A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
-- Stephen Crane
Friday, May 30, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
O dear Lord, we're all going to die
New Trend in Biofuels Has New Risks
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: May 21, 2008
ROME — In the past year, as the diversion of food crops like corn and palm to make biofuels has helped to drive up food prices, investors and politicians have begun promoting newer, so-called second-generation biofuels as the next wave of green energy. These, made from non-food crops like reeds and wild grasses, would offer fuel without the risk of taking food off the table, they said.
But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended consequences. Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.
At a United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany, on Tuesday, scientists from the Global Invasive Species Program, the Nature Conservancy and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as other groups, presented a paper with a warning about invasive species.
“Some of the most commonly recommended species for biofuels production are also major invasive alien species,” the paper says, adding that these crops should be studied more thoroughly before being cultivated in new areas.
Controlling the spread of such plants could prove difficult, the experts said, producing “greater financial losses than gains.” The International Union for Conservation of Nature encapsulated the message like this: “Don’t let invasive biofuel crops attack your country.”
To reach their conclusions, the scientists compared the list of the most popular second-generation biofuels with the list of invasive species and found an alarming degree of overlap. They said little evaluation of risk had occurred before planting.
“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,” said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative assessment.”
The biofuels industry said the risk of those crops morphing into weed problems is overstated, noting that proposed biofuel crops, while they have some potential to become weeds, are not plants that inevitably turn invasive.
“There are very few plants that are ‘weeds,’ full stop,” said Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group. “You have to look at the biology of the plant and the environment where you’re introducing it and ask, are there worry points here?” He said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.
The European Union and the United States have both instituted biofuel targets as a method to reduce carbon emissions. The European Union’s target of 10 percent biofuel use in transportation by 2020 is binding. As such, politicians are anxiously awaiting the commercial perfection of second-generation biofuels.
The European Union is funding a project to introduce the “giant reed, a high-yielding, non-food plant into Europe Union agriculture,” according to its proposal. The reed is environmentally friendly and a cost-effective crop, poised to become the “champion of biomass crops,” the proposal says.
A proposed Florida biofuel plantation and plant, also using giant reed, has been greeted with enthusiasm by investors, its energy sold even before it is built.
But the project has been opposed by the Florida Native Plants Society and a number of scientists because of its proximity to the Everglades, where giant reed overgrowth could be dangerous, they said. The giant reed, previously used mostly in decorations and in making musical instruments — is a fast-growing, thirsty species that has drained wetlands and clogged drainage systems in other places where it has been planted. It is also highly flammable and increases the risk of fires.
From a business perspective, the good thing about second-generation biofuel crops is that they are easy to grow and need little attention. But that is also what creates their invasive potential.
“These are tough survivors, which means they’re good producers for biofuel because they grow well on marginal land that you wouldn’t use for food,” Dr. Howard said. “But we’ve had 100 years of experience with introductions of these crops that turned out to be disastrous for environment, people, health.”
Stas Burgiel, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said the cost of controlling invasive species is immense and generally not paid by those who created the problem.
But he and other experts emphasized that some of the second-generation biofuel crops could still be safe if introduced into the right places and under the right conditions
“With biofuels we need to do proper assessments and take appropriate measures so they don’t get out of the gate, so to speak,” he said. That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don’t respect borders.
The Global Invasive Species Program estimates that the damage from invasive species costs the world more than $1.4 trillion annually — five percent of the global economy.
Jatropha, the darling of the second-generation biofuels community, is now being cultivated widely in East Africa in brand new biofuel plantations. But jatropha has been recently banned by two Australian states as an invasive species. If jatropha, which is poisonous, overgrows farmland or pastures, it could be disastrous for the local food supply in Africa, experts said.
But Mr. De Greef said jatropha had little weed potential in most areas, adding: “Just because a species has caused a problem in one place doesn’t make it a weed everywhere.”
