I made mistakes. Flipping the “e” and the “i" in Treitschke is the type of typing error I am prone to. I went through the site and found eight instances where I had misspelled Treitschke, writing Trietschke instead. Sloppy? Yes. But this hardly constitutes misspelling the name "in several different ways", precisely the type of exaggeration that Staudenmaier is prone to, and cannot resist, when he gets on his polemical rolls.

Now to the central argument: Can Rudolf Steiner be said to be "an admirer" of Heinrich von Treitschke? Well now, I suppose that really depends on how you define "admirer". For Staudenmaier's purposes, any hint of sympathy to any aspect of Treitschke’s work is sufficient to merit the label, so that this "admiration" can be rapidly and broadly extended to every aspect of Treitschke’s work, and especially the nationalistic portion, whether this is actually merited or not. This continues his "guilt by association" line of argumentation that he has been using against Steiner since he first published "Anthroposophy and Ecofascism".

So I will make a concession. I will confess that it is inaccurate to state without qualification that Steiner was not an admirer of Treitschke. For there were some aspects of Treitschke’s work that Steiner did profess to find useful. On the other hand, it is just as inaccurate to state that Steiner was an admirer of Treitschke, for this too is misleading. It is just as misleading because Treitschke left a large body of work ranging across a number of topics, though German and especially 19th century Prussian history was his specialty. Today he is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, and therefore can be easily defined as a one dimensional character. During his lifetime he was a very famous and highly popular historian and politician.

When I wrote about Steiner's relationship to Treitschke in the article that Staudenmaier attacks, I concluded with the following statement:

Steiner did speak favorably of certain aspects of Treitschke's works in a number of places, but his praise was always narrowly directed. And Steiner was careful not to praise Treitschke's person, only aspects of his work. Thus I do not feel that it is accurate to call Steiner an admirer of Treitschke.

As is typical, Peter Staudenmaier did not engage in the subtlety of my argument, but rather made a quick straw man and proceeded to knock that down rather vigorously. Staudenmaier writes that I insist “that Steiner, who met Treitschke personally and referred to him frequently throughout his anthroposophical works, did not admire Treitschke”. You would think from reading this sentence Treitschke was a frequent subject of praise and discussion in Steiner's nearly 6000 lectures. But that is simply not the case. There are under 20 references in these 330 volumes, a statistically highly infrequent occurrence. Staudenmaier has searched through these, and as usual as selectively quoted from a few trying to make the case that Steiner did utter laudatory statements about the person of Treitschke. Why is this important? Again it is to establish the "guilt by association" argument. What Staudenmaier has utterly failed to find, and this is because there are not any, are blanket endorsements of Treitschke nationalism. These simply do not exist, because Steiner was a vigorous and lifelong anti-nationalist. What you do find is what I described in my article over three years ago: narrowly directed praise to certain aspects of Treitschke work.

Still, to make the case against Steiner, Staudenmaier quotes extensively from a lecture Steiner delivered on January 13, 1917, (Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen - Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit - 2. Teil GA 174; Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1983) attempting to show Steiner's great praise of the man. But Staudenmaier could not help selectively quoting, for if he actually reproduced or summarized Steiner's entire description, he would undermine his own case. In the lecture where Steiner supposedly praised Treitschke extensively, Steiner's description starts off with an explanation that Treitschke was the subject of a demonic possession (page 109, the page before Staudenmaier begins his quotations). Now you may think what you wish of Steiner's diagnosis of demonic possession, but that is hardly the way someone starts off praising an author whom they admire. It was, Steiner explained "not an evil demon, but nonetheless a demon” (109). Treitschke was driven, Steiner explains, by a demonic force towards a materialistic explanation of history. Anyone familiar with Steiner's praise of the spiritual perspective and frequently expressed concern with materialism would hardly consider this to be praise of Treitschke’s person. But Staudenmaier, our polemical historian, has omitted this entire section as he tries through selective quotation to make a case to the opposite.

