Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

China Acts on Funeral Strippers (Wolff)

From the BBC, via my colleague Michael Otsuka:

Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say. The once-common events are held to boost the number of mourners, as large crowds are seen as a mark of honour.

But the arrests, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, could signal the end of the rural tradition.

Local officials have since ordered a halt to "obscene performances" and say funeral plans have to be submitted in advance, Xinhua news agency said.

The arrests, in Donghai county, followed striptease acts at a farmer's funeral, the agency said.

Two hundred people were said to have attended the event, which was held on 16 August.

The Beijing News said the event was later revealed by a Chinese TV station. The leaders of five striptease troupes were held, it said, including two involved in the farmer's funeral.

"Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers," Xinhua agency said.

"Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured."

As well as ordering an end to the practice, officials have also said residents can report "funeral misdeeds" on a hotline, earning a reward for information.

Can this really be true, or has the international news media fallen for a hoax? (Reuters covered the story too.)

Intelligent cultural analysis welcome. Extra bonus points to anyone who can come up with an argument why such practices should not be tolerated, drawing only on premises to be found in standard liberal thought (i.e. no appeals to tradition, religion, or an unanalysed notion of dignity).

How Many Universities? Part 2 (Wolff)

Has Australian Education minister Julie Bishop been reading this blog? If so, she needs to read it more carefully. It has been reported in the THES (p. 11 of the print edition, August 18th) that she has argued recently that Australia needs only 12 universities, rather than its current 37. But with a population of about 20 million, Australia clearly needs 20 universities.

Bishop's argument is that Australia is spreading its resources too thinly to have the major global impact it ought to be able to achieve. Perhaps she has a point. In yet another survey of the world's leading Universities, from Newsweek, the highest placed Australian University is ANU, at 38, although there are, I think, 8 in the top 100.

Average and Marginal Environmental Cost (Wolff)

How bad for the environment are different forms of transport? It is common to assume that air and road travel are much worse than rail. Maybe this is right, but how exactly is it to be calculated? There are many types of environmental impact, and it is not obvious how they should all be taken into account.

Suppose we start with the simplest calculation, and imagine that I have the choice either of staying at home or taking a trip by air, rail or road. Assuming that the train or plane will depart whether or not I am on it, the only cost of my travelling will be the additional fuel needed to carry one person’s body weight (assuming too that the seat would have been empty had I not been occupying it). Calculated this way presumably flying and going by train come out well; driving very badly.

However this line of reasoning looks very superficial. Average, rather than marginal, fuel costs will be very different, and more information is needed – more than I have at present – to calculate average fuel use per passenger per mile, per hour, or per typical journey, for the different modes of transport. But I assume that it is this calculation which is behind the common argument that air travel is, comparatively, so damaging.

Fuel consumption, and the consequent pollution and effects on the climate, are obviously vital considerations. But there are other issues too, such as the cost in terms of resources and energy in manufacturing the plane, car or train, and then of maintaining it. Furthermore, the infrastructure to make such travel possible needs also to be taken into account. Airports, of course, have a huge environmental impact. But planes have the advantage of not needing roads or tracks, both of which are very expensive to produce and maintain. As well as its obvious environmental impact, a road needs ballast, concrete, tarmac and so on, while railways need enormous quantities of steel, timber and gravel, which have to be renewed at intervals.

I’m too lazy to look into relevant research on this, but surely someone must have done? My question is whether there is any research suggesting how to compare different forms of environmental impact, and calculate the comparative average cost of train, air and road travel, mile for mile. Next time I need to travel from London to Scotland what should I do? (I know, I know, I should stay at home in an unheated darkened room …)

A Question of Priorities (Wolff)

From The Independent today:

The chief of staff of Israel's military was under pressure yesterday after a disclosure that he sold about £14,500 of stocks within three hours of the Hizbollah border raid that triggered the Lebanon conflict.

Dan Halutz, head of the Israel Defence Force (IDF), was reported by the Israeli newspaper, Maariv, to have instructed his investment manager on 12 July to sell his personal portfolio, just as senior military and political figures were discussing the military response to the raid, in which two soldiers were abducted.

