Jon Cogburn's Blog

wisdom from March, 2008

Charles Bukowski

I should have been a monk.

Tom Engelhardt

So what exactly has the Bush Administration proven itself good at? The twin skills of destruction and looting would stand at the top of any list. Perhaps that's because it chose to put its "eggs" in only two baskets--those of the US military and crony corporations. Awed by the shock-and-awe force of forces that fell into their hands, Administration officials moved to transfer as many powers of civil governance as possible to the Pentagon. From diplomacy to disaster relief, nation-building to intelligence gathering, an organization built only to destroy was designated as the go-to outfit for activities normally associated with those who have building in mind. At the same time, the government was being staffed, top-to-bottom, with ill-prepared political pals, while a small set of crony corporations, of which Halliburton is certainly the best known, was given the nod in every rebuilding situation. It really didn't matter where you looked, they were the ones camped out, making money, on the landscape of destruction. With their no-bid, cost-plus contracts, these companies ran up the hours and then tended to jump ship when the going got bad. The same corporations that had essentially looted Iraq--it was labeled "reconstruction"--were the first ones called in when New Orleans went down. (Of the initial six contracts the Bush Administration offered for the reconstruction of the city, five went to companies previously involved in Iraq's reconstruction program.) Unsurprisingly, the Bush Administration has proved serially incapable of building anything, even--in the long run--their own machine. And, from the Enron moment to the Bear Stearns one, whenever it looked like the Titanic might have hit an iceberg, it was a lock that those passengers assigned to the limited places in the lifeboats wouldn't be from steerage (or be weighed down with subprime mortgages). So rebuilding. No. Saving people who aren't already friends. No. Doing a heck of a job in a crisis. No.

Joseph Conrad

I am too firm in consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.

Paul Theroux

He woke much too early . . . thinking of how he loathed medical doctors, their absurd authority, their bossy arrogance, their airs - you were familiar, they were formal; you were small, they were large: "Wait here, Slade; the doctor is busy at the moment." A doctor posed as a figure of power and wisdom, knowing how to ease pain and cure sickness and save lives. Those skills were like a higher form of plumbing, mastered by earnest drudges, yet they regarded themselves as shamans and did not want to be judged like ordinary mortals. They hated their learning to be called into question, and they never listened.

. . . .The pencil lead trembled against the paper then began paring at the page like a knife point. No other sound came from the doctor except the bump of her bare forearm on her desktop, like the skid of raw meat, a fat rind of cold pork slapped onto a butcher's block.

As she began to write, and it sounded like an indictment, her scraping the paper with her pencil point, Steadman inwardly objected again: another doctor dominating him, behaving as pompously as a priestess, hinting that she had power over life and death, knew the diagnosis for all mortal ills if not the cure, protective of the special language of illness, the code words of doom, a superstitious idiolect a lingo that was all about fear and flesh. He was supine; there was no sympathy there.

Gary Kamiya

It's not surprising that the right is using Wright to paint Barack Obama as a closet Farrakhan, trying to let the air out of his trans-racial balloon by insinuating that he's a dogmatic race man. But beyond the fake shock and the all-too-familiar racial politics, what the whole episode reveals is how narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country. This is especially true of anything having to do with patriotism or 9/11 -- which have become virtually interchangeable. Wright's unforgivable sin was that he violated our rigid code of national etiquette. Instead of the requisite "God bless America," he said "God damn America." He said 9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost. Now we must all furrow our brows and agree that such dreadful words are anathema and that no presidential candidate can ever have been within earshot of them.

This is absurd. We're worrying about someone in Row 245 who refuses to stand up for "The Star Spangled Banner," while the people who are singing loudest and waving the biggest flags are the ones who got us into the mess we're in today.

Wright isn't the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.

. . . .Bill Clinton's line that McCain and Hillary are "two people who love their country" may or may not have been intended to subtly denigrate Obama's patriotism. But whatever it meant, it didn't have anything to do with the actual problems facing the country. Loving America more than your opponent does is not a qualification for higher office.

In fact, the same all-American flag-wavers who called loudest for war against Iraq are now denouncing Wright as a hate-monger and a traitor, and attacking Michelle Obama for saying that only recently has she had reason to feel proud of her country. They insist that anyone who is not permanently proud of the United States, whose patriotism isn't plastered on his or her face like the frozen smile of a beauty queen waving from a Fourth of July float, is beyond the pale. Never mind that the glorious results of their debased version of patriotism -- 4,000 American troops dead, a wrecked Iraq, and a greatly strengthened terrorist enemy -- are plain for all to see.

. . . .Today, after five years of a catastrophic war driven by patriotic vengeance, it's still not acceptable to disturb the myth of eternal American innocence. As David Bromwich wrote in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, "the uniformity of the presentation by the mass media after 2001, to the effect that the United States now faced threats arising from a fanaticism with religious roots unconnected to anything America had done or could do, betrayed a stupefying abdication of judgment." Stupefying indeed: Patriotism has proved to be a stronger opiate of the people than religion.

Paul Theroux

The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance - buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

Most travel writing was about vacations and comforts, not real journeys and ordeals. So the very words "travel writing" were debased to the point where I hated to use them, but what else was there, and how could I reclaim them? Now and then one would meet the real thing in a book: Evelyn Waugh mistaken for his brother Alex in Labels; Naipaul's explosions of bad temper in An Area of Darkness; the "I hate Mexicans" parts of Greene's The Lawless Roads; or the human encounters, full of dialogue, in Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main. In these and other cases, something human happens and was recorded. That seemed to me the point of travel writing.

. . . .The travel books I liked were oddities, not only Greene and Trollope, but Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (across America, coast to coast by car) and Mark Twain's Following the Equator (lecture tours around the world).

. . . .I never got around to worrying about the trip itself, though I was beset by an obscure ache that was both mental and physical - the lingering anxiety that I was going to die. I had always felt that my exit would be made via an Appointment in Samarra - that I would go a great distance and endure enormous and pointless discomfort in order to meet my death. If I chose to sit at home and eat and drink, it would never happen. I imagined myself in a silly accident, like that of the monk, writer and poet Thomas Merton, at last leaving his monastery in Kentucky after 27 years and accidentally electrocuting himself on the frayed wires of an electric fan in Bangkok a week later.

