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“We shouldn’t attempt to fit ‘outreach’ or ‘engagement’ into one of the existing three categories [of research, teaching, or service]. It doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. And, more importantly, all of us should be doing it as part of our jobs, not just a few of us. We are in an all-hands-on-deck situation.”
In the following guest post, Alex Guerrero, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, argues that we should count engagement or outreach as a distinct component of the job of professor.
This is the fifth in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.]
[“The Beautiful Walk” by René Magritte]
The job of a philosopher in America has been defined in relatively specific terms. These are the terms: research, teaching, and service. How much of one’s life one is expected to contribute to each, the precise percentage and weight, varies from job to job. In some, research is all that matters. In others, teaching is the thing. More rarely, a philosopher wanders deep into administration, lost in a forest of service, and emerges as a thoughtful if pesky manager and builder of things with varying degrees of value. For most of us, we are required to do all of these, more or less well, with more or less joy.
Socrates and Kongzi both might have, for once, been at a loss for words if forced to say whether they were doing research, teaching, or service. But we have contracts, faculty handbooks, promotion guidelines, and legalistic specifications of what we are required to do. None of us are employed as philosophers. We are employed as professors (lecturers, instructors). For the most part, our job is like that of other humanities professors, and unlike that of research scientists and others in STEM fields supported by grants, who do things like “buy out” of teaching and oversee research labs. For us, the job is the core three: research, teaching, and service.
Teaching is the very official role where we are in front of enrolled students, in a class that counts for credit, presenting material, devising and evaluating assignments, and figuring out ways for students to learn what we take to be important about the subject. Our teaching responsibilities are almost always defined by the number of courses taught per academic year, spread out over semesters or quarters, often specified in terms of level and number.
Research is publication. We might wish it were instead about ideas, figuring new things out, moving knowledge forward—regardless of whether that results in articles in peer-reviewed journals or books in academic presses. But we know better. You need 8 publications for tenure in B+ or better peer-reviewed journals. Or 1.5 per year on the tenure clock. Or whatever. What “counts” for research, and how much it counts, is usually clear, even if promotion requirements are rarely specified in detail. Post-tenure, although research productivity factors into further promotions and merit raises, the sense in which it is “required” becomes considerably murkier.
Service is what is required to keep up the pretense that universities and colleges are run by the faculty, rather than by a distinct managerial class. We “serve” on hiring committees, as undergraduate and graduate program administrators, on curriculum committees, on admissions committees, in organizing colloquia and events, in putting people forward and evaluating them for tenure and promotion, as chairs and vice-chairs, deans and deanlets, and on committees for every domain of human complaint and frustration—these are the core of internal, university service. We serve our departments, schools, colleges, and universities. Many of us expand beyond this to engage in service to the “profession”—running academic journals, professional associations, planning workshops and conferences, creating and supporting broad mentoring and inclusion efforts, and so on.
Most of us were just dropped into this world of research, teaching, and service. I’ve never seen anyone try to justify why these are the three parts of the job. As many have noted, they don’t fit together all that naturally. What makes one an amazing teacher might have nothing do with what makes for a groundbreaking researcher. And we almost expect that whatever makes us good at those things will make us inept at, or at least impatient with, most kinds of “service.” Our graduate training programs do very little to train us to teach, or to administer anything or manage anyone.
The explanation for the three branches seems to be a historically contingent one, with the modern college or university coming to exist with a dual-purpose mission of educating students (teaching) and advancing knowledge (research), and service comes along as a third thing essential to preserving various values relating to those first two. Specifically, the values of academic, expert peer review (for admissions, hiring, publication, research evaluation, promotion) and academic, expert curriculum and course design and implementation.
There are, of course, many ways of rethinking this basic three branch setup, and many institutions that have already reconfigured things so that people are hired into jobs where they will do just one or two of those three things. I don’t want to wade more deeply into those waters. Instead, I want to suggest that, given the pressures confronting colleges and universities, sustaining those institutions in their core dual-purpose mission of educating students and advancing knowledge requires introducing a fourth branch. I’m not sure what name for that fourth branch is best. Here are my two favorite candidates: outreach and engagement.
