Reason & Persuasion

Exam Aftermath

Question 1 was flawed. It won't be counted. My sincere apologies for pain and suffering caused. (Hope the exam was not, otherwise, unduly painful.)

Final Paper Marks

Your papers are all marked and reviewed and reconsidered and all that. Sorry it took so long. Your tutor now knows what your mark is, and can inform you. Various tutors may have different ways of doing so. Check your local tutor blog and, if you don't see any special information there, email the tutor him or herself.

I realize that it's nice to be able to go into the final exam knowing, for better or worse, how you did on a major assignment. So I hope most of you can get that news by tomorrow morning at the latest.

Questions?

Good Luck - and Bring A Pencil!

As you know, the final exam is TUESDAY, APRIL 28, at 1 PM in MPSH6.

Some things to keep in mind.

1. Bring a pencil. You have to bubble in those little bubblesheets.

2. BRING A PENCIL.

3. Remember to bring your ID.

4. The exam is OPEN BOOK. This means: you can bring any piece of paper you desire. Textbook, dictionary (not an electronic one). Piles of old exams. Your lucky origami grasshopper. Anything paper.

5. There is no penalty for guessing, so you should guess if you don't know the answer. (True belief is as good as knowledge so long as it does not run away. Who knows? Maybe you'll guess them all correctly. But knowing the answers is a more secure methodology. So study.)

6. If you find a minor error - typo, misnumbering, something that looks definitely odd - feel free to raise your hand and ask. In fact: please do. We don't want people to be confused by any little misprints we may have perpetrated. The exam contains many printed pages and every semester there is something (for which we are sincerely sorry, but we are only human). On the other hand, if you think there is a more serious problem with any given question ... well, we can't sit down and debate it with you during the exam itself. See 7.

7. My policy is to allow substantive challenges to any question that you feel is ill-designed during the 24 hour period after the exam. That means: the challenge period ends at 3 PM sharp, on Wednesday. 'Ill-designed' means: there is no strictly defensible answer. Or: there is more than one strictly defensible answer. I'm not allowed to release the key during the exam period, so you will have to figure out for yourself that a question is flawed. You are allowed to take the exam script itself with you after the exam. (Obviously you have to turn in your answer sheet, but you can keep the question booklet.) You must submit challenges by email and the email must be written clearly. Don't come see me in my office. (Feel free to visit me socially. But I won't discuss the exam during the exam period.) I will acknowledge receipt of any challenges but won't otherwise reply or tell you the outcome during the exam period. But I will try to be fair-minded. I don't want anyone else to suffer for my mistakes and don't mind admitting errors. (Hey, it's hard to write these darn things. I sometimes slip.) On the other hand, I won't change the answer key if it merely turns out that a question was harder than I anticipated. If some question has some awkward feature that does not technically invalidate it, then accept my  apologies, but that sort of thing falls equally on all your shoulders. Take that into consideration before appealing.

8. If you have any further questions that I might be in a position to answer before the exam itself, feel free to leave a comment to this post. If not: GOOD LUCK! I'll see you all tomorrow. I am also continuing to answer emails this week. And I'll be in and out of my office most days, if you want just to drop by

Final Paper Marks

You are probably wondering: when will you find out your final paper mark?

Here's the deal.

The markers are just about done, but then what happens is this: we compare notes, your original tutor finds out what you got. If there are any discrepancies (draft mark significantly different from final mark) then your tutor will check to see that he/she thinks the final marker's judgment is basically reasonable.  (That is not quite the same thing as agreeing with the marker, be it noted.) In cases of disagreement, the paper is flagged for review and final decision by me. THEN you get it back. That is, then you can ask your original tutor what you got. Obviously this takes a bit more time and paper-shuffling. I hope not more than another week or so. It is a lot more fair, however.

I don't know whether I've mentioned this before, but all markers are required either to hit an average or justify departure from it. (Often people have relatively small stacks of papers, so we can't be too insistent on hitting averages, but we do strive for consistency in grading. We don't want anyone to be harder, or easier, than the rest.)