There is no suggestion General Halutz did anything illegal and the newspaper quoted him responding to what he called the "malicious and tendentious" report that the sale could not be linked to the war. He said he had made the decision because of previous losses and added: "At the time I did not expect or think that there would be a war."

The Post-iPod Era (Wolff)

So I've survived my first flight in the post-iPod era. Thankfully I was flying from Gatwick, rather than Heathrow, and suffered only a ten-minute delay. I flew to Jersey - that's Old Jersey, in the Channel Islands - which is a 35 minute flight. Just long enough for one pass each of the duty free and soft drinks trolleys.

The deal here is that although you cannot take anything through security, except a few essential items in a little see-through plastic bag, anything you buy in the departure lounge can then be taken on board, unless you are flying to the US, where you cannot take liquids in any form. You can, however, buy newspapers, books, etc, and take them on board wherever you are going. This is ok at Gatwick, which has two bookshops in the departure area, one of which has a reasonable stock. In the US this may be more of a problem. The few times I have tried to buy a novel at a US airport I have found myself forced to select from a shelf marked something like 'Oprah's Book Club'. Luckily there has been some great stuff there.

I have often reflected on the difference in design in US and UK airports. In the UK once you pass through security everyone in the same terminal waits for a while in a central departure lounge. Consequently there is sufficient foot traffic to sustain a decent range of shops. By contrast, in the airports I know in the US, passengers are dispatched quickly to their gates, and so the resulting relative low density means that you get little more than coffee shops, newspaper stands, and stalls selling baseball caps and penants.

I suppose that the first restriction to be relaxed will be to allow passengers to carry books through security. If not, maybe we'll start to see changes in the layout to US airports, to capitalise on the new retail opportunities.

UPDATE

My predictions usually have a very poor success rate, but being refuted within 12 hours or so is a little galling, even by my standards. It seems that we have not entered the post-iPod era after all. In some ways this is a shame. Probably the best way of reducing air travel is to make it as horrible as possible. But the threat of this has been averted. Here is the latest, from the BBC:

Long-term changes to airport security checks outlined by Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander include the following:

"Passengers can choose what to take on to a plane, but any form of liquid, fluid, lotion or gel will be banned. Electronic devices, such as laptops, will be permitted but will be thoroughly screened.

A medium-sized item of hand luggage will be permitted. This bag will be around half the size of luggage previously admitted.

Searches of passengers and their clothing will be conducted more frequently and are to be carried out by hand or using body scanners."

On Sunday night a British Airways flight was turned back after a mobile phone was heard ringing at the back of the plane. No one admitted owning the phone so flight BA179 with 217 passengers on board returned to Heathrow as a precautionary measure, prompting BA to apologise for inconvenience, although it said safety was its "number one priority".

UK Security Alert (Wolff)

The police here claim to have disrupted a terrorist threat to blow up planes in flight between the UK and US. ‘Disrupted’ is an interesting word. It is rather different to ‘thwarted’ which would be more comforting, but better than ‘delayed’ I suppose.

Details are murky, but from the precautions now being taken it appears that they are concerned that liquid explosives would be used, and detonated using something else carried in as hand-luggage. There are, of as today, enormous restrictions on what can be carried on board: no newspaper, no book, no food, no drink, no lap-top, no mobile phone, no ipod, no headphones. All of these have to be checked. If this goes on it might mean that I’ll be forced to watch a movie on my next transatlantic flight; something, for some reason, I have never managed to do.

Here is what you are allowed to carry on board, all of which must be placed in a clear plastic bag and not in your pockets, which must be empty. If the fear of liquid explosives is a real one, this might be with us for some time:

pocket size wallets and pocket size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards etc (not handbags))

travel documents essential for the journey (for example passports and travel tickets)

prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (e.g. diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic

spectacles and sunglasses, without cases

contact lens holders, without bottles of solution

for those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger)

sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags)

female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg tampons, pads, towels and wipes)

tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs

keys (but no electrical key fobs)

All passengers must be hand searched, and their footwear and all the items they are carrying must be x-ray screened.

These searches and security checks are causing chaos, especially at Heathrow. Not a good day to be flying.

