When I was a child, my parents spoke to me frequently about the evils of racism. Some people, they said, judge others by the color of their skin, but we don’t do that, and you mustn’t either. And when you meet the people who make those judgments—and you will, they told me—you must never ever ever give them an ounce of credence because we’re right and they’re wrong. There were many discussions of this topic, but in my memory they all ended with the same refrain. We’re right and they’re wrong.
I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.
Continue reading ‘Moral Education’
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In 1958, the 30-year-old Alexandre Grothendieck stunned the International Congress of Mathematicians with his audacious proposal to remake the foundations of algebraic geometry, vastly expanding the scope of the field, subsuming all of commutative algebra and algebraic number theory, and paving the way for the solution of the elusive Weil conjectures, then considered decades or centuries out of reach. No mathematical vision had ever been more radical or more ambitious. Someday I will blog about that vision. Today’s post is about genius, eccentricity and intellectual property.
Continue reading ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’
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In this week’s insult to his readers’ intelligence, Randy Cohen, the designated “Ethicist” at the New York Times, responds to two reader inquiries: May I refuse to hire someone because I don’t like his politics? (Answer: “No you may not”.) And: May I, as a doctor, refuse to treat someone because I don’t like his occupation? (Answer, in essence: “Yes you may”.)
More striking even than Cohen’s characteristic “ethics by pronouncement”, refusing to acknowledge, let alone address, the underlying issues, is that he doesn’t even seem to notice that these questions have something in common. He treats them as two separate reader inquiries, from two separate and non-overlapping universes. Thus it’s okay for the doctor to turn away a patient because “You cannot be forced to practice medicine” and because the patient can always find another doctor. One might wonder, then, in the case of the employer, why it’s not true/relevant/dispositive that “You cannot be forced to provide employment” and/or that the candidate can always find another job.
Continue reading ‘Ethics by Pronouncement’
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Randy Cohen, the house ethicist at the New York Times, frequently strikes me as disappointingly shallow. Take, for example, his latest column, posing this ethical quandary:
You’re redesigning a website and you want to include a photo of a generic customer. The client does not want the generic customer to be African-American, partly because he has never had an African-American customer and thinks it unlikely that he ever will. Is this okay?
My objection is not to Cohen’s answer (which is “no”) but to the way it’s dispensed, as if from an oracle, with no attempt at a derivation from clearly stated principles.
Continue reading ‘The Oracle of Eighth Avenue’
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Over on Econlog, Bryan Caplan uses an example from The Big Questions to illustrate his intuitionist approach to meta-ethics: Start with concrete, specific cases where your ethical intuition is clear, and reason by analogy from there. If you have multiple intuitions that lead you down conflicting paths, give some thought to which ones you’re most willing to jettison.
Bryan’s example is about discrimination, a subject that has come up before on this blog, but I want to emphasize that the argument Bryan quotes is quite separate from the arguments we got into in that earlier thread, and, for the sake of clarity, I hope we manage to keep them separate.
Bryan (paraphrasing me!) starts with the rather strong intuition that it’s okay for tenants and workers to discriminate. If you don’t want to live in an Albanian-owned building or an work for an Albanian employer, that’s your right (no matter how strongly we might strongly disapprove of your attitude). By analogy, then, it might seem that landlords and employers should have the same right to discriminate.
Continue reading ‘Analogize This’
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Partially blind gamer Alexander Stern wants Sony to make its games more accessible to him and others like him—and he’s gone to court to force the issue. This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?
A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won’t rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?
Continue reading ‘Blind Justice’
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