Lyonel Feininger. Longeuil, Normandie.

More on this German American artist here, here and here.

William Grimes in the NYT:

Philippa Foot, a philosopher who argued that moral judgments have a rational basis, and who introduced the renowned ethical thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem, died at her home in Oxford, England, on Oct. 3, her 90th birthday.

Her death was announced on the Web site of Somerville College, Oxford, where she earned her academic degrees and taught for many years.

In her early work, notably in the essays “Moral Beliefs” and “Moral Arguments,” published in the late 1950s, Ms. Foot took issue with philosophers like R. M. Hare and Charles L. Stevenson, who maintained that moral statements were ultimately expressions of attitude or emotion, because they could not be judged true or false in the same way factual statements could be.

Ms. Foot countered this “private-enterprise theory,” as she called it, by arguing the interconnectedness of facts and moral interpretations. Further, she insisted that virtues like courage, wisdom and temperance are indispensable to human life and the foundation stones of morality. Her writing on the subject helped establish virtue ethics as a leading approach to the study of moral problems.

“She’s going to be remembered not for a particular view or position, but for changing the way people think about topics,” said Lawrence Solum, who teaches the philosophy of law at the University of Illinois and studied under Ms. Foot. “She made the moves that made people see things in a fundamentally new way. Very few people do that in philosophy.”

It was the Trolley Problem, however, that captured the imagination of scholars outside her discipline.

David Edmonds in Prospect:

Moral philosophers have long debated under what circumstances it is acceptable to kill and why, for example, we object to killing a patient for their organs, but not to a distribution of resources that funds some drugs rather than others. To understand the debate you need to understand the trolley problem. It was conceived decades ago by two grande dames of philosophy: Philippa Foot of Oxford University (click here to read more about Foot) and Judith Jarvis Thomson of MIT. The core problem involves two thought experiments—call the first “Spur” and the second “Fat Man.”

In Spur, (see diagram one, below), an out-of-control trolley—or train—is hurtling towards five people on the track, who face certain death. You are nearby and, by turning a switch, could send the trolley onto a spur and save their lives. But one man is chained to the spur and would be killed if the trolley is diverted. Should you flick the switch?

In Fat Man (see diagram two), the same trolley is about to kill five people. This time, you are on a footbridge overlooking the track, next to a fat man. (The Fat Man is now sometimes described as a large gentleman. But fat or large, the fact of his corpulence is essential.) If you were to push him off the bridge onto the track his bulk would stop the trolley and save the lives of those five people—but kill him. Do you push him?

Study after study has shown that people will sacrifice the spur man but not the fat man. Yet in both cases, one person is killed to save five others. What, then, is the relevant ethical distinction between them? This question has spawned a thriving academic mini-industry, called trolleyology.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan, J. M. Bernstein in the NYT's Opinionator:

As of today, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, the emergency bailouts born in the financial panic of 2008, is no more. Done. Finished. Kaput.

Last month the Congressional Oversight Panel issued a report assessing the program. It makes for grim reading. Once it is conceded that government intervention was necessary and generally successful in heading off an economic disaster, the narrative heads downhill quickly: TARP was badly mismanaged, the report says, it created significant moral hazard and failed miserably in providing mortgage foreclosure relief.

That may not seem like a shocking revelation. Everyone left, right, center, red state, blue state, even Martians — hated the bailout of Wall Street, apart of course from the bankers and dealers themselves, who could not even manage a grace moment of red-faced shame before they eagerly restocked their far from empty vaults. A perhaps bare majority, or more likely just a significant minority, nonetheless thought the bailouts were necessary. But even those who thought them necessary were grieved and repulsed. There was, I am suggesting, no moral disagreement about TARP and the bailouts — they stank. The only significant disagreement was practical and causal: would the impact of not bailing out the banks be catastrophic for the economy as a whole or not? No one truly knew the answer to this question, but that being so the government decided that it could not and should not play roulette with the future of the nation and did the dirty deed.

