Money taketh happiness away!

From the abstract of a paper available here:

having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures.

I love the title: "Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away"...

Plagiarism is a Big Moral Deal

But not according to Stanley Fish today in a NYT post titled "Plagiarism is Not a Big Moral Deal". Now a lot depends on Fish's use of the words "big" and "moral".

First, on the claim that plagiarism is an issue in the small world of academia. Fish notes:

The concept of plagiarism, however, is learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few; it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without citing him.

So, plagiarism is not like stealing apparently. But is that right? Is it really more like breaking the rules of a game? This is what Fish suggests with the several paragraphs long discussion of various sports and their rules. A rule, in that context, is simply an agreement on the procedures that should be followed. No big moral deal - as he says.

Second, on defining plagiarism, it is found to lack a philosophical basis, and therefore has no moral claim on which its proscription can stand:

the ground plagiarism stands on is more mundane and firm; it is the ground of disciplinary practices and of the histories that have conferred on those practices a strong, even undoubted (though revisable) sense of what kind of work can be appropriately done and what kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.

So disciplinary practice and moral proscription are two parallel universes? Fish says that originality, which is what plagiarism is intended to protect is not such a big deal:

If it is wrong to plagiarize in some context of practice, it is not because the idea of originality has been affirmed by deep philosophical reasoning, but because the ensemble of activities that take place in the practice would be unintelligible if the possibility of being original were not presupposed.

But originality does not need to be philosophically based in order for the literal copying of a text to be wrong. Taking something without asking is wrong. Period. That is a moral claim, and there are numerous contexts to which it applies. Some are professional, others are not. Why is this so complicated? Stealing is morally and professionally proscribed and no philosophical justification or that philosophy's denial (Fish) adds anything to this proscription.

Fish ends with the following, which is where he is most tellingly wrong:

Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them.

No, Professor Fish. Everyday disciplinary practices rest on the foundation of human art and science, the conventions of which are possible on the basis of human nature, a nature capable of virtue and vice and much else besides.

That is the ultimate moral foundation by which the rising problem of plagiarism ought to be judged. Plagiarism is stealing or lying and usually both if done intentionally. (The plagiarism which I've encountered as a teacher is the unintentional sort - people who literally did not know that they were stealing/lying!)

But here's the point: the person who plagiarized Professor Fish undoubtedly still feels guilt over what he/she did. And guilt is a sure sign of moral failure, a different kind of failure than forgetting to tag third base on the way to home.

Christopher Hitchens, Man of Faith

So says a friend of his, in the NYRB. Read to the end to see what kind of faith Ian Buruma is referring to. After years of enjoying his pugnacious and rhetorically breathtaking articles in the Atlantic and elsewhere (prior to his atheist book anyway), this evaluation of "Hitch" is a most revealing read.

LRB Review of Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini

This review by Peter Godrey-Smith in the LRB of this book, 'What Darwin Got Wrong' is very concise and revealing of the serious philosophical dispute at the heart of contemporary interpretations of Darwinism. Scroll down for Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's brief reposte. While my own sympathies are with Fodor and P-P based only on a couple of other articles (I have not read this book under review), I nevertheless tend to agree with Godfrey-Smith when he comments:

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini criticise the tendency to talk of selection as if it were an agent. They are right that this is often misleading, but they seem to be making a similar mistake when they treat it as something over and above the ordinary facts of life, death and reproduction. For Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, it makes sense to ask: ‘Even if trait T causes organisms to reproduce more while T* has no effect, how can selection see that fact?’ But there is no question to ask here, nothing extra that selection might achieve or fail to do.

In other words, Godfrey-Smith is defending a more modest interpretation of the classic received view of Darwinism, a modesty that is itself conducive with Christian and other religious interpretations of evolutionary theory, it is important to note. Godfrey-Smith is one of a number of thinkers who want to take the metaphysical sting out of Darwinism - without making the more dramatic criticism of Darwinism that Fodor and P-P undertake.

Fish fun

Stanley Fish is often a riot. Here, in the NY Times the other day, he is provocative and right on - discussing student evaluations of professors. Now, there is in my view, an important role for student evaluations, but as one commentator says in response to Fish, "the popular is not necessarily the good." Popular teachers are not necessarily the best, which (again to qualify what needs qualifying) does not mean that unpopular is good either.

But the practice of evaluating faculty teaching based on student evaluations alone, which is (I'm afraid to say) the practice at Concordia, is not good. Faculty teaching should be evaluated to include assessment by senior faculty - who may be more immune to fashionable trends in teaching.