I finally got around to adding answer keys to those two last exams

Sorry for the delay. Here they are, along with all the other keys. I retook the exams myself (so if there are any stupid mistakes, I'll correct them real quick after you point them out!)

More Thread

Last minute open thread.

Open Thread: General Philosophy Stuff

Today is the paper due day. Hope that is going alright for you. You have the weekend and Monday to satisfy your blogging requirement. I expect most of you will choose to blog paper-related stuff, because that's what you are thinking about. Then again, maybe you have had enough of all that.

How about this. If you still need to talk about something, poke around in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Just put something that sounds interesting into the 'search' box, then read about it. I hope some of you go on to be philosophy majors, so this is a good chance to see what it's all about. (It isn't just Plato plus theory of justice.)

For example: they have a new article up about 'modularity of mind'. Does my mind consist of several different, semi-autonomous 'modules' - little units doing their own thing and maybe not communicating perfectly (or at all) with each other? Interesting question. Plato was one of the first to suggest something of the sort. It's a pretty technical article. So if you find it too hard, look elsewhere. But it gives you some idea of what advanced philosophy of mind may look like.

Here's something more accessible. A lecture on consciousness by Daniel Dennett. It's nice because it starts with some general reflections on what philosophy is all about, what reason and persuasion are all about.

Or talk about something else!

Paper Turn-In Information/Blog comment submission

Per this post, your final paper is due this Friday (5PM). The turn-in procedure is basically the same as for your draft. Upload it to the appropraite IVLE bin. You can save it over the draft file, which is still there. Or add something like 'finalpaper' to the file name. Either way is fine.

If you experience any sort of technical problem, email me - phihjc@nus.edu.sg. (We want to use IVLE for this, but you can always get a real human to sort things out if the technical stuff is giving you trouble.)

Your blog posts were also supposed to be due this Friday. However, one tutor has requested an extension and that's ok with me. So: blog posts must be posted by Monday (5 PM).

How do you turn in blog posts? The first thing you should know is: you do have to turn them in. Your tutor needs to know where they are.

The basic rule is: do whatever your tutor tells you, to turn in your blog comments. More specifics under the fold.

Continue reading "Paper Turn-In Information/Blog comment submission"

Notes Are Up For Wednesday

The notes are updated for Wednesday on the lecture page. Also, I've added two more exams to the practice page. I haven't had a chance to make keys for those exams. (Silly me, I have to go back and retake my own exam again. I'll do that a bit later.) We'll work through one of those new exams - number 15, during nuts&bolts on Wednesday.

Nationalism and Culture

I've gotten several emails from students asking what the relationship is between nationalism and culture. (Gong Li's Chinese critics are obviously nationalists. But is that the same thing as saying this is a 'cultural' issue.)

Here's a good article on the subject. I'll just quote the first bit:

The term “nationalism” is generally used to describe two phenomena: (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination. (1) raises questions about the concept of nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual’s membership in a nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary. (2) raises questions about whether self-determination must be understood as involving having full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less is required.

It is traditional, therefore, to distinguish nations from states — whereas a nation often consists of an ethnic or cultural community, a state is a political entity with a high degree of sovereignty. While many states are nations in some sense, there are many nations which are not fully sovereign states. As an example, the Native American Iroquois constitute a nation but not a state, since they do not possess the requisite political authority over their internal or external affairs. If the members of the Iroquois nation were to strive to form a sovereign state in the effort to preserve their identity as a people, they would be exhibiting a state-focused nationalism.