Academic Funding and Two Types of Error (Wolff)

Comments on my 'How Many Universities?' post included interesting reflection on how many people with PhDs should a subject like Philosophy produce. The discussion concentrated on whether there is, or ought to be, a prospect of gainful employment for everyone with a PhD, and if, not, whether it is irresponsible to encourage so many people into graduate work.

This is an instance of a broader question concerning waste and risk, although I realise that this might be thought a rather distasteful way of putting things. In the current context the question is this: given that it is unlikely that we will design a regime such that ALL AND ONLY the best philosophers do PhDs, should we aim at a regime where ONLY the best philosophers do PhDs, or a regime where ALL the best philosophers do PhDs? The former system is one where we don't accept people unless we are pretty sure there will be a job for them, and thereby risk missing some really good ones whom we have failed to spot; the latter says that we should accept a larger group to make sure we don't miss out on anyone who turns out to be really good, even if the cost is that we take many unsuitable people. One might argue that the latter - many more PhDs - is better for the advancement of the subject, but the former is better for the individuals involved. This is why, I think, that it is not an easy issue to solve.

In research terms, the issue comes to this. Should we we make sure that we don't waste money, and fund only realistic, deliverable projects, thereby denying funding for more speculative work which has a serious risk of failure but might have greater rewards, or should we be prepared to risk wasting money in order to aim at really valuable results. I have written on what I think is the overly conservative approach taken by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. A couple of days ago my UCL colleague in Science and Technology Studies, Donald Gillies, sent me a paper arguing at length a similar criticism of the Research Assessment Exercise. The essence of Gillies' argument is:

Statistical tests are said to be liable to two types of error (Type I error, and Type II error). A Type I error occurs if the test leads to the rejection of a hypothesis which is in fact true. A Type II error occurs if the test leads to the confirmation of a hypothesis which is in fact false. Analogously we could say that a research assessment procedure commits a Type I error if it leads to funding being withdrawn from a researcher or research programme which would have obtained excellent results had it been continued. A research assessment procedure commits a Type II error if it leads to funding being continued for a researcher or research programme which obtains no good results however long it goes on. This distinction leads to the following general criticism of the RAE. The RAE concentrates exclusively on eliminating Type II errors. The idea behind the RAE is to make research more cost effective by withdrawing funds from bad researchers and giving them to good researchers. No thought is devoted to the possibility of making a Type I error, the error that is of withdrawing funding from researchers who would have made important advances if their research had been supported. Yet the history of science shows that Type I errors are much more serious than Type II errors.

Gillies' paper is available here.

Why I Can't Solve The Problems in the Middle East (Wolff)

I know that any blogger worth their day in the sun should be expressing a view about the Israel/Lebanon conflict, and/or Iraq and/or Iran, and I have tremendous admiration for my co-bloggers in their attempts to understand and come to terms with the complexities of these situations. But I am an amateur: the motivations of the people involved in these conflicts is so far from my experience and comprehension as to leave me without firm grip.

The difficulties came home to me on my first visit to Israel about 8 years ago, I suppose. Tel Aviv seemed like a rather frantic version of many southern European cities, but Jerusalem, especially the old city, was beyond comparison. It was astonishing to see Welsh Baptists, in their sensible shoes and coats, dragging a large wooden cross up the via Dolorosa, under the eyes of the Arab traders who had seen it a thousand times before. Muslims, Christians, Jews and Armenians (I never understood what they were doing there) live uneasily side-by-side in the Old City. This I took, wrongly no doubt, as embodying a spirit of toleration, or at least modus vivendi, which, I imagined could be captured and developed to bring peace to the region.

However the naivety of this thought became clearer on my route home. I took a sharoot – a cheap minibus taxi – to the airport, and it wound its way around the suburbs picking up passengers. After a while we hit the desert, but then drove into some sort of Israeli settlement to pick up another passenger. I don’t know what the settlement was called, but it was secured at its one entrance point by armed guards. On being allowed through the gate, we entered what looked like a modern housing estate, although everyone living there, including the children, were dressed in ultra-orthodox clothing. It was a hot day, but still the little children were wearing heavy frock-coats and dresses to play on the swings, which they did with great gusto. What left the deepest impression on me, though, was the fact that in every car we passed the glass in their windscreens had been replaced with a strong wire mesh, presumably in the expectation that a stoning was in prospect on venturing beyond the security gate.