The basic argument for the fourth branch is simple.
Colleges and universities are supported (1) by the general public, through government funding; (2) by students and their families, through tuition and fees; and (3) by rich people, through donations. What education and what knowledge will be pursued in colleges and universities is not set in stone; it is, rather, a function of what those three groups want and demand. If we want philosophy to be part of the education and part of the knowledge that is pursued in the years to come, we need people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy. And for people in those three groups to want and demand philosophy, we need to reach out to them, engage them, make them aware of what philosophy is and why it is wonderful and valuable. Given what philosophy is, and given our contemporary situation, that task is monumental, and must be undertaken at many different levels, in many ways. No small number of us can do it on our own. Therefore, it should be a part of all of our jobs—quite literally—to do this work.
(We can substitute in almost any humanistic field for ‘philosophy’ in the above argument, with similar implications for a needed fourth branch for the rest of the humanistic fields.)
The basics of this ‘demand side’ story are familiar. Many students and parents think of college and university in terms of relatively short term, career ambitions—how will this major, this degree, this school help me get a job. Many states and nations have begun taking a similar attitude toward all higher education, thinking in terms of contribution to economic productivity. Little actual empirical investigation is involved in deciding that humanistic fields, and fields such as philosophy, in particular, don’t do well by this score. But that is a common public perception. And it is understandable. It seems plausible that a degree in business, health professions, computer science, engineering, or biomedical sciences (the five largest growth majors over the past ten years) would be a more direct route to a job than a degree in English, history, or philosophy (three of the majors that lost the most majors over the past ten years).
There are other factors that affect demand. STEM fields are intimately connected to industries and occupations outside of the academy, so that one might have encountered a person with background in that field. We no longer have the same kind of elite, quasi-aristocratic veneration of those humanistic things that every “educated” person must know. STEM spends more time in the news, as breakthroughs in tech, science, and computing get regular reporting and discussion, and result in products in our pockets and dreams on our screens. In the United States, quality exposure to literature, philosophy, and even history is rare prior to college or university, with many students not having encountered any philosophy before college, and having encountered history only as rote memorization and literature only as forced reading.
Behind the idea that colleges and universities have a dual-purpose mission of educating students and advancing knowledge is a mostly implicit idea about what education and knowledge is valuable and why. For those of us working as professors in a subject domain, we almost certainly see the domain as valuable, and can offer many different compelling reasons why it is valuable, pointing both to intrinsic or final value of the subject, and to instrumental benefits of education and knowledge in the domain. We can go on and on about personal transformation, what it means to be human, learning to think critically about what is important, becoming a democratic and cosmopolitan citizen of the world, and so forth. But for those not already in philosophy, where are they supposed to hear the good news?
It is easy to vilify the administrator class, focused on the bottom line—bottoms in seats, donations to “development” offices, legislative support for public institutions. But it is not their fault that higher education is funded as it is. It is not their fault that we, the professoriate, don’t have unbridled power to force people to study those subjects that we see as most valuable. Professors like the idea of being in control: we get to design the curriculum, plan the syllabus, pick the readings, develop the research projects, evaluate the work, decide what should be published, determine who should be admitted, hired, promoted, esteemed. This all seems right and good to us, given our knowledge and expertise. But that is not the system we have with respect to the very basic facts of higher education in most contemporary political environments. We might wish for administrators who could hold the line, fight the battle for us, make the case for the importance of philosophy and the humanities. And some of them can and do. But many operate in incredibly difficult economic and political environments. They can’t change the basic facts about whose demand matters. And they can’t even do much to affect the substance of what is in demand. They need help. And—at least given our knowledge—we are well positioned to provide it.
