I'll to England

In less than seven hours, I'll be flying off to Chicago, and then to Southampton, England, for a job interview with these folks. So there probably won't be much blogging, here or at Ezra's place, for the next week or so.

Upon returning from the UK, I'll go to San Francisco to visit the family, and then to Washington DC around the end of June.

Was the left row full of A-theorists?

My friend Dan Korman, who works in metaphysics and is soon to become a professor at the University of Illinois, tells me that he once was on a flight with Dave Chalmers. As fate had it, Dan was in seat 2-D, and he was pleased to offer it to Chalmers. (Chalmers refused.)

There's my Johnny

Good to see him hitting back.

Three and One

This weekend I wrote three little posts on the presidential primaries:

Larry, Curly, Moe... Newt?

Family Issues Aren't Primary

The Latest From Iowa

And one big one on how I learned that the anti-abortion movement was up to no good:

What I Learned From Missouri

And kneel and squeak an Ave there for me

Apparently the dolphins of the River Shannon have an Irish accent:

As part of a research project, student Ronan Hickey digitised and analysed a total of 1,882 whistles from the Irish dolphins and those from Cardigan Bay in Wales on a computer and separated them into six fundamental whistle types and 32 different categories.

Of the categories, he found most were used by both sets of dolphins -- but eight were only heard from the Irish dolphins.

No word on whether they drink Guinness and play underwater hurling.

Pretty Pretty Polls

I've posted some nice state-by-state polls showing how Clinton, Edwards, and Obama stack up against Giuliani. Edwards dominates the Midwestern swing states that decide presidential elections. The post got linked at a lot of sites including Buzzflash and Memeorandum, and Matt Yglesias did the favor of commenting on it (though he was dubious.)

I've also got a nice post on hedge funds and why you shouldn't be scared of them.

Parfit blogging

It's always nice to be able to introduce my favorite passage from Reasons and Persons to non-philosophers.

Ultrasound and the Future of Confused Wannabe Paternalists

My biggest problem with William Saletan's support for requiring women to view fetal ultrasounds before having an abortion is that it gives women actively misleading information.  What are you going to learn from an ultrasound that you didn't know already?  Well, obviously you already knew you were pregnant, so all ultrasound adds is the visual experience of your fetus squirming inside you.  This visual experience is apparently of great moral significance to Saletan -- "Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.

Of course, nothing is morally significant about squirming -- ours or the fetus'.  What is significant is whether the fetus has a mind like ours.  If it has no mind, or a mind of such a primitive level that it can't even feel pain, there's no reason to have attitudes of moral concern for it.  The neural hardware for pain perception only starts to show up around week 23, and isn't in place until week 30 of the pregnancy.  So having moral concern for a first-trimester fetus on the basis of the squirming you see in an ultrasound is a mistake.

It's a mistake that lots of people will easily make, though.  People are quick to attribute mental qualities like beliefs, desires, and the ability to feel pain to things that don't have them.  I imagine that lots of anti-abortion activists will be happy enough to let ultrasounds drive home the thought that women are murdering a real person inside them when they have an abortion -- when it turns out that women are doing nothing of the sort.  (As Amanda points out, ultrasounds also cost money, and another part of the anti-abortion strategy is to reduce access to abortion simply by making it more expensive.)

It's hard to see a plausible moral outlook on which ultrasound would be genuinely enlightening as to the morality of abortion.  It's not like an ultrasound is going to show you that the fetus has desires or a soul or a future capacity for having a mind like ours.  There are non-rational processes that all of us are subject to, however, that cause us to see minds in places where no minds exist.  By triggering these processes, ultrasounds promise to sow moral confusion, bad decisions, and unwarranted guilt.

Feminist commentators on Saletan's piece have played up its paternalistic elements.  To quote Jessica:

He claims to “trust women” while simultaneously making the case that women don’t understand what they’re doing when they get abortions; that we’re incapable of making an informed decision without a helping hand from the state.

For my part, I think there's room in the world for paternalism, but if you're going to be a paternalist you need to be better-informed and more rational than the people you're trying to impose your paternalistic requirements on.  By letting his own squirming get the better of him and push him to support a useless and expensive procedure, Saletan fails this test.  Instead of requiring ultrasounds before abortions, perhaps we should require him to reread the medical research on fetal pain before he does any more punditry. 

Ezrapostage

Why is the 2008 presidential election so important? I describe how the Senate calendar makes 2008-2012 the window in which progressive political change has to happen.

And if you're looking for the Democratic candidate most likely to win that election, you might want to pick the solid progressive who people mistake for a moderate. I think people tend to average out Edwards' liberal issue positions and his Southern accent, and think he's a moderate.

To link to content not created by me, I think the guy in this comic should be happy. He made the right wish.

Weekend Johnny posts

I put two Edwards-related posts up on Ezra's blog. First, I managed to get the facts out about the haircut pseudo-scandal. (Thanks to Kevin Drum for linking!) Then I compared the recent head-to-head polling data between Edwards and Republicans.

