… has died, age ninety. UD didn’t know, until she read some obituaries, that she was Grover Cleveland’s granddaughter…
TPM, The Philosopher’s Magazine, republishes a 2003 interview with her. Excerpts:
… [Foot’s] view can be summed up in the idea that moral reasoning is about practical rationality that recognises the existence of objective human needs as reasons for action. What Foot thinks most significant about this is that it stands opposed to what she calls speaker-relative accounts of ethics found in theories such as emotivism, prescriptivism and subjectivism. She explains the contrast between her view and the speaker-relative one in some detail.
“Emotivism, expressivism and so on (all of them I lump together) think that there is something special in a moral judgement in the way that there is something special about an order. It’s a special bit of language, like an avowal or a wish, or a greeting, although it isn’t any of those. These philosophers all ask what must the circumstances be for a moral word to be used by a speaker? What must he desire, what must he want others to do, what must he feel; all of which are questions about the speaker. That is the right kind of question to ask about an order or a greeting, but I don’t think that that sort of account is right for morality at all. I say that what we’ve got to dig out in order to understand a moral judgement is a particular use of the word ‘good’, and that is nothing to do with what the speaker wants. It’s not dependent on conditions in the speaker, so mine is not a speaker-relative account.
“So I’m really talking about a general concept of ‘good’ that applies to plants, animals and human beings. You can’t understand what I mean when I say I think it is acting badly to break a promise until you first understand that ‘good’ is used of living things in a particular way…”
… “People want different things and there are different cultures. But that is not in favour of subjectivity at all. It only means that you’ve got to differentiate. Certain things are absolutely certain – that the young are helpless and so are the old – they don’t just die suddenly, they get ill and infirm and need help. These are facts for all human beings. They don’t do well being very lonely. When Freud said that love and work are the only two real therapies I think that he said something quite generally true about human beings…”
…”The idea that because people have different preferences you can move to the conclusion that there must be a radical breakdown of discussion about good and bad action – that’s exactly what I deny and can’t let past. Some people care about art and some people don’t. Some people want public money spent one way and some people don’t. You don’t conclude ‘so subjectivism’.” …
UD supposes that in a rather wide range of instances that feature blatant cruelty — consider two much-discussed recent cases, Tyler Clementi and Westboro Church — Foot must be right. It’s absolutely certain that the most vulnerable and private aspects of individual human lives should not be trashed. We can argue about legal responses to their having been trashed, but I don’t think many people would argue the morality of the matter.
… for what sounds like erotic behavior at a university residence hall — palladium-catalyzed cross coupling.
… on its faculty bios: INDICATORS OF ESTEEM. Of which Professor H M Evans has many.
He’s a medical ethicist, and has written papers with intriguing titles like Madness, medicine and creativity in Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
And speaking of wonderful: Here’s a wonderful photo of Professor Evans holding his Advanced Purchase First Class train ticket.
A university professor who alighted his train one stop before his final destination was stunned when he was asked to pay £155 to leave the station.
Martyn Evans was told he would have to pay up after leaving the train at Darlington, near his home, rather than wait until Durham where he works at the university’s philosophy department.
… Station staff said his ticket was invalid because he had left the train too early, and was told he would have to pay some £155 – the price of the same ticket from Birmingham to Darlington.
Ethicists tend to be particularly prickly.
“The whole process made me feel like a wrongdoer from the beginning and that disgusted me more than just the money itself.”
He’s made such a stink, the trains have said okay, forget about the money.
The President’s threats to increase the taxes of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year have exposed the ugly underbelly of the shame of a nation: Law professors.
Already, under pressure of budget cuts at the University of California, law professors have gone public with their working conditions ($200,000 to $300,000 a year, tenure, light teaching loads) and argued that the best way to save money would be to lay off, as Kristin Luker points out, “anyone but professors.”
Now, the proposed tax increase has brought more suffering out of the shadows. A University of Chicago law professor with a household income of $400,000 has sketched so powerful a portrait of what John Edwards called The Two Americas that his testimony has been picked up by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. Krugman quotes from a post about this professor written by Brad DeLong.
[Todd Henderson] knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.
And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them–widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.
Is this America? I’ve searched my library for any account of degradation in this country comparable to what we’re beginning to glimpse in these testimonials. I had to go to Italy — to Danilo Dolci’s 1959 Report from Palermo — to remind myself what Henderson and his family must be undergoing.