Many of us are already involved in various efforts to broaden exposure to and engagement with philosophy. Most involved in this work aren’t doing it thinking to “increase demand” for philosophy, but it plausibly has that effect. There are obviously central enterprises: exposing children and adolescents to philosophy and serious humanities in K-12 education, for example, something that many are already doing. Writing “public facing” philosophy that appears in newspapers, broad circulation prestige venues, trade books, and so on. Creating online philosophy courses and videos and other broad access materials like podcasts. There are also more local, more intimate efforts: organizing a public philosophy week at a public library, running a philosophy club or ethics bowl team at the local high school, organizing community book groups and “meetups” to discuss philosophy, running “ask a philosopher” booths at the train station, farmers’ market, or mall. These activities bring philosophy to people outside of the academy and bring people into philosophy, giving them entry points and a better sense of what the subject is and why it is of value. They also are a lot of fun. And a ton of work to do well. And, for the most part, they are treated as outside of one’s job, falling outside of the big three: research, teaching, and service.
For those involved in this work, a common argument is that it should be included under research, teaching, or service—depending on the details. In a few places, “engagement” work is already included as part of one’s official job requirements. In more places, efforts are being made to think about how to include this work under research, or teaching, or service. I’ve spent the past year on a committee at Rutgers on a “Task Force for Community Engaged/ Publicly Engaged Scholarship,” focused on questions of definition (what is it, what counts) and evaluation (what metrics are available and appropriate, what standards should be used) of this kind of research. In serving on this committee, I’ve learned in detail about dozens of similar efforts at other institutions. In almost every case, the discussion is focused on how to credit the work being done by a small percentage of professors who are doing some “community engagement” or “public facing” work. Can it count instead of other, more traditional academic research? Can it count for teaching or service?
I want to suggest that, for those of us in the humanities, we should understand the importance of this engagement work to our core dual mission of educating students and advancing knowledge in our fields, and we should stop trying to shoehorn it into the traditional three categories. In the same way that service is required to sustain certain valuable features of how education and research is conducted, engagement is required to sustain certain valuable features of what education and research is conducted. Professorial “service” is required due to internal, contingent features of running a college or university, as something instrumentally important to enabling high quality education of students and to advancing serious research and knowledge. In the modern political and economic context most of us are in now, professorial “outreach” or “public engagement” is required due to external, contingent features of running a college or university, as something instrumentally important to enabling high quality education of students and to advancing serious research and knowledge in all academic domains that are of genuine value, including philosophy. We shouldn’t attempt to fit “outreach” or “engagement” into one of the existing three categories. It doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. And, more importantly, all of us should be doing it as part of our jobs, not just a few of us. We are in an all-hands-on-deck situation. It’s not clear that even this huge shift would be enough to save the humanities, but it affords more hope than doing nothing and just praying for favorable shifts in the demand curves.
So, the proposal is this. Add “engagement” or “outreach” as a fourth component of the job of professor, along with research, teaching, and service. The exact percentages might vary, as they already do, across institutions. One model might be 35% teaching, 35% research, 20% service, and 10% outreach. Just as with service, there would be a variety of ways of satisfying the requirement. And it might be assessed over several years, rather just in one particular year.
In addition to the familiar forms above—creating and running K-12 programs and clubs, public facing writing, online courses and spaces for public philosophy discussion, podcasts, local events and courses and reading groups at libraries and other community venues—there might be other work that would count. Creating and publicizing materials about philosophy and its intrinsic and instrumental value, developing materials to connect philosophy to prominent issues of the moment, connecting philosophy to locally popular elements of colleges and universities (such as college sports), strategically lobbying local and state political officials to help explain the value of philosophy and to think about ways in philosophy might be relevant or useful given their political agenda, developing white papers and strategic plans to encourage businesses and industries to seek out philosophy graduates and build philosophy alumni networks, even working on philosophy-related fundraising (either through or, where permitted, outside of, the development office). We need to do work at many different levels, in many different venues and spaces. New Yorker articles and popular books are important, but insufficient to reach or affect the very broad, heterogeneous communities whose interest and demand is relevant.
Just as with service (and teaching and research, for that matter), we shouldn’t expect that everyone will be equally good at or equally drawn to every aspect of outreach. And, just as with service, much of our evaluation of the work will be somewhat less precise than our evaluation of teaching or research. Norms and guidelines will need to be developed and adjusted over time. There is also the question, as with teaching and service, of how to train people to do this work well. Much of the work being done by committees like the one I’ve been on can be of help in thinking through these issues. None strike me as insurmountable.