It is further interesting to note what of all of Treitschke’s work Steiner singles out for praise. Steiner praises Treitschke’s essay on freedom, and another essay in which Treitschke discusses the necessary limitations on the power of the state over the individual. Hardly the type of work that nationalists focus on. Nationalism, after all, is the philosophy that the nation and the state representing the nation has primacy over the individual.

So while Staudenmaier has clipped his citations such that they might be plausibly read as possibly indicating some form of praise for Treitschke, if you read the portions that he has left out, they are the contextualizing and critical portions. This is a point I have frequently raised in analyzing Staudenmaier's writing: namely that he selectively quotes, which in itself is necessary, but that he does so in such a way that the original passages are distorted, frequently into the opposite of the authors original statements.

So while Steiner delivered a lecture in which he sought to explain Treitschke work and significance both critically and from the occult perspective, describing Treitschke as possessed by a demonic force and also criticizing aspects of Treitschke work, Staudenmaier has selected only the slightly positive sentences, reproducing them as full paragraphs, to make his point. This is nothing less than intellectually dishonest. Steiner did not "specifically and effusively praised Treitschke’s contributions to the German national project”. The closest that he remotely came was to pointing out that a nationalist historian such as Treitschke is understandably appreciated by the Germans in a different way than by non-Germans. Had Staudenmaier left in the full context, it would be clear that Steiner was speaking in an objective way about international criticism of Treitschke and the German reaction to it; he was not taking sides. And Steiner, I must again emphasize, was emphatically not endorsing Treitschke’s nationalism. This is clear if you read the entire lecture, and not the heavily edited version Staudenmaier has offered and interpreted in trying to make his point.

Peter Staudenmaier likes to complain that anthroposophists do not "get" his arguments, and he practically laments the fact that they frequently do not agree with him. But there is a reason for that which goes beyond stubbornness, ignorance, or stupidity. His argumentation is faulty, his research highly selective, and his treatment of sources is repeatedly, deliberately, and blatantly dishonest. The only way that Peter Staudenmaier is able to continue to plausibly argue his tired and mistaken point of view is that almost none of his readers are able to check his citations against the original, and a few that are generally do not want to spend their lives as his research assistant. Were he to attempt such a hatchet job on an intellectual figure who worked primarily in English, he would be laughed off the Internet.

I will stand by my original summary of Steiner's relationship to Treitschke, even as I concede that some of my phrasing can be as misleading as Staudenmaier's.

Steiner did speak favorably of certain aspects of Treitschke's works in a number of places, but his praise was always narrowly directed. And Steiner was careful not to praise Treitschke's person, only aspects of his work. Thus I do not feel that it is accurate to call Steiner an admirer of Treitschke.

It turns out I stumbled on something a little bit larger than just a personal annoyance. In the comments of my blog a graduate student came forward to tell how Eric P. Wijnants had conned her into sending review material, pretending to be a professor at the University of Vienna. Her entire research, previously unpublished, showed up on his website as his own work. In a follow-up post a few years later I summarized the whole affair: “Eric P. Wijnants and the problem of pseudo-scholarly writing without footnotes”. Eric himself, using psudonyms, jumped to his own defense in the blog comments.

But the story continues. It seems Susan Olsson was not the only researcher and graduate student whose material was “borrowed” by Eric P. Wijnants – solicited for scholarly review and then posted wholesale on his site. Brendan French's Ph.D. thesis was similarly plagiarized, as was that of Dr. Walter Penrose.

Because his own name is now linked to this broadening plagiarism scandal, Eric P. Wijnants has increasingly used pseudonyms to solicit work. He also uses the pseudonyms to reference his own work, support himself and his other pseudonyms, and defend himself in public discussions (a tactic known as sock puppeting). Ah the wonders of the Internet, when you can pretend to be anyone you want!

