Who should make you eat your brussels sprouts?
The market, responsibility and perfectionism
The New York Times has an article from last week on a duo of internet filmmakers, known as the Internet Celebrities, who use humor and YouTube to spread a unique brand of social criticism. One of their most watched videos has them entering the world of Bronx food bodegas to highlight the diverse, yet disgusting food options available to many New Yorkers.
Beyond the humor – for example, the bodega food pyramid – their video raises important normative questions about the availability of healthy foods in low-income communities.
It is a well documented fact that middle- and upper-income communities have many times more supermarkets than low-income neighborhoods. As a result, people in these communities are forced to purchase food at corner markets, convenience stores and bodegas. And these food providers have little in the way of healthy options. This matters because a diet short on healthy foods increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and other illnesses. So if healthy foods have such a direct impact on the life of individuals, whose responsibility is it to ensure that everyone, including those in low-income communities has access to them?
A tough climate
The life and obligations of Lindsey Graham
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (SC) has been considered a key player in the development of a Senate energy and climate bill designed to move the country towards reduced carbon emissions and lessened dependence on foreign oil. On Saturday, Graham withdrew his support for the bill, a move that he annouced in a letter to supporters:
Recent press reports indicating that immigration – not energy – is their priority have not been repudiated. This has destroyed my confidence that there will be a serious commitment and focus to move energy legislation this year.
Why is Graham so upset that immigration will take precedence over action on the climate? He explains:
Moving forward on immigration – in this hurried, panicked manner – is nothing more than a cynical political ploy. I know from my own personal experience the tremendous amounts of time, energy, and effort that must be devoted to this issue to make even limited progress.
There’s no question that hardcore politics are at work here, but is there something else, too?
The possibility of bipartisan compromise on a particular issue cannot guarantee – or require – the same cooperation on another issue, or vice versa. But when should partisan rancor necessarily derail bipartisan compromise? Read more
Tea Partyers for Medicare
Inconsistency or philosophical conservatism?
The New York Times had a fascinating look yesterday at the demographic and ideological makeup on the Tea Party movement. Long discussed, but little studied, The New York Times and CBS commissioned a poll this month to get a detailed look at the profile and attitudes of Tea Party supporters.
The poll found that the 18 percent of Americans who associate with the Tea Party movement tend to be white, male, married, over 45 and on the “very conservative” end of the ideological spectrum. Tea Partyers express “fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, [ ] rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”
But here’s the surprising stuff. While Tea Party supporters believe the goal of their movement is reduce the size of government and favor doing so even if it means cutting domestic programs, most happily partake in the three most expensive domestic programs: public education, medicare and social security. And they assert that these programs are “worth the cost to taxpayers.”
So what gives? Read more
WWTD? (What would Tiger do?)
Robert Wright argues in today’s New York Times that “in its own way, the Tiger Woods scandal is as important as Kandahar and the Catholic Church.” Why? He provides a list of reasons, including:
5) Moral sanction matters. Though monogamous marriage may be, on average, the best way to rear children, a lifetime of monogamous fidelity isn’t natural in our species. And extramarital affairs have a way of leading, one way or another, to the dissolution of marriages – not unfailingly, by any means, but with nontrivial frequency. And even when an affair doesn’t end a marriage, it can permanently change the marriage – and child-rearing environment – for the worse.
So we’re stuck with this unfortunate irony: the institution that seems to be, on average, the least bad means of rearing children is an institution that doesn’t naturally sustain itself in the absence of moral sanction – positive sanction for fidelity, negative sanction for infidelity. And negative sanction often involves sounding judgmental – something that, in addition to incurring the wrath of a columnist’s readers, raises genuinely thorny intellectual problems.
This is a pretty instrumental view of morality. Wright is essentially arguing that Tiger’s infidelity vitiates cultural support for monogamous marriage. On his account, that’s bad because monogamous marriage is good for children, but without moral sanction, it’s a difficult institution to preserve.
But why is good childrearing so important? The only answers are really (a) it provides for the best, most successful propagation of our species or (b) it’s something we owe both to our own children and to the next generation in general to help them thrive and succeed.
The first option is one that seems logical, but actually has trouble finding a rational foundation until you get down to some inherent human dignity. And the second option refers to that dignity directly.
But once you’re in the field of human dignity, it’s hard to suppress issues of choice, freedom, etc. that call into question both emphasis on monogamous marriage as a lifestyle and a ethical structure that uses moral injunction to support a cultural practice.
-Sam
Photo by Flickr user Keith Allison used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Controlling the uncontrollable
Righting wrongs during wartime
War is difficult to execute, and its costs are inevitable. Good people die, the innocent are hurt or killed, and the destructin – physical and otherwise – persists long after the fighting has stopped.
But that hasn’t prevented us from trying to limit the extent of war’s evil. New facts have surfaced with regard to a disturbing incident in Afghanistan that raise – again – the question of whether such attempts are simply a fool’s errand.
In February, three women were killed in an American Special Operations gaffe, although U.S. soldiers denied it at the time. Now an Afghani investigation has not only confirmed that American forces were responsible for the deaths, but that they attempted to actively hide their involvement. A chilling account in the New York Times reports evidence that Special Operations soldiers dug bullets out of the women in order to disguise the cause of death. Read more
Kill the whales?
As part of a series on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, the Washington Post takes a look at “Save the Whales!”–perhaps the environmental movement’s most successful marketing campaign to date:
And to a significant extent, the campaign worked: A quarter-century after the first anti-hunting regulations were approved, several whale populations have stabilized and a few seem to be rebounding.
Now, in light of that comeback, delegates from around the world will decide in the coming weeks if they should condone commercial hunts once more.