The basic hope is that, by requiring everyone to do some outreach and engagement work, we can get many more people involved, and have a correspondingly greater effect on the broad understanding of philosophy and its value, with a hoped-for uptick in interest, support, and demand.
There are other potential side-benefits to creating the fourth branch. One is that it might mean that the public face of philosophy will be much more complex and multifaceted, so that it isn’t entirely dominated by a few prominent people who are skilled at prestige publishing or personal branding or whatever we want to call Žižek’s skillset. Another is that, as most people who have done this work will attest, engagement and outreach work provides a kind of beneficial feedback, potentially improving the quality of one’s teaching, research, and service, as one steps back from those activities and considers and attempts to communicate about their value, and to share philosophy with people who have not encountered it before. A third is that it might enable and prepare philosophers and other humanists to push back more effectively against the tendency for humanistic and normative concerns to be overrun by the march of technological, scientific, and commercial “progress” and “innovation.” And it might help the broader public see, raise, and respond to these concerns for themselves, even without any university training in the field.
There might be a worry that focusing on demand and broad interest sets up a zero-sum competition. We might do better, but that will mean some other field, perhaps with a harder case to make, will do worse. Perhaps, although I think a broad push from humanists in this regard might make a considerable difference to public understanding and public perception, even about the basic role of colleges and universities and the value of attending those institutions. Much greater, more structurally supported and organized efforts from professors in this regard might help alter the discussion and push back against the view of higher education as just some kind of pre-vocational training for those who can afford it. Most optimistically, it might alter the public funding dynamics of college and university, reasserting the ideal of affordable liberal arts, humanistic higher education for all as part of an important public component of a genuinely democratic, flourishing society.
Earlier, I mentioned that administrators are often limited in the ways in which they can help us. Here is one: help the humanists help themselves, by building a fourth branch, focused on engagement and outreach, into our jobs. In some cases, we could begin doing this somewhat informally within departments, setting up service positions focused on outreach, and then treating that work as part of service. But, in my view, it will be better to build it in more structurally, with a broader requirement for everyone, and allowing a broader array of ways in which to contribute.
If we want philosophy to survive, we need people to understand what it is and why it should survive. We can’t just rest on our historical laurels or on “get off my lawn” arguments that simply insist that no serious university can exist without a philosophy department. We might be right. But we also might just end up surrounded by unserious universities.
Other posts on public philosophy, engagement, and outreach.
The post The Fourth Branch (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
A silicon wafer, a thin material essential for manufacturing semiconductors, at a chip-packaging facility in Santa Clara, Calif.
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The materials developer formerly known as ELeather has a new name and $18 million in fresh growth funding from some of the world’s fanciest brands.
Now going by Generation Phoenix, the upcycler says its new investors include Coach parent Tapestry, Jaguar Land Rover (via InMotion Ventures) and Dr. Martens, plus lead investor Material Impact and prior investor Hermès.
The 15-year-old firm is based in Peterborough, U.K., and has worked with brands such as Nike and Delta. The upcycler intends to use the new cash to expand “into the luxury fashion and footwear categories,” Gen Phoenix said in a statement. The company claims it has diverted more than 8,000 tons of leather waste from landfills to date.
“Imagine what can happen when waste is no longer wasted,” Gen Phoenix says in an aspirational message on its new website. The upcycler tells TechCrunch that its “feedstock comes directly from tanneries where about 1/3 of a leather hide is typically discarded.” Turning the leather waste into a usable, leather-like product involves shredding and “entangling” it “around a high-performance core using nothing but high pressure water,” the firm said.
Gen Phoenix’s “recycled leather” is not entirely made of recycled materials. A spokesperson for the company tells TechCrunch that its products feature “up to 86% recycled content,” including recycled leather and recycled plastic. Still, the firm’s final product also contains virgin plastic.
