Disinterested service and personal responsibility

 I recently finished The Judgment of the Nations, by Christopher Dawson, "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century" (according to his Wikipedia page).  In this book, he wrote about how England can survive as a nation of free people:

It is only by strengthening the element of vocation both in the State and in society generally that these evils can be avoided.  ... It is remarkable that when in the first half of the nineteenth century a great French writer set out to portray the principle of duty and disinterested service against the motive of power and ambition and military glory he chose an English admiral who was his country's enemy as the embodiment of his ideal. ... It is easier for the English to accept the idea of social duty and disinterested service with a sense of personal responsibility.  If this spirit can be applied to the new conditions of mass society, it is conceivable that a planned society might be created without the destruction of freedom either by impersonal bureaucracy or by inhuman tyranny.

Georgia Tech bought by Adidas

Yesterday's issue of The Washington Post included an article explaining that two Adidas officials (and an aspiring NBA agent) are on trial in a federal court in New York.  The men broke NCAA recruiting rules and allegedly defrauded the colleges recruiting a high school basketball player from Michigan (Will Hobson, "Any probes by NCAA will wait till trials end," Page D1, October 6, 2018).

The same day, I received the Fall 2018 issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine.  Its cover included the teaser: "Inside the deal with Adidas." An article by Tony Rehagen provided the following details: over six years, Adidas will provide a total of $17.46 million worth of apparel and $1.2 million cash.  (Adidas will give bonuses if the football team or men's basketball team appears in a championship game.)  According to the article, "college athletics is big business."

And that includes branding.  As part of the deal, Tech revamped the teams' uniforms (all featuring the Adidas logo), with a new color and new wordmark (here).  The football helmet has a new version of the GT logo.  The football team also got a renovated locker room that cost $4.5 million; of course, it features the Adidas logo also.

The men and women who play on these teams will also get workout gear to wear around campus.  But they won't be compensated when Adidas or Georgia Tech sells replicas of their uniforms to students and fans, because of NCAA rules.  The athletes' compensation is restricted by the NCAA, a cartel that exploits them and refuses to share the millions that it receives in various media and marketing deals (including deals for video games featuring players' likenesses, an issue in the O'Bannon lawsuit).  The players have no association to represent them; they have no power except the power to opt out (which some do, working in professional leagues without playing for college teams).  

Because of the NCAA, Adidas supposedly commits a crime when it gives money to high school athletes, but it is acceptable to give gear and money to the athletic departments who are recruiting and exploiting these athletes.  The trial in New York is about people who broke NCAA rules, but the NCAA is the guilty party. 

The Case against Automation

In "Skilled Perception, Authenticity, and The Case against Automation," David Zoller argued that we shouldn't automate everything.  Automating an activity implies that satisfactory performance of that task is sufficient; there is no need to do it excellently.   But doing something excellently is necessary for happiness (cf. Aristotle).

Moreover, each person defines himself by certain vocations (such as being a parent or a teacher or a firefighter), and fulfilling each vocation requires doing certain types of activities.  Automating those activities would contradict the requirement of the vocation.  For example, how can one be a teacher if the associated activities such as demonstrating and explaining something for one's students are done by machines or computers?

Acquiring the skills to perform the duties of a vocation requires training, which requires activity.  One cannot learn to perform a task that, because it is automated, one never does. Because humans and the time and resources available are limited, one can pursue only a limited number of vocations, and so one's skills are limited, which makes the skills that one has mastered more valuable as a sign of one's competence and ability to accomplish something.

David Zoller, "Skilled Perception, Authenticity, and The Case against Automation," in Robot Ethics 2.0, Patrick Lin, Ryan Jenkins, and Keith Abney, editors, Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-19-065295-1.

Discounting moral concerns for the greater good

On Friday, The Washington Post had an article by Sarah Kaplan about research on a chimera technique.  (Such research cannot receive federal funding.)  The article mentioned the moral and ethical concerns from different viewpoints but also included this quote from Vardit Ravitsky at the University of Montreal:

The more you can show that it stands to produce something that will actually save lives ... the more we can demonstrate that the benefit is real, tangible, and probable---overall it shifts the scale of risk-benefit assessment, potentially in favor of pursuing research and away from those concerns that are more philosophical and conceptual.

Ravitsky's argument is a utilitarian one ("it's useful, so let's do it") that prioritizes the ends over the means and ignores any reasonable bounds that reflect our values and beliefs about the dignity of human life. 

Academic Freedom

As described in the post by Robert P. George, Princeton University formally adopted the principles of the University of Chicago report on academic freedom, which includes the following principles:

The ideas of different members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.

How to Find a Spouse

From First Things, an article by Betsy VanDenBerghe on what is truly important when looking for a spouse. She lists the five factors that John Van Epp (author of How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk), says are essential to consider in a relationship:

• compatibility in familial, religious, and financial values and priorities,
• communication skills like self-disclosure, mutual assertiveness, and ability to apologize,
• behavior in other relationships,
• patterns of family background, and
• a healthy conscience (neither underactive nor overactive).

Organ Harvesting in China

Wesley Smith's description of the report by two Canadian lawyers that describes how Chinese authorities are harvesting organs from members of the Falun Gong and a call for a boycott of scientific and medical interchange with China concerning transplantation

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code describes a statistician in Toronto who figured out how to buy only winning lottery tickets.

More Unwritten Laws of Engineering

Part 3 of 3 has tips regarding personal and professional behavior in the workplace.

Links to Parts 1 and 2 can be found in my earlier post.

Via Mechanical Engineering Magazine.

Comments on George Bailey

Joe Carter (in On the Square today) has an article about George Bailey, the protagonist of the classic film It's a Wonderful Life. Carter discusses Bailey and Howard Roark, from Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead.