That we all agreed about the moral ugliness of the bailouts should have led us to implementing new and powerful regulatory mechanisms. The financial overhaul bill that passed congress in July certainly fell well short of what would be necessary to head-off the next crisis. Clearly, political deal-making and the influence of Wall Street over our politicians is part of the explanation for this failure; but the failure also expressed continuing disagreement about the nature of the free market. In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel. He is not, by a long shot, the only philosopher who could provide a glimmer of philosophical illumination in this area. But the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. And right now, this is also where many of the hot-button topics of the day reside.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The most compelling aspect of Titanic, to me, is the degree to which it multiplies stories without lessons. It is, of course, tempting to draw out a lesson about hubris from Titanic, and many have made the mistake of trying to do so. Here is man, challenging nature and the gods with a vessel that would tame the seas, and with beautiful carved mahogany interiors to boot. This behemoth proclaimed itself invincible, unsinkable, and then promptly went under at the hands of a silent and dumb chunk of ice. If frozen water could laugh, there'd have been some icy chuckling in the North Atlantic that night.

The great Protestant theologian Karl Barth tried an early sermon along these lines. This was a young and inexperienced Barth, to be sure. But his tale of hubris and human neglect of spiritual matters is a forced and clunky attempt. Barth said of it later, “… in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic shook the whole world, I felt that I had to make this disaster my main theme the following Sunday, which led to a monstrous sermon on the same scale.” Titanic doesn't like such overreaching. She doesn't like to be a symbol for anything. The attempts to do so seem to pale in comparison to the actual facts. The grand reflections on morality that people have tried to hang on Titanic sink even more quickly than she did.

Joseph Conrad, a man otherwise reasonably subtle in his discussions of the darkness at the heart of men, tried to pen a few big thoughts about Titanic directly after the sinking. “But all this has its moral,” Conrad wrote. “Yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from-which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made.” Is that the moral of Titanic? I don't think Conrad even believed what he was writing, if he understood it. There are so many qualifications and backslidings in his final sentence it is a wonder it doesn't erase itself from the page.

I would offer perhaps as a counterexample, Thomas Hardy's poem, “The Convergence of the Twain,” “Lines on the loss of the 'Titanic'”.

A very fascinating discussion:

Mike Phillips in Prospect:

Authentic historical identities are beside the point in most people’s life and work. The typical migrant, instead, survives by operating several different selves at once.

Yet the very policies designed to recognise and value citizens’ identity are still in many ways influenced by 19th century ideas about ethnicity. It is commonplace, for instance, to be told that a child with a dark(ish) skin needs to be acquainted with his or her “own culture,” even when it isn’t clear what that might mean. The more we know about the science of genetics and the history of humankind, the more obvious it is that race itself is a more or less meaningless category (see “Black Men CAN Swim” in Prospect’s August issue).

Ironically, over the last decade or so, as the label “race” began to be discredited, the word “culture” has been pressed into service as a surrogate for all the familiar old attitudes. Figures like the previous mayor of London, Ken Livingston, decided that multiculturalism would be the political strategy to solve all the problems of migrant and British identity. But multiculturalism offered different meanings to different people. Even the right-wing and racist parties, staunch opponents of what they might have described as “race-mixing,” recognised the advantages of a multicultural arrangement in which each “culture” could maintain its exclusivity behind various social and political barriers.

Multiculturalism, therefore, had made life easier for a number of institutions and authorities—if only because it allows connections between social, political and economic conditions to be sidestepped. Meanwhile the interests and aspirations of the ethnic minorities have invariably been ignored. Even worse, the fact that multiculturalism is now integral to the right-left divide in British politics has spawned its own pattern of damage. In my own experience of discussing funding and sponsorship, or reporting on the progress of cultural projects and programmes, it is clear that subsidies and patronage, especially in the context of local authority funding, may now depend on which side you’re on.

