Ciceronian Review

Interviews

I started Volume I of the Paris Review Interviews over the weekend.  I read the first four, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Truman Capote.  Each had an interesting way of talking, distinctive.  A little surprise because interviews by journalists tend to be flat -- the words change but not the tone or language.  These are not that.  It should not have surprised because I subscribe to the Paris Review and have been reading the interviews for awhile.  Still, these were all interviews from the early days of the journal.  Parker's interview sounded like her, by which I mean sounded like the woman whose stories I've read.  Same with Capote -- and also reminded me I have not read much of his work, and brought to mind a reading on the radio of a portion of The Grass Harp which was moving.  Hemingway's interview was kind of strange for me.  I have not read a biography of him or much criticism, and a long time since I read the novels.  The interview seemed quite formal, and of its time.  It reminded my of essays by James Wright or James Dickey -- talk of truth and courage and the like; dated and a little foreign.  Maybe it is just the pastness of the language, way of talking about the work that led me to think it foreign.  Eliot's interview was, as promised, funny.  I am going to reread the Four Quartets.  I wonder if I have a recording of  Murder int he Cathedral?  What a peculiar kid I was -- it was one of the records I bought as a teenager, along with Jethro Tull. 

End of History

Rawls' lectures must have been quite interesting and fun to attend.  I found the book interesting reading.  (I liked WIggins' Twelve Lectures more.)  I wish it had changed more of my views, or any.  I suppose I have not read carefully enough.  Nevertheless, I still do not see that Kant offers a sensible account of morality or political theory, nor Hegel.  Kant's philosophy still seems to be a kind of mysticism.  I suppose a big part of my difficulty is with the talk of pure reason and the like, and the unyielding commitment to human beings as distinct from the remainder of the world.  It would work for the religious, but it is not consistent with seeing the world as we live in it.  One could, I suppose, just stick the two ways of thinking together,  a sort of intellectual sandwich.  But where is the link, the peanut butter as it were?  In Kant, one just has a kind of ipse dixit that there are two ways of thinking and they somehow fit together.  But no real explanation.  In the context of morality, there is no route from the pure practical reason to this world.  The Categorical Imperative does not get anywhere because it is not about events or acts at all.  There is overt rejection of reason within causation.  Well, I am repeating myself.  What I want to say is the lectures are worth reading and provocative.  Ever so important for me to say.

I think next I will go through Parfit's book.  (Like many, I have a PDF of a draft; unlike many I am not reading hundreds of pages on a computer screen so I have never read the draft.)  One thing I am anxious (interested? curious?) about is how Parfit connects his account of identity and personhood to his moral theory.  After that, I think I will re-read some Mackie.     

Strauss-Kahn

It appears to me that the Manhattan DA has some problem prosecuting sex crimes. Earlier in the year they lost the prosecution of the policemen who used a woman too drunk to walk (but able to consent?).  Now, we get prosecutors dancing about in a fit over issues that are peripheral to the case.  Victim's dealings with immigration are not relevant to whether she was raped.  I don't see why that sort of thing would get in at trial.  I am having difficulty seeing what it was even a topic of conversation between the prosecutors and the victim.  There is physical evidence.  There is plenty for a prosecution.  But, prosecutors seem to have a hard time when the defense has resources to match.  It all reflects very poorly on the Manhattan DA and his underlings.  They have a pretty poor attitude and the treatment of the victim reeks of pique, not professionalism.

More on the Geat Pissant

I am most of the way through the section on Kant in Rawls' Lectures.  I have at last found a portion I agree with -- the practical necessity of belief in freedom.  Of course, that is not really what Kant would say and I don't think any Kantian would agree with the way I think about freedom in this context, but there is some common ground at long last.  I don't buy the pure practical reason talk, but there is a common conclusion.  In order to make sense of how people act, and how they conceive of themselves as acting, one has to assume some sort of freedom of will, and more robust than Hume would allow.  I have to work under the assumption that reasons and reasoning have some sort of efficacious powers.  In thinking about what to do, it does seem that one has to think that one can act on reason or reasons.  Even if there is some full causal determinism, one still thinks about choices, seeks to persuade, and so on, all of which are built on the idea that there is a free moral agent in attendance. Even this thinking about the thinking seems to me to suggest a commitment to freedom, as a practical matter.  I don't have to think that it is part of the full explanation of the world, or that there is some non-causal aspect to the world we live in.  So it is a practical necessity.  I also do not think it true.