Among Eric’s many pseudonyms:

Eric P. Wynants
Dr. Brigitte Muehlegger
Robert Anton Wilson
Francois Martinet PhD
C.Wong
Bhakti Ananda Goswami
Dr. Raphael Vishanu
Brian Muehlbach
Amara Das Wilhelm

And there are doubtless dozens more. Some of these pseudonyms Eric P. Wijnants uses may be real people, but they are also names that have been borrowed and used by him on the Internet, either to post in public forums or to solicit articles from scholars and researchers.

Eric P. Wijnants’s own website (http://sociologyesoscience.com/) continues to be a hotbed of activity, to which Eric posts up to 20,000 words of unreferenced, often uncited, and unsigned material per day. Much of it is highly specialize and thoroughly researched (by somebody, though if Eric P. Wijnants  did the research, you’d think he’d bother to mention the sources – but then if he was actually researching the stuff, there’s no way he would be writing 20,000 words of proofed, edited, and publishable <except for the frequent absences of references> material per day). Either he spends all day in front of a keyboard retyping everything he’s ever read in slightly different words and without a single citation or reference, or – more likely – he is copying and pasting wholesale from all over the place, leaving out the citations and references, and sticking it on his site, where it sits unsigned an unreferenced, but nonetheless implicitly as his own work. For more evidence that he is likely cutting and pasting (and/or scanning and OCR-ing) consider the page “Historical Overview” on his site (http://soc.world-journal.net/HistoricalOverview.html). The entire page is a bunch of scanned pages from some book and/or magazines(s) showing the history of the world. No, he did not master Adobe Illustrator and make all the charts himself; he scanned them and posted the images on his site. And he did not say where they came from, either. So aside from the blatant copyright violation, if anyone wanted to use them, it would be extremely difficult to find the original source so as to be able to cite it.

Consider Eric P. Wijnants’s output in the first 10 days of March, 2008: 9700 words on the beginning of the cold war, part one. 15,700 words on the beginning of the cold war, part two (between them, 260 citations to over 200 books and documents – I’ll get to that in a minute). A 1500 word commentary to a BBC article on Hitler and the occult. 5500 words on Chinese Tantra (a separate citations page lists 384 sources consulted, including over 100 primary documents – in the original Chinese!). 14,257 words on the end of the cold war (60 references). 628 words on the state of Eastern Europe today (no citations, but a scan of a map, uncredited). 17,700 words on “Populations at War” with 40 citations to over 80 sources. 1900 words on Kurdish nationalism (no references).

That is a total of 66,825 words in 10 days, or about a 200 page book. The topics span at least three different academic specialties, and the references (for 10 days of work, mind you) total 744 different books and documents (over 100 of them in Chinese). Not a bad output for 10 days! At that rate you should be able to complete about 10 doctoral dissertations per year, easily!

Aside from the improbable quantity (he’s been going at close to this rate for years now; in February he posted 24 different “articles” – there are 8 so far this March), what might cause us to believe that this isn’t all Eric’s original output? Well, there are the obvious OCR errors, for one. To give an example, “From romantic hero to man of steel; such was [he evolution of Stalin's self-image.2” (taken from http://soc.world-journal.net/startColdWar.html). Notice the “[he”. That is an OCR error. No typist would ever make that keystroke error. The [ symbol is the left pinky finger. A “t” is the right index finger. You don’t mix those up. But to an OCR program, t can look a lot like [.  Notice also how the footnotes have lost their superscript. If you typed the document in MS Word, you could transfer it to the web easily while maintaining the footnotes properly. Instead Eric uses Netscape Navigator 4.7 to create his web pages.

The well turned phrase “From romantic hero to man of steel” is enough for Amazon to locate the book (thanks to the “Search Inside the Book” feature). Eric P. Wijnants has lifted the entire chapter from Melvyn P. Leffler’s recently (September 2007) published book “For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War”. Does Leffler’s name appear anywhere on Eric P. Wijnants’ website? No.

So what are we to conclude? Eric P. Wijnants is a blatant, serial, high-volume plagiarist. Almost everything on his site comes from somewhere else, and none of it is credited to the original authors. The strange thing is that he becomes indignant when this is pointed out. And the biggest irony is that he runs around the world pretending to be an academic. Half his pseudonyms have PhD’s!