Gen Phoenix founder and CEO John Kennedy explaining the company’s leather-like product. Image Credits: Gen Phoenix
Without sharing a specific deadline, a spokesperson for Gen Phoenix said the company aims to “reduce and eliminate virgin materials from their products completely.”
The upcycler is also “commercialising a bio-based coating system and bio-based substitutions for any synthetic materials used in the process,” the spokesperson added. Hopefully, we’ll soon see Gen Phoenix kick virgin materials altogether.
Zooming out: Gen Phoenix’s inclusion of plastics is hardly unusual, even for “sustainable” brands. Fossil fuel–based materials permeate the fashion business. Polyester? Nylon? Elastane? All plastic.
Even the rise of recycled plastic fabrics warrants deep skepticism; the resulting synthetic clothing is rarely recycled, and the microplastics they shed go basically everywhere, including the ocean, mountaintops, the insides of sea critters and even our own bodies. Addressing the industry’s climate and broader environmental toll demands rethinking everything, from how we dye fabrics to killing “fast fashion” altogether.
Gen Phoenix’s upcycled leather woos luxury brand investors by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
A woman prayed among flowers left at a memorial at the entrance to the Covenant School in Nashville.
Researchers have demonstrated a caterpillar-like soft robot that can move forward, backward, and dip under narrow spaces.
The caterpillar-bot’s movement is driven by a novel pattern of silver nanowires that use heat to control the way the robot bends, allowing users to steer the robot in either direction.
“A caterpillar’s movement is controlled by local curvature of its body—its body curves differently when it pulls itself forward than it does when it pushes itself backward,” says Yong Zhu, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper on the work.
“We’ve drawn inspiration from the caterpillar’s biomechanics to mimic that local curvature, and use nanowire heaters to control similar curvature and movement in the caterpillar-bot.
“Engineering soft robots that can move in two different directions is a significant challenge in soft robotics,” Zhu says.
“The embedded nanowire heaters allow us to control the movement of the robot in two ways. We can control which sections of the robot bend by controlling the pattern of heating in the soft robot. And we can control the extent to which those sections bend by controlling the amount of heat being applied.”
The caterpillar-bot consists of two layers of polymer, which respond differently when exposed to heat. The bottom layer shrinks, or contracts, when exposed to heat. The top layer expands when exposed to heat. A pattern of silver nanowires is embedded in the expanding layer of polymer. The pattern includes multiple lead points where researchers can apply an electric current. The researchers can control which sections of the nanowire pattern heat up by applying an electric current to different lead points, and can control the amount of heat by applying more or less current.
“We demonstrated that the caterpillar-bot is capable of pulling itself forward and pushing itself backward,” says postdoctoral researcher Shuang Wu, first author of the paper.
“In general, the more current we applied, the faster it would move in either direction. However, we found that there was an optimal cycle, which gave the polymer time to cool—effectively allowing the ‘muscle’ to relax before contracting again. If we tried to cycle the caterpillar-bot too quickly, the body did not have time to ‘relax’ before contracting again, which impaired its movement.”
The researchers also demonstrated that the caterpillar-bot’s movement could be controlled to the point where users were able steer it under a very low gap—similar to guiding the robot to slip under a door. In essence, the researchers could control both forward and backward motion as well as how high the robot bent upwards at any point in that process.
“This approach to driving motion in a soft robot is highly energy efficient, and we’re interested in exploring ways that we could make this process even more efficient,” Zhu says.
“Additional next steps include integrating this approach to soft robot locomotion with sensors or other technologies for use in various applications—such as search-and-rescue devices.”
The paper appears in Science Advances.
Support for the work came from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Source: NC State
The post Soft robot crawls like a caterpillar appeared first on Futurity.
It’s only Wednesday and I’ve had a couple of occasions this week to refer to Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and the FONT framework that I learned in workshops run by Outlandish. I’d highly recommend that you also attend their Reframing Conflict sessions.
I’m publishing this post so that I’ve got something to point people towards during conversations in which I reference FONT and NVC.
Let’s begin by defining terms:
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is an approach to communication based on principles of nonviolence. It is not a technique to end disagreements, but rather a method designed to increase empathy and improve the quality of life of those who utilize the method and the people around them.