And...

THIS popped up c/o Eric Mankiw's blog more recently from an interesting study that he links here:

Results show that there are statistically significant and sizable differences in student achievement across introductory course professors in both contemporaneous and follow‐on course achievement. However, our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes. Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value‐added but positively correlated with follow on course value‐added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow‐on related curriculum.

Student evaluations are positively correlated with contemporaneous professor value‐added and negatively correlated with follow‐on student achievement. That is, students appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value‐added in follow‐on courses). Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this latter finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

In other words (C/o Wapo)

Sarah Coakley Symposium

Here is an interesting list of abstracts for an Australian symposium dedicated to the thought of Sarah Coakley. I heard Sarah speak in Oxford on the science of cooperation and the theology of Incarnation a few weeks ago, and it was a tour de force, the moreso given its theological locus. She will also give the Gifford lectures in 2011.

What Happened to B XVI?

Wonder what happened to the catholic church sex abuse scandal in the media? Well, you're not alone, and getreligion's got some interesting analysis with links to more here.

Short excerpt:

I think things died down because these reports tried to bring Benedict down. And when it didn’t work, folks lost interest.

Yup, that about sums it up. But read the last line of the article - that is the tragic part: there are other abuse victims who we don't know about and whose stories (and faith) we won't hear about.

Summer Reading

Not my summer reading, but the summer reading of college and university students. In the U.S., a large number of post-secondary educational institutions mandate summer reading for those students who have been accepted into various programmes. This sounds like a great idea. And it is - except that the range of reading prescribed is disturbingly myopic.

A report from the U.S. National Association of Scholars puts it this way in a balanced report available here:

In principle, of course, a common reading program could be built on the basis of intellectually challenging works; books of widely‐recognized and lasting merit; books that are milestones of cultural achievement; books of undeniable historical importance; or books of profound artistry. We noted that five of the colleges out of the 290 chose works that plausibly fit at least one of these criteria: Frankenstein, Walden, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (two colleges), and The Communist Manifesto.

What of the selections by the 285 other colleges? The best we can say is that all (or almost all) the selected works have some merit.

Then a few lines later, it diagnoses the problem in terms of American culture's bias toward the present, a.k.a. what's in front of our noses...:

We suspect that the present‐ism that is so prevalent in the common readings reflects an underestimation of the students’ ability to discover connections between the past and the contemporary world. College ought to push students towards making such connections rather than assume that students won’t “get it.”

It makes for arresting reading and I'm sure that this report would be relevant for Canadian universities, at least those (few?) which have summer reading programmes.

The Big Shaggy

It's a terrible moniker, but it is nonetheless the term du jour in a wonderful column by David Brooks on the need, more than ever, for a humanities education. A most "useful" kind of education to have!

Here is my favorite part of what he has to say, because it touches on the ability to think analogously. Making good analogies is an effect of a creative, educated mind. Thinking analogously is not thinking that is careless or ad hoc. Analogies are a way of making the merely metaphorical more orderly. Unlike so many of the empirical claims common to the social and natural sciences, analogies are not governed by strict deductive or inductive inference. Here's Brooks:

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

Too much of what passes for a university education these days is being driven by the need to teach "skills" and to "train" students. We see this creeping trend even in Theology, especially in "biblical studies" where philology and language driven methods substitute for genuine inquiry into theological meaning and hermeneutically shaped purpose. As if data and method are all what really counts.

There is an almost "in-humane" aspect to this trend - as the increasing number of advocates for theological exegesis have readily diagnosed in regards to biblical studies.

But do read the whole thing here.

Upcoming Seminar

I will be giving a lecture at one of the seminars of the University of Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre.
Below is the abstract. Look forward to seeing you if you're in the UK, perhaps if you're stuck here for lack of air transport...