In Re-public:

In December 2008, Athens saw an eruption of violent protests that followed the murder of a teenager by a policeman. Initially reacting to police violence, the protestors did not articulate a specific agenda. The rallies, which mobilised a substantial part of the population – particularly the youth – dissipated a few weeks later. Similar outbreaks have taken place in other European cities in recent years (e.g. the Paris banlieues) and warrant a number of questions with regards to the capacity of our states and our cities to nurture a strong democratic life, acknowledging the role of conflict and preventing its violent expression.

Question: Do such events in their proportion and accumulated anger they carry illustrate the fact that liberal democracies actually fail to create room for dissent? In other words, could we argue that the emphasis on consensus has undermined the capacity of political actors to articulate dissent in ways that are necessary to democratic life?

Chantal Mouffe: In fact, I was thinking precisely of that at the moment when this was happening. This was a very good example of one of the arguments that I am making: that, if you don’t adopt an agonistic form of politics, if you don’t take the responsibility for different conflicts and struggles to take a political form of expression, then, when these conflicts erupt, they erupt in violent form. I was relating what took place in Athens on 2008 with the banlieues in France; it is a very similar phenomenon, in that there were no clear political demands. In order to understand the similarities between the two cases, it’s important to stress that, contrary to many interpretations, what happened in the banlieues was not an ethnic or religious conflict; this was a different phenomenon, a cleavage that concerned the youth. The conflict in this case erupted in a very violent manner but it did not articulate specific demands. And that of course was difficult for people to come to terms with, because they wondered: “What do they want? What do they ask for?”. This is similar to what happened in the Greek case: of course in the case of Greece there was no misunderstanding about ethnicity or religion, but I think the two phenomena have a lot in common. This is clearly the expression of a crisis of representation in politics due to the political move toward the centre; particularly by the socialists and the social-democratic parties, who seem to identify with a certain kind of middle class and leave many segments of the population, like traditional workers and the youth, without a discourse within which to address their demands. There is no political form of expression for those demands; so when the conflict erupts, it erupts in an antagonistic way and not in an agonistic way.

From The Boston Globe:

America is disappointed. The economic recovery, such as it is, has produced few jobs and little growth, the war in Afghanistan is going poorly, and Washington’s political culture, which President Obama took office promising to reform, is as vitriolic and paralyzed as ever. As a supporter put it to Obama at a Sept. 20 town hall meeting, ”I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people. And I’m waiting, sir. I’m waiting.”

There’s no question that the president has failed to live up to the expectations of many of his supporters–expectations he created with his empyrean campaign rhetoric. But it turns out that human beings are easy to disappoint. Research suggests that even when people know that someone has nothing but bad options to choose from, they still blame the decider for a bad outcome. And while disappointment and regret and even anger are often spoken about in similar terms, psychologists see them as distinct emotions, triggered by different sorts of events and motivating us to act in different ways. Even disappointment itself comes in flavors: Being disappointed with a person feels different from being disappointed with an outcome, and demands a different response.

In short, alleviating disappointment means understanding what someone actually means when they say they’re disappointed.

Manjit Kumar in The Telegraph:

I have never thought of Buffalo as a city of rebirth. It’s too cold there. And the city has been dying for more than a generation. All of upstate New York is like that, the creeping death and a winter that pounds the graveyards into tundra for much of the year. I have a healthy respect for Buffalo, for this very reason. But only a madman would go there to be reborn. LaDainian Tramayne Tomlinson is just such a madman. He was supposed to fade away, to be hidden deep in the roster of some team needing depth at running back after the San Diego Chargers traded him away at the end of last season. His motor had run down, his legs couldn’t do it anymore. Nine seasons is a long time for a workhorse. The body revolts. The ligaments, sinews, and tendons start to scream inside their fleshy shell all year long. And so, Tomlinson was meant to go out to pasture like all the rest, collecting a few more paychecks from a league whose memory is necessarily short.

more from me at The Owls here.