Reference:

Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

References:

Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Vinatage,1978.

Said makes a two-part claim about Orientalism. The first is that Orientalism constitutes a discourse, in the sense that Foucault uses the term. The second is that this discourse, this network of interlinked ideas, is inextricably linked to the history of political domination over the region known as the Orient. I can accept the first claim is fairly obvious, and to the second claim I would gladly grant a degree of influence, but the inextricable part is the one I wonder about. You can it really be true that no observations in 150 years of study of the Middle East are accurate enough to stand independent of the fact that the observer belonged to a dominant political structure? While the introduction portion of the 2003 edition of Said's book happily recounted the reactionary criticism that the first edition received when it was first published, criticism that was so ill considered that it's hardly worth taking seriously, the book is now 25 years old, popular, and well-established. In that time various points have been disputed, some more effectively than others. I quoted Robert Irwin above, who wrote an entire book on the subject. It seems me the most cogent arguments against Said’s thesis are those that go after the second part, the claim that the history of imperialism is inextricably linked to all thoughts about "Orientals". Influence is surely present, but thoughts about, say, the development of the Arabic language could conceivably come from a study of the language itself independent of whether your people occupy an Arabic-speaking territory, or your territory is occupied by Arabic speaking peoples.

References:

Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Vinatage,1978.

Robert Irwin. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontentents. New York: Overlook, 2006.

I
Why is it that for academics, the solution to any problem is “a new critical theory” (69)?

II
It is an interesting starting point that requires the assumption that “both redistribution and recognition” (69) are necessary in a theory of Justice. This may well be the case, but I would like to see on what grounds she establishes this.

III
Fraser's view on the economic consequences of gender division within society seems a little bit abstracted from the real world. Certainly she identifies real problems. But she moves all too quickly to the conclusion that "gender justice requires transforming the political economy so as to eliminate its gender structuring” (78). This seems like a worthy abstract ideal, but I can predict a number of practical problems with any attempt to implement it. Viewing social structure as the only reason why women are drawn to certain occupations (think kindergarten teacher) presupposes no biological basis for these affinities. Now don't get me wrong, not arguing that women are only fit to be kindergarten teachers, nor am I arguing that men can't make perfectly good kindergarten teachers as well (in fact I know a few). What I'm arguing is that the affinity for teaching kindergarten may be statistically more widespread among women than among men for reasons other than just social constructions. And if this is the case, then social justice is not achieved by ignoring this fact. And it also means that social justice is a lot more complicated than a simple prescription for eliminating gender as a social construction (a prescription that anyway contains no helpful program for how this could be achieved).

IV
Fraser's analysis suffers on the whole from working with the idea of groups, while leaving aside the fact that groups consist entirely of individuals. This seems to me the reason why her analysis is interesting, but contains nothing useful for how society ought to get to a more socially just level. I say “nothing useful” because her prescriptions are abstract and group related, full of ought’s and should’s about transforming structures, and seemed to leave out the very individuals whose job it will be to transform these structures. (Example: “The logic of the remedy... is to put race out of business as such”(80). Great idea, but who's going to do it and how?) She plays elaborate games with abstract concepts, but these possess only a tenuous relationship to reality, and ignore all the interesting complications and contradictions that make real life so messy.

V
Fraser's prescription for successful change, what she terms a "transformative remedy" (85), is economic socialism combined with "deconstructive cultural politics" (92). In net effect I suspect she is right. A decrease in economic inequality would make for a society better able to overcome differences. And inasmuch as "deconstructive cultural politics" means people respecting each other more, this is also a recipe for success. However, in practical terms the socialist societies that she refers to exist primarily in nations that are culturally homogenous to a much higher degree than the United States. And it is in these countries-France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark-that the loss of homogeneity has coincided with a marked increase in social tensions. As immigrants become an increasingly larger part of these countries, the same class and race-based problems that have long plagued the United States also arise. The lesson seems to be, where cultural differences are small, equality comes more easily, and where cultural differences are vast, the equality is much more difficult. This is quite understandable and even predictable given what sociology is learned about the process of othering.

