Chris Bertram

This blog post is a shameless plug for a friend’s book. But I wouldn’t be writing it if I didn’t believe that the book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. Havi Carel’s Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (UK link ) is published tomorrow by Acumen. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Havi’s experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another’s catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn’t maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Havi was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that’s, obviously, a difficult business.
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Michael Reiss has been forced to resign as Director of Education of the Royal Society . Absolutely shocking, in my view. Several of those calling for his head, such as Sir Richard Roberts, made much of the fact that he is an ordained minister. But since at least two FRSs—John Polkinghorne and Bernard Silverman—are also priests, that’s hardly a reason for the Society not to employ him. The RS statement says:

“Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education.”

Well, no, they weren’t “open to misinterpretation”, they were wilfully misinterpreted by those who were always going to be determined to do so, and it shows real spinelessness on the part of the RS that they didn’t back him. As I blogged a few days ago , Reiss didn’t call for creationism to be part of the science curriculum, he said (absolutely clearly, in his original statement of his view) that teachers should, as a matter of good pedagogical practice, be willing to engage with students they encounter who come to the class with creationist views. That seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate position for someone concerned with science pedagogy to take. Others may disagree with the substance of his view. That’s fair enough. But to push him out for saying it? Dreadful.

(A list of issues where partisans are only willing to tolerate a simple straightforward and unequivocal expression of the party line (on either side) and will seek to punish deviants: anything touching on religion and education (including this issue); Israel/Palestine; abortion/right to life, ….etc. )

Update: see also James Wimberley here .

There’s much anger circulating around the blogosphere about the comments of Michael Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society about how to deal with creationism and ID in school science classes. In fact, the whole thing could stand as an example of how on some issues (of which this is one) people only want to hear an unequivocal assertion of a party line and get unreasonably annoyed (and purport not to understand what they understand perfectly well) when someone says something nuanced or pragmatic.

Here’s the question Reiss asked:

What should science teachers do when faced with students who are creationists?

To which he gave the answer that simply ignoring them is wrong and counterproductive. Rather, in his view, it is better pedagogical practice to engage with their doubts about evolution. He also adds that teachers have a duty to explain the scientific position but that they should not expect the doing so will displace creationist beliefs in students. His thought there is that explaining that evolutionary theory provides the best scientific explanation is not necessarily going to cut ice with people who don’t accept the scientific way of looking at the world.

All reasonable enough, or so it seems to me. But then you get headlines like Leading scientist urges teaching of creationism in schools Of course, strictly speaking that’s true, since he advocated that teachers be open to the discussion of creationism with their students. But it gives the impression that he wanted creationism (and its ID variant) to be given house-room in the curriculum as “valid” alternative explanations of life. And that he didn’t say.

Incidentally, the Times also devoted a leader to the controversy , comparing inter alia Reiss to Sarah Palin:

Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, while not a creationist, has courted the support of those who want to teach biblical creationism alongside evolution in science classes by saying that schools should “let kids debate both sides”. Both Governor Palin’s populism and Professor Reiss’s well-meaning intervention are based on the same mistake – that it is acceptable to teach faith as if it were science.

Since Reiss’s clearly expressed view is that creationism is no part of the scientific world view, that is a gross distortion by their leader-writer who is clearly neither a careful nor a charitable reader.

Jim Henley writes :

Oh by the way: “Country First” is a fascist idea. There ought to be a fairly large number of people, things and groups that are more important to you than your “country.”

Well, as a Brit, I oughtn’t to intrude, but I can report that within seconds of reading Jim’s post, a certain Woody Guthrie song was going through my head …..

Oh how times change! I rather doubt that a piece of 1958 research on how children behave when locked in fridges would make it past a modern university ethics committee!

Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment as the result of observation of behavior. Success in escaping was dependent on the device, a child’s age and size and his behavior. It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined. Three major types of behavior were observed: (1) inaction, with no effort or only slight effort to get out (24%); (2) purposeful effort to escape (39%); (3) violent action both directed toward escape and undirected (37%). Some of the children made no outcry (6% of the 2-year-olds and 50% of the 5-year-olds). Not all children pushed. When tested with devices where pushing was appropriate, 61% used this technique. Some children had curious twisting and twining movements of the fingers or clenching of the hands. When presented with a gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob. Time of confinement in the enclosure was short for most children. Three-fourths released themselves or were released in less than 3 minutes; one-fourth in less than 10 seconds. Of those who let themselves out, one-half did so in less than 10 seconds. One-third of the children emerged unruffled, about half were upset but could be comforted easily, and a small group (11%) required some help to become calm.

I’ll bet they did.

H/t Zoe D.

Obviously, this shouldn’t be taken too, indeed at all, seriously, but I did a little playing around to try to discover which nation did best at the Olympics. I’m told (or at least, I read in the Times the other day) that some US commentators favour an assessment based on total medals won divided by population. Well they would, wouldn’t they? But obviously, some medals are worth more than others and you want to take some account of relative economic development. So here’s what I did: I assigned 7 points for gold, 3 for silver and 1 for bronze and then divided by Gross National Income in $billion (PPP adjusted) as given by the Nationmaster site. GNI is going to vary positively by population and by economic developement, thereby capturing both relevant facts. The GNI figures are probably not completely accurate, and I had to plug in a figure for Cuba. I also discarded all nations that scored less than 50 points (there’s a pretty big an convenient gap below that score). The result is in the table below. So well done Jamaica, and, among the OECD countries, Australia.