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: May 21, 2008
ROME — In the past year, as the diversion of food crops like corn and palm to make biofuels has helped to drive up food prices, investors and politicians have begun promoting newer, so-called second-generation biofuels as the next wave of green energy. These, made from non-food crops like reeds and wild grasses, would offer fuel without the risk of taking food off the table, they said.
But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended consequences. Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.
At a United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany, on Tuesday, scientists from the Global Invasive Species Program, the Nature Conservancy and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as other groups, presented a paper with a warning about invasive species.
“Some of the most commonly recommended species for biofuels production are also major invasive alien species,” the paper says, adding that these crops should be studied more thoroughly before being cultivated in new areas.
Controlling the spread of such plants could prove difficult, the experts said, producing “greater financial losses than gains.” The International Union for Conservation of Nature encapsulated the message like this: “Don’t let invasive biofuel crops attack your country.”
To reach their conclusions, the scientists compared the list of the most popular second-generation biofuels with the list of invasive species and found an alarming degree of overlap. They said little evaluation of risk had occurred before planting.
“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,” said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, often from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative assessment.”
The biofuels industry said the risk of those crops morphing into weed problems is overstated, noting that proposed biofuel crops, while they have some potential to become weeds, are not plants that inevitably turn invasive.
“There are very few plants that are ‘weeds,’ full stop,” said Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group. “You have to look at the biology of the plant and the environment where you’re introducing it and ask, are there worry points here?” He said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.
The European Union and the United States have both instituted biofuel targets as a method to reduce carbon emissions. The European Union’s target of 10 percent biofuel use in transportation by 2020 is binding. As such, politicians are anxiously awaiting the commercial perfection of second-generation biofuels.
The European Union is funding a project to introduce the “giant reed, a high-yielding, non-food plant into Europe Union agriculture,” according to its proposal. The reed is environmentally friendly and a cost-effective crop, poised to become the “champion of biomass crops,” the proposal says.
A proposed Florida biofuel plantation and plant, also using giant reed, has been greeted with enthusiasm by investors, its energy sold even before it is built.
But the project has been opposed by the Florida Native Plants Society and a number of scientists because of its proximity to the Everglades, where giant reed overgrowth could be dangerous, they said. The giant reed, previously used mostly in decorations and in making musical instruments — is a fast-growing, thirsty species that has drained wetlands and clogged drainage systems in other places where it has been planted. It is also highly flammable and increases the risk of fires.
From a business perspective, the good thing about second-generation biofuel crops is that they are easy to grow and need little attention. But that is also what creates their invasive potential.
“These are tough survivors, which means they’re good producers for biofuel because they grow well on marginal land that you wouldn’t use for food,” Dr. Howard said. “But we’ve had 100 years of experience with introductions of these crops that turned out to be disastrous for environment, people, health.”
Stas Burgiel, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said the cost of controlling invasive species is immense and generally not paid by those who created the problem.
But he and other experts emphasized that some of the second-generation biofuel crops could still be safe if introduced into the right places and under the right conditions
“With biofuels we need to do proper assessments and take appropriate measures so they don’t get out of the gate, so to speak,” he said. That assessment, he added, must take a broad geographical perspective since invasive species don’t respect borders.
The Global Invasive Species Program estimates that the damage from invasive species costs the world more than $1.4 trillion annually — five percent of the global economy.
Jatropha, the darling of the second-generation biofuels community, is now being cultivated widely in East Africa in brand new biofuel plantations. But jatropha has been recently banned by two Australian states as an invasive species. If jatropha, which is poisonous, overgrows farmland or pastures, it could be disastrous for the local food supply in Africa, experts said.
But Mr. De Greef said jatropha had little weed potential in most areas, adding: “Just because a species has caused a problem in one place doesn’t make it a weed everywhere.”
Monday, May 19, 2008
So...what's the problem?
Clinton Quiet About Own Radical Ties
Faulting of Obama Called Hypocritical
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 19, 2008; Page A04
When Hillary Rodham Clinton questioned rival Barack Obama's ties to 1960s radicals, her comments baffled two retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.