The International Whaling Commission will consider a controversial plan seeking a truce in the battle that has raged since a global whaling ban took effect in 1986. Three nations — Japan, Norway and Iceland — have defied that moratorium, insisting on the right to use the oceans as they always have, and in recent years have expanded their whale hunts.
For people in my generation, protection of whales felt extremely urgent thanks to the efforts around “Save the Whales!” (and the popularity of those whale-singing cassette tapes). But the nations that have opposed bans on whale hunting aren’t “whale-haters” or mercilessly anti-environment: Read more
No-mah
An interesting blog post by professional ethicist Jack Marshall, discusses the recent one-day contract tendered to former Red Sox great Nomar Garciaparra so that he could retire as a Sock. A debate ensued. Many of the Beantown faithful felt betrayed by Nomar’s departure from the Sox after injuries reduced his role to the team. Fans loved it, and many turned out in droves during the waning years of Nomar’s career when he appeared on the roster of a visiting team.
Marshall says that the one-day contract was the right move due to what he calls the “Legacy Obligation”:
hen an organization has parted ways with any individual who has been unusually important in its development, it has an ethical obligation to make certain there is genuine closure and reconciliation some day, some way. Unless the individual actually harmed the organization or institution so grievously that it erases any benefit he and she conferred, not to acknowledge a debt of gratitude and recognition estranges the organization from its past, and whiffs on the important values of respect, fairness, gratitude, and kindness. And rare is the former organization super-star who is so bitter about his exit that he won’t accept this important gesture.
According to Marshall, the Red Sox had a Legacy Obligation to Garciaparra because “For nearly eight seasons, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra was the face, heart, and soul of the Boston Red Sox.”
In the realm of practical ethics, Marshall may have a point. By all accounts, Garciaparra was a good guy and his departure from Boston was a trade. He didn’t violate his contract or smear the club or the fans. It’s true that he and the club did not see eye-to-eye during his final season, which undoubtedly led to the trade, but he hardly transformed into some kind of vocal Red Sox critic.
At the same time, baseball clubs aren’t just any organization. They are a business. Offering Nomar a one-day contract is a symbolic action, but one with business implications. Projecting an image that shows the kind of organization they want to be is something the Red Sox should do to encourage fan loyalty. If the organization feels that it stands to gain nothing from a gesture that will stoke Nomar’s happiness or ego, it’s hard to understand how the Legacy Obligation can surmount even the administrative overhead that was probably associated with the one day contract.
If we’ve learned anything in the last two years, is that’s major corporations don’t owe anybody anything, a fact of which they seem acutely aware. Giving Nomar a one-day contract was probably the right thing to do–for the bottom line.
-Sam
Must we call genocide “genocide”?
The Armenian genocide? Or The Armenian mass killings? And does it matter?
In a debate that seems to recur every few years, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted today to condemn as “genocide”, the mass killing of Armenians during and after World War I. Like in 2007, the last time an Armenian Genocide resolution came up, the Administration (then Bush, today Obama), sought to halt the vote – both times to no avail.
Unlike with the situation in Darfur, the hesitancy to use the word “genocide” stems not from worries about the responsibilities to which the use of the word would commit the United States, but from simple geopolitics. Turkey, while acknowledging that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks, has always denied that the deaths were part of a planned orchestrated campaign – a prerequisite for calling them “genocide.” And fearing the genocide label would tar their national reputation, Turkey has long fought the official declaration by other governments of the events as such. Because of this lobbying, only twenty countries, to date, have recognized the Armenian genocide. Read more
How should we pick judges?
The fight over judicial elections
On Tuesday, I attended a conference put on by the Aspen Institute and Georgetown Law on the topic of judicial selection. In light of two recent Supreme Court cases, Caperton v. Massey Coal (in which the court held that judges should recuse themselves from cases involving donors to their campaigns) and Citizens United v. FEC (in which the court ruled that corporations and unions may spend without restraint to influence elections), debate has been heating up about the effect of elections on the judiciary.
There were a number of interesting questions raised at the conference, which featured a wide range of authorities on the subject, including several state supreme court justices, politicians, legal scholars, and the keynote speaker, Sandra Day O’Connor.
The broad question is, of course, whether we should subject judges to popular election in the first place. It was pointed out that the public tends to hold two strong but contradictory views on the subject: First, that judges are often corrupted by political and financial forces; and second, that popular elections are necessary to hold them accountable. But these elections, so it was suggested, are the problem, not the solution.
Dealing with death
The New York Times has a nice update to an issue I discussed months ago – end of life decisions in health care and the angst that accompanies them. Official guidelines call on doctors to begin “the conversation” (about how a terminally ill patient would like to spend their final days) at about 1 year away from estimated death. But it seems that there are diverging opinions on the viability of these guidelines; this “conversation,” after all, is perhaps the most difficult a person will ever face and such emotionally taxing questions are sometimes as difficult for doctors to broach as they are for patients to digest.
One one hand, there’s our desire to remain hopeful as long as possible, if not to the end. Many patients – even when faced with dire forecasts – demand that doctors continue chemotherapy and other intensive (and expensive) treatments even when their effectiveness has worn off. They want to live like Sisyphus, knowledgeable of their unwinnable predicament yet committed to fighting ’till the end.
But of course, fighting costs money, time, and diverts resources away from others, and when patients request major surgeries and experimental treatments in the face of extremely low or impossible odds, utility seems to demand that they be overridden. Can we do so, however, without succumbing to the “death panel” argument? Is there something just inherently wrong about telling the terminally ill to give up?
The existentialist in us says that we can come to terms with our finality without falling into despair, but something tells me that doctors don’t read Camus in medical school.
-Colin
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