. . . .

Almost immediately, as the boat train headed to Folkestone, I felt I had made an absurd mistake. I hadn't the slightest idea what I was doing. I became very gloomy, and to cheer myself up and convince myself that this was indeed work, I began to take voluminous notes. From the moment I left until the night I arrived back in London almost four months later - homesick most of the time - I filled one notebook after another. I wrote everything down - conversations, descriptions of people and places, details of trains, interesting trivia, even criticisms of the novels I happened to be reading. I still have some of those books, and on the blank back pages of the paperbacks of Joyce's Exiles, Chekhov's stories, Endo's Silence and others I had scribbled insectile notes, which I amplified when I transferred them to my large notebooks. I always wrote in the past tense.

On returning home, I found that in my absence I had been replaced in my wife's affections by another man. "I pretended you were dead," she said. This was something horrible to me, especially in my fragile mental state at the end of this difficult trip. My wife tried to reassure me - she loved me again - but I was inconsolable, feeling angry and betrayed. I looked for refuge in my book and through the weird alchemy that turns misery to humour, much of what I wrote was comedy.

Andrew Sullivan

Yes, the incompetence and arrogance were beyond anything I imagined. In 2000, my support for Bush was not deep. I thought he was an OK, unifying, moderate Republican who would be fine for a time of peace and prosperity. I was concerned—ha!—that Gore would spend too much. I was reassured by the experience and intelligence and pedigree of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell. Two of them had already fought and won a war in the Gulf. The bitter election battle hardened my loyalty. And once 9/11 happened, my support intensified as I hoped for the best. Bush's early speeches were magnificent. The Afghanistan invasion was defter than I expected. I got lulled. I wanted him to succeed—too much, in retrospect.

But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom—the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, it was yet another epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.

I know our enemy is much worse. I have never doubted that. I still have no qualms whatever in waging war to defeat it. But I never believed that America would do what America has done. Never. My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of—a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise—was my worst mistake. What the war has done to what is left of Iraq—the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed—was bad enough. But what was done to America—and the meaning of America—was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself.

Kingsley Amis

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk

Eric Sofge

. . . .What's wrong with Dungeons & Dragons? It plays like a video game. A good role-playing game provides the framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater. But D&D, particularly the first edition that Gygax co-wrote in 1975, makes this sort of creative play an afterthought. The problem is most apparent in one of Gygax's central (and celebrated) innovations: "experience points." To become a more powerful wizard, a sneakier thief, or an elfier elf (being an elf was its own profession in early editions, which is kind of like saying being Chinese is a full-time job), you need to gain "levels," which requires experience points. And the best way to get experience points is to kill stuff. Every monster, from an ankle-biting goblin to a massive fire-spewing dragon, has a specific number of points associated with it—your reward for hacking it to pieces. So while it's one player's job—the so-called Dungeon Master—to come up with the plot for each gaming session and play the parts of the various enemies and supporting characters, in practice that putative storyteller merely referees one imagined slaughter after another. This is not Tolkien's Middle-Earth, with its anti-fascist political commentary and yearning for an end to glory and the triumph of peace. This is violence without pretense, an endless hobgoblin holocaust.

Here's the narrative arithmetic that Gygax came up with: You come across a family of sleeping orcs, huddled around their overflowing chest of gold coins and magical weapons. Why do orcs and other monsters horde gold when they can't buy anything from the local "shoppes," or share a jug of mead in the tavern, or do anything but gnash their teeth in the darkness and wait for someone to show up and fight them? Who knows, but there they are, and you now have a choice. You can let sleeping orcs lie and get on with the task at hand—saving a damsel, recovering some ancient scepter, whatever. Or you can start slitting throats—after all, mercy doesn't have an experience point value in D&D. It's the kind of atrocity that commits itself.

. . . .There is a way to wring real creativity, and possibly even artistic merit, from this bizarre medium—and it has nothing to do with Gygax and his tradition of sociopathic storytelling. In the mid-1980s, right around the time that Gygax was selling off his company, Steve Jackson began publishing the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, or GURPS. Jackson's goal was to provide the rules to play games in any genre. More importantly, characters in this new system could be fleshed out down to the smallest detail, from a crippling phobia of snakes to a severe food allergy. And when it came to experience points, characters got whatever the "gamemaster" decided. They might earn points for succeeding at a given task or simply for playing their character in a compelling way. Of course, players could still take out their real-life bitterness in a fictional killing spree, and the game master might end up with a bumbling and incoherent story line. But GURPS created the potential for so much more.

William Gibson

If there's any one thing about England that Cayce finds fundamentally disturbing, it is how "class" works -- a word with a very different mirrorworld meaning, somehow. She's long since given up trying to explain this to English friends.

The closest she can come is that it's somewhat akin, for her, if only in its enormity, to how the British seem to feel about certain American attitudes to firearms ownership --  which they generally find unthinkable, and bafflingly, self-evidently wrong, and so often leading to a terrible and profligate waste of human life. And she knows what they mean, but also knows how deeply it runs, the gun thing, and how unlikely it is to change. Except, perhaps, gradually, and over a very long time. Class in England is like that, for her.

Mostly she manages to ignore it, though there's a certain way they can have, on first meeting, of sniffing another's caste out, that gives her the willies.

Katherine, her therapist, had suggested that it might in fact be because it was such a highly codified behavior, as were all of the areas of human activity around which Cayce suffered such remarkable sensitivity. And it is, highly codified; they look at one another's shoes first, she's convinced, and Lucian Greenaway has just done that to Ngemi.

And doesn't like them.

Daniel Gross

. . . .now, thanks to widespread incompetence, American management is on its way to becoming an international laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of knee-slapping in even the most sober Swiss banks. (How do you say schadenfreude in German?) Earlier this month, as oil hovered near $100 a barrel, President Bush complained to OPEC about high oil prices. OPEC President Chakib Khelil responded acidly that crude's remarkable run had nothing to do with the reluctance of Persian Gulf nations to pump oil, and everything to do with the "mismanagement of the U.S. economy." Since Bush's plea, oil has gushed to $110 per barrel. (How do you say schadenfreude in Arabic?)