"She's a hypocrite," Doris B. Walker, 89, who was a member of the American Communist Party, said in an interview last week. "She had to know who we were and what kinds of cases we were handling. We had a very left-wing reputation, including civil rights, constitutional law, racist problems."
Malcolm Burnstein, 74, a partner at the firm who worked closely with Clinton during her internship, said he was traveling in Pennsylvania in April when Clinton attacked Obama for his past interactions with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, members of Students for a Democratic Society who went on to found the bomb-making Weather Underground.
"Given her background, it was quite hypocritical," Burnstein said. "I almost called the Philadelphia Inquirer. I saw what she and her campaign were saying about Ayers and I thought, 'Well, if you're going to talk about that totally bit of irrelevant nonsense, I'll talk about your career with us.' "
In her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Clinton has said little about her experiences in the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, including her involvement with student protests and her brief internship at the law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. She has said she worked on a child custody case, although former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath.
But her decision to target Obama's radical connections has spurred criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has opened her own associations to scrutiny.
"The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.
Robert Reich, who went to Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton and later served in the Clinton administration, called Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama "absurd," adding: "That carries guilt by association to a new level of absurdity. Where does guilt by association stop? I mean, she was a partner of Jim McDougal in the 1980s, for crying out loud." Reich is now an Obama supporter.
In response to the assertion that Clinton is a hypocrite for calling out Obama's ties to Ayers, campaign spokesman Philippe Reines said: "The comparison is patently absurd." The campaign played down her friendship with a noted student protest leader and defended her work with the Oakland firm. "At the time she worked there, the firm was primarily at the forefront of civil rights advocacy cases, which was a good fit with Senator Clinton's long-standing interest in civil rights and constitutional law," Reines said.
Clinton's associations date to her years as a student leader at Wellesley from 1965 to 1969. It was the height of student opposition to the Vietnam War, and Carl Oglesby, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, came to campus to speak.
"I gave a talk at Wellesley, where she was a student," Oglesby said in a telephone interview from Amherst, Mass., where he is recovering from a stroke. "I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the current primary."
Oglesby had been close to Ayers and Dohrn, but the couple split with the more moderate SDS factions to form the Weather Underground, which engaged in a bombing campaign to try to stop the Vietnam War. The FBI monitored Oglesby throughout the period.
The Clinton campaign suggested last week that she did not meet Oglesby until the 1990s, long after his activist years. But in recent interviews, Oglesby has made clear that she stood out in his memory as he traveled across the country speaking at rallies.
In 1994, Clinton told Newsweek that Oglesby's writings in the 1960s helped persuade her to oppose the Vietnam War and to become a Democrat. She visited Oglesby in 1994 in Massachusetts, a meeting that was omitted from the First Lady's official schedule. Oglesby told the Boston Globe at the time, "We mostly discussed the '60s. I may have been a little gushy in my praise of the administration, but she was extremely impressive."
Oglesby now talks warmly about Clinton. In an interview with Reason magazine, he called their association "a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close."
But Oglesby said he has not contacted Clinton because he is afraid that he could harm her candidacy.
Faulting of Obama Called Hypocritical
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 19, 2008; Page A04
When Hillary Rodham Clinton questioned rival Barack Obama's ties to 1960s radicals, her comments baffled two retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.
"She's a hypocrite," Doris B. Walker, 89, who was a member of the American Communist Party, said in an interview last week. "She had to know who we were and what kinds of cases we were handling. We had a very left-wing reputation, including civil rights, constitutional law, racist problems."
Malcolm Burnstein, 74, a partner at the firm who worked closely with Clinton during her internship, said he was traveling in Pennsylvania in April when Clinton attacked Obama for his past interactions with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, members of Students for a Democratic Society who went on to found the bomb-making Weather Underground.
"Given her background, it was quite hypocritical," Burnstein said. "I almost called the Philadelphia Inquirer. I saw what she and her campaign were saying about Ayers and I thought, 'Well, if you're going to talk about that totally bit of irrelevant nonsense, I'll talk about your career with us.' "
In her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Clinton has said little about her experiences in the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s, including her involvement with student protests and her brief internship at the law firm, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. She has said she worked on a child custody case, although former partners recall her likely involvement in conscientious objector cases and a legal challenge to a university loyalty oath.
