Removing Confederate Monuments

Travis Timmerman
1000 Word Philosophy
Originally posted 19 June 20

Here are two excerpt:

1. A Moral Argument for Removing Confederate Monuments in Two Parts
Part 1:

(1) If some monument(s) unavoidably harms undeserving people, then there is moral reason to remove that monument.

(2) Public Confederate monuments unavoidably harm at least (i) those who suffer as a result of knowing the racist motivation behind the existence of most Confederate monuments and having those motivations made obvious by public Confederate monuments, and/or (ii) those who suffer as a result of being reminded of the horrors of the Civil War and the United States’ racist history by public Confederate monuments.

(3) Therefore, there is strong moral reason to remove public Confederate monuments.

If premises (1)-(2) are true, then the truth of (3) is logically guaranteed.

(1) should be uncontroversial since it follows from the more general claim that we have moral reason to avoid harming innocent people.

Part (i) of (2) is supported by the ample testimony of the groups fighting to remove Confederate monuments. Many know the history behind them, and are constantly reminded of the racist motivation for their creation, and suffer as a consequence.

(cut)

3. Conclusion

The above argument is but one possible point of entry into this complex debate. If successful, it shows that we’re obligated to continue removing public Confederate monuments.

The Pro and Con arguments are here.

The New Science of How to Argue—Constructively

Jesse Singal
The Atlantic
Originally published April 7, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Once you know a term like decoupling, you can identify instances in which a disagreement isn’t really about X anymore, but about Y and Z. When some readers first raised doubts about a now-discredited Rolling Stone story describing a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia, they noted inconsistencies in the narrative. Others insisted that such commentary fit into destructive tropes about women fabricating rape claims, and therefore should be rejected on its face. The two sides weren’t really talking; one was debating whether the story was a hoax, while the other was responding to the broader issue of whether rape allegations are taken seriously. Likewise, when scientists bring forth solid evidence that sexual orientation is innate, or close to it, conservatives have lashed out against findings that would “normalize” homosexuality. But the dispute over which sexual acts, if any, society should discourage is totally separate from the question of whether sexual orientation is, in fact, inborn. Because of a failure to decouple, people respond indignantly to factual claims when they’re actually upset about how those claims might be interpreted.

Nerst believes that the world can be divided roughly into “high decouplers,” for whom decoupling comes easy, and “low decouplers,” for whom it does not. This is the sort of area where erisology could produce empirical insights: What characterizes people’s ability to decouple? Nerst believes that hard-science types are better at it, on average, while artistic types are worse. After all, part of being an artist is seeing connections where other people don’t—so maybe it’s harder for them to not see connections in some cases. Nerst might be wrong. Either way, it’s the sort of claim that could be fairly easily tested if the discipline caught on.

The info is here.

Time to abandon grand ethical theories?

Julian Baggini
TheTLS.co
Originally posted May 22, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

Social psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists would not be baffled by this apparent contradiction. Many have long believed that morality is essentially a system of social regulation. As such it is in no more need of a divine foundation or a philosophical justification than folk dancing or tribal loyalty. Indeed, if ethics is just the management of the social sphere, it should not be surprising that as we live in a more globalized world, ethics becomes enlarged to encompass not only how we treat kith and kin but our distant neighbours too.

Philosophers have more to worry about. They are not generally satisfied to see morality as a purely pragmatic means of keeping the peace. To see the world muddling through morality is deeply troubling. Where’s the consistency? Where’s the theoretical framework? Where’s the argument?

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There is then a curious combination of incoherence and vagueness about just what it is to be ethical, and a bogus precision in the ways in which organizations prove themselves to be good. All this confusion helps fuel philosophical ethics, which has become a vibrant, thriving discipline, providing academic presses with a steady stream of books. Looking over a sample of their recent output, it is evident that moral philosophers are keen to show that they are not just playing intellectual games and that they have something to offer the world.

The info is here.

There’s Argument, and there’s Disputation

by Iain Brassington
British Medical Journal Blogs
Originally posted June 6, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Basically, the problem is this: that the model for debating contests is, presumably, based around the idea that debate is an effective way to whittle bad ideas away from good; if each participant is a doughty falsificationist, and equally able in debate as his opponent, then at the end of a process of debate, we’ll be closer to the truth of the matter than we were at the start.  So far, so good.  But there’s a handful of fairly obvious problems with that model.  First, that doesn’t lend itself to the idea that there is a winner and a loser in any particular debate.  Second, a shoddy argument presented by a good speaker might win a competitive debate over a good argument presented by a diffident speaker.  We might hope that a competent judge would account for that, but it’d be better if there wasn’t any need to solve what looks to be a structural problem to begin with.  Third – which is related, but probably more importantly when it comes to ethics – someone with a good understanding of the moral arguments and who is a decent orator might stand a fair chance of winning an argument; but it doesn’t follow that a good orator who’s won an argument has any particular understanding of the moral arguments.  Debating contests reward people for being good at debate; but that’s presumably not the true end of ethics education.  Fourth, this kind of strategy is possibly OK in politics, in which the point of oratory is to persuade people to adopt a certain cause; and so debating competitions might provide training for that.  (I suspect that that’s something like the rationale behind things like the IofI’s competition in schools: it’s directed at developing a certain set of skills, with one eye on a vivacious public debate.  Whatever my private suspicions of the IofI generally, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea.)  But ethical debate is qualitatively different.  It isn’t really about winning converts.  Or, at least: one might hope that a convincing argument would have moral gravity and attract agreement, but the mood of the thing is different.

The article is here.

The Attack on Truth

We have entered an age of willful ignorance

By Lee McIntyre
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published June 8, 2015

To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when scientists occasionally have to retract their own work.)

Humans have always held some wrongheaded beliefs that were later subject to correction by reason and evidence. But we have reached a watershed moment, when the enterprise of basing our beliefs on fact rather than intuition is truly in peril.

It’s not just garden-variety ignorance that periodically appears in public-opinion polls that makes us cringe or laugh. A 2009 survey by the California Academy of Sciences found that only 53 percent of American adults knew how long it takes for Earth to revolve around the sun. Only 59 percent knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as the dinosaurs.

The entire article is here.