Reference: Nancy Fraser. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition. London: Routledge, 1997.

The "right of exit" workhorse is only necessary if you're trying to reconcile the rights of groups with the rights of individuals. But to me that's like trying to compare apples and oranges. A group is not an entity directly comparable to an individual. A group is an entirely different class of moral object from an individual. Groups have a lot of characteristics, and one characteristic of groups as an entity is that their characteristics are always hard to define, hard to pin down. If you want to define an ethics that is applicable with clarity, then it is best to work with clearly defined entities. The individual is such a clear and unambiguous entity. "The group" is a really fuzzy entity.

Whether the group is punk rock fans, or metalheads, or rappers, or other culturally defined affiliation groups upon which people in our society can build their identity, or whether it is something more ancestral, an identity built around an ancient religion or regional practices that have substantially greater weight of tradition behind them, it is always hard to find the boundaries, or even the core, of what makes that group distinctive. And the dilemma of the individual who must reconcile conflicting demands resulting from simultaneous membership in different groups is the basis of much great literature. In ancient Roman the conflict between the demands of family loyalty and those of citizenship that was a frequent source of moral commentary. In 17th-century Japan such a conflict with manifested between the demands of the code of the samurai and the new civil authority of the Emperor, as reflected in the 47 Ronin incident. And plenty of teenagers experiences in high school when friends in one clique make demands on your loyalty that conflict with those of friends in a different clique.

So it is almost the very nature of group identities that, one, individuals possess multiple identities, and two, that these identities will at some point conflict with each other. Thus groups will never have exclusive possession of any one individual. They might claim it, but they don't actually have it. And if groups can't speak exclusively and totally on behalf of all their members, to me that indicates again that groups are a different order of moral entities. That is why I can't conceive of an ethics that places the rights of groups (whichever group that ethics chooses to privilege) on the same level as the rights of individuals.

If we recognize groups and group identity as a secondary characteristic of human beings, and don't create moral rights based on obligations to groups as an entity (obligations to other individuals, who may form groups, may certainly be recognized, but not to the group as such) then the "right of exit" as such is actually unnecessary. The practical right to exit would instead be derived from other basic human rights that apply to all individuals.

My own sympathies lie with the individualist argument. Following a long tradition in Western ethics, I take the individual to be the primary moral unit and all collective traits to be secondary. This means I subscribed to what Appiah termed a position of "ethical individualism" (72) which he explains as "we should defend rights by showing what they do for individuals – social individuals, to be sure, living in families and communities, usually, but still individuals.” It is a position I first encountered in the moral philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who wrote in the 1890s and called his philosophy one of ethical individualism.

I find the idea of the individual as a type of moral monad to be axiomatic, something that can be known with certainty. Group affiliations on the other hand are quite fuzzy and flexible. Individuals possess identities, alter them, discard them, and as join and leave numerous groups and thereby exist simultaneously in multiple categories, in ways that are virtually impossible to pin down. But an individual is one thing they always remain. Privileging groups thereby becomes problematic because the question of who is in and who is not in the group is not easily decided, and always subject to change. Further, privileging groups seems to necessarily disadvantage at least some individuals – usually those not in the group – in every instance. Privileging individuals, on the other hand, can only disadvantage people to the degree that their group affiliation causes them to feel disadvantaged. But that group affiliation is itself a secondary trait. So if the choice is a philosophy or policy that disadvantages individuals – a primary moral unit –on the one hand, or one that disadvantages some groups – a secondary characteristic – on the other hand, I would choose to disadvantage the secondary characteristics rather than the primary moral units. That is I would choose policies that disadvantaged groups over those that disadvantaged individuals.

A recent article I wrote was a list of lens bargains for the Sony Alpha (formerly Minolta Maxxum) lens mount. The article was titled Sony Alpha (Minolta Maxxum mount) lens bargains.

