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Weiye Loh

On Forgiveness - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...on-forgiveness

Ethics Forgiveness Philosophy

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Why is it considered to be commendable?  Some claim that forgiveness is merely about ridding oneself of vengeful anger; do that, and you have forgiven.  But if you were able to banish anger from your soul simply by taking a pill, would the result really be forgiveness?
  • The timing of forgiveness is also disputed. Some say that it should wait for the offender to take responsibility and suffer due punishment, others hold that the victim must first overcome anger altogether, and still others that forgiveness should be unilaterally bestowed at the earliest possible moment.  But what if you have every good reason to be angry and even to take your sweet revenge as well?  Is forgiveness then really to be commended? Some object that it lets the offender off the hook, confesses to one’s own weakness and vulnerability, and papers over the legitimate demands of vengeful anger.  And yet, legions praise forgiveness and think of it as an indispensable virtue
  • Many people assume that the notion of forgiveness is Christian in origin, at least in the West, and that the contemporary understanding of interpersonal forgiveness has always been the core Christian teaching on the subject.  These contestable assumptions are explored by David Konstan in “Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea.”  Religious origins of the notion would not invalidate a secular philosophical approach to the topic, any more than a secular origin of some idea precludes a religious appropriation of it.  While religious and secular perspectives on forgiveness are not necessarily consistent with each other, however, they agree in their attempt to address the painful fact of the pervasiveness of moral wrong in human life. They also agree on this: few of us are altogether innocent of the need for forgiveness.
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  • It’s not simply a matter of lifting the burden of toxic resentment or of immobilizing guilt, however beneficial that may be ethically and psychologically.  It is not a merely therapeutic matter, as though this were just about you.  Rather, when the requisite conditions are met, forgiveness is what a good person would seek because it expresses fundamental moral ideals.  These include ideals of spiritual growth and renewal; truth-telling; mutual respectful address; responsibility and respect; reconciliation and peace.
  • Are any wrongdoers unforgivable?  People who have committed heinous acts such as torture or child molestation are often cited as examples.  The question is not primarily about the psychological ability of the victim to forswear anger, but whether a wrongdoer can rightly be judged not-to-be-forgiven no matter what offender and victim say or do.  I do not see that a persuasive argument for that thesis can be made; there is no such thing as the unconditionally unforgivable.  For else we would be faced with the bizarre situation of declaring illegitimate the forgiveness reached by victim and perpetrator after each has taken every step one could possibly wish for.  The implication may distress you: Osama bin Laden, for example, is not unconditionally unforgivable for his role in the attacks of 9/11.  That being said, given the extent of the injury done by grave wrongs, their author may be rightly unforgiven for an appropriate period even if he or she has taken all reasonable steps.  There is no mathematically precise formula for determining when it is appropriate to forgive.
Weiye Loh

Hacktivists as Gadflies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...hacktivists-as-gadflies

Hacking hacktivism Law Technology Censorship

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as "Weev." When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not "hack" anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day - sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato's "Apology." "You consider yourself a hero of sorts," she said, and noted that Weev's "special skills" in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: "My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: "I don't come here today to ask for forgiveness. I'm here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life." He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swart
Weiye Loh

Libertarianism Is Marxism of the Right - 4 views

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t21933.html "Because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hil...

Libertarianism Marxism

started by Weiye Loh on 28 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Religion: Faith in science : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...470323a.html