I read Krugman’s account of Henderson’s situation to Mr UD. He shook his head. “He’s fallen so low,” he finally said, “he thinks 4.5 million is rich…”
******************************
In a dark and drear room on the quad
Sits a man quite abandoned by God:
“We make half a million
But not a gazillion.
Dear Lord, can you hear me? It’s Todd.”
As with the students of Mark Hauser, so with Suchitra Holgersson’s students: You can’t train them in empirical methods and then expect them to look the other way when you fudge things.
… Holgersson, who joined the [Sahgrenska] Academy [in Sweden] two years ago, [has been found] guilty of severe science fraud in several cases where she has fabricated data … and distorted results, and also in that she has forged documents in attempts to mislead the expert [review] panel itself during the investigation.
Professor Holgersson’s own PhD students blew the whistle on her.
Holgersson studies transplantation and immunity.
The provost of Texas Tech
suspects for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix are pilfering faculty from public universities to fill their ever-growing instructor ranks.
More specifically, he fears some of Tech’s 970-plus full-time faculty members are moonlighting for these schools as online course instructors, a practice Tech’s policies prohibit without his office’s consent…
Bob Smith can’t get Phoenix University to release the names of its faculty. He’s been hearing rumors that a number of Tech’s full-time, tenured professors earn extra money by running online courses for Phoenix.
**************************
Don’t you think it’s odd that Phoenix considers its faculty a state secret? What sort of university won’t tell us, or the people signing up for its degree, the names of the professors who teach there?
… (title: On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures), has died.
… Although [Julian] Besag was a leading figure in a notoriously complex field, he was himself highly averse to all forms of pomposity…
… Besag was a passionate man who was demanding of both colleagues and himself. He was a keen hockey player, devoted to Northop Hall hockey club, and once trialled for the Welsh national team. After moving to Seattle he loved to sail, voyaging single-handed through Puget Sound and beyond, even after kidney failure required him to undertake a punishing regime of self-dialysis…
… from a New York City high-rise.
Background on Janet Hamburg here.
*************************
Update, Kansan.com: “A detective with the New York City Police Department said Hamburg jumped from the 19th floor of a building on East 57th St.“
… just caught my eye in the New York Times. I’ll link you to it now. Then I’ll read it and see if I’ve got anything to say…
*************************
Hokay.
Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.
Absolutely. It’s okay for a few courses at extremely expensive colleges to be taught by carefully selected adjuncts and grad students. But more than a few? Scandalous.
[If] colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.
Uh-huh.
But I dunno. If you read the whole thing, it’s confused. It takes on all sorts of big issues – presidents’ salaries, tenure, athletics, inequality – but doesn’t have the space or the organization to make much sense of them.
Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychology professor who took leave after University investigators said he was responsible for scientific misconduct, will teach two courses at the Harvard Extension School this academic year even though he is facing a federal inquiry.
Way bad call. This is a swiftly moving story, its latest charge fabrication of evidence. Things could get worse still. Having Hauser on your active teaching faculty communicates cluelessness as to the seriousness of the case against him.
… and more characterize the Marc Hauser misconduct story. The journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science attempts to clarify things.
Mr UD loves it — as do many of their friends — and since he does the food shopping, we eat a lot of Joe’s food.
A longish article in Fortune tries to explain the market’s appeal.
Who’s a fan of Trader Joe’s? Young Hollywood types like Jessica Alba are regularly photographed brandishing Trader Joe’s shopping bags — but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly is a fan too. “What’s not to like?” says Costco (COST, Fortune 500) co-founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. “They’re very good retailers, and we admire them a lot.” Visit a Trader Joe’s early in the day, and there are senior citizens on fixed incomes shopping for bargains; on weekends and evenings a well-heeled crowd takes over. Kevin Kelley, whose consulting firm Shook Kelley has researched Trader Joe’s for its competitors, jokes that the typical shopper is the “Volvo-driving professor who could be CEO of a Fortune 100 company if he could get over his capitalist angst.”
But Mr UD hates Volvos.
Whenever UD worries that the currency of the title “Professor” has been devalued, she reads articles like this one in USA Today, about the styling of the latest Mercedes-Benz model, and heaves a sigh of relief.
“The new CLS points the way forward for the future perceptible design idiom of Mercedes-Benz”, explains Professor Gorden Wagener, head of design at Mercedes-Benz. “At the same time it takes its inspiration from the great tradition of stylish, refined sportiness which has always been a feature of Mercedes coupés.”
If Mercedes-Benz thinks it’s a plus to put “Professor” in front of the names of its designers (this guy’s predecessor was also Professor), I guess we’re still prestigious.