[…]
NVC is a communication tool with the goal of firstly creating empathy in the conversation. The idea is that once there is empathy between the parties in the conversation, it will be much easier to talk about a solution which satisfies all parties’ fundamental needs. The goal is interpersonal harmony and obtaining knowledge for future cooperation. Notable concepts include rejecting coercive forms of discourse, gathering facts through observing without evaluating, genuinely and concretely expressing feelings and needs, and formulating effective and empathetic requests.
Wikipedia
I have to be honest, I thought this was some real hippy-dippy stuff when I first read it. But the FONT framework in particular changed my mind. As Pete Burden and Abi Handley explain:
“FONT” is not a single model – it is a bricolage; it draws on:
Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, Gervase Bushe’s Clear Language, Thomas Gordon’s work on I-statements and requests.
Ideas from several people (such as Bill Isaacs and Diana McLain Smith) at the MIT Dialogue and Harvard Negotiation projects ; David Grove’s Clean Language; Agazarian and Simon’s System for Analysing Verbal Interaction (SAVI™); Bill Torbert’s collaborative enquiry.
And work by Arnold Mindell, Bob Kegan, Carl Rogers, David Cooperrider, David Kantor, Douglas Stone, Lisa Lahey, Mary Follett, Reg Revans, Robert Plutchik, Stephen Hayes, Susan Wheelan, Richard Schwartz and many, many more.
So what is it? How does it work?
FONT is an easy way to remember the four constituent parts, but when you use this as an approach, you actually use it in this order:
Since I attended the workshop, I’ve used this approach in both professional and personal conflict situations. Sometimes I’ve done it verbally, starting with “I noticed that…” whereas other times I’ve gone through the FONT process in written form to prepare me for a potentially-awkward conversation.
Step 1: Observe the situation objectively — focus on the specific behaviour that’s causing the issue, rather than making assumptions or jumping to conclusions. For example, if a colleague is frequently interrupting you during meetings, observe that behaviour without making any assumptions about their intentions or motivations.
Step 2: State your thoughts — try and articulate what you are thinking or have noticed in an uncontroversial way. For example, you could say to your colleague, “I notice that you often have a lot that you want to communicate during meetings.”
Step 3: Identify your feelings — are you feeling frustrated, angry, or upset? By identifying your emotions, you can communicate more effectively and avoid becoming defensive or confrontational. For example, you might say “I feel frustrated when you interrupt me during meetings because I want to make sure my ideas are heard.”
Step 4: Articulate your needs — what do you need in order to feel more comfortable or productive in the situation? This is an opportunity to express your needs in a positive and constructive way. For example, you might say “I need to have uninterrupted speaking time during meetings so that I can share my ideas and feel heard.”
Step 5: Make a request — this is an opportunity to ask for what you need in a constructive and positive way. For example, you might say “can we agree that everyone will have an opportunity to speak uninterrupted during our meetings?”
As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that “I noticed that…” is a bit of a magic phrase. For example, there are cars which travel too fast down the 20mph street next to my house. I tend to get annoyed at this and have a tendency to shout at the drivers, but my neighbour has a better approach. He smiles, asks them to wind down their window, and says something like, “I noticed that you seemed to be in a hurry?” His going on to explain that the road has a 20mph speed limit feels overall like a less confrontational approach.
In closing, one of the things I’ve learned during my career to date is that coercion and manipulation tends is a hallmark of hierarchical and paternalist organisations. We can do without it:
Nonviolent Communication holds that most conflicts between individuals or groups arise from miscommunication about their human needs, due to coercive or manipulative language that aims to induce fear, guilt, shame, etc. These “violent” modes of communication, when used during a conflict, divert the attention of the participants away from clarifying their needs, their feelings, their perceptions, and their requests, thus perpetuating the conflict.
Wikipedia
People may bristle at the accusation that many of our ‘normal’ ways of communication tend to be violent but, it’s worth thinking about adding the FONT framework and nonviolent communication techniques to our toolboxes. I think my family, friends, and colleagues would still say I’m perhaps a little too quick to anger, but at least I now have tools to defuse situations that would previously feel out of my control!