Americans abroad are constantly taunted by perceived failings of American management. America's aviation system is now the butt of jokes because 9-year-olds have become accustomed to removing their Heelys before boarding a plane. As my family and I passed through the snaking security line in Cancún, Mexico's airport last month, we were harangued by a security guard who encouraged tourists to sing along with him: "Please. Do not. Remove. Your shoes."

The concern extends beyond airlines to America's industrial complex. Doubtful of the ability of provincial American executives, with their limited language skills, to negotiate today's global business environment, the boards of massive U.S. firms like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Alcoa, and insurer AIG have hired foreign-born CEOs. Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider, has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at CEOs' expense. On a recent 60 Minutes, Icahn complained to Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management. "I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it."

Rumi

Those spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital. 

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop. 

Where did you go? "Nowhere."                
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much." 

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy _something,_ to be part of the exchanging flow. 

Start a huge, foolish project,                
like Noah. 

It makes absolutely no difference                
what people think of you. 

reply to brute

Neal Hebert posted a very nice editorial here and this jerk named "Bob Weir" posted a response here. Weir's response contained so many irritating conservative tropes in such a short space that I had to respond. I submitted the response on the Daily Reveille website, but thought I'd reproduce it here for everyone's enjoyment.

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I for one want it to be noted that, contra Mr. Weir (didn't he also play guitar for the Greatful Dead?), Neal Hebert does not have a "little head."  Though I have not been priveledged to measure it, I can attest that physically, Mr. Hebert's head is what you would expect from good Acadian stock. Metaphorically? It's hard to say, the conceit of much of his humorous writing is of a person with a gigantic head, but the very fact that it is a humorous conceit shrinks it back down. So instead of the Goodyear Blimp you have a head-sized (are you listening Mr. Weir?) fascimile of the Goodyear Blimp. One with frizzy hair on top.

Seriously, Weir's comments are submental, a disgrace to the uniform he claims to represent. First, whether or not people would want to serve with Hebert has nothing to do with Hebert's claims. Second, Weir's attack on Hebert's fighting skills (did you know that Neal Hebert is a specialist in drunken monkey kung fu style, Mr. Weir? Huh? Did you?) and masculinity is entirely based on Hebert's opposition to this war. Since most of the readership of this august publication have college degrees, and since it would be wasted on a blustering fool like Mr. Weir, I won't explain the logical fallacies involved in the above.

Mr. Weir says that he will kill anybody who negotiates with terrorists. So you are going to kill General Petreus? *All* military strategists agree that a large part of the surge's success is due to the creation of Sunni Awakening Councils. This is where we pay money to the Sunni terrorists so that instead of attacking us they police their own areas. This "negotiating with terrorists" is central to General Petreus' counterinsurgency strategy. So Mr. Weir has announced in a public forum that he intends to kill General Petreus. I hope the FBI's web spiders are smart enough to catch this exchange (they are!).

If you want to note just how laughable Weir's claim to speak for active duty military and veterans are, just note that of all the presidential candidates, Barack Obama has received the most amount of money from active duty military members. Why? Because most active duty military members can't stand what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld etcetera's incompetence and moral evil have done to the United States Military. So Mr. Weir's pretense to speak for the military is as laughable as his dumb bluster and logical fallacies.

Finally, I honor your service Mr. Weir. Would that you did the same by respecting the Constitution you and your sons swear to uphold when you are given your first rank (hint, killing people you disagree with politically is not kosher in free societies).

Jon Cogburn

The world shutters as the worm gets his wings.

Sorry so few posts. I'm trying to get as much book rewriting done prior to getting an endoscopy (matrixy camera on the end of a worm guided through the nose and into the stomach), biopsy, and having my esophagus expanded with a balloon this Friday, and then (if that goes well) getting my polypy gall bladder out after that.

The hardest part of rewriting is taking stuff out. Part of why Mark and I are good co-writers is that we're merciless with each other in this regard and we trust the other person's intuitions enough to not turn everything into a battle.

This one is hard though, because I spent about a month doing nothing but writing an appendix that traces the key logical developments that led to the digital computer and the Computational Representational Understanding of Mind. And like my poor gall bladder, the appendix must be excised (it is out of place in a book that will hopefully have a broader appeal). The sad task these last few days has been seeing how much (how little) of the appendix needs to be cut and pasted into the body of the text itself.

Even though the gall bladder is physically a part of me, I have a lot more identification with the poor appendix. There's no polyps on it; it just doesn't fit with the rest of the book. . .

studying ethics is bad for the soul

I have a pet theory that a necessary condition for being an academic philosopher is also being a profound failure. Philosophers of science and metaphysicians are failed scientists. Epistemologists are failed psychologists and lawyers. Philosophers of language are failed linguistics. Aestheticians are failed painters/musicians/filmmakers/etc. Philosophers of math and logicians are failed mathematicians. Philosophers of logic are failed reasoners. And ethicists are failed human beings.

This raises an important question. Does the study of ethics make one a worse human being?

By some conceptions of  ethics this is clearly false. Anyone would do better to learn from the kind of metaphysically informed self-help books produced by Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, as well as from anything that David Hume had to say (about ethics or anything else). This tradition of metaphysically informed self-help is still alive in the writings of many prominent Buddhist thinkers today (e.g. Thich Naht Hahn).

The kind of ethics that submits itself to "publish or perish" is a very different beast though. By this conception an ethical theory is sort of a machine that spits out our moral obligations and permissibilities. Then we can test these theories by seeing if they accord with our considered moral intuitions and by the extent to which they uphold the kind of theoretical virtues important for science and engineering (though most philosophers have an extraordinarily simplistic view of these virtues). So for example, you can respond to the fact that Kant's deontological ethics entails that one should tell the truth to Nazis by biting the bullet (going against the intuition), by rejecting the deontological approach, or by trying to change Kant's theory a little bit so that it gets the intuition correct. Likewise with Mill's Utilitarian view entailing that in some circumstances it is correct to execute innocent people.

Typical intro classes in ethics are rooted in these two theories (and usually social contract theory as well, and maybe some virtue theory and meta-ethical concerns and moral epistemology thrown in if there is time).