(thanks to John Mooney)

Michael Tomasky in the NYRB:

My own answer to the question of how things got this bad has less to do with whether Obama should have been more liberal or more centrist than with his and his party’s apparent inability, or perhaps refusal, to offer broad and convincing arguments about their central beliefs that counter those of the Republicans. This problem goes back to the Reagan years. It is a failure that many Democrats and liberals hoped Obama could change—something he seemed capable of changing during the campaign but has addressed rather poorly once in office.

In American politics, Republicans routinely speak in broad themes and tend to blur the details, while Democrats typically ignore broad themes and focus on details. Republicans, for example, speak constantly of “liberty” and “freedom” and couch practically all their initiatives—tax cuts, deregulation, and so forth—within these large categories. Democrats, on the other hand, talk more about specific programs and policies and steer clear of big themes. There is a reason for this: Republican themes, like “liberty,” are popular, while Republican policies often are not; and Democratic themes (“community,” “compassion,” “justice”) are less popular, while many specific Democratic programs—Social Security, Medicare, even (in many polls) putting a price on carbon emissions—have majority support. This is why, when all else fails, Democrats try to scare people about the threat to Social Security if the GOP takes over, as indeed they are doing right now.

What Democrats have typically not done well since Reagan’s time is connect their policies to their larger beliefs. In fact they have usually tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose. The result has been that for many years Republicans have been able to present their philosophy as somehow truly “American,” while attacking the Democratic belief system as contrary to American values. “Putting us on the road to European-style socialism,” for example, is a rhetorical line of attack that long predates Obama’s ascendance—it was employed against the Clintons’ health care plan as well.

Basharat Peer in Granta:

Srinagar used to be a city of elegant latticed houses, mosques and temples on the banks of the river. Srinagar was people strolling on the wooden bridges and wandering into old bazaars or stepping with a prayer into a Sufi shrine with papier-mâché interiors. Now it is a city of bunkers, a medieval city dying in a modern war. One of the most prominent landmarks of war is the sprawling Martyrs’ Graveyard in north-western Srinagar; several hundred Kashmiris killed in the early days of the conflict are buried here. Among them is a well-known politician and head cleric of Srinagar grand mosque, Moulvi Mohammed Farooq, who was assassinated by pro-Pakistan militants on 21 May 1990. More than sixty mourners were killed when Indian paramilitaries fired upon his funeral procession. The cleric’s eighteen-year-old son, Omar Farooq, left school to inherit his father’s mantle. He is now one of the best-known Kashmiri separatists, heading the Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference coalition.

A few days before the twentieth anniversary of his father’s assassination, I walked past the Martyrs’ Graveyard to an old wooden mosque nearby, where Farooq was holding a meeting with his supporters. In an elegant brown lambskin cap and delicately embroidered beige gown, he deftly mixed his roles as a modern politician and the head cleric in Kashmir’s Sufi tradition, leading his followers in a sing-song voice humming Kashmiri and Persian devotional songs and then moving effortlessly to the question of Kashmiri politics. He spoke of the memory of the thousands who had died in the battles for Kashmir, including his father. He spoke of preventing further deaths. And then the old Kashmiri slogans for independence followed. ‘Kashmir is for Kashmiris!’ Farooq shouted. ‘We will decide our destiny!’ the people replied. He was about to lead a march through the city. Outside, excited young supporters were revving up their motorbikes and raising flags on cars.

Over the years, Farooq has engaged with both India and Pakistan and sought to rally the Kashmiris towards a peaceful agreement, often at a high personal price. In 2004, after failed peace talks with India, pro-Pakistan militants assassinated his uncle.

From The Guardian:

We lived in Essington, a mining village close to Walsall, in the West Midlands. It was a very rural, working-class upbringing and one of my earliest memories is walking through a cornfield with my dad. My early years were a riot of earthy smells, outside loos, fun in fields and windy bus stops. And lots and lots of fresh air and freedom.