I also wrote a review of my main wide-angle lens, the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM. And predictably review was titled Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM Review.

A couple years ago I wrote an article called How Ebay profits from software piracy, based on my experiences with one transaction. Those are the most recent articles on my photography blog.

Several years ago I wrote a review of the CompactDrive PSD PD7X. This is a portable hard drive casing that ran off of AAA batteries and allowed you to dump the contents of CompactFlash drive cards on to your portable hard drive in the field. In the days of 16 gig CF cards, it is not terribly useful anymore. It back when he spent $200 for a one gig card, it made a lot more sense.

I also written a review of Genuine Fractals 3.5, were I compared it to Photoshop CS bicubic interpolation, and found Photoshop to upsize better than genuine fractals. The article is titled Genuine Fractals 3.5 Review.

Before that I wrote a review of the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D. I am still very pleased with the camera, and think that the 7D still takes better pictures than my Sony Alpha 100. Read my review at Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D Review.

My latest article is titled Flatbed scanner comparison: The Canon CanoScan 4400F vs the CanoScan 8600F. in this article I attempt to answer the question, "What is the difference between the Canon CanoScan 4400F and the CanoScan 8600F?

Daniel

It is questionable whether the government can somehow avoid any influence on the issue of language. It seems any policy, especially in education, will have will have an effect one way or the other. Research has shown that bilingual children achieve the best long-term educational outcomes when they have their initial reading instruction in the language in which they have the largest speaking vocabulary. Once they have mastered basic literacy in their primary language, it is then far easier for them to transfer the skill into a different language. Concretely then, a Spanish-speaking child should be instructed in reading first in Spanish, and once having mastered the basics of literacy can then be taught English as a second language. Outcomes are better than for children who struggle to master reading in a language which they can barely speak. So in that sense California Proposition 227 was actually detrimental to the education of non-native speakers, although in practice bilingual teachers in many classrooms have been allowed by school district policies to impart the basics of literacy in the student’s native language first. Other practical problems include the fact that if a non-English speaker studies in a classroom full of native English speakers, they will pick up English fairly quickly. But if a non-English speaker finds herself in a classroom full of other non-English speakers, she will all pick up English far more slowly. And if the class teacher is bilingual but a non-native English speaker and not a very good one, you can see how students could go from kindergarten through 12th grade and never managed to master English even though they were studying in California. [In case anybody is wondering how I know all of us, my wife is a bilingual teacher and reading specialist in California.]

Hispanics are not the only non-native English speaking minority with ESL problems in California. Similar issues exist in Armenian neighborhoods, as well as in neighborhoods with concentrations of people from various Asian countries, such as those with Chinese speakers, Cambodian and Thai speakers, and Vietnamese.

Beyond full languages is the question of dialects. Certain forms of English are not generally accepted among mainstream whites as “normal”. The city of Oakland in California became the subject of much ridicule when it attempted in 1996 to institutionalize a dialect of English (though they called it a full West African language) common among African-Americans, which is termed Ebonics. (You can read the school board’s resolution here: http://www.jaedworks.com/shoebox/oakland-ebonics.html ). The Oakland school district wanted to treat Ebonics as a foreign language, and black students as non-English speakers. The only thing more interesting than the backlash was the fact that research, both in the United States and Europe, solidly supports treating dialects as foreign languages for the purposes of literacy instruction. Both England and Germany have strong traditions of regional dialects so distinctive that they are unintelligible between regions, as well as official versions – Queens English in England and “High German” in Germany – that were taught in schools and became the common language across regions. (I believe France also has a tradition of strong regional dialects; in Slavic countries the dialects became independent languages – Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, etc. so that Russian does not have a tradition of dialects in the same way. I’m sure there are examples from other parts of the world as well.) What research supports then is treating Standard English as a non-native-language when instructing speakers of a dialect such as Ebonics.