I think that this way of teaching ethics is usually pretty bad. The first problem is that the possible situations that are put forward to counterexemplify the theories are so preposterous. For example, if a train is headed towards ten people and you could switch the track so that it just kills one person should you do it? WTF? Unfortunately, given our epistemic limitations, this kind of preposterousness productively leads to the justification of great evil. It is at the center of people who currently defend state sanctioned torture (and if you think "stress positions" combined with sleep deprivation through constant ear splitting music and blinding light is not torture, then you need to be subject to it for a week or so). What if there is a "ticking bomb" situation where lives can be saved only if the information is gotten within a short time frame, and only by torturing somebody to get the information? Would it not be justified in that case?

Well what if someone put a miniature bomb in a baby such that the only way to defuse the bomb was to eviscerate the baby? Israeli studies on "ticking bomb" justifications for torture (their supreme court ruled abuse of detainees, even in such circumstances, to be illegal) showed that the baby scenario is about as likely. But it could happen. Shouldn't we then give Bush et. al. legal permission to eviscerate babies on the suspicion that there might be a bomb inside of them?

The point is, these outlandish possible worlds systematically allow people to justify courses of action that should not be justified. We can't know if we really are in a ticking bomb scenario (and there is no evidence that there ever has been such a case, even in countries like Israel subject to a tremendous amount of terrorism), so once you use that rational you start torturing every time you think you might be in such a case. Given the nature of administrative evil, the slippery slope gets slid down.

In addition, the incessant focus on extreme kinds of badness (i.e. the Nazis) makes us less self aware about all of the ways we could be better people. But then the systematic study of ethics is making you less self-aware and a worse person.

The second way these ethics classes are destructive is much more widespread among students.To understand this we need to take note of how "practical ethics" (as a colleague of mine once wrote, an oxymoron) classes get taught. In these classes you spend less time on the ethical theories and more time on applying them to controversial political issues like abortion and the death penalty. You typically present very good prima facie arguments pro and con each position and present very good refutations of everyone's arguments.

I think students get out of such classes with their puerile skepticism and relativism increased. They reason that if such smart people of good will can't agree about anything, there must not be a fact of the matter.

This is the all too predictable result of focusing on the very few very complicated issues that informed people of good will can disagree about. But the whole "ethics is a theory that can be tested" paradigm forces that to be the case.

Third, wisdom counsels that it is very dangerous to set yourself up as the moral arbiter of the universe. Pride goes before a fall and a haughty spirit before a destruction. But isn't it then a little bit sick to present ethicists as the masters of the moral theory that can determine for any arbitrary action whether it is obligatory or permissible? Thus even people who don't come out further entrenched in puerile relativism can come out of the study of ethics even less self critical and aware, because they have abrogated for themselves the role of God's judges. My personal experience is that (with some notable exceptions, usually involving Stoics of Buddhists) people who study ethics a long time learn not to lose sleep about any of their professional decisions. This is really bad because so many professional decisions are made under such conditions of heuristic uncertainty. For example, you can't really know 100% that you are hiring the best person or that your view on the essay you are reviewing is optimal. This should lead to humility and an attempt to increase shared humanity and compassion as much as possible. But the study of ethics can rend the soul such that just the opposite occurs. I guess that being an ethicist means never having to say you are sorry. No thanks.

Fourth, and finally, ethics makes it much easier to rationalize any possible action. You just pick a moral theory whose weird counterfactual results can be made to seem similar to whatever you are contemplating doing. Again, I've seen professional ethicists do this with aplomb when it comes to professional scenarios. It makes me really worry about what our business students are getting out of their "professional ethics" classes.

One further topic needs to be addressed. While the aesthetician is almost always a failed artist prior to becoming an aesthetician, we need to ask if the ethicist is a failed human being prior to becoming an ethicist, or if the study of ethics ruins them as a human being. Surely a judgmental prick who wants to justify all of his own crappy ways of treating people would be exactly the kind of person drawn to the kind of ethics predominant in philosophy departments in the first place. But I think there is still some causation in the other direction, which we can examine by examining what our students (many whom take the classes because they are required) get out of these courses.

As a footnote, one might object that all the above concerns "analytical ethics." Well and good, but when a pedant like Leonard Lawlor gets a full professorship at Penn State, I don't think "continental ethics" is any better. Of course this is to ignore all the great work coming out of the Nietzsche/Marx/Foucault materialist tradition (as opposed to the Derridean and Levinasian rehashed Sartrean neo-Kantianism expressed so badly by writers such as Lawlor) by American continental thinkers. And to be fair, with my focus on the "reflective equilibrium" brand of analytical ethics I'm leaving out incredibly important developments as well (virtue theorists, anti-theorists, and people working in moral psychology in particular).

As a final footnote, I'm not trying to put Kant or Mill down here. My own view is that Kant expressed as well as possible many of the moral obligations we have that arise out of sapience and Mill expressed as well as possible many the moral obligations we have that arise out of sentience and the social contract theorists express as well as possible many of the moral obligations that arise out of the fact that we are sapient social creatures. I am a moral dialetheist, so I think when these contradict you just often just have systematic tragic choice scenarios. This way does not lead to skepticism or relativism because the judgments they agree on are objectively true. -All this being said, some caveats- (1) There is a lot more to the world than sentience, sapience, and community, so these ethical theories are limited, and not particularly helpful for the more important quest of being a better person (I'd read Hume or the Greek or Roman Stoics any day before Kant or Mill in these regards), (2) I don't think Moral Obligations are linguaform entities, and any linguistic theory such as normative ethics is going to be misleading in important ways because of that (this is a long story), and (3) even if everyone were to embrace my moral dialetheism (and non-reaction to the one paper I've managed to get published where I suggest this (in the Priest anthology) shows that this is not going to happen), I still worry that the idea that there could be "ethicists," good at judgments in general but expert in nothing in particular, is morally damaging the ways listed above. It is of a piece with the post World War II culture of "management" that is so damaging to our country. I hope (and hopefully with John Protevi) to write a book about this phenomena of experts with no expertise one day. I'll post on that and the history of cognitive science in my next philosophy post, because I'm interested in what anyone thinks.