Inside our Punjabi household the atmosphere was one of familiarity and solidity, but outside the house things sometimes felt threatening. I have vivid memories of my parents and all their friends talking about a certain speech that Enoch Powell made. I always thought that the reason there were packed suitcases on top of every wardrobe was that we might have to leave the country in the middle of the night because of Enoch Powell. It was only years later that I realised that everybody's families had suitcases on top of the wardrobe.

Punjabis are the cockneys of India. They are party people – gregarious, outgoing, very entrepreneurial, sharp-witted, loud, meat-eaters. Back in the Punjab, they are basically earthy, rural workers. And that was very much the atmosphere when we had friends around. It was incredibly noisy, loads of music, lots of loud voices and drinking, and I thought that was normal until I went to other people's houses and I was shocked to discover that sometimes people's families say nothing to each other during dinner.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Many adults have a fantasy that if they could go back to college — now that the desire to party, drink and sleep around has faded to a burnished memory — they’d get so much more out of it. The publishing industry often reflects this wish. Every season brings offerings that are right at home on anyone’s continuing-ed syllabus: innovative, original ways to study world history through lenses trained on the minutiae of salt or cod, earthworms or spices, tea or telephones. Now, finally, for those of us who wrestled with Rocks for Jocks, pined amid Physics for Poets and schlepped through college on 101s of any and every subject — the beloved survey courses — here’s that most popular professor, Bill Bryson, with a fascinating new book, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.”

Bryson is best known for “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which took a cosmic perspective on the creation of the place we call home, our planet — no, make that our solar system — and created a run on yellow highlighters. Why he insists on calling these histories “short” is beyond me, when each runs to more than 450 pages. Perhaps they’re short when compared with the stacks of tomes that have to be ingested, digested and egested in order to produce them? With “At Home,” Bryson’s focus is domestic; he intends, as he puts it, to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” You can take this class in your pajamas — and, judging by the book’s laid-back, comfy tone, I have a sneaking suspicion that Bryson wrote much of it in his.

More here.

Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

Under the stewardship of its boyish chief justice, John Roberts, the court has taken the law for a sharp turn to the ideological right, while at the same time masterfully concealing it. Virtually every empirical study confirms this rightward turn. Yet recent public opinion polls indicate Americans continue to see a bench that is, if anything, a wee bit too liberal.

How to explain the justices shoving the law rightward, while everyone thinks it is dead center or too far left? The answer is that Roberts is a brilliant magician. He and his four fellow conservative justices have worked some classic illusionist tricks to distract us from seeing the truth. Roberts is likely the first chief justice to understand that the message matters as much as the outcome. He has played his role with consummate skill, allowing the law to shape-shift before our very eyes, even as he and his fellow conservatives claim that nothing is happening.

How does the Roberts Court work its magic in that marble mega-mall of the law? Here, revealed, are the top tricks of the illusionist Roberts Court.

More here.

[Photo above shows eyelash hairs growing from the surface of human skin, magnified 50 times.]

Graham Smith in The Daily Mail:

Quite what this industrious little wood ant [on the cover of the book shown here] is planning to do with this microchip is not known, but how appropriate it is that he appears to have a scientific interest.

Because the insect features in a stunning new book featuring the art of the coloured scanning electron micrograph – in the case of this chap magnified 22 times.

Microcosmos takes readers into a secret world of extreme close-ups. Some subjects have been magnified by as much as 22million times.

Detailed descriptions of the subjets are contained within. The wood ant, for example, is a social creature, and acts as a slave for the blood-red ant Formica sanguinea.

Inseminated females of the blood-red ant invade wood ant nests, steal the pupae, and the ants that hatch are made to work for the strange queen.

Compiled by London-based science author Brandon Broll, Microcosmos takes a piercing look at the everyday in six sections including Zoology, The Human Body and Botanics.

More here.