But treating a dialect as a foreign language for the purposes of teaching Standard English is one thing. Instructing students in the dialect with no intention of introducing Standard English is another. And it was not Oakland’s recognition of Ebonics as a dialect that was controversial (that fact was already well established among linguists) it was Oakland’s intention not to even try to teach Standard English that attracted so much attention. Which gets back to the issue of public policy and minority languages. Should the state encourage or even imposed standard English on students in the public school system? The ideal behind such a proposal would be a mainstreaming of what are currently distinctive cultures so that over two or three generations the culture gradually disappears, much the way Irish, Sicilian, and Polish cultural heritages are today largely insignificant among those whose parents emigrated to the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s. Others see a terrible loss in cultural heritage that starts with language, and hope to preserve the uniqueness, and also the separateness, that comes with a strong non-mainstream language and cultural identity. Which option is preferable? I suppose it depends on the outcome you are seeking. If you want people to be equal culturally and socioeconomically then it helps to emphasize and reinforce similarities, including language. But if you want people to be free and distinctive, then you would find it important to preserve language as the basis of identity.

Mandating instruction in Standard English inevitably results in a gradual diminution of distinctive cultural identity, though the process usually takes a few generations. Whether this amounts to a suppression depends on the intention behind it, and whether it is desired or resisted by those subjected to it.

The problem with hypothetical examples for moral dilemmas is that they invariably oversimplify the situation. It trying to highlight the dilemma, they posit a few facts, and then ask the reader to consider what they would do. But what any of us would do is ultimately dependent on a far greater range of data than the hypothetical example can provide. And, of course, it also tends to assume that our actions are largely the result of our moral reasoning, something that should not be taken for granted.

Two examples in Rorty's essay include that dilemma of a family after a nuclear holocaust who now shoot their neighbors to preserver their own dwindling food supplies, and the classic lifeboat dilemma. As to the example of the family after a nuclear holocaust, the problem is can be considered from several angles. For one, everyone is going to die anyway, so why worry about whether you can feed your family for two extra days. This is the real problem with hypotheticals: as models they are always incomplete. There are always factors that the model excludes. For example, someone once asked me (knowing I am married), “If you could sleep with another woman and no one would ever find out, would you do it?” The expected answer is, “… well, if no one would ever know…” However, there is another dimension to the issue. I would know, even if no one else ever did. And this is not insignificant. So back to the nuclear holocaust example: food is limited and family and neighbors all want to eat. The choices are: fight off the neighbors in the name of family, or share with all and run out sooner. Given the bleak situation, I question whether the moral course is to put a black spot on your soul by killing your neighbors for the sake of your kids, or to go out with a clean conscience, knowing you did best for everyone. The radiation will probably get you before the hunger.

Move the scenario to a life boat on the open ocean, and the problem of hypoteticals again shows up. There are simply too many unknowns. You don’t know how long until you will be rescued, if you will be rescued, whether you will be able to catch fish, and where ocean currents will take you. And anyway, dehydration is a bigger problem than malnutrition. To kill off the strangers so as not to have to share food and thus provide better for your family sets a terrible moral example for them, and they will have to witness the deed. Then if you all survive, you will never know if you could have done things differently and brought everyone through.

Finally, as a principle, looking out for those closes to you does not create a society I or anyone else would want to live in. So if it doesn’t serve well under normal circumstances, how is it any better in extraordinary ones? Once you accept the expediency excuse (desperate circumstances call for desperate measures) then you have the slippery slope problem: when are circumstances desperate? Nuclear holocaust is remote, but what about unemployment? Is that desperate enough to justify stealing food (my family needs it more than the store proprietor)? Where is the line?

Rorty, Richard. "Justice as a Larger Loyalty."  Justice and Democracy: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Ron Bontekoe. Honolulu, HI: U of Hawaii P, 1997. 9-22. ]]> http://www.danielhindes.com/blog/archives/2008/01/richard-rorty-and-the-problem.html http://www.danielhindes.com/blog/archives/2008/01/richard-rorty-and-the-problem.html Philosophy Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:43:00 -0600