Dinners I've suffered through

One of the many self-destructive things I've done in my life was read a significant chunk of Henry Miller in high school. You might expect that this bad influence would be primarily in terms of giving me stupid 1920's tough guy attitudes about sex. No. That didn't happen. Nor did it make my prose style any more affected and incoherent than it already was. The real damage was when I read the part about how Miller managed to eat in Paris even though he had zero money. What he did was contrive to be such a great conversationalist that each of his carefully cultivated friends could be counted on to buy him one meal a week. This actually worked for him for a couple of years I think.

Somehow that entered my psyche and as a result I had a period where I endeavored to eat dinner with my three best friends' families as much as possible. Luckily, this was in the late 1980's, after the television had completely ravaged American culture (and before the Internet, video games, professional wrestling, and non-hair rock rock restored our Republic to her former glory). As a result all three of my best friends' families tended to eat dinner on trays in front of the television while watching shows like "Family Ties" or maybe spinoffs from the "Cosby Show."

In each case I did manage to wrangle invitations to actual sit-at-the-table dinners, but it was always a disaster. I blame Henry Miller.

In the first, my friend's father read the newspaper the entire time, and it freaked me out. I was trying to have entertaining conversation like Henry Miller (obviously, since this was 1980's Alabama and not 1920's Paris the conversation was without reference to either writing or all the body parts and various movements and fluids apparently endlessly discussed by artists in Miller's coterie). But the voice of my friend's Dad kept emanating behind the paper with cryptic comments about what he was reading, usually of the "Damn Democrats. . . always up to something" variety. And we'd all have to quiet down and eat after he said that, even though nothing else was forthcoming. It was agonizing.

My second friend was slightly better. The Dad was not behind a newspaper, but after he said the prayer nobody talked the whole time. We just ate the hideously bland 1980's middle-class American fare (flavorless soup, microwaved vegetables, a roll, and some kind of meat with no sauce) in silence. I couldn't do the Henry Miller trick of making entertaining conversation in those circumstances, and I didn't want to. But then, fifteen minutes into the meal, my friend's Dad looked up at the ceiling and ponderously intoned, "Mother. You've outdone yourself." He called his wife "Mother." And I wanted to say, "No she hasn't. Look at this tasteless garbage we're eating. If Julia Child was dead she'd rise up out of the grave as a super-zombie and come do a Hannibal Lecter number on all of our brains for eating this crap. And you know what, our brains would taste a lot better than this." But of course I didn't. Instead, I looked at the calender on their refridgerator, and saw that each month had a different Georgia O Keefe flower painting. And my then teenaged brain (thoroughly warped as it was by an unbearable combination of adolescent pulchritude, school, and television) had a rare moment of clarity. I realized that nobody in my friend's family saw O Keefe's phallic and vulvic (is that a word? is there an antonym for phallic?) images as remotely sexual. The were just pretty flowers. As much as I loved my friend, I could not eat there any more.

My third best friend invited me to dinner after a day we'd spent watching Woody Allen movies in his house. We were on the last one while his Mom was cooking. It was "Love and Death," Allen's fantastic early send-up of 19th century Russian novels. I was in the bathroom during the scene where Allen's character has hung himself (he gets better) and starts to think of all the things he is going to miss. He gives all sorts of characteristic romantic reasons (e.g. the beauty of the tundra, discussing philosophy into the late hours of the morning, etc.), but in the middle of this, one of the things he lists is "oral sex." It's very funny. Unfortunately my friend's mom (a devout evangelical) heard those words coming out of her T.V. set and literally started screaming as if someone was assaulting her. As soon as I could extricate myself from the bathroom (and its suffocating presence of "pot pourri" spray, plug in air-freshener, and bowl of dried flowers) my friend and I ran out of the house to the nearest Burger King. Not only did I not get a free meal, but I never got my tape of "Love and Death" back.

So ended my career as a Milleresque con man, like so many things in my life virtuous only due to the manifest incompetence with which I play the part.

Some things I like about students

Given that many recent posts have either mocked student foibles or openly contemplated how best to deal with those foibles, dharma demands some balance. I have the best job in the world and here are some of the main reasons. Please share yours that aren't on this list.

1. Some of my students have excellent taste in novels, better than any of my colleagues. I've read well over a hundred very good books that I would not have heard about otherwise.
2. Some of my students are very good barometers of what is good in pop culture, on the whole much better than my colleagues (with possibly one exception). I don't have a television and only watch stuff like that on DVDs. Without students I never would have gotten into: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Battlestar Galactica, Rome, The [British and American] Office, and Extras (I liked Xena before I started teaching). Likewise, I never would have discovered the great comic books Renaissance that we are undergoing, especially (for me) all things Gaimonesque. And my knowledge of video games and professional wrestling (which I think is as important an art form as opera, which is the closest genre) would be pretty poor as well. Musically, I would never have gotten into the White Stripes or AC/DC.
3. Many of my students have extremely good senses of humor, better than most of my colleagues. Class discussion is not only vastly better for this, but my life is brighter. I'm actually the faculty adviser for the L.S.U. student group Mustache Advocacy Network, perhaps my greatest distinction.
4. Many of my students are philosophically creative (two M.A. students have published in fairly decent journals) and can be taught to express this in a good way. It's work to get this out of them in a decent way. You have to spend a lot of class time talking with everyone about their paper plans (it helps the students to hear what others are doing), giving them detailed advice about how to narrow down the punch-line, and how to structure the paper to get to it. But if you do that, then at the end of the semester in upper level classes you always get at least two papers that just wow you. And this often happens in lower level classes too.
5. Tied to the previous point- In all of my classes the class discussions help my research immensely.
6. Many of my students are heroic. One works as a counselor at a summer camp for kids who suffer from severe burns. One helps take care of her sister with severe cerebral palsy. Some are returning war vets from Iraq. About a third of them were devastated to some degree (losing their homes at a minimum) by hurricanes Katrina or Rita (and devastated even more so by the Bush administration's sadistic response).
7. Most of my students are at a point in their life where they are experimenting with what kind of person they want to be. I strongly believe that learning (albeit perhaps not getting an academic job in) philosophy helps us do this better. More importantly, good-humored, free wheeling, open class discussions where we are not afraid to get lost on tangents present a model of fun collegiality and respect for people and ideas that I think help students recover from the baleful MTV and high school hegemony of cool that sucks the creativity and soul out of so many people. Amazingly, in college you see a different kind of "cool," where students excited about life and ideas and who are loving of others end up having more charisma than fratboy and other acolytes of the eternal James Dean inarticulate loutness lowest common denominator consumerist culture (as well as the women attracted to such louts). Good class discussion is like an insecticide exterminating brutishness; it is a balm for my troubled soul.
8. Many of my students care deeply about those around them, the stuff they are learning, and the fate of our Republic. I think this is much greater than when I was in school; perhaps because of the web students are both more informed and less cynical and pessimistic about the chances that they can do something meaningful for their own lives and for the lives of those around them. I hope that the Bush recession (and the economic mess he has left us in with his lack of investment in infrastructure, ruinous wars, massive corruption, deficit-causing tax cuts for the rich, and resulting horrendous monetary policy) does not beat this amazing sense of possibility out of Generation Y.
9. Students today are the least racist and homophobic demographic in American culture, and they are the least racist and homophobic group of students in American history.