But her decision to target Obama's radical connections has spurred criticism from some former protest movement leaders who say she has opened her own associations to scrutiny.
"The very things she's accusing Barack of could be said of her with much greater evidence," said Tom Hayden, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist, author and self-described friend of the Clintons.
Robert Reich, who went to Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton and later served in the Clinton administration, called Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama "absurd," adding: "That carries guilt by association to a new level of absurdity. Where does guilt by association stop? I mean, she was a partner of Jim McDougal in the 1980s, for crying out loud." Reich is now an Obama supporter.
In response to the assertion that Clinton is a hypocrite for calling out Obama's ties to Ayers, campaign spokesman Philippe Reines said: "The comparison is patently absurd." The campaign played down her friendship with a noted student protest leader and defended her work with the Oakland firm. "At the time she worked there, the firm was primarily at the forefront of civil rights advocacy cases, which was a good fit with Senator Clinton's long-standing interest in civil rights and constitutional law," Reines said.
Clinton's associations date to her years as a student leader at Wellesley from 1965 to 1969. It was the height of student opposition to the Vietnam War, and Carl Oglesby, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, came to campus to speak.
"I gave a talk at Wellesley, where she was a student," Oglesby said in a telephone interview from Amherst, Mass., where he is recovering from a stroke. "I can't say that I was a close friend of hers. It was more of a passing acquaintance. I liked her. I think of her as a good guy. I think she has a good heart and a solid mind. And I support her in the current primary."
Oglesby had been close to Ayers and Dohrn, but the couple split with the more moderate SDS factions to form the Weather Underground, which engaged in a bombing campaign to try to stop the Vietnam War. The FBI monitored Oglesby throughout the period.
The Clinton campaign suggested last week that she did not meet Oglesby until the 1990s, long after his activist years. But in recent interviews, Oglesby has made clear that she stood out in his memory as he traveled across the country speaking at rallies.
In 1994, Clinton told Newsweek that Oglesby's writings in the 1960s helped persuade her to oppose the Vietnam War and to become a Democrat. She visited Oglesby in 1994 in Massachusetts, a meeting that was omitted from the First Lady's official schedule. Oglesby told the Boston Globe at the time, "We mostly discussed the '60s. I may have been a little gushy in my praise of the administration, but she was extremely impressive."
Oglesby now talks warmly about Clinton. In an interview with Reason magazine, he called their association "a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close."
But Oglesby said he has not contacted Clinton because he is afraid that he could harm her candidacy.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
To do? To do good?
Where the Conscience Meets the Checkbook
-
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, May 12, 2008; Page A02
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.
-- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
A few decades ago, a cyclone similar to the one that ravaged Burma last week struck South Asia. As in the case of Burma, the earlier disaster caused widespread destruction among some of the poorest people on the planet. Britain and Australia were among the most generous of the countries that stepped forward with aid, but the philosopher Peter Singer pointed out that Britain's donation was about one-thirtieth the size of its investment in the Anglo-French Concorde jet project. Australia's contribution, Singer added, was less than one-twelfth the cost of Sydney's famous opera house. Going strictly by the numbers, Singer asked whether Britain valued supersonic jet travel more than 30 times as highly as the lives of 9 million refugees.
Natural disasters such as the one in Burma, where the death toll is expected to cross 100,000, bring to the fore several paradoxes of human behavior. Most people and nations do not follow the tugs of conscience about whether to help others in distress. The paradox is not that people are uncaring. Rather, it is that they fail to act in ways that they themselves know they should.
Hardly anyone would think twice about leaping into a pond to save a drowning child, if the only cost to them was ruining a pair of $200 shoes. But in that case, Singer once asked, why do people hesitate to write a $200 check to a reputable relief agency even when they are certain it would save the life of a child halfway around the world?