This brought home to me, with some force, that the people who had moved there, for this was obviously a recent settlement, had done so in the expectation that they would come under attack. It is not that they had formed an attachment to a particular place, and had decided that, in changing circumstances, to make the best of it. Rather they had made a deliberate choice to move, and bring their families, to a place where they would be physically attacked, rather than living in comparative safety elsewhere. Is this an act of defiance? Is it a way of testing their faith? Is it a way of declaring that life on earth is worth nothing compared to the glory to come? Could it be that some people seek conflict as part of their conception of the good life? Whatever it is, and I don’t think it is confined only to the Israelis, I can barely understand it, and hence do not feel qualified to pass further comment on what could bring lasting peace to the Middle East (or indeed anywhere).

How Many Universities Does A Country Need? (Wolff)

This question is prompted by visits to a number of smaller (in terms of population) countries in the past year or two: what counts as a saturation point for a country in terms of having enough universities? To focus the question, consider only those universities - call them research universities - which can award PhDs, and actually do so on a regular basis. Of course universities differ in size, but still, based on nothing more than a few alcohol-fuelled conversations with philosophers from Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Croatia, Hungary, Israel and Portugal, here is my thesis: a country is unlikely to be able to sustain much more than one research university for each million of its population.

By this calculation the US should have about 275 research universities, the UK about 60, Canada 30, and Australia 20. You can check out the populations of the countries of the world here. I don't know how to check how many PhD awarding institutions there are in different countries. The figures work out reasonably well for the UK. There are more than 60 universities, but some of these barely have a research mission. Canada and Australia can't be too far off. As for the US, is 275 a reasonable estimate of the number of research universities?

Of course there are many developing countries which have nothing like one university per million. But I'm interested to know whether this is a reasonable maximum. Are there countries which manage to have more than (roughly) one PhD awarding institution per million? And has there been any discussion of this question?

Academic Freedom in the UK (Wolff)

The Times Higher Education Supplement today leads with the story that in a survey "some 38 per cent of professors, 45 per cent of senior lecturers and 36 per cent of lecturers said that their academic freedom was under attack."

I wonder whether this is like one of those "80% of 12 year olds smoke, drink, take drugs and have sex every day" polls. Earlier this week I got an email from the journalist who was then writing up the story, asking me if I wanted to comment on the results. I started to reply saying how astonishing I found this, but then thought that I might be missing something and so deleted the email and continued to ponder, which I am still doing, but now in public. Journalistic deadlines and due consideration are not always compatible, sadly.

So, is my academic freedom under threat? Within my research, the only thing limiting my freedom of expression is journal editors turning down my papers the *&%^%& @£@%s, which I don't think counts. I did play a minor role in an empirical study under a consultancy contract which the client has declined to allow to be published, for reasons of commercial confidentiality. But this was agreed as a possibility in advance. I also had a protracted discussion with one organisation about what could or could not go into a newspaper article, but that was not so much censorship as my not wanting to say things that could not be substantiated. What else? Contrary to the comments on one of my earlier posts I don't promote views conventionally regarded as racist, sexist, or homophobic, and so the attempts to silence people in these areas has not affected me, and I cannot believe that it has affected all that many others either. I suppose I would feel rather inhibited in criticising my own university in public, unless, of course, I had very good reason, but I don't think I would have felt any differently 10 years ago.

In my own department the only issue that seems to have come up is when a student society objected to the arguments a retired member of staff posted on his university webspace, and I was caught in the middle of a rather squalid little squabble. Academic freedom won, hands down, but still I suppose that this does count as an attack on it. But the same person was being attacked for his views 10 years ago, 20 years ago and 30 years ago, so no change there.

Do other UK academics have different experiences? And what about elsewhere in the world?

Drugs and Punishment (Wolff)

A few weeks ago I asked whether there was a good argument that those who harm themselves by taking drugs should be imprisoned for doing so. I didn’t open comments, but did invite email comments. Few took up the challenge, although Thom Brooks discussed this on his own blog and sent me his remarks. Thom didn’t attempt to justify punishment, although he did express an aesthetic preference for seeing drunks, rather than junkies slumped in the streets. I suppose I agree if the drunks are healthy looking office workers or teenagers after a night on the town (and in Newcastle, where Thom lives, this is a common enough sight). However if we are talking about street drinkers I find this a harder one to call. Yesterday my tennis game in Lincoln's Inn Field in Central London was accompanied by the random, shrill, highly abusive jabberings of a toothless alcoholic. The junkie on the next bench was comatose.