Working through the longish lectures on Kant left me thinking that a great deal of Kant's philosophy is built around and of metaphor, rather abstract but still metaphor.  I still do not see quite what an end in itself is supposed to be or what it could mean in practice to treat others as ends in themselves, or, frankly, most o the rest of the stuff.  It alternates between a constricted world of all duty and a world without any moral content (because no duties can be specified).  It is a bit bothersome -- these are very smart folk and I still think they are blowing smoke and wiggling fingers, not more.

Wrong Rule

A case handed down by the Utah Court of Appeals today illustrates the oddity of Utah la won summary judgment.  It is interesting that the Court gets the relevant standards wrong, although it is quite understandable because the Utah law is a bit off kilter on this.

In Fischer v. Davidhizar, the Court of Appeals (2011 UT App 270) in footnote 7 observes that:

The trial court then stated that even if it were to grant the motion to amend,
Davidhizar still could not prevail at trial because he could not prove his fraud claims by
clear and convincing evidence. The trial court’s statement is curious because the court
had previously denied OMC’s motion for summary judgment on Davidhizar’s fraud
claims, presumably because there were significant factual disputes surrounding
Davidhizar’s fraud claims, which would warrant a trial to allow the fact finder to
determine which of the competing version of events to believe. See infra ¶¶ 14‐15.

Then at ¶¶14-15 you get a pretty standard recitation of the burdens on summary judgment and the rule that it may be granted where as a matter of law the moving party wins on the undisputed facts.  What is odd here is that the Appellate Court has moved the goals a bit.  For summary judgment, any disputed issue of material fact will do to defeat the motion.  Any dispute.  It is not a reasonable person or finder of fact standard in any form (i.e., the standard is not that a reasonable trier of fact could infer...).  So summary judgment in Utah is harder to get than either dismissal or summary judgment in federal court.  In fact, it is higher hurdle than a motion for directed verdict in Utah.  This is an effect of the requirement, as interpreted by Utah courts, that there not be any weighing credibility at the summary judgment stage, and the failure of the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court to say anything useful about a failure to prove every element at summary judgment. 

A motion for directed verdict should be granted “if the evidence [is] such that reasonable men could not arrive at a different conclusion.” Anderson v. Gribble, 513 P.2d 432, 434 (Utah 1973).  That is a higher standard than the summary judgment standard.  Which means the trial court was right, and that denial of a motion for summary judgment is not relevant to whether leave to amend should have been granted under the circumstances. 

Secrets of NIMH

For Kant, morally good action conforms to the good will, and is done, on balance, out of regard for duty, i.e., whatever other motivations may exist, the agent finds the motive of duty sufficient for action (and, I presume, sufficient to overcome countervailing motivations should they arise).  Duty gets identified through application of the categorical imperative procedure, which involves, inter alia, specification of the conditions in which the action will occur.  (And some completely ad hoc generalization of factual conditions, but some other time.)  So, for any given act or course of conduct, how does one tell if it is morally good?  By assumption (and one hopes nto at all controversial as observation of human conduct), action may have multiple motivations or be the result of a multitude of desires and preferences.  Most are irrelevant to the moral quality of the action, which is dependant on whether the act was done with a regard for duty.  In other words, all acts are the same from the outside or observation.  Moral qualities are entirely private to the agent (and God I would venture).  Kant was a Christian believer and seems not to have had serious doubts about the existence of the Christian God.  Anyway, his arguments about good will and the like presuppose God.  Back to the point -- the ethics is quite private, it is entirely internal.  There does not look to be any route to judgment of conduct by human beings. 

I find that a telling deficiency.  Fatal.  It appears that the Kantian ethics cannot guide conduct because it has no public form or content.  (Yes, I think Searle is right that Kant was a solopsist.) 

I remember teaching this material by keeping the focus on the argument that the regard for duty only needed to be sufficient to motivate action as a hypothetical.  One did not need to act against one's desires and inclination.  Where they aligned with duty, the agent was a happy actor.  That seems to me still the proper way of presenting the material.  And the material is still wrong.

Go Paul

The sad season has begun -- 2012 campaigns.  Iowa straw poll: 5,000 people vote as bribed and that is the national news.  Bachmann gets about 1,500 votes and that makes her the leader, for a couple of hours.  I understand that the race is at least a little interesting for the reporters, but that does not alter how fundamentally ridiculous the coverage is.  The Straw Poll has not picked a winner ever I think.  Of course, there is also Palin and Perry. 