Carter' conclusions:

What makes George Bailey one of the most inspiring, emotionally complex characters in modern popular culture is that he continually chooses the needs of his family and community over his own self-interested ambitions and desires—and suffers immensely and repeatedly for his sacrifices.

and

Capra’s underlying message is thus radically subversive: It is by serving our fellow man, even to the point of subordinating our dreams and ambitions, that we achieve both true greatness and lasting happiness.

Academic Ostpolitik

Articles by and about Todd Hartch (a history professor at Eastern Kentucky University who wrote a letter opposing the university's decision to extend benefits to domestic partners akin to those available to married couples): Hartch's experience in his own words (from Public Discourse) and End Academic Ostpolitik (from First Thoughts).

The Deadly Choices at Memorial

New York Times article by Sheri Fink on how patients were killed at a beleaguered New Orleans hospital.

The Case for Marriage

Editorial highlighting important aspects of traditional marriage.

Hat tip: First Thoughts.

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler

The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler is a television movie airing tonight on CBS. The First Things blog has a note from Cynthia L. Haven, a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, about Sendler, a Polish Catholic, and the network of women who helped her.

Potterville

The December 2008 issue of Touchstone has a piece by Anthony Esolen about the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Esolen discusses how George Bailey's decisions (to rescue his brother, to stay home and run the building and loan, to use his own cash to save it in a bank run, and others) - not merely his existence - are important and helped prevent Bedford Falls from becoming Potterville.

He then goes on to say that most of us live in a Potterville, a place of abandonment, where we are citizens of no town at all, where we don't care what our neighbors do. But we can still turn away from "the universal wolf of avarice, ... the desire to have, have, have," by using the gifts that God gave us and staying where we are and loving our neighbors. And that would be a wonderful life.

A Marriage in Full

Also in the May, 2008, issue of First Things was an article by Gary A. Anderson about marriage, entitled "A Marriage in Full." It includes the following quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whose The Cost of Discipleship I am still reading):

Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race until the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his kingdom. In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.

and

It is not your love that sustains marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

Anderson then goes on to discuss the Book of Ruth and its depiction of marriage, and he concludes with "The Book of Ruth tells us that within the sacred bond of marriage there lies a symbol of the love of God for humanity."

Men and Beasts

The op-ed page in yesterday's Washington Post Outlook section included an opinion by Russell Paul La Valle about the decision to support giving rights to various primates by Spain's parliament, the Cortes Generales. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial about this on Friday.

In particular, the parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the recommendations of the Great Ape Project, which seeks to extend human rights to great apes. According to Reuters, the resolution "is expected to become law and the government is now committed to update the statute book within a year to outlaw harmful experiments on apes in Spain."

It is hard for me to see how mere beasts can have rights. That does not follow from our responsibility as stewards to care for animals and protect them from unnecessary suffering and death. Often one hears that rights accompany responsibilities. But apes have no responsibility to humans.

When Pope Benedict addressed the United Nations, he praised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and said:

"The rights recognized and expounded in the declaration apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high point of God's creative design for the world and for history. ... They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations."

Lord of the Flies

I recently finished listening to Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I had read it many years ago (probably in high school) but remembered it always as a dark and violent picture of how bad anarchy is. I was not wrong. It is a violent tragedy.

Brief plot summary and spoiler: an undefined number of British schoolboys (ages 5 to 12) survive their plane crashing into a deserted island (resembling something in the South Pacific). Ralph, initially elected the leader, tries to organize them in building shelters and keeping a fire going to attract rescue, but most of the other boys don't want to do that and eventually leave to form a tribe of hunters. The resulting violent conflict ends when they are suddenly rescued.

In thinking about Ralph's efforts to form a society, I kept thinking of how the family is the basic unit of society. The collegial, democratic model sounds wonderful, but it will work only if there is an authority to set the rules, enforce them, and punish lawbreakers. In the book that was absent - the little ones were interested only in playing and eating, and the bigger ones felt no responsibility to help Ralph, and Ralph didn't try to punish anyone. Another model would have been to setup little family-like groups, with two older boys (like big brothers) sharing the responsibilities of caring for a small number of little ones. Perhaps the big brothers would have formed an attachment to their little brothers and worked to provide for them. Having two big brothers would enable them to share that work and the community work of tending the fire and hunting. (The way two parents share the work of child-rearing and income-earning?)

Ultimately, despite Ralph's attempts to create a social order, the boys' downfall is that, in some of them, the evil part of them (which exists in all of us, thanks to original sin) overcomes friendship and cooperation and leads to selfishness and pride and fear and jealousy and hate and senseless violence.

It becomes a world without rules, without authority; a world where everyone does what they want without considering the long-term consequences; a violent tragedy.

The Ethical Mind

The March 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review has an edited conversation with Howard Gardner, a professor of psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Professor Gardner's research on how professionals work is now a book, Five Minds for the Future.

Gardner described five minds (or sets of skills):

1. The disciplined mind is how one gains expertise.

2. The synthesizing mind combines information from a variety of sources.

3. The creating mind looks for new ideas and discovers new things.

4. The respectful mind tries to understand others.

5. The ethical mind considers how one's actions affect the world.

A whistle-blower is using his ethical mind by considering the impact of his company's actions on its customers or the environment.
An ethical mind begins at home, as a child learns his parents' values.
Seeing others behave badly undermines the ethical mind, while seeing others do the right things strengthens it.

Gardner points out that conflicts betwen stakeholders make ethical behavior difficult.
He states that journalists face difficulties because they desire to report objectively on important events, but the public desires sensationalism, and the publisher wants advertising dollars and a paper that avoids offending advertisers.