Rational Philosophy

On the genetic ancestry of the duck-billed platypus, the beating of suspects by police in Philadelphia, and the race tensions in the Democratic primary contest.

The duck-billed platypus has a bill, webbed feet, lays eggs, but has fur and nurses its young. And now that an international team of scientists has decoded the duck-bills genome its uniquely ambivalent classification — part reptile, part mammal — has become a little less mysterious. The team found that the duck-bill’s genetic line split off from the other primary line over 166 million years ago. It has many genes in common with other mammals, but has retained many reptilian genes.

In Philadelphia, police and city officials have hurried to stress that the beating of restrained suspects caught on tape by television news reporters wasn’t racially motivated. The police officers were mostly white, the suspects black. (One presumes that this means they would have beaten white suspects, too.)

And in the contest for the Democratic nomination Hillary Clinton has again hinted that her success with white voters makes her a better matched against the Republicans.

We live in the confines of our prejudices. Prejudice rests on the fear that our identity of self isn’t supreme.

Philadelphia city officials probably believe they act out of a different fear when claiming that race wasn’t a factor in the beatings. One presumes that they fear the incident will fuel racial tensions. Asserting that race wasn’t a factor allows them to feel that they’re acting to diffuse the tension. But asserting that race is not a factor before that aspect of the beatings has been thoroughly investigated seems to work counter to that aim.

Hillary Clinton fears losing more than she fears anything else, even betraying her bigotry. However latent and denied it is, bigotry does seem to underpin Clinton’s use of the difference of her race from Obama’s as a tool to further her campaign.

The duck-billed platypus, amalgam of reptile and mammal, can stand as an emblem of the possibility of living without prejudice. Rather than spending so much time parsing our differences, how much better would the world be if we could acknowledge that the world is just as diverse and bizarre as we can accept it to be.

On the Supreme Court’s upholding of ID needs for voters, Barack Obama’s tussle with Wright’s preaching, and a couple of proposed field trips.

Upholding the Indiana state requirement for voters to show a picture ID, the Supreme Court majority concluded that this requirement wasn’t unduly burdensome on any class of voters. Indiana provides picture IDs at no cost for the poor and allows someone to vote without an ID if they subsequently show one within 10 days. (Souter, in his dissent, said the requirement could pose a non-trivial burden on many.)

After reading today that Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years, I felt prompted to give some more thought to the controversy stirred up by Wright’s divisive and outspoken views. His critics would have Obama explain why he cannot be associated with Wright’s views when he sat through his sermons for twenty years.

Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration have criticized President Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas and the Syrian leadership. Carter writes an elegant response to these criticisms in an op-ed today. What he says, effectively, is that avoiding discourse works far less well than engaging in discourse.

I don’t know whether Obama ever engaged Wright directly on his views. But just sitting through those sermons must have forced Obama into having to engage with the ideas being expressed, not to agree with them necessarily, but to acknowledge their presence in the world. If he’d got up and walked out and never come back he might have made a statement, but he would have missed out on years of study of Wright’s perspective — and Wright’s perspective is not unique. If the country’s leaders don’t engage with it, we won’t made progress against racism.

But while the furore continues the burden remains with Obama to define his identity. Much better for him to do this by being what he is (as he did in his eloquent speech on racism) rather than defend what he’s not.

(Ironically, sitting through endless speeches one disagrees with figures prominently in the job description for a law maker. Obama seems to have that qualification in spades.)

How does a Supreme Court judge begin to determine whether the acquisition of a picture ID constitutes a reasonable burden for a poor would-be voter in Indiana?

The ID may be free, but where are the administrative offices from where the IDs would be attained? How far from where people live? How convenient for public transportation? How long is the wait once they get there? What fears may large numbers of poor people have about applying for a picture ID?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they seem to be the kinds of questions one would need to answer before deciding whether the burden would be reasonable.

I suggest a field trip: Take the Supreme Court justices to Indiana. Let them go along with a couple of poor people to get their IDs, then decide.

I’d suggest the same for Obama’s critics. Have them attend a sermon at his church. Then ask them when they come out whether they’ve been swayed by Wright’s opinions.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

A Princeton Professor of Philosophy writes this week about a trend toward philosophical experimentation and away from a field of pure thought. He gives an example of the kind of experiment being performed. The philosopher devises two questions and puts them to a group of people, then tallies the results:

Question #1:

A company chairman has to decide whether to adopt a new program that would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Did the chairman intend to help the environment?

Question #2:

The chairman must decide on a new program, but the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Did the chairman harm the environment intentionally?

(In one survey, 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment, 82 percent thought that the chairman in the second situation had intentionally harmed the environment.)

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, the author of the piece, supports the perspective that such studies can shed light on philosophical study, but points to the complex and subjective matter of interpreting the results, and the ultimate need for traditional armchair thinking to surface any new philosophical insight.

But, to me at least, this seems to be a matter of one of those divisions in a field where philosophy should fall back to give way to a new field of scientific study. This is not experimental philosophy, it is experimental psychology mixed up with the study of language.

This kind of study doesn’t ask people to analyze the situations objectively, which would give us some meager insight into common objective analysis, it merely asks them to give a subjective response. When Socrates posed questions to his fellow Greeks, he didn’t use their answers to tally up some new philosophical insights, he used them to show how most people didn’t have a clue how to objectively interpret the world around them. Philosophy is neither a matter of statistics nor subjective perspective.

And finally a long overdue and eminently cogent report on the illusory impact of race on intelligence. Richard Nisbett in the NY Times draws together a broad and well-informed knowledge of the various studies on racial differences, both those flawed and those not flawed, to show that the likes of James Watson, and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (authors of The Bell Curve) are full of crap. That was the conclusion I would have drawn in the absence of such information, but it’s good to see it in print.

I’m puzzled though by why such a keen rebuttal took so long to appear. When Watson made his remarks earlier this year, the general consensus seemed to be that he was either bigoted or off his rocker or both. But people rebuked him with opinion rather than information, which seemed at the time and has seemed since almost a cover up for a concealed bigotry — as if people were thinking to themselves, it’s terrible that he said that, but what if he’s right?

Which makes me think that freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, because it allows people like Watson to say inflammatory things and for people like Richard Nisbett to set matters straight. It’s the advice we give our children in school — if you have something to say, speak up, because you can bet that there are several other kids thinking the same thing but saying nothing.