You know this one. There’s a trolley on a track. Up ahead, the track splits: if the train goes straight, it will run over five people, but if the train turns, it will only run over one person. You stand at the junction holding a lever and you have to decide if the train will continue straight or if you’ll pull the lever and reroute the train so that it only kills one person. What do you do?
Read MoreMy recent blog post was published at Common Dreams, so here it is:
Read MoreAlmost a week after the Superbowl, I learned that there had been a shooting at the victory parade for the Kansas City Chiefs. What struck me about the story, however, wasn’t that it happened; what struck me was that it took me three days to learn about it.
Read MoreI was at the doctor’s office the other day and was struck by a paradox of modern medicine: on the one hand, we have truly miraculous cures that testify to the collective genius of the human species, while on the other hand, this genius is often wielded by people who exhibit all of the shortcomings of our species, like callousness and ignorance. It was a good lesson in the promises and perils of technology.
Read MoreI don't really have a stake in the situation in Ukraine, and have mostly avoided conversations about it, because I'm pretty clueless about the region. But the conversations about Ukraine - and the divisions in opinions about it - are sometimes frustrating for me. I wasn't sure why, but I think it might be because of the tendency to conflate moral responsibility with causal responsibility. It's not a problem that's limited to Ukraine, but it's certainly become inflamed by it.
Read MoreLike many of you, I grew up reading fiction. I just consumed it, devouring everything I could get my hands on. In junior high, it was tons of fantasy and sci-fi, and it seems like I'd whip through entire series in no time flat (Piers Anthony was a fave), so that I was always searching for something new.
In high school it got trickier because I was looking for headier material, and I didn't really have anyone to suggest the kinds of things I wanted to read. I still read a lot, but running into authors like Vonnegut and Kundera were godsends, and I read just about everything they wrote.
Read MoreOn October 14, 2021, the workers at John Deere went on strike. While they had many demands, among them was the demand to halt the introduction of a two-tier pay and benefit system. Under such a system, existing workers would get to keep their existing rates of pay and benefits, but new hires would be brought in under a new tier, in which both their pay and benefits would be lower. On November 17, workers approved a new contract that had eliminated this tiered provision. And on this day, the John Deere workers demonstrated that they knew something that my colleagues in academia do not: a tiered employment system decimates the power of workers.
Read MoreThe Philosophers’ Magazine published an article of mine that defends the validity and necessity of ad hominem arguments. I think it makes a compelling case for why we need to embrace them. The link is here. The full text also follows
Read MoreIt’s syllabus time again and this had me thinking about one of the recent initiatives in higher education, OER or Open Educational Resources, which is an initiative to replace expensive textbooks with free alternatives. As with so many such initiatives, they’re cloaked in compassionate rhetoric (OER helps cash-strapped students) but this veneer also hides the underlying dismantling of our universities. It’s an interesting example of how the attacks on our universities (or on other institutions) often appear as their exact opposite; how your enemy approaches in the guise of a friend.
Read MoreHaving been raised in Canada, I wasn't raised with any of the jingoistic patriotism that is pretty common in the United States, and that cuts across all partisan divides. If anything, growing up in Canada inoculated me against it. So I've never had much of anything invested in the idea of “the future of America.” Whether it's great or not, I care little, except insofar as this is the place where I live and I'd prefer my life to be better rather than worse (and I hope the same for my fellow Americans too).
But whether America exists in the future, whether it rises to greatness or fades into obscurity, is a question about which I am indifferent. Truth be told, I’m probably pretty hostile to it
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