Nationalism has long been ignored as a topic in political philosophy, written off as a relic from bygone times. It has only recently come into the focus of philosophical debate, partly in consequence of rather spectacular and troubling nationalist clashes, like those in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet republics. The surge of nationalism usually presents a morally ambivalent and for this reason often fascinating picture. “National awakenings” and struggles for political independence are often both heroic and inhumanly cruel; the formation of a recognizably national state often responds to deep popular sentiment, but can and does sometimes bring in its wake inhuman consequences, including violent expulsion and “cleansing” of non-nationals, all the way to organized mass murder. The moral debate on nationalism reflects a deep moral tension between solidarity with oppressed national groups on the one hand and repulsion in the face of crimes perpetrated in the name of nationalism on the other. Moreover, the issue of nationalism points to a wider domain of problems having to do with the treatment of ethnic and cultural differences within a democratic polity, which are arguably among the most pressing problems of contemporary political theory.

Note how 'nationalism' is being used as a term for any large-scale, intense, in-group-focused cultural formation. That is, nations ARE cultures. (Sort of.) Lots of good cases to be considered here, if you are still looking for good cases. 'Nationalist awakenings' that are good, bad and somewhere in between. How do we tell which are which? How do we judge such cases?

Open Thread

I'll put up some more substantive posts a bit later - busy busy. Let's make this an open thread concerning yesterday's lecture. (Or anything else moderately relevant you might wish to discuss.)

Some Quotes From An Article I'm Going To Talk About Today

From a New Yorker Article, "Vengeance Is Ours", by Jared Diamond:

In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans. Daniel often did not even distinguish between his biological father and other male clansmen of his father’s generation. And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance.

Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. “Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge,” Daniel said. “On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll.” As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility ...

“I admit that the New Guinea Highland way to solve the problem posed by a killing isn’t good…we are always in effect living on the battlefield.”

Notes For Tomorrow

Your reading for tomorrow (as you should know already) is Chapter 1 from Ian Miller, "An Eye For An Eye", available here.

The notes for the lecture are up on the main site. (Slightly updated from what they were 24 hours ago.)

Basically, the lecture is about justice and punishment. The notes contain some long passages, but I'll try to be good and not just read those verbatim. But I do want to be able to refer you to them.

Important fact: the Miller reading will be tested on the final. That is, I will base a few questions on it. So you should read it.

More to follow ...

Final Exam Information and More Utilitarianism

First, the utilitarianism. Here's a good podcast discussion between the philosopher, Peter Singer, and an economist, Tyler Cowen, whom I actually know slightly. (I never watch the video on these things. I just download the mp3. Up to you.) Singer was mentioned by Neil in his lecture. He is perhaps the world's most famous orthodox utilitarian. That is, he really believes in utilitarianism. Cowen is, I think, a libertarian with utilitarian sympathies. Anyway, one thing that's nice about the discussion is that Cowen's first question for Singer concerns the ethics of immigration. Overall it's a very nice discussion and I think it would be helpful for you. They both offer various cases, to illustrate their points. And I think the kinds of cases they come up with are the kinds of cases you should be coming up with. Not the same ones, probably. But this kind of thing. When you understand how their cases function, you understand what kind of cases you need.

Now, the final exam. I've just written it, and I've decided to tell you a couple of important facts. Obviously a bit more than half of the questions will be about Plato. But a few particularly long passage questions (that is, questions about passages that are unusually long) are from the "Meno". So I'm telling you: if you are planning to reread your Plato to prepare, make sure to reread "Meno" in particular. Free advice.

Second, I decided, after my lecture, that it would be a good idea to ask questions about the Sam Scheffler paper. So I did. I am also asking questions about our Ian Miller reading for this week. You can download the Miller reading as a PDF or read it online here. The Miller readings and the Scheffler reading are the only readings I've decided to test, besides Plato. So now you know. I'll explain about all this next week in lecture but I think I pretty much just said it all.

Feel free to discuss the Singer/Cowen exchange.

Guest Lecturer Tomorrow

My colleague, Asst. Prof. Neil "the dancing philosopher" Sinhababu, will be lecturing tomorrow about ethical theory. He's been instructed to 1) give you a sense what it might be like to take a module about that; 2) be generally lively and informative; 3) give at least a little assistance with your topic. Let me just explain about that briefly: Sam Scheffler argues, basically, that justice is more significant than culture. (This is too simple, but let's leave it at that. For the more complicated version, watch my lecture last week.) But what's justice? I'll lecture about this next week, and for the remainder of the semester. But Neil will approach from the other direction, in effect. What's justice? Well, presumably, justice is what you get when everyone behaves ethically. So let's consider the individual case a bit, shall we? (Not that this will necessarily give us a decisive answer, but it's worth a try.)