Psychological studies suggest the drowning child motivates us to act because a tragedy unfolding before our eyes activates our emotions, whereas abstract statistics about deaths in faraway places fail to engage us viscerally. Another reason we choose to help the child who is nearby is that we feel personally responsible for the drowning child, whereas we feel many other people are potentially responsible for the faraway child.
"We are told there are all these people who need help in Myanmar [Burma], but there are 100 million Americans who are comfortable enough to send money, plus hundreds of millions of Europeans and others, so the responsibility is very diffuse," Singer said.
Singer believes our inconsistencies in moral reasoning highlight the importance of a school of thought called utilitarianism, which suggests we should make moral decisions in a coolly scientific manner, rather than rely on intuitions, laws or religious guidelines. The philosophy is controversial because it suggests people are wrong to put the needs of those from their own countries, their neighborhoods -- or even their own species -- ahead of the needs of others. The only thing that matters, Singer argues, is what causes the largest improvement in overall well-being.
Singer backs up his words with actions: Over several decades, he has contributed a growing share of his income to charitable causes, such as the Oxfam group. He said he now gives about one-third of his income to such causes. And yet, he said, when he passes a homeless person on the street, although he feels drawn to help, he stops himself because it is not in keeping with utilitarian thinking: The same money can produce more well-being overall when channeled through a group such as Oxfam.
"The first donation was the hardest to make," he said. "The first time I wrote a check that had at least a couple of zeroes at the end -- that was the hardest thing."
Fiery Cushman, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who studies how people's moral intuitions can clash with deliberate reasoning, said the unfolding disaster in Burma highlights another dimension of the warring moral compasses we have within ourselves: People are more willing to help in the case of disasters such as the cyclone than with "mundane" and ongoing problems that are equally deadly, such as malnutrition or malaria in poor countries.
"Our reasoned judgment says people are suffering in both situations," Cushman added. "That is a good example of the mismatch between our emotional responses and rational responses."
Still, Cushman questions Singer's utilitarian approach, because he argues that emotions undergird even our most rational responses. And there is abundant evidence that even though people value reason and rationality, human beings are biologically programmed to react emotionally to visceral moral challenges.
Joshua Greene, a Harvard philosopher and neuroscientist who also studies how people think about moral dilemmas, said: "The difference between Peter Singer and others is not that he does not have normal emotions but that he is able to override his emotions because of his utilitarian values."
In the end, the rules that people choose to motivate their actions might be less important than whether they actually act -- for whatever reason. At the National Press Club last week, for example, Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi, was asked whether there was a single rule that guided his grandfather, who was anything but a utilitarian.
Gandhi, a scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has just written a new biography called "Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire," thought a moment and then said simply: "If you see something wrong, do something about it."
Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this report.
-
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, May 12, 2008; Page A02
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.
-- William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
A few decades ago, a cyclone similar to the one that ravaged Burma last week struck South Asia. As in the case of Burma, the earlier disaster caused widespread destruction among some of the poorest people on the planet. Britain and Australia were among the most generous of the countries that stepped forward with aid, but the philosopher Peter Singer pointed out that Britain's donation was about one-thirtieth the size of its investment in the Anglo-French Concorde jet project. Australia's contribution, Singer added, was less than one-twelfth the cost of Sydney's famous opera house. Going strictly by the numbers, Singer asked whether Britain valued supersonic jet travel more than 30 times as highly as the lives of 9 million refugees.
Natural disasters such as the one in Burma, where the death toll is expected to cross 100,000, bring to the fore several paradoxes of human behavior. Most people and nations do not follow the tugs of conscience about whether to help others in distress. The paradox is not that people are uncaring. Rather, it is that they fail to act in ways that they themselves know they should.
Hardly anyone would think twice about leaping into a pond to save a drowning child, if the only cost to them was ruining a pair of $200 shoes. But in that case, Singer once asked, why do people hesitate to write a $200 check to a reputable relief agency even when they are certain it would save the life of a child halfway around the world?