In this paper, I take up the issue that was debated so famously in the early fifth century between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum on whether or not the fact of sin implies a negative or evil character to the natural world. This paper retains a focus on the perennial question of the nature of sin. It begins with a reconsideration of the terms of theological debate that were inaugurated by Karl Barth’s “no” to Emil Brunner’s natural theology in the 1930’s. I argue that a contemporary notion of sin that is informed by several disciplines could overturn this argument by accepting that both a natural theology and a theology of salvation are mutually interactive, because of recent scientific developments in evolutionary psychology and moral philosophy. Sin is foreshadowed in a natural law account of the vices and the passions, which today are increasingly understood as a function of heritable traits in human evolutionary history, and which are therefore biologically prompted. A few studies in evolutionary psychology are cited to support this claim. Therefore, sin itself can be identified independently of theological sources, but its meaning is not fully grasped unless there is the sort of full blown theological account that Barth was trying to stress. Textual evidence from Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and Pannenberg is introduced to support this claim. The conclusion is that a focus on sin in the science-theology dialogue would bring together otherwise disparate theological accounts of God and creation. Natural theology and a theology of salvation are not so far apart as twentieth century theologians imagined

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Eric Gregory on Transforming Theology

Much to be gleaned from Princeton professor of religion and philosophy, Eric Gregory, here.

April 1 Update: And David Brooks gets it very right: here

On Darwinian Enthusiasms

Here is a great article by Stephen Shapin in the London review of Books, in which he tells an important story that has largely been sidelined during the past year's festivities associated with the bicentenary of Darwin's birth. In short, many protagonists in the Darwin-fest have used their religious opponents to mask a much more scientifically plausible form of dissent.

Shapin argues, for instance:

The academic wagons are more commonly circled to control the battle within than to repel attacks from without. Take the tensions internal to evolutionary theory. All is indeed well with modern evolutionary theory when set against creationism and intelligent design, but biologists themselves are not now singing from the same evolutionary hymn-sheet, and you might not know that from some of the enthusiastic accounts of Darwinism as ‘fact’.

The role played by scientists as propagandists is a key to what future historians may well judge to be nothing less than a political campaign waged by powerful scientific interests who seek to squelch dissent. This paragraph strikes me as absolutely on target:

‘Adaptationists’ take it as securely established that organic change proceeds through the natural selection of individual traits, each of which improves the organism’s reproductive chances, that each trait’s evolutionary end-point represents an optimum, and that no other process is needed for an evolutionary lineage to move along through time. But adaptationism has distinguished critics within biology departments – Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and the late Stephen Jay Gould among them – and they have argued that there is a difference between asserting adaptation as a possible means of getting smoothly from evolutionary point A to point B and establishing that this is in fact how organic change has occurred. Maybe there are developmental constraints on how traits change, and change with respect to other traits; maybe some traits are accidental by-products of changes in other traits; maybe evolutionary change is in fact discontinuous; maybe there is a dialectical causal relationship between organisms and the environmental niches to which they ‘adapt’; maybe processes other than adaptation are at work but we just don’t know much about them yet. The adaptationist camp includes Dawkins, Dennett and Pinker – some of the most enthusiastic Darwin Year celebrants. Adaptationists tend to give spectators a misleading picture of the scientific state of play, while at the same time laying claim to a founding father who in fact had reservations about the power and sufficiency of natural selection. There is a struggle among scientists for Darwin’s soul. It is understandable that modern evolutionists should configure history as best suits present purposes, but truth in advertising should be part of the exercise.

In other words, Darwin's theory of evolution is a fact and a theory, just as Gould said. Read the whole thing though...

Quote of the Day

Jn. 2:24-5: "Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man."

Obama's Christian Realism (2)

For months, the Obama presidency has been unfolding in a way that has disappointed both those who would be predictably disappointed and those whose hopes have been dashed...or at least tempered. David Brooks has chimed in on Obama's perception of international affairs in a column that is characteristically concise and precise. More to the point: as I argued in a 2008 article in the Toronto Star, Obama's worldview is decisively Christian, though not in ways that some Christians will be all that comfortable, both from the left and right.

Whether Obama is informed by the Augustinian sense of existential tension (between the folly and necessity of waging war for example) remains to be seen, although I think that there is something there in Obama that testifies to his reliance on Augustinian thinking - via Niebuhr probably.

What I do know is that there are plenty of reasons for both those on the left and right to resist an Augustinian turn in political theory and practice. The right will resist the contemplative thread in one like Obama, who tends to remark on his own country's temptation to embrace (imperialist forms of) evil. Obama is not alone in that regard, but that is a convenient example, since he is the current target of right wing venom. But the left also feels compelled to resist an Augustinian turn in politics, because that would be an implicit theological and moral turn. Not only that, it would be a theological turn that actually takes seriously the fact of evil, instead of using it merely as a rhetorical prop (in other words, actually believing words such as those used by Bush Jr. in his axis of evil speech etc., even though resisting the association of particular regimes with evil per se - unlike Bush Jr. who saw evil as manifest in that axis of N. Korea, Saddam's Iraq and Iran).

Comments?