The issue has come to prominence in the UK with a front page story in yesterday’s Independent which summarises findings from a report attempting to order drugs in terms of the harm they do.

Current regulations place illegal drugs into three classes of seriousness, ordered, presumably, by the panic of the minister in charge of regulations when a new drug is discovered. Sometimes classes change. Cannabis was downgraded to Class C fairly recently. The existing classes correlate badly with the new list, ordered by a combination of harm to the individual and harm to society

No surprise to find heroin (Class A) at number one in the hit parade, with cocaine (A) following. Then come barbiturates (B) and street methadone (A) and then alcohol (legal). The rest of the list runs Ketamine (B), Benzodiazopines (C), Amphetamines (B), Tobacco (legal), Buprenorphine (C), Cannabis (C), Solvents (legal), 4-MTA (A), LSD (A), Methylphenidate (B), Anabolic Steroids (C), GHB – liquid ecstasy (C), Ecstasy (A), Alkyl Nitrates (legal), Khat (legal).

One hopes that this will help inform future drug policy.

What, then, about my question about punishment? The best argument I can think of is loosely adapted from an argument given by Warren Quinn; that the right to punish derives from the right to threaten. If I have the right to threaten you with punishment in order to protect myself, then that threat would be idle unless I could actually punish you if you attack me. Therefore the right to punish is needed to make the threat effective. By extension, if government has the right to protect me from myself, then it may have the right to threaten me with punishment to deter me from doing bad things to myself. If I then do those bad things to myself the government, reluctantly, should punish me, because otherwise it would show that its threats are empty, with no deterrent effect.

Another way of thinking about this is that punishing people for harming themselves is perplexing on a retributive theory of punishment, but makes perfect sense on a deterrence theory. First, though, we should make sure that the behaviour we want to deter really is worth deterring. This is why information such as that reported in the Independent is so important.

Price Elasticity (Wolff)

I just walked past a health shop advertising ‘Colonic Irrigation: Half Price!’

Does this mean that some people have been put off because of the cost?

Linguistic Divide (Wolff)

As a speaker of the Queen's English, as distinct from the President's English (as in "Yo! Blair"), I am acutely aware of the differences between our languages. On my first trip to the US I mentioned that I was going to go and change into my 'swimming costume', and everyone fell about laughing. I admit that people are entitled to laugh when they actually see me in my Speedos, but I thought that it was a bit rude to laugh just at the thought. How was I to know that for Americans this expression conjoured up an image of someone emerging from a Victorian bathing machine, wearing a striped blue and white knee-length one-piece?

The topic (lingustic difference, not, thankfully, me in my beach gear) is important enough to have a very long (and to me rather dull) wikipedia entry, the highlight of which is the following:

In BrE, the phase "I can't be arsed [to do something]" is approximately equivalent to the American "I can't be bothered [to do something],". This can be extremely confusing to Americans, as the Southern British pronunciation of the former sounds the same as "I can't be asked...", which clearly sounds either defiantly rude or nonsensical.

Now it is true that I don't think that there is any documented example of the Queen using these words, but I bet her grandchildren do. Up to now it hasn't been a regular expression of mine either, but things are going to change, now that I have seen a potential explanation of its meaning. As I understand it, it is a shortening of the expression 'I can't be bothered to raise my arse out of this chair to do that.' In essence, then, it means 'I so cannot be bothered to do that that I can't even be bothered to utter a fully formed sentence to express the fact that I can't be bothered.' Brilliant. And very, very useful.

Philosophy for Africa (Wolff)

Like others, I found the comments on my post "Is This A Scam?" of great interest and help. Accordingly I have now replied, asking my correspondent to tell me which of my profound works he has found the most fascinating, and for the address of the library at his university. We shall see. Of course, if he is one of the readers of this blog my strategy is in pieces.

