rousseau, the belief that children will learn by themselves, via “experiences,� all that they need to know. Anyone for letting every student intuit calculus on his own, from “experiences�?

This is a withering critique of a position Dewey never took. In fact, in Experience and Education he explicitly argued against it right from the first page, where he criticized progressive educators of his day for getting trapped in Either-Or thinking. If too much structure, lecture, and top-down learning from teachers was the problem, then the solution must be an absence of structure, right? Wrong, says Dewey. You need both. In School and Society he talks about how students at the Laboratory School he ran in Chicago would indeed have their own projects, like trying to grow a vegetable garden. But then teachers would instruct them on the historical development of agricultural tools, on the principles of biology and chemistry that lead to better farming, and so on. Teaching in the Dewey method is actually a very demanding task, because the job of the teacher is to help provide the structure and context that lets the child see how education actually connects with one’s life outside the school and then provide the child with useful knowledge and skills.

I have a feeling we’ll be coming back to that issue quite a bit. Somewhere along the way Dewey’s theory of education got tossed in the intellectual blender and the mess is everywhere.