The post FONT and Nonviolent Communication first appeared on Open Thinkering.
Apple is said to have already made arrangements to deliver iPhone 15 series display panels to domestic companies, and will soon finalize details and prepare for mass production. What is confirmed here is that only the Pro Series will have a specification that supports LTPO 120 refresh rate, with the basic regular Plus model not having it in its requirements.
"In Your Wildest Dreams" is a 1996 duet by soul/R&B legends Tina Turner and Barry White. The bizarre, hot, and hilarious music video below was created by stop motion animation studio Aardman Animations and features cameos from their superstars Wallace and Gromit along with, er, Antonio Banderas. — Read the rest
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by Roger Crisp
This may be an odd thing for a moral philosopher to say, but I think that morality is not fundamentally important. In fact, I think it would be helpful if we stopped using, or at least drastically cut the use of, moral language in philosophical ethics, unless we are engaged in some non-normative enterprise, such as describing a particular morality, that of common sense, for example, or of some particular group or individual. This is not because I am some kind of normative nihilist, or rational egoist. I accept that we should do many things that morality requires us to do, such as not to inflict pointless suffering on non-human animals, but not that we should do them because morality says we should. Morality is a social phenomenon analogous to law, and in the case of law also I see no reason to do anything merely because the law requires it.
Another reason to avoid moral terminology in philosophical ethics is that morality functions through the emotions, especially that of anger, of which the primary moral species is blame. The emotions, though they may have some cognitive content, are passions, and in most areas of philosophy it is rightly thought that arguments should be assessed in the light not of emotion, but of calm rational reflection. Blame is not entirely irrational, of course, but as Aristotle says, ‘it seems to listen to reason to some extent, but to hear it incorrectly; it is like hasty servants who rush off before they have heard everything that is being asked of them and then fail to do it, and dogs that bark at a mere noise, before looking to see whether it is a friend. In the same way, spirit, because of its heated and hasty nature, does hear, but does not hear the command, and so rushes into taking revenge’ (EN 1149a).
This is not to say that there could not be fundamental moral reasons. That is to say, morality could be more than a social phenomenon, constituting a set of independent norms which must be characterized in moral terminology. (This picture of morality is analogous to the picture of law in natural law theory, according to which positive law – the social phenomenon – can be assessed in the light of natural laws independent of positive law.) But we should not begin, as so many philosophers have done and continue to do, with the assumption that there are fundamental or ultimate reasons for action the content of which can be captured only by using moral terminology. We should introduce such reasons into our account only if they are independently justified and required to answer our ultimate practical question: what does one have reason to do? One can say, for example, that each of us has an ultimate reason not to inflict pointless suffering on a non-human animal without using any moral terminology. Someone might wish to add: ‘It is wrong to do so, and hence this reason is a moral one’. But since this introduces a whole set of moral notions, and raises many questions about the nature and status of moral properties, the onus is on this person to explain the value of their suggested addition.
Moral language, then, including the notions of right and wrong, duty, rights, justice, the virtues, and so on, is best avoided as far as possible in fundamental normative ethics. If someone claims that f-ing is wrong, for example, we should translate that as the claim that there is a reason, perhaps an overriding reason, not to f, and then ask why. If the answer comes in moral terminology, that will need to be translated as well. By ‘demoralizing’ such language we may arrive at what really matter – our reasons for action and what grounds them – and we will also be less likely to be misled by emotion.
What, then, does ground reasons? Nothing other, I suggest, than the welfare or well-being of individual sentient beings. This is not a commitment to utilitarianism, since welfarism does not imply that the only grounding relation is that of impartial maximization, though I suggest that any plausible form of welfarism will allow that this is one way in which well-being can ground a reason. But there may be others; it may be, for example, that we should give some priority to those who are badly off, or that we should be especially concerned about the well-being of those affected by our own agency. Nor are the only issues here purely ‘ethical’: matters involving, for example, the metaphysics of personhood or the theory of decision are bound also to arise.