The comments also raise the question of whether Philosophy has anything to contribute to development in Africa. I agree we need to tread with caution. Somewhere in Friedman or Hayek is the story of the British Council funding the brightest young minds in the newly independent African republics to come to England in the 1960s, to learn from our political and intellectual traditions. Unfortunately this was a time when Locke and Mill had been put aside in favour of Marx and Lenin, and so the African students returned having learnt of the bankruptcy of the western liberal tradition, and with an opportunity that their teachers never had to put their ideas into practice.

Still, just because there are bad ways of doing good things, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try harder. As it happens I have been in discussions with a legal academic from Namibia about the possibility of conducting a short summer school on liberal political philosophy there this time next year. The discussions are at an early stage, and it may well not happen, but the idea, as I understand it, is an interesting one. In providing higher education in a developing country, one first thinks of engineers and medicine, and then comes law and business. The humanities are considered a luxury for the prosperous future. However learning law and business is largely a matter of learning how to pursue self-interest with ruthless efficiency. Without the scaffolding of norms and values to keep individual interest under proper restraint, it is not surprising that often the distinction between legitimate business and corruption disappears.

Of course, a summer school on contemporary political philosophy is hardly going to bring an end to corruption. But it is an interesting experiment, and if the pilot goes ahead and has some success, it could be expanded, and perhaps eventually incorporated into the standard university curriculum. Funding is not so easy: it isn't research, and it isn't aid or development in any traditional sense, but we have scraped around and I think we have funds for the first year, which would be sufficient to test the idea.

I'm curious to know what people think of this project. Misconceived? The best thing since debt relief? Naive? Bound to fail? I'd also be interested to hear if anyone knows of similar projects, anywhere else in the world but especially in Africa. There is, by the way, a very well-established Anglo-Chinese summer school, which has been running for more than a decade (I have taught on it twice). And just look how well the Chinese economy is doing as a result.

Is This A Scam? (Wolff)

A few weeks ago I got the following:

Dear Prof. Jonathan Wolff ,
My name is xxx, I am an Ethiopian living in the capital city which is
Addis Ababa. I have strong interest in political philosophy and political
science- as I am student of political Science. And presently I am working a
thesis.
Occasionally, when I read articles written by you I found it incomparable
and distinct from contemporary thinkers, scholars and writers. Unfortunately,
I did not manage to get your books in Ethiopia and it is difficult for me to
buy/order books via internet- I am student. Therefore, please, please I beg
you(I am in dire need of the following books), send me the following books (An
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Political Thought and Why Read Marx
Today? -I need this three books very very extremely) that would help me to
understand and elaborate political philosophy, political thought and other
burning issues in magnificent way.
I have a great hope that my email will receive a good response.

Sincerely yours:

Some people instinctively know me so well. This combination of flattery and need I would normally find irresistible. But I smelt a rat and suspect that anything I send would not remain in the possession of my correspondent for long, and didn’t reply.

A couple of years ago I got a similar request from someone claiming to teach in an under-resourced community college on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. I didn’t reply to that either. But could either be genuine? Does anyone have any relevant knowledge? I suspect not, but comments open, just in case.

Geeky Postscript (Wolff)

The blurb on the back of the Husak and de Marneffe book refers to a country called the ‘Untied States’. I have never seen this typo before, either for the United States or the United Kingdom. It ought to be very funny, although instead it has had me reflecting on the rather silly names of our countries. They sound like something made up for the purposes of a teenager’s computer game. Should we be campaigning for grown-up names for our countries?

The Legalization of Drugs (Wolff)

I’ve been reading The Legalization of Drugs: For and Against, by Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe. Fascinating stuff. Husak, who is well known for his views on this subject, argues the case for legalization, whereas de Marneffe argues against. I was a bit surprised to see de Marneffe taking this side: I knew him twenty years ago, and although people change I wouldn’t have expected him to be taking a puritanical line.

Simplifying dramatically, Husak’s argument is that even if it can be shown that taking drugs is very bad for you, it is still hard to see the argument for locking people away, sometimes for many years, as punishment for harming, or risking harm, to themselves. In response, de Marneffe’s first restricts the discussion primarily to heroin, and argues, plausibly enough, that it is a very bad idea for adolescents to take heroin as this will adversely affect at least their emotional development, and perhaps much else too. It is also very bad for children if their parents are addicts, as this is likely to lead to abuse and neglect. These risks are so severe, he argues, that they amount to an argument that heroin should not be legalized.