To get some discussion going - it's been a bit quiet around here - what about taking this Moral Sense Test. (It was partly designed by an old poker buddy of mine. Small world!) Also, I think the cases you are confronted with might give you better ideas how to design and describe cases in your papers. Here's a bit of information about the test:

Nothing captures human attention more than a moral dilemma. Whether we are soap opera fanatics or not, we can’t help sticking our noses in other people’s affairs, pronouncing our views on right and wrong, permissible and impermissible, justified or not. For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that our moral judgments arise from rational, conscious, voluntary, reflective deliberations about what ought to be. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is a slowly developing capacity, founded entirely on experience and education, and subject to considerable variation across cultures. With the exception of a few trivial examples, one culture’s right is another’s wrong. We believe this hyper rational, culturally-specific view is no longer tenable. The MST has been designed to show why and offer an alternative. Most of our moral intuitions are unconscious, involuntary, and universal, developing in each child despite formal education. When humans, from the hunter-gathers of the Rift Valley to the billionaire dot-com-ers of the Silicon Valley generate moral intuitions they are like reflexes, something that happens to us without our being aware of how or even why. We call this capacity our moral faculty. Our aim is to use data from the MST, as well as other experiments, to explain what it is, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities and concerns about human welfare. The MST has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word “ought” — about the principles that make one action right and another wrong, and why we feel elated about the former and guilty about the latter.

As in every modernly held view, there are significant historical antecedents. The origins of our own perspective date back at least 300 years to the philosopher David Hume and more recently, to the political philosopher John Rawls. But unlike these prescient thinkers, we can now validate the intuitions with significant scientific evidence. Over the past twenty years, there has been growing evidence for a universally shared moral faculty based on findings in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, and neurobiology. This evidence has created a powerful movement directed at the core aspects of human nature. It is a movement that has the power to reshape our lives by uncovering the deep structure of our moral intuitions and showing how they can either support or conflict with our conscious, often legally supported decisions.

I'm skeptical about the empirical reliability and scientific value of the results of these sorts of surveys. But they are interesting. So have at it!

Culture and Immigration

More substantive posts to follow this week, but here's something short. Many of you have been emailing and asking about possible immigration-related cases. We have talked quite a bit about immigrants' reasons and somewhat about how society may decide to cope with immigrants. These are basically the cases Scheffler considers. An obvious area I haven't said much about is: what sorts of principles should guide countries in controlling immigration? Obviously they will have a basic interest in letting in immigrants who have skills or talents that will, on the whole, raise the quality of life for the other citizens. And obviously (at least I would say so, others wouldn't) there is some sense in which countries have a moral duty to admit refugees from other countries if, due to extreme circumstances, they have nowhere else to go. (If they are going to die or be killed if you don't admit them.) But what about less clear cases? Cultural cases. Would it be reasonable for Singapore to discriminate in favor of/against some class of immigrants on 'cultural' grounds? How so? Or how not?

Nudge - a possible theory of culture

Alright. You need help thinking about culture and justice. Here's something that might help. I recently read (actually, listened to, as an audiobook) Nudge: Improving Decisions and Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.

Let me quote the book description from the (very extensive) book website:

Unfortunately, we often make poor choices - and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself.

Our errors are what make us human, but up till now, they have been largely ignored by those around us, whether they make a complex public policy or sell us a plain old bottle of wine.

In this ground-breaking collaboration, two extraordinary, if ultimately human, thinkers, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, invite us into an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for them to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society.

Using colorful examples drawn from the realms of 401(k) investing, organ donations, and marriage, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful "choice architecture" can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice.