class policies I'm toying with

My Oklahoma/book-with-Mark/child-with-Emily/intermittent-severe-pain-in-my-gastro-intestinal-system idyll will be over in Fall of 08 at which point I will be back at LSU in the trenches.  The last semester at LSU I had a ridiculous amount of skipping in my classes and a ridiculous amount of late work. In the past I've always been incredibly laissez faire about that, reasoning that the important thing was that the work was the best the student could do and that good late work is better than bad on time work. But with the expansion in class sizes at LSU and students' increasing tendency to avail themselves of my lenience, this is now creating so much extra work for me that I didn't get any research done during the last semester. And my contract stipulates that half my work time is supposed to be research (which is weird because according to the contract the other half is teaching, even though service is part of what determines retention, raises, and promotion). I'm also not convinced that the freedom is producing better work at this point. Deadlines are a good thing. And the vast majority of students who miss over half the class periods are not going to learn very much, even if they can game the grading such that it doesn't effect them horribly.

Makeups- No makeups will be given. Instead, the portion of your grade that would have been determined by that test is added to the final exam (which is cumulative).
Exams- All exams will be multiple choice. Exam help (discussion questions such that if you can answer them correctly, then you can ace the exam) will be distributed one week prior to each exam.
Short Papers- Short papers answering a discussion question on the reading will be due at least once a week. Most of these will be graded on a check/no check system. No late papers will be accepted, but students will get a pass on two of the papers.
Attendance- Attendance will be taken at the beginning of class. If you are late then you count as absent for that day. Students get a pass on one week's absences and after that lose one point a day from their final grade. No distinction is made between excused and unexcused absences. If students miss so many class days for excused reasons that this impinges on their grade, then the professor will support their efforts to get a retroactive drop.
Specific Disruptions policy- Laptops will remain shut in the classroom. Unless you must cover your face for religious reasons, hats will be removed in the classroom.No food, gum, or tobacco in the classroom. Newspapers and books not related to the course material will not be accessed during class time. Cellphones must be turned off and text messaging is not allowed (an exception is made for people with dependents or who are like to have to deal with an emergency in class; such people must set their phones to vibrate and leave class before answering the calls).
Long Papers- In 4,000 and higher level classes a substantial research paper will also be due on the Friday of the penultimate week of class. Students will have to turn in an annotated bibliography and paper proposal a month before the due date of the paper.  Late papers lose 5 percentage points per day late, with no distinction made between excused or unexcused papers. Again, if this hurts someone's grade too much due to excused absences then the professor will support an excused withdrawal from the class.
Review Week- In all classes, the final week of class will be review for the final exam. As with the short exams, a review sheet will be distributed one week prior to the final exam.

[P.S. After writing the above, I thought of three additional new policies.

1. Don't add students over and above the class limit. I used to add anyone who wanted, but these were the students who didn't register in time and most of them would end up barely attending and then doing badly (and a non-attending student that does badly is a lot more work in terms of grading and in terms of the demands they make on you outside of class).
2. Don't do independent studies any more. I've done well over twice as many of these as any of my colleagues, but you are not paid extra, you don't really get service credit for them, and (most important) very few students in American Universities have the ability to effectively avail themselves of this kind of learning.
3. If a registered student does not attend the first week, LSU lets you purge their registration from the class. Pretty cool. Start doing this.]

 

some great pics with new camera and impending surgery

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Well, at the end of this month I've got to get doped up on Demerol and then have a Matrixy looking machine put down my nose all the way to my stomach. It will film my insides, take biopsies, and inflate my esophagus like a balloon where necessary. Then if that goes well I'll have my gall bladder taken out after that.

Here's the strange thing. Prior to having a kid, all these procedures would have induced massive amounts of proactive anxiety. But now I'm just not too hung up about it; I look forward to getting relief from the symptoms so that I can be a better Dad.

I always thought being a Dad would mean more debilitating stress because of worries about the children, but it's really the opposite. The vast increase in other-directed love gets your head out of your own navel, and as a result lessens useless fears (that's especially a good thing for me, since the new gall bladder procedure involves actually making an incision in the navel and pulling the freshly cut organ out through that).

I should have known this already because the myriad joys of marriage and to a lesser extent left-wing Christianity have helped me in a similar manner.

Pure selfishness is incoherent for reasons that Sartre explicitly thematized ("At the heart of Being lays nothingness, coiled like a worm in an apple" etc.) and Levinas recapitulated (albeit his followers have the unfortunate and ultimately dishonest tendency to present him as anti-Sartrean merely because he uses different terminology to make the same points Sartre did). The point also follows from the early Marx, late Wittgenstein, and certain interpretations of the early Heidegger, and almost certainly traces back to Hegel (I don't understand Hegel) and Hume before him. All there is to the self is a position in a net of relationships essentially involving the body's normative projects undertaken with and for others (and people miss Sartre on this because they think that for Sartre "the subject" is the self, when it's not; for Sartre, the self, in the philosophically relevant sense, is made up of both other-constituted facticity and something very like the Kantian thing in itself). But then there is no self without others.