Bloggers like Form One

My post on Edwards' tax simplification plan got a positive reception from a bunch of people. Thanks to Becks for linking. I particularly liked this comment: "People might be more aware of this proposal if two ladies hadn’t been chased out of their jobs by a rabid mob."

Concrete possibilia

Of course, in the Lewis system the worlds are spatiotemporally isolated, but I can't read this without thinking about my possible girlfriend. I suppose this could happen in an impossible world, though, so those of you with impossibiliaphilia can dream about it...

Republicans Wish You A Painful Tax Day

So here's a pretty nice policy idea from John Edwards: if the IRS already has all the information it needs to do your taxes, as it does for about 50 million Americans, why don't we spare you the trouble and have the IRS do your taxes by itself? The IRS would then just send you "Form 1" in the mail, telling you how much you owe or how big your refund is, and you'd sign it and return it. Studies suggest that this would save Americans approximately 225 million hours of tax-related drudgery.
The folks at the National Review have objections, though. I particularly liked this from Steve:

I think one of the best things conservatives could do to make people realize just how bad our tax burden is would be to require all taxpayers to file and pay taxes quarterly. The current insidious system of employer withholding was designed to collect income taxes without taxpayers feeling the pain of writing a check.

Apparently he wants to build up government bureaucracy... so that people will get mad and want to tear down government bureaucracy. Republican governance at its best!
Now, I think the Republicans are right about the political situation here. If you make paying taxes painless, the most intense negative emotional experience associated with the tax system will go away. Not that everyone will suddenly be going "Hooray for taxes!" but the situation that instills the most passionate hatred of taxes will be gone, and resistance to taxation won't be as strong. Those of us who want to provide the revenues for national health care, free preschool, or any number of other useful benefit programs should be especially happy about progressive tax simplification proposals of this kind.
There are a couple other side benefits to the Edwards tax simplification proposal. It'd help poor people get deductions and credits that they might not know they're entitled to, like the EITC. Less than half of the eligible families with incomes below half of the poverty line know that they're eligible, and Hispanics are especially likely to be unaware.
Also, some poor people don't know about refunds, and the "Form 1" proposal would be especially beneficial for them. A friend of my brother was in a poor black North Carolina neighborhood some years ago, educating people about their taxes as part of a volunteer program. He met a woman who had been avoiding her taxes because she simply didn't have any money to pay. When he explained to her that doing her taxes meant getting a large refund check from the government, she didn't stop hugging him for a while.

Hair

The best post I read on the Don Imus situation was by Pam Spaulding. It dealt with the subject of nappy hair and how to straighten it:

I am old enough to experience the “pleasure” of the thermal hot comb — you rested it over the gas flame of the stove to heat it up. Then the grease was carefully applied to your hair and that comb sizzled through the kinks till it was bone straight, hissing as you prayed the comb didn’t touch your scalp — inevitably you got scalp burns because the “stylist” f*cked up. [By the way, the “stylist” for most folks was usually a relative, but in my case, everyone in my family had straight hair, so my mom had to take me to a salon till she figured out what to do.]

Once the chemical relaxer came into vogue it was the same problem with a different twist, it became a watch-the-clock endeavor to see how long you could leave the vile-smelling chemicals on to achieve maximum straightness before your scalp started to peel, burn and get open sores. Anything for that damn straight hair.

And that's what one does to get hair that won't activate Don Imus' stereotypes about "nappy-headed hos". It wouldn't be so much of a problem, except that the success of one's career often depends on impressing men who come from Don Imus' demographic.

Dominant groups can impose strange and unpleasant burdens on less powerful groups, while acting on judgments that they never take a moment to consider. A straight man reading feminist blogs learns this over and over again.

Catch of the day

My big post on the Ezra blog this weekend expresses my concerns about Barack Obama. Does he actually have it in him to fight for progressive causes? His recent actions don't inspire a lot of confidence.

I also have stuff about the vacuum at the top of the GOP nomination race, media coverage of the primaries, and the fragmented nature of Iranian politics.

In philosophical news, the lineup for our grad student conference is looking pretty good.

The way things go

Yeah.

This weekend's stuff

Over at Ezra's blog, I've got a tribute to Elizabeth Edwards (complete with pretty photo) and a little post on the unfortunate incentives for nonpartisanship in the media, which relates to 24.

Great

Thanks to Paul the Spud for posting this.

Spreading the gospel of spreading aid

Or at least, I'm defending it both at Ezra's site and on Daily Kos. Here's the Kos version from today, which comes with an amusing poll. The Ezra version currently has a longer comment thread.

I'm everywhere!

One of my recent posts got linked by these respectable people who are famous and advise campaigns and write books and stuff.

About two years ago, fellow philosopher Jonathan Ichikawa saw me give my "Possible Girls" paper, which I'm currently submitting for publication. He has a webcomic discussing this significant issue, in a somewhat ontological-argument related context.

My friend Warren made avatars of a bunch of us. I like mine a lot -- it's the 4th from the top.

[2019 edit: Warren's avatars are the last link still standing; I've removed the others.]