Science Religion Faith Funding Academic Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?
  • With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.
  • however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.
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  • But other researchers, both with and without Templeton grants, say that they find the foundation remarkably open and non-dogmatic. "The Templeton Foundation has never in my experience pressured, suggested or hinted at any kind of ideological slant," says Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience, who was hired by the foundation to edit an essay series entitled 'Does science make belief in God obsolete?'
  • The debate highlights some of the challenges facing the Templeton Foundation after the death of its founder in July 2008, at the age of 95.
  • With the help of a $528-million bequest from Templeton, the foundation has been radically reframing its research programme. As part of that effort, it is reducing its emphasis on religion to make its programmes more palatable to the broader scientific community. Like many of his generation, Templeton was a great believer in progress, learning, initiative and the power of human imagination — not to mention the free-enterprise system that allowed him, a middle-class boy from Winchester, Tennessee, to earn billions of dollars on Wall Street. The foundation accordingly allocates 40% of its annual grants to programmes with names such as 'character development', 'freedom and free enterprise' and 'exceptional cognitive talent and genius'.
  • Unlike most of his peers, however, Templeton thought that the principles of progress should also apply to religion. He described himself as "an enthusiastic Christian" — but was also open to learning from Hinduism, Islam and other religious traditions. Why, he wondered, couldn't religious ideas be open to the type of constructive competition that had produced so many advances in science and the free market?
  • That question sparked Templeton's mission to make religion "just as progressive as medicine or astronomy".
  • Early Templeton prizes had nothing to do with science: the first went to the Catholic missionary Mother Theresa of Calcutta in 1973.
  • By the 1980s, however, Templeton had begun to realize that fields such as neuroscience, psychology and physics could advance understanding of topics that are usually considered spiritual matters — among them forgiveness, morality and even the nature of reality. So he started to appoint scientists to the prize panel, and in 1985 the award went to a research scientist for the first time: Alister Hardy, a marine biologist who also investigated religious experience. Since then, scientists have won with increasing frequency.
  • "There's a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientist they can find who's willing to say something nice about religion," says Harold Kroto, a chemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who was co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and describes himself as a devout atheist.
  • Yet Templeton saw scientists as allies. They had what he called "the humble approach" to knowledge, as opposed to the dogmatic approach. "Almost every scientist will agree that they know so little and they need to learn," he once said.
  • Templeton wasn't interested in funding mainstream research, says Barnaby Marsh, the foundation's executive vice-president. Templeton wanted to explore areas — such as kindness and hatred — that were not well known and did not attract major funding agencies. Marsh says Templeton wondered, "Why is it that some conflicts go on for centuries, yet some groups are able to move on?"
  • Templeton's interests gave the resulting list of grants a certain New Age quality (See Table 1). For example, in 1999 the foundation gave $4.6 million for forgiveness research at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and in 2001 it donated $8.2 million to create an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (that is, altruism and compassion) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "A lot of money wasted on nonsensical ideas," says Kroto. Worse, says Coyne, these projects are profoundly corrupting to science, because the money tempts researchers into wasting time and effort on topics that aren't worth it. If someone is willing to sell out for a million dollars, he says, "Templeton is there to oblige him".
  • At the same time, says Marsh, the 'dean of value investing', as Templeton was known on Wall Street, had no intention of wasting his money on junk science or unanswerables such as whether God exists. So before pursuing a scientific topic he would ask his staff to get an assessment from appropriate scholars — a practice that soon evolved into a peer-review process drawing on experts from across the scientific community.
  • Because Templeton didn't like bureaucracy, adds Marsh, the foundation outsourced much of its peer review and grant giving. In 1996, for example, it gave $5.3 million to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, to fund efforts that work with evangelical groups to find common ground on issues such as the environment, and to get more science into seminary curricula. In 2006, Templeton gave $8.8 million towards the creation of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which funds research on the origins of the Universe and other fundamental issues in physics, under the leadership of Anthony Aguirre, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
  • But external peer review hasn't always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those awards became a major embarrassment in late 2005, during a highly publicized court fight over the teaching of intelligent design in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. A number of media accounts of the intelligent design movement described the Templeton Foundation as a major supporter — a charge that Charles Harper, then senior vice-president, was at pains to deny.
  • Some foundation officials were initially intrigued by intelligent design, Harper told The New York Times. But disillusionment set in — and Templeton funding stopped — when it became clear that the theory was part of a political movement from the Christian right wing, not science. Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
  • Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all. "Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
  • Foundation officials insist that this is backwards: questioning is their reason for being. Religious dogma is what they are fighting. That does seem to be the experience of many scientists who have taken Templeton money. During the launch of FQXi, says Aguirre, "Max and I were very suspicious at first. So we said, 'We'll try this out, and the minute something smells, we'll cut and run.' It never happened. The grants we've given have not been connected with religion in any way, and they seem perfectly happy about that."
  • John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, also had concerns when he started a Templeton-funded project in 2007. He had just published a paper with survey data showing that religious affiliation had a negative correlation with health among African-Americans — the opposite of what he assumed the foundation wanted to hear. He was bracing for a protest when someone told him to look at the foundation's website. They had displayed his finding on the front page. "That made me relax a bit," says Cacioppo.
  • Yet, even scientists who give the foundation high marks for openness often find it hard to shake their unease. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is willing to participate in Templeton-funded events — but worries about the foundation's emphasis on research into 'spiritual' matters. "The act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the Universe, that no spiritual dimension is required," he says.
  • It hasn't helped that Jack Templeton is much more politically and religiously conservative than his father was. The foundation shows no obvious rightwards trend in its grant-giving and other activities since John Templeton's death — and it is barred from supporting political activities by its legal status as a not-for-profit corporation. Still, many scientists find it hard to trust an organization whose president has used his personal fortune to support right-leaning candidates and causes such as the 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California.
  • Scientists' discomfort with the foundation is probably inevitable in the current political climate, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The past 30 years have seen the growing power of the Christian religious right in the United States, the rise of radical Islam around the world, and religiously motivated terrorist attacks such as those in the United States on 11 September 2001. Given all that, says Atran, many scientists find it almost impossible to think of religion as anything but fundamentalism at war with reason.
  • the foundation has embraced the theme of 'science and the big questions' — an open-ended list that includes topics such as 'Does the Universe have a purpose?'
  • Towards the end of Templeton's life, says Marsh, he became increasingly concerned that this reaction was getting in the way of the foundation's mission: that the word 'religion' was alienating too many good scientists.
  • The peer-review and grant-making system has also been revamped: whereas in the past the foundation ran an informal mix of projects generated by Templeton and outside grant seekers, the system is now organized around an annual list of explicit funding priorities.
  • The foundation is still a work in progress, says Jack Templeton — and it always will be. "My father believed," he says, "we were all called to be part of an ongoing creative process. He was always trying to make people think differently." "And he always said, 'If you're still doing today what you tried to do two years ago, then you're not making progress.'" 
Weiye Loh