Arguments from Hume et. al.'s insights to the claim that marketplace Nietzschean "selfishness" is both philosophically incoherent and psychologically neurotic obviously involve telling a pretty long story, but one I think supported strongly by human experience.

Gary Gygax passes away

Well, I'm very sad. NY-Times explanation of his importance here.

Two of the chapters in Mark and my book on video games (the revised version will hopefully be called Philosophy and Video Games as opposed to the previous Philosophy Through Video Games) deeply involve Dungeons and Dragons. The personal identity chapter discusses the way D & D players talk about their characters in first person, and the artificial intelligence chapter attempts to explain some of the reasons why people still play tabletop D & D when there are computer versions with cool graphics now (this explanation involves understanding why artificial intelligence is so disappointingly crappy).

The philosophy professors of my generation owe Gygax more than we could possibly repay. . . . Using his D & D system (most role playing games are some variant of it), we compulsivley created worlds and stories with our friends. Most of us devoted a great deal of thought to this process, and then later when we took our first philosophy classes we realized that through D & D we had already been thinking of all of the issues covered.

The man deserved several Nobel Prizes (again, if you doubt this, see the argument in the Times article) and should be honored by the American Philosophical Association as well as the Modern Languages Association. But the world's true visionaries often fall through cracks like that. By all accounts he was a generous man satisfied with just having been able to give the world so much. If there are gods, then he is ascended now.

March, 2008 posts on blind refereeing

1. Brief Explanation of How Blind Refereeing Works

Academic journals have varying levels of blind-reviewing. The levels enter because the editor first looks at the manuscript, then determines whether to send it to referees (usually two to four), then (should he so decide) sends it to them, at which point they read the manuscript and write a referee's report to the editor. When he gets the report he can either accept the paper for publication, allow the author to revise the paper and submit it again (at which point he may send it back to referees for one more judgment, or just accept or reject the piece), or just reject the piece.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is no consistent terminology for these. I think the most standard use is the following. Single blind reviewed journals are ones (like The Journal of Philosophy) where the author does not know the identity of referees that write reports to the editor, but where the referees do know the identity of the author. Double blind reviewed journals are ones (like the Australasian Journal of Philosophy) where the editor knows the identity of the author but the referees do not, and as before the writer does not know the identity of the referees. Triple blind reviewed journals are ones (like some Kluwer journals, I think Synthese and Philosophical Studies) where even the editor does not know the identity of an author. With these, a secretary assigns the manuscript a number, and even the editor goes by that. I guess you could have quadruple blind reviewing where the editor doesn't know the identity of the referees, but nobody does that, and it's hard to see the point.

A few years ago there was a brouhaha in the letters section of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association where people complained that The Journal of Philosophy could be single blind reviewed and still be considered the best journal in the field. The editor's response was especially embarrassing, given that students take logic classes in philosophy departments. He listed a set of second tier schools where some of their published authors resided, as if that was enough to refute claims of heuristic bias. If any student in a freshman level informal logic class did something like that they would get an F (and I can explain why if anybody is interested), but here you have the editor of the most prestigious journal in philosophy doing so with (I assume) a straight face.

I don't think this is so pernicious on the field, just because it is so uncommon.  A much more pressing problem is the fact that heuristic biases almost certainly lead editors to interpret reviewers' comments more or less charitably depending on the identity of the author. If this is the case, then there is a problem, because the vast majority of journals are double blind reviewed. While this is anecdotal, it is at least a piece of data that I know a number of people from top (and none from second tier) schools who have been given multiple revise and resubmits of the same piece after getting successive negative reviews. In some cases, the editor had previously gotten the writer to referee articles for him, based on a recommendation by members of that writer's dissertation committee. Well, nobody I know from OSU, even those who have published very well, has been given a second revise and resubmit for the same paper. If the editor decides that you can revise and resubmit the paper, then the norm is that he either accepts or rejects the rewritten piece, not give you another chance with another set of referees, if the initial referees still don't like it.

And again, while this is entirely anecdotal, I should note that the first journals I was able to publish in were Kluwer journals where only the secretary knew my identity. Prior to that I had two years of getting mixed referees reports and rejections by editors.

Oh well. What doesn't kill you and all that. . . . There is at least little enough heuristic bias that people from second and third tier schools can get top publications, albeit perhaps we have to work a bit harder (note how easy it is for someone with tenure to discount the effects of what are almost certain rampant heuristic biases; dear Jesus, what have I become?).

In this respect, it would be really nice to have a list of all the philosophy journals that genuinely do triple blind reviewing. I might do this after the rewrite of the book is in. This process has made me pretty interested in the ethics of refereeing. The fact that the author doesn't know the referee's identity presents a Ring of Gyges (if you could be invisible, what would you do?) scenario that can lead to moral atrociousness. I have strong views on what a referee's obligations are and I'll blog on that tomorrow. After Mark and I finish the book, and I finish and get out four co-written papers (and I don't deserve the forgiveness of my co-writers Sal Florio, Jason Megill, Sean Whittington, and the long suffering Mark Silcox in this regard) on which I'm horribly behind, I'm going to write a paper on this topic (tentative title "Three Blind Referees"), so any thoughts would be really helpful. I'll outline the main argument tomorrow.

2. Three Blind Referees

Time is short today, so I'm going to do another part tomorrow on the ethics of blind reviewing. Today I want to just define a few more terms to be able to set out the problem of what kind of reviewer one should be. [And while we are on the topic of journal procedures- also check out a recent post by Andrew Cullison defending open access in philosophy journals; you can read that on his interesting blog here.]

Referees know that the author will not know their identity. This leads to the proliferation of hostile and abusive comments (albeit, some journals, in particular the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, send a note out to all referees stating that if the review is overly negative the editor will not send it on to the authors). And yet despite anonymity, some referees are incredibly helpful to both the editor and the writer.

I propose three archetypes. On one side is the Good Samaritan reviewer. Even though the writer does not know his or her identity, the Good Samaritan goes out of her way to at the very minimum provide detailed advise about how the article could be improved, even in cases where rejection is counseled to the editor. Such referees play a very important role in improving the level of published academic philosophy, and have certainly saved the careers of young Ph.Ds struggling to go from dissertationese to mainstream published philosophy.