So how does de Marneffe respond to Husak’s argument? It seems he accepts it! (p. 129) He agrees that no one should go to prison for taking heroin. On de Marneffe’s view production and sale should be illegal, including dealing, but no one should be punished simply for using. And if this applies to heroin – de Marneffe’s worse case – it must apply more generally.

Now, if the ‘for’ and ‘against’ positions converge on the judgement that no one should be jailed for using drugs, does this merely mean that de Marneffe was simply the wrong person to argue the ‘against’ case, or is it rather that there are no good arguments to defend the current law in all civilized countries? If there are good, or even interesting, arguments I’d be interested to hear them. I’m not going to open comments on this, as I will be away for 10 days or so, and not posting. But if anyone would like to email me at j.wolff@ucl.ac.uk, I’ll do a round up when I return.

On the issue of harm, here are some fascinating figures from a UK report, which quotes a Cato Institute Paper. The following are ‘Deaths from Drug Use Per 100,000 Drug Users’. Tobacco: 650. Alcohol: 150. Heroin: 80. Cocaine: 4. Marijuana: 0. (p. 38 of overview report).

Of course I know it isn’t as simple as this, but these are thought-provoking numbers.

The Godless Institution of Gower Street (Wolff)

One of the reasons I’m pleased to be a member of the Philosophy Department at University College London (UCL) is that it has the reputation of being a thoroughly secular institution, in contrast to many other universities in the UK which have at least a nominal connection with the Church of England or Scotland. No Chapel, no Dean, no department of theology.

This, so the story goes, is a consequence of the origins of the institution. At its foundation in 1826 the only universities in England were Oxford and Cambridge, and their students were required to express allegiance to the Church of England as a condition of entry. UCL (then called the University of London – a name it would like to get back) was, from the start, open to non-conformists, Catholics and Jews. Derided as ‘godless’ by the religious orthodoxy, this reputation has stuck.

One way or another I have been at UCL since 1980 and have repeated this story many times. However, recently I took a look at the official history of UCL and its Philosophy Department, and found that things are not quite so clear cut. The founders of UCL were united by one thing: opposition to the Church of England, and this can take many forms. Essentially there were two camps. The one we remember is that of the philosophical radicals, who were followers of the elderly Jeremy Bentham, including James Mill (father of John Stuart) and George Grote, and other Victorian atheists and agnostics. The other group were leading religious non-conformists of the day, such as Congregationalists and Unitarians.

At the foundation of UCL two Chairs in Philosophy were announced, one in the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, the other in Moral and Political Philosophy. To the former, the Rev John Hoppus was put forward. His appointment was blocked by George Grote and others, on the grounds that an ordained minister could not hold a Chair at a secular institution. Charles Hay Cameron, better known as a subject for his young wife Julia Margaret Cameron’s pioneering photographs, was proposed for the Chair in Moral and Political Philosophy. This was opposed on the grounds, set out by Zachary Macaulay, that ‘there could be no satisfactory teaching of ethics except on a religious basis’. So on foundation of the university neither of the Chairs was filled. The tension between the non-conformists and the atheists remained for decades, perhaps right up to the second world war.

I have written up an informal talk on this, available for download for those with nothing better to do. (Scroll to the bottom of the list.)

Instead of a Post (Wolff)

I understand that it is some sort of national holiday in one of the former colonies, and so those who live there and would be reading this blog as a way of looking like they are doing some work will not have that need today. So instead of writing something, I thought instead I would link to my June Guardian column, which for some reason has been published today. The topic is university teaching.

Philosophy Citations In The Age of Duran Duran: Part II (Wolff)

Yesterday, I set a little quiz: who were the most cited four philosophers working in 'top ten' departments in the US in 1982? A little obscure, I know, but as I already had the answers it was easy to set the questions.