Martin O’Neill has a characteristically interesting piece in the New Statesman, this time on QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) and their role in the National Health Service decision to provide or deny expensive drugs to patients. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I had one quibble with Martin’s analysis. He writes:

Littlejohns [the clinical director of NICE] has released a preliminary ruling, denying access to the drugs Sutent, Avastin, Nexavar and Torisel to patients with advanced metastatic kidney cancer. These patients will, on average, die months earlier than those with the same condition in other countries in Europe where such drugs are available.

But then later in the same piece:

… if such decisions are made locally rather than nationally, we are thrown into the familiar problems of the ‘post-code lottery’. A patient in Nottingham may find herself denied treatment that is provided to someone in Newcastle. Allowing matters of life and death to depend on the good or bad luck of geographical location seems like the very opposite of finding justifiable policies.

Hmm. So in the first-quoted paragraph, Martin presents the supra-national geographical variation as a troubling datum, to which the adoption of a sensible national drug-evaulation policy is a response, whereas in the second, he presents sub-national geographical variation as a decisive reason for rejecting local discretion. But why not say that local variation is OK, just so long as it is backed up by good reasons, or, alternatively, that we should have European (or even global) standards that treat like cases alike?

“The absence of war between major established democracies is as close to anything we know to a simple empirical regularity in relations between peoples.”

John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 52—3.

Well, obviously it depends on how much you pack into “major” and “established”, but, since both Russia and Georgia rate as 7, “fully democratic” on the Polity index, there’s at least some case for saying that there’s just been an exception to that lawlike generalization.[fn1]

Also under pressure in the past few days has been the claim that, since the United Nations was established, no member state has invaded another state, taken over the entireity of its territory and annexed it (successfully). The one unsuccessful attempt was Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Happily, it looks as if the Russians aren’t going to take over Georgia, but I guess they now have to be the favourites to be the first power to do this somewhere.[fn2]

1. I seem to remember reading, maybe in something by Michael Mann, that various native American peoples had democratic constitutions, and that wars waged on them by the United States were also counterexamples.

2. Hat-tip to Leif Wenar, who has a paper co-written with Branko Milanovic on the Rawls-Doyle generalization forthcoming in The Journal of Political Philosopy .

I’m guessing that there’s already a ton of papers about a certain sort of second-order desire, so people can tell me in comments …. The sort I have in mind is the following: I, trivially, want my desires to be satisfied. But over the course of a life, I want for some of my desires not to be satisfied. Now this is clearly the case for desires I ought not to have. But I’m not thinking of those cases: cases involving desires to drink the clear liquid on the table (which turns out to be sulphuric acid) etc … In fact we can rule those out by stipulating that I’m rational, fully-informed, that my desires are filtered by some guardian angel (or whatever desire-cleaning tweak we choose). I’m thinking about the case where my satisfied desires wouldn’t give me the satisfaction they give me were it not for the thwarting of many similar desires. So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much. Maybe we could express this with the thought that it would be good for me to have those desires satisfied with a certain probability, but I’m not sure about that, either, because it seems that the probability of winning must itself be uncertain if I’m to get the necessary satisfaction.

In other words, then, it is a crucial component of the good life that my life be unpredictable and that I don’t get many of the things that I want. Not just that I don’t get many of the things I think I want (but wouldn’t if I were fully rational, informed etc), but that I don’t get lots of outcomes I would actually want on the best account of wanting, desire, etc. As I mentioned above, sports are a good example of this phenomenon. But my guess is that it generalizes and that it is good for me not to get a lot of what I want across a whole range of activities (maybe nearly all of them): career, parenting, politics, whatever.

(I’ve rescued the above post from the CT drafts folder, where it has been languishing for months. But Harry persuaded me that I should press “publish”, even though I’m not sure there’s a lot there. Harry thought it relevant to the discussion over at 11D about happiness and parenting . I’m not sure I quite see the connection that Harry sees, but commenters who do (or don’t) might like to tell us.)

Sitting here in the UK, I have no idea whether you people in other places can see everything that the BBC is putting out on its iPlayer service. If you can’t, then tell me in comments. If you can then enjoy Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story and the Stax/Volt tour of Norway (1967), both broadcast in the UK a week ago. Superb stuff, and good reason to think of Booker T and the MGs as one of the top bands of all time.

The latest issue of the Modern Law Review has an article (by Phillip Johnson) about copyright law in the UK and US [access may depend on whether you or you firm or institution has a subscription] that suggests that it is harder for someone to give up a copyright than you might think. It would appear to have the implication that even where the creator of a work explicitly dedicates that work to the public domain, their estate might later revoke the license and seek to restrict use, demand payments etc. Alarming (but interesting) stuff. The conclusion:

This article has shown that copyright owners cannot cause their copyright to cease to exist by dedicating it to the public. It is true that US authors may dedicate their US copyright to the public and in so doing cause it to cease to exist, but such a dedication will not have the same effect in relation to the equivalent UK copyright. In contrast, UK authors cannot take any steps which will cause their copyright to cease to exist. Instead, these dedications create licences, which can be withdrawn at any time. Such a withdrawal will bar new users from having access the work. But of more concern is that in England and the United States (and in Scotland, where the formalities for contract or promise are not satisfied) this will also terminate any rights existing users have by reason of the dedication. In which case, only where the conduct of copyright owners is so unconscionable that they are estopped (or barred) would the dedication have any continuing effect. This means that despite the desire of authors to dedicate their works to the public domain, the boundaries of that domain, uncertain as they already are, remain outside their control.