Paranoid Android

A profile in a recent issue of The New Yorker reported that Paul Wolfowitz, President of The World Bank, is a staunch advocate of moral relativism. Such one-sided support seems a bit arrogant. Moral relativism is the belief that ethics are decided by cultures and there is no basic moral code. In ethical philosophy, there is an argument called The Argument from Tolerance:

1. Either moral realism is true or relativism is true.
2. If realism is true, one ought not be tolerant of other culture's moral views.
3. If relativism is true, one ought to be tolerant of others
4. One ought to be tolerant of other culture's moral views
5. Realism is false and relativism is true

The Argument concludes that realism (a basic level of morals applicable to all cultures) is false and that what is ethical is decided by the culture (relativism).
It's funny for a world leader to admit favor of one idea or the other, especially an American. Diversity and acceptance are one of the most basic beliefs of the United States, which could be called relativism, but there are numerous cases of the United States meddling in international affairs in the name of right or wrong which sounds a lot like realism. The Iraq War is apparently happening to free a country from a tyrannical dictator. America's entrance into World War II could also be an act of realism (it was a far more noble one). But the idea of bringing "democracy" to a people is a dangerous one. In the 20th century American leaders felt the spread of communism warranted American intervention in Vietnam with disastrous results. The U.S. involvement in these conflicts had other motivations than bringing democracy to a people and shielding them from communism. Usually when one society attempts to "purify" the ethical foundations of another, there are intricate ulterior motives but that attempt to change a basic moral principle is itself complicated.
Unfortunately countless U.S. politicians don't see it this way. To them the antonym for democracy is terror or anarchy. That's simply not the case. No world leader, especially those representing superpowers, should fly just the banner of realism or relativism. Killing is wrong, unnecessary and pain inflicted by others is wrong (the realist argument) but beyond that societies deserve their own way even if a different ethical code works for a different society -which is kind of what makes those societies different.
It's frightening that the entirety of this superpower's world leader's don't recognize the ethical complexity of realism and relativism.

Race for the Prize

Of interest to the editor:

A friend posed this to me the other day. Imagine that there is a runaway trolley, and this trolley is headed down a track toward a group of people, you have the power to flip a switch and divert the trolley down a different track to where one person is having a picnic, killing that one person but saving the others. Which do you choose?
I chose to switch the switch because someone is going to die no matter what so it's better to save the lives that I can rather than save one life and kill the other people.
So then my friend posed the second scenario. You are a doctor and have a number of patients who need transplants, one needs a new heart, another needs skin, another needs blood type O, another needs a bone marrow transplant. In walks a man with all the specific body parts that are totally compatible for the patients. Your fellow hospital doctors say that you have to kill him to get his organs and save the lives of all these others. Do you kill him? There is not much time left so it's either kill this perfectly healthy guy who's a match for all these other people and save their lives or let that guy live and watch the other people die.
I said no, I don't kill him because killing another man is wrong even though that means all the patients will die.
So what's the difference between the first scenario and the second scenario? Basically, you aren't the trolley. For some reason people find it more ethical to switch the trolley's track killing one person than to actively choose to kill one person to save others even though killing one person in both scenario saves more people. If the choices only include either killing one person or killing a few people, we defer to the quantity to choose which is ethical. If there is an option to kill one person to save others or not kill that one person, not killing that one person becomes the most ethical choice. In the doctor scenario you could kill one person to save others but it seems wrong because you are actually doing the killing. Because there is no option to choose to kill like there is in the doctor case, switching the track to kill one person seems ethical even though the death of one person saves others just like the doctor case.

Daniel

Bossa Nova

In grading quizzes from her Honors Introduction to Philosophy class, Professor Sarah Chant, at the University of Missouri at Columbia, realized a pattern: many of the students hadn't approached the essay questions. Instead they had scribbled down everything they knew about a topic, like Descartes, for instance, instead of actually answering the question. This wasn't Chant's fault, nor was it fully the students'. Overtime they had learned that in some classes, a substantial number of points were lost by simply responding to a test question, those points are gained only by regurgitating everything the teacher mentioned in class. Professor Mashoon Bahrain's Concepts in Cosmology (also at Missouri) class works exactly like that. The students gain more points and higher grades if they read the word "Black Hole" and then write down everything they learned about Black Holes even if the question is "what kind of star becomes a Black Hole"?
The fact that Chant's Intro class is almost exclusively second semester students suggests that this information vomit spewed by students isn't the University of Missouri's fault. They must have learned it in high school or at lower educational levels. How does this exactly happen? Tests are meant to judge whether a student is accurately understanding a subject. Writing down everything the teacher professed does imply that a student placed some value on the knowledge but not necessarily that the student understands it. There's a good chance that Missouri isn't alone in breeding this type of learning. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania described teachers who reward these answers as ubiquitous. What it suggests is that the student repeats what the teacher says without actually utilizing the lessons. Students may be learning the teaching but a far more basic one is in jeopardy if teachers (at the collegiate level and under) award this simple recitation. Sometimes new ideas and innovations are born from the foundations of older ones. These revelations don't exist if students are just working for the grade but not the information.