Let me relate this to the stuff Sam Scheffler has to say in his paper. Scheffler suggests that what matters is not so much culture as justice. But: you can't have no culture. There has to be a default - a national culture or a community culture, some prevalent set of norms - and this default will have consequences. So how do you decide what the default should be? This is exactly what Thaler and Sunstein discuss. They advocate a culture of 'nudges', in effect. Legislators and other designers of 'choice situations' are 'choice engineers'. (This is a lot of people: everyone who designs a web site is, in some sense, a 'choice engineer'. What do I put in the sidebar? What are all the default display settings?) Ideally, they argue, culture should be a set of weak nudges in the right direction. What's the right direction? The direction in which, we are pretty sure, people want to be going in anyway. They want to be healthy. So we try to set their health insurance options in a sensible way, so, in case they don't think about it too hard, they'll end up in more or less the right place. On the other hand, we don't heavily presume their preferences in any controversial way. (We don't try to nudge them to go to one particular church, for example.) And the nudges should be weak and easily defeatable. If people really don't want to do it, they can easily get around it. (We tax cigarettes and put nasty pictures on the package, but people can still buy the stuff.) They call their philosophy 'libertarian paternalism'. It is, if you like, a theory of ideal, rationally-designed culture. Ideally, a culture ought to be a libertarian-paternalistic environment in which wise legislators and other 'choice engineers' set sensible defaults, but in which the population can easily go against these defaults.

I don't think you need to go and read the whole book. The site provides a lot of little bits to think about. There is a excerpt from the book, containing a number of cases. (You need cases! You could look at their cases and maybe get some ideas.) There are book reviews and there is a blog.

Now, one big difference: they are mostly concerned with public policy, which is not quite the same thing as culture. But it is similar to this extent: it is a matter of establishing norms. That's enough for one post. I hope this is helpful to some of you.

Lecture Notes For Tomorrow

Tomorrow I'm going to lecture on Sam Scheffler's paper, "Immigration and the Significance of Culture", and your paper topic. I don't have the notes ready yet. They will consist (mostly) of short bits from the Scheffler paper, which I will discuss. I'll post the notes tomorrow morning (at the latest). But I don't think they are the sort of thing you need to print out anyway. I think just showing up and listening will be best.

UPDATE: Notes are up now on the lecture page. They consist of short too medium-ish passages from the Scheffler paper. I strongly recommend NOT printing them out. Better just to print the whole paper. I want to be able to read and paraphrase them. But you don't need to kill a tree to follow along.

Reel Horizons

In lecture I mentioned that the department is sponsoring a film series, Reel Horizons. Sadly, I'm busy tomorrow, and can't be on the panel for the latest installment, but here's the poster. Feel free to attend.

As I mentioned in lecture, I think the poster is a bit confused. (It wouldn't be the first time!) Can corporations own everything? Would that be so bad? I'm afraid the answer to the second question is a dull: yes, it would obviously be very bad, because it would mean people couldn't own themselves - i.e. be free. I'm pretty sure that there is no good model on which corporations strip all humans beings of all their freedoms.

A more interesting question (which is what I expect you'll actually hear discussed): what are the advantages and disadvantages of treating corporations as a species of very large person? Or nation states, for that matter. As I mentioned in lecture, it is a standard joke that if corporations were people, they would all be clinically insane - psychopathic, really. Same for nation states. The joke isn't exactly the same as an analysis, but it's pretty sharp, all the same. The puzzle, then, is: how can it be a good thing for people to be living among these super-powered persons: corporations and states and so forth? I think it is a good thing, for a wide range of possible arrangements. Yet when you put it a certain way, it sounds like the sort of thing that would tend to go very badly. How can it possibly not tend to go badly?

What's that you say? (More philosophy of questionable audio quality)

But seriously, I like podcasts, so let me recommend a couple. (I am assuming that you are a bit exhausted from writing your papers, and in need of a break. So I'm recommending stuff that might be relevant, but that is also about something a little different. Give you some variety.)

Continue reading "What's that you say? (More philosophy of questionable audio quality)"