Peripheral and Essential Moral Charicteristics

Where is the line between an act such as cloning-to-produce-children become morally wrong in itself or morally wrong due to peripheries? What distinguishes a periphery from what is central to a moral action? (Q&A 1)

In the cloning debate in class there was a lot of talk about what was peripheral to the idea of cloning, especially when we where discussing the possible health effects. Are effects of a morally considered action therefore peripheral and something else essential? But an action is a thing producing results, so the results define the action.

Maybe the difference between an essential and a peripheral quality of an action is weather the effects of the action must necessarily make certain results. If human cloning necessarily has negative health effects then that would be essential to the action of cloning. If ill health effects can be avoided, then they are a peripheral quality of the action of human cloning.

Then the only essential quality of cloning to produce a person is creating a human clone. We can solve all the peripheral qualities of that action as they come up, but the action of cloning itself doesn't seem to be challenged much at all.

Under Grad Research Conference

Ok, I admit I signed up for this class to have a lot of debates about meta-ethics, which has been marked off limits since the begining of the course. I also wish I had gone to see the philosophy presentations last Thursday at the undergraduate research conference because JonDavid told me of a really interesting presentation.

When it comes to morality, I don't think there is any objective basis to be found in nature or in the way humans are that will tell you how to behave morally. Morality is based entirely on what sort of outcomes you want to produce through your actions, the pretense that morality is an objective truth or at all universal is only used to motivate those who do not act moral because of reason reason.

Apparently Jacob Wheeler's presentation was about his attempt to find an objective basis for morality. Failing that, as he necessarily would, he concluded that we need to hold onto morality because of its utility as a regulative idea.

Response to "Film Transgressions"

Raanan's original post here.

It is likely many parents, or so-called advocates, where only shown that scene out of context, or else just heard about it out of context. Also, it seems many advocates for public morality are very willing to exploit each instance of content, which could be debatable, to the extreme.

This reminded me very much of the ransom put on the writer of The Satanic Verses by the government of Iran. Several passages could be taken from the text and look like an attack on Islam, but the larger work is not a critique of Islam and is in fact wide ranging and dreamy. Despite this, the Iranian government decided to ruin the life of this poor author, who had to live in hiding for years, because of a few disembodied passages.

Race Beyond Crime and Punishment

Are there other ways to deal with race besides different practices regarding punishment and discrimination? (Q&A 2)

While it is clear that racism and the social segregation of race is supported institutionally through patterns of criminal punishment, the roots of racism must be deeper than the economics of impoverishment and crime. Why is it we are trapped in this rut? I know I wont be able to fully answer this question.

I'm sure one reason that racism is still popular among poor whites is one of the same reasons it became popular in the first place. That is, that it is an accepted way to boost your ego, racism says that you are innately better than those people over there, and that is understandably an ego boost. It is unsurprising then that in my experience the upper middle class at least makes a nod at being anti-racist, and people from less financially secure backgrounds tend to be occasional racists. This might also be especially true because people living closer to poverty live in the same areas as impoverished blacks, and have more contact with racist concepts that are more readily replicated because of regular contact with blacks.

Responding to 'The Men's Center'

Brandon's original post can be found here

When reading this post I thought of an analogy that had been bugging me since I started looking for colleges. There are so many Black Student Unions, which are fine, but a White Students Union would clearly be racist.

I don't know if this fully explains it, but the logic behind oppressed groups banding together shares the logic of the classical Marxist proletariat organizing itself against its opporessor. However in the case of the proletariat the oppressors are just thrown off and cease to exist. If you attempt to do the same thing with race or gender you will never be able to achieve the same sort of result.

I fear that there are at least two competing logic in the politics of race. One is integration, where the cultures of the different race communities do not have to dissolve but cannot be separate. The second, more dominant, is the new separate but equal, except this time around it is not institutionally supported by racist government policy but by the way the black and white communities segregating themselves from each other mutually. It fits in very well with rhetoric of multiculturalism, which the listener understands as multiple separate cultures living together. I think the logic of the second is driving black student unions, and the logic of separation and difference might explain certain strains of feminism.

Discussing the Death Penalty Beyond Race

Is the death penalty wrong for reasons beyond race? (Q&A 1)

The last few chapters have been very focused on race. While the issue of the death penalty should probably be addressed partially due to issues relating to race, I think it should be approached from a different angle.

The death penalty is wrong simply because we don't want murder in our society. Even when justice is the justification for the killing it provides a legitimate means through which a person can be killed. If the state is justified in killing in response to a killing, isn't a citizen? Or at least a citizen could think this while trying to justify his actions in an unstable state.

Punishment vs. Rehabilitation & Norway

Considering we're reading allot of material dealing with crime and punishment it should be worth while to look at prison. I subscribe to a sort of utilitarian theory of justice, justice should produce the best social outcomes possible for the greatest possible structural good. My working assumptions therefore assume that rehabilitation should be the goal of the prison systems (Which we are utterly failing to do in the US, with privatizing prisons and stigmatizing past inmates so they re forced back into crime).

Even with my admittedly liberal leanings I was shocked to discover that Norway had such success with rehabilitation. I assume, and this is an important assumption, that the reason rehabilitation has failed so utterly in the US is because it has never been attempted with such single mindedness like it was tried in Norway. We have always tried to sorta rehabilitate and always punish, and this approach has lead to some pretty sorry outcomes (the US has the highest number of prisoners in proportion to its total population than any country (yup, even including the anti-democracy guys: Russia, China, and Iran))

This is a very good article about a Norwegian low security prison.