On the other side is Professor Angrypants. Professor Angrypants uses the anonymity as a bad person uses Plato’s invisibility granting Ring of Gyges, to take pleasure in terrorizing those who cannot know his or her identity. Rhetorically, Angrypants always presents him or herself as just objectively explaining to the editor the myriad reasons the editor should not publish the article, though the astounding level of misplaced condescention (strangely, almost always redolant of the manner in which twits and gits put down others according ot the assholery standards of the British class system) is a red light for editors in search of this. Unfortunately though, the process of blind refereeing is set up just because (in the vast majority of cases) the editor cannot be a specialist in all of the areas in which the journal in question publishes, and because the editor cannot possibly read all of the articles submitted. Thus, Professor Angrypants can resort to breathtaking sophism and uncharity and get away with it if he or she is rhetorically skilled enough. Every published author has suffered multiple times at Angrypants’ hand. Many professors are surprised when they inadvertantly learn that one or more of their colleagues is actually Professor Angrypants (albeit it is from such incidents that we have ascertained that Angrypants' behavior is almost always the result of overwhelming vanity, unjustified professional dissatisfaction, combined with other forms of jerkiness).

In between the Good Samaritan and Professor Angrypants is Joe Friday, who really does in a straightforward way present “just the facts” to the editor. The paradigm Joe Friday reviewer is very good at telling the editor what claims are being argued for and assessing the extent to which they have been successfully established according to the standards of the journal in question.

The way I’ve set this up, makes it appear that Joe Friday is the Aristotelian mean for which we should all aim. In fact I think this is demonstrably false. We should all aim to be Good Samaritans. Since this suggestion (not framed in this terminology) enraged a number of people when I made it on Leiter Reports, I’ll set out the defense tomorrow, when I have more time.

3. In praise of Good Samaritans

Here I want to defend the claim that all blind reviewers should try to be Good Samaritans. It is perhaps not so strange that this claim strikes some as common sense and provokes a great deal of defensive hostility in others.

To make my case, I want you to first imagine somebody defending the Joe Friday approach as striking them as the right Aristotelian mean between two vices, in the sense that courage is the mid-point between cowardice and foolhardiness. Such a defense does not get very far on its own though, because the Good Samaritan does not accept the view that Good Samaritanism is a vice. So Joe Friday will have to offer other reasons. For example, Joe could argue that he can do more reviews if he doesn't try to help the writer and thus contribute more to the greater good. But the Good Samaritan can respond by saying that by charitably construing the writer's claims and arguments and then giving the writer detailed advice about how to recraft the paper (or book) so that it achieves these goals he or she plays a crucial role in: (1) helping grad students mired in dissertationese learn to write published papers, (2) helping everyone's published papers be the strongest they possibly can. If everyone was a Joe Friday, the level of published philosophy would be much worse and many good philosophers would not develop their writing skills well enough to get tenure. Joe Friday will have a response, but like all such debates the participants will not convince one another.

Here's a much deeper reason why all reviewers should consciously try to be Good Samaritans. Professor Angrypants always thinks that he is really Joe Friday. Almost nobody consciously thinks, "I am going to be hostile, abusive, and uncharitable." Instead, they think that they are just presenting the facts to the editor. And yet the number of reviewers that are hostile, abusive, and uncharitable are legion.

There is a lot of cognitive science on this very issue, the ethical consequences of which are explored in the excellent papers by my ex-colleague Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald. In brief, anger really is a "short madness." When people are angry they systematically lose the ability to determine when anger is justified. Due to the similarity to self referential paradoxes ("this sentence is false") Boleyn-Fitzgerald appropriately calls this "the paradox of anger." Thus the kind of misdirected animosity characteristic of Professor Angrypants is such that he will be much more likely to see his behavior as not the result of animosity or even particularly angry.

Now let us return to Aristotle, who very sensibly said that the virtuous person will often need to shoot for an opposite vice than the one to which he is prone. So if I tend to be too much of a Puritanical tea-totaler I should shoot for more drunkenness in order to achieve true temperance (and vice versa if I tend to be a drunk). Without admitting that Good Samaritanism is a vice, this insight can be used against the defender of Joe Friday. Everybody suffers from the short madness of anger and as a result does irrational and destructive things, but research (cited by Boleyn-Fitzgerald) shows that if one prepares oneself ahead of time by noting that people are going to do irritating things (i.e. submit badly prepared papers) and tells oneself that one's job is to help people, then the irritating things do not provoke anger. So if one rationally wanted to be a Joe Friday (and not a Professor Angrypants who thinks he is being Joe Friday), then one should consciously strive to be a Good Samaritan. So we must all try to be Good Samaritans.

Fitzgerald uses this paradox to argue that anger is never justified. The only way one could have a justification (in the epistemic sense) that one's anger was justified is if one was not angry. The above reasoning is similar.

I don't think this argument will change anything, even if I get off my butt and write it up as an actual paper. There are too many Professor Angrypants in our field. Most of them are extraordinarily bitter for personal reasons (such as thinking they should be at a better ranked institution or that their articles should be cited more) and take it out on writers. Unfortunately, almost none of them realize they are doing this, and they get very defensive when confronted with it. Like all evil and abusive people, they see themselves as good guys doing the right thing. Moreover, given the nature of academic philosophy it will never be possible for the most conscientious editor to always catch Angrypants.

One thing that could change though is that journals and presses could explicitly tell reviewers that they expect them to be Good Samaritans even when counseling rejection. Of all the journals I've reviewed for and published in perhaps Australasian comes the closest to already doing this. And clearly Mind has been the worst in this regard; about five years the editor publicly rationalized the shoddy paperwork that leads them to keep papers for over a year by saying it's not Mind's job to help young scholars get tenure (long turnaround times are murderous when you are under the publish or perish gun). This is the classic Angrypants claim that he is just being Joe Friday. But if I am right that we need to all try to be Good Samaritans, then it is the job of Mind to try to help people get tenure. Even rejected authors should get helpful non-abusive comments in a timely fashion.