BBC News - Should victims have a say in sentencing criminals? - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-12277696

Victim Ethics Crime

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • If someone does you wrong, should you have a say in their punishment?
  • Should victims have a say in sentencing criminals? That partly depends upon what you mean by "have a say". A weak form of involvement would have a judge listen to a statement from victims, but ensure the judge alone does the sentencing. A slightly stronger form would be when the impact on victims is considered as part of assessing the moral seriousness of the crime. The strongest form would be when victims have a direct say in the type of sentence. So which is the more just?
  • A utilitarian approach, which seeks people's greatest happiness and is associated with the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, can provide one reason why victims should, in part, play judge. It can be called the therapeutic argument.
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  • However, this might backfire. Given the choice, many victims might desire longer sentences than the judiciary would allow. When that desire is not satisfied, their anguish might be exacerbated. The therapeutic argument has also been called the "Oprahisation" of sentencing.
  • The second, Kantian approach emphasises reason and rights.
  • It stresses the law should be rational, and that includes keeping careful tabs on the irrational feelings that are inevitably present during legal proceedings. This would be harder to do, the more the voice of victims is heard.
  • More seriously still, strong forms of victim sentencing would reflect the capabilities of the victim. A victim who could powerfully express their feelings might win a longer sentence. That would be irrational because it would suggest that a crime is more serious if the victim is more articulate.
  • Taking considerations of moral seriousness into account would fit within a third approach, the one that stresses the common good and virtue and is associated with Aristotle. Would you want to meet the person who did this to you? Understanding the moral seriousness of a crime is important because it helps the criminal to take responsibility for what they've done. Victim feelings are also a crucial component in so-called restorative justice, in which the criminal is confronted with their crime, perhaps by meeting the victim.
  • virtue ethics approach would be concerned with the moral state of the victim too. Victims may need to forgive those who have wronged them, in order that they might flourish in the future. An impersonal legal system, that does not allow victims a say, might actually help with that, as it ensures objectivity.
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