Psychological studies suggest the drowning child motivates us to act because a tragedy unfolding before our eyes activates our emotions, whereas abstract statistics about deaths in faraway places fail to engage us viscerally. Another reason we choose to help the child who is nearby is that we feel personally responsible for the drowning child, whereas we feel many other people are potentially responsible for the faraway child.
"We are told there are all these people who need help in Myanmar [Burma], but there are 100 million Americans who are comfortable enough to send money, plus hundreds of millions of Europeans and others, so the responsibility is very diffuse," Singer said.
Singer believes our inconsistencies in moral reasoning highlight the importance of a school of thought called utilitarianism, which suggests we should make moral decisions in a coolly scientific manner, rather than rely on intuitions, laws or religious guidelines. The philosophy is controversial because it suggests people are wrong to put the needs of those from their own countries, their neighborhoods -- or even their own species -- ahead of the needs of others. The only thing that matters, Singer argues, is what causes the largest improvement in overall well-being.
Singer backs up his words with actions: Over several decades, he has contributed a growing share of his income to charitable causes, such as the Oxfam group. He said he now gives about one-third of his income to such causes. And yet, he said, when he passes a homeless person on the street, although he feels drawn to help, he stops himself because it is not in keeping with utilitarian thinking: The same money can produce more well-being overall when channeled through a group such as Oxfam.
"The first donation was the hardest to make," he said. "The first time I wrote a check that had at least a couple of zeroes at the end -- that was the hardest thing."
Fiery Cushman, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who studies how people's moral intuitions can clash with deliberate reasoning, said the unfolding disaster in Burma highlights another dimension of the warring moral compasses we have within ourselves: People are more willing to help in the case of disasters such as the cyclone than with "mundane" and ongoing problems that are equally deadly, such as malnutrition or malaria in poor countries.
"Our reasoned judgment says people are suffering in both situations," Cushman added. "That is a good example of the mismatch between our emotional responses and rational responses."
Still, Cushman questions Singer's utilitarian approach, because he argues that emotions undergird even our most rational responses. And there is abundant evidence that even though people value reason and rationality, human beings are biologically programmed to react emotionally to visceral moral challenges.
Joshua Greene, a Harvard philosopher and neuroscientist who also studies how people think about moral dilemmas, said: "The difference between Peter Singer and others is not that he does not have normal emotions but that he is able to override his emotions because of his utilitarian values."
In the end, the rules that people choose to motivate their actions might be less important than whether they actually act -- for whatever reason. At the National Press Club last week, for example, Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi, was asked whether there was a single rule that guided his grandfather, who was anything but a utilitarian.
Gandhi, a scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has just written a new biography called "Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire," thought a moment and then said simply: "If you see something wrong, do something about it."
Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this report.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Why don't my dogs do this?
a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/05/09/funny-pictures-communist-cat-misunderstands-party/">
more cat pictures
more cat pictures
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
DON'T STAND NEAR ME
Social psychologist Michelle Hebl of Rice University once conducted an interesting experiment that helps explain the phenomenon. Hebl had volunteers evaluate a mock job applicant. Some volunteers saw the applicant sitting in a waiting room next to an overweight person, while others saw the applicant in the waiting room sitting next to a person of average weight. A variety of experiments have shown that overweight people suffer from discrimination; what Hebl wanted to find out was whether strangers in the vicinity of overweight people would share in such approbation.
Remarkably, Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people.
Remarkably, Hebl found that volunteers rated job applicants more negatively when they had been seen seated next to an overweight person than when they were seen seated next to an average weight person. The volunteers had no idea that they were showing not only a prejudice against fat people but also a bias against people who were merely in proximity to overweight people.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Oh, fantastic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/health/policy/02gene.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin
So if you have the potential for depression, diabetes, alzheimer's, heart-disease, or MS you can kiss insurance good-bye. No - that doesn't sound bad at all.
So if you have the potential for depression, diabetes, alzheimer's, heart-disease, or MS you can kiss insurance good-bye. No - that doesn't sound bad at all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)