I am sure the suspense is killing you. Adding together citations from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index, the most cited philosopher working in the top ten US universities in 1982 was Thomas Kuhn. Number two was John Rawls, and number three John Searle. So who was number four (number one in Arts and Humanities alone)? Paul Ricoeur. Anyone who ‘guessed’ this must have already known the answer, surely? In fact I tried this out on someone who was a faculty member at Chicago, and hence a colleague of Ricoeur’s when the survey was done and he couldn’t come up with the answer, even when I told him it was a Chicago philosopher.

This information comes from ‘The Editor’s Page’ from the APQ October 1984, which I glanced at when it first came out, and have brought to mind from time to time, whenever issues of citations or quantitative metrics come up. This is a hot topic in the UK at the moment, in the light of proposed changes to the research assessment exercise (RAE), and so revisiting the APQ article is particularly interesting for us. Are citations a good proxy for research quality? The answer, on this evidence, may well be ‘if taken over a long enough period, probably better than anything else, and not terrible, but still pretty rough’.

The article compares the ranking of the top ten departments, according to the National Research Council, with their citation records. The departments are the usual suspects from the 1980s: in order - Harvard, Princeton, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, MIT, Cornell. This roughly correlates with citations, although MIT rises and UCLA falls when ranked that way.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Here are some random observations:

1. The citations to Kuhn’s will typically, I suspect, be footnotes of the form ‘in Thomas Kuhn’s sense’, accompanying the word ‘paradigm’ or ‘paradigm shift’. Lesson 1: ‘capturing the discourse’, in the sense used by some of our post-modern friends, wins you a lot of citations.

2. Work that manages to cross disciplinary boundaries can benefit from an ‘amplifying effect’, if it is treated as representative of a literature or tradition.

3. There is surely a difference between (mere) citations and what we might call ‘engagements’ where someone’s work is used or argued against, rather than merely cited in a round-up of ‘honestly, I do know the literature’-style footnotes. Within engagements we might distinguish ‘positive’, which explicitly use and build on the details of the cited work, and ‘negative’, which try to refute it. Of course some engagements do both. An index of ‘positive engagements’ could be interesting: might it correlate fairly well with the platonic form of true philosophical merit?

4. Switching topic, one remarkable thing is how many of the top philosophers from 1982 remain on our reading lists today. OK, Kuhn is not so often studied in detail, and Ricoeur as unlikely now as then, but Rawls and Searle are still central figures. The other members of the top twenty, in order, were Putnam, Feyerbend, Fodor, Hempel, Lewis, Nozick, Toulmin, Kripke, Sellars, Rescher, Suppes, Barry, Harman, van Frassen, Stalnaker, and W. Salmon. The first woman, Judy Thompson, comes in at about number 25. Some philosophers were not considered because they worked in lower ranked departments, such as Nagel at NYU. Some, like Quine, had, I assumed, already retired. Also no one working in the UK or elsewhere was included. The absence of Davidson, though, is surprising – not among the top five at Berkely that year, and hence behind Hans Sluga. Could this be a clerical error? Or was he still at Chicago (and thereby behind Adkins)? Despite the fact that the list is incomplete, and fashion has shifted away from the philosophy of science which is heavily represented on this list, the influence of the top twenty remains strong. Should we conclude that Philosophy hit some sort of peak in the early 1980s? Or does it always look better 25 years later? We can hope, I suppose.

Philosophy Citations In The Age of Duran Duran (Wolff)

As this is Brian’s blog it is only fitting that I start off with an item on rankings in Philosophy. I’d like to introduce the topic by way of what used to be called a ‘parlour game’ although I have to confess that I have never knowingly set foot in a parlour. Cast your mind back to 1982, if you were born then (I was an undergraduate) the year Duran Duran released Rio. Taking together citations from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index, who were the four most cited philosophers working in the US that year, among those then employed in the “top ten US departments” according to one set of pre-Leiter rankings?

You might need ten guesses to get number 1. Numbers 2 and 3 are easier. If you get number 4 in twenty-five goes I’m impressed. Actually, take a hundred, and you still won’t get it, I suspect, unless you resort to underhand tactics like looking at lists of philosophers. And if we take only citations in Arts and Humanities this person rises to number 1. And here is another clue. Non-philosophers might do better in this quiz than philosophers. I’ll post the answers – and my reasons for raising this – in a day or two.