The paragraphs above come from the beginning of a paper I recently published on religious pluralism in health care, in an excellent special issue of Bioethics, edited by Justin Oakley, C.A.J. Coady, and Lauren Notini. In that paper, I go on to explain why the case for welfarist demoralizing seems especially strong when dealing with issues such as that of religion in health care, where emotions run high. I also point out that, though I’m primarily recommending demoralization in philosophical ethics, I recognize the instrumental value of a good deal of morality (as I do that of law), and believe that there may be a place for (careful) demoralizing in thought, discussion, and action more generally.
(Thanks to the editors for publishing my paper. Further discussion of demoralizing can be found in the first chapter of my book Reasons and the Good (2006) and in another (excellent!) special issue — of the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice — edited by Tyler Paytas, Richard Rowland, and me.)
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.
A new study found that undergraduate degrees from Princeton, along with Harvard and Yale, offer a leg up in getting a coveted Supreme Court clerkship.
"We define ourselves more by certain emotions. I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm trying to get over my embarrassment and I feel so inauthentic.'"
The post “It Is Not How You Feel”: Batja Mesquita on How Different Cultures Experience Emotions appeared first on Public Books.
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When you’re in a bad mood, you might want to focus on tasks that are more detail-oriented, such as proofreading, research indicates.
The study, published in Frontiers in Communication, builds on existing research on how the brain processes language.
Vicky Lai, assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, worked with collaborators in the Netherlands to explore how people’s brains react to language when they are in a happy mood versus a negative mood.
“Mood and language seem to be supported by different brain networks. But we have one brain, and the two are processed in the same brain, so there is a lot of interaction going on,” Lai says. “We show that when people are in a negative mood, they are more careful and analytical. They scrutinize what’s actually stated in a text, and they don’t just fall back on their default world knowledge.”
Lai and coauthors set out to manipulate study participants’ moods by showing them clips from a sad movie—Sophie’s Choice—or a funny TV show—Friends. They used a computerized survey to evaluate participants’ moods before and after watching the clips. While the funny clips did not affect participants’ moods, the sad clips succeeded in putting participants in a more negative mood, the researchers found.
The participants then listened to a series of emotionally neutral audio recordings of four-sentence stories that each contained a “critical sentence” that either supported or violated default, or familiar, word knowledge. That sentence was displayed one word at a time on a computer screen, while participants’ brain waves were monitored by EEG, a test that measures brain waves.
For example, the researchers presented study participants with a story about driving at night that ended with the critical sentence “With the lights on, you can see more.” In a separate story about stargazing, the same critical sentence was altered to read “With the lights on, you can see less.” Although that statement is accurate in the context of stargazing, the idea that turning on the lights would cause a person to see less is a much less familiar concept that defies default knowledge.
The researchers also presented versions of the stories in which the critical sentences were swapped so that they did not fit the context of the story. For example, the story about driving at night would include the sentence “With the lights on, you can see less.”
They then looked at how the brain reacted to the inconsistencies, depending on mood.
They found that when participants were in a negative mood, based on their survey responses, they showed a type of brain activity closely associated with re-analysis.
“We show that mood matters, and perhaps when we do some tasks we should pay attention to our mood,” Lai says. “If we’re in a bad mood, maybe we should do things that are more detail-oriented, such as proofreading.”
Study participants completed the experiment twice—once in the negative mood condition and once in the happy mood condition. Each trial took place one week apart, with the same stories presented each time.
“These are the same stories, but in different moods, the brain sees them differently, with the sad mood being the more analytical mood,” Lai says.
The study took place in the Netherlands; participants were native Dutch speakers, and the study was conducted in Dutch. But Lai believes their findings translate across languages and cultures.
By design, the study participants were all women, because Lai and her colleagues wanted to align their study with existing literature that was limited to female participants. Lai says future studies should include more diverse gender representation.
In the meantime, Lai and her colleagues say mood may affect us in more ways than we previously realized.
Coauthors are from Utrecht University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Source: University of Arizona
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