Jon Stewart was right last night about Ron Paul.  If Bachmann is great for her votes, there really should be a good deal more coverage of Ron Paul.  Coverage of Paul would at least involve discussion of some ideas and reasonably coherent political view.  (It is always a little shock to listen to Paul -- he says things on a number of topics with which I come close to agreeing with - -foreign policy for example, and the wars.)  He states his beliefs without trying for cover.  Compare to Bachmann on the Sunday morning shows.  Well, I suppose that would mean Perry over Bachmann ....  There is a thought.  What a party -- a leading candidate thinks the Fed Reserve Bank head has committed treason.  It is endless months more of such ridiculous stuff.

Someone should remind the national political pundits that Bennett did not lose an election -- he was dumped in a convention, rather like the Ioaw straw poll -- a couple of thousand rabid ragamuffins. 

Worthy

I am about halfway through Rawls' Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy.  Done with the lectures on Hume and Liebniz.  The Hume lectures struck me as fair accounts, and interesting.  I am just starting the lectures on Kant.  It is a little disconcerting.  It has been a while since I read Kant, and had begin to think that my views applied to a fanciful caricature of Kant.  It is disconcerting to see Kant as weird as I had thought him.  The only thing good in itself is a good will, and morality is to make us worthy of happiness.  These are very peculiar ideas.  Some of it is a deep disinclination to think in the same general ways.  I don't see why a will would be good in itself, and am a bit doubtful that a will standing alone (so to speak) has any such moral quality at all.  It does not change the world in any way.  BUt it makes some sense in the context of religious views of the world; there one could well think that there is value inhering in a bare willing.  Anyway, the notion is hard for me to think of as a serious effort, yet it plainly is.  As well, it is now surprising to me that I got so many students to think of Kant as the great moral philosopher -- how did I do that given that I thought then as now that the project was, at the heart of it, nonsense.  

Worthy of happiness -- I have been puzzling over this all weekend.  It must be something about reasonable persons because it cannot be that there is some standard of worthiness for dogs or small children being happy.  I don't see how there could be any sense, even on the surface, to the question of whether some Schnauzer is worthy of happiness, or a ten year-old.  Why or how the lines would be drawn among kinds of creatures who are or could be happy is, at the least, a mystery.  But suppose there is something about reasonable persons that allows a line to be drawn and one can ask whether such are worthy of happiness -- it is still a very weird idea (to me).  It seems to require some very elaborate system of appraisal, reaching to every corner of every life; in other words, a deeply religious attitude towards ethics -- theory for the capricious god.  I don't see how it gets us to anything useful or intelligible about living.  On the other hand, it is important to work at seeing theories in their contexts.  Kant was a Christian and his theories do not (as far as I can tell) seriously consider the question of justifying belief in God.

 

The Third

Without Warning

By Sarah Lindsay

Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked,

both fell to the floor. A gesture

gone sadly awry. This was close to fact

and quickly became symbolic, bound to occur

in Florida, where she was surrounded

by rotting abundance and greedy insects.

One moment a laughing smile, a graceful hand

alighting on solid furniture,

a casual shift of weight,

the next, undignified splayed legs.

The shell of the table

proved to be stuffed with termite eggs.

True, it was a fall from no great height—

merely the height of herself,

and although the hollowed-out table failed,

at least the floor held,

though probably infested by termites as well,

and possibly built on a latent sinkhole,

how can you tell?

And how could she, smiling and easy,

arm moving without forethought and permission,

have forgotten fear, apparently

let go of a hard-learned lesson?

Enter a room as though it is strange.

What you recognize may have changed,

or may change without warning.

Trees fall in hurricanes

and on windless mornings,

breaching houses where people you knew

have vanished or died or stopped loving you.

She regained her feet, already composed,

brushing dust from an elbow. There would be a bruise,

but it would remind her that words are full of holes;

flung hard, like paper they fly sideways.

And a call to joy—a landscape, a face—

may, though scarcely moving, perhaps by not moving, go

in one breath from heartening to ominous,

proving to children who need more proof

that we don’t know what we know.

Source: Poetry (May 2011).

Another Poem

The Land of Nod

By James Arthur

Growing up, I barely knew the Bible, but read

and reread the part when Cain drifted east

or was drawn that way, into a place of desolation,

the land of Nod, there to begin, with a wife

of unknown origin, another race of men,

under the mark of God. As a boy, I thought Nod

would be a place where the blue scillas

would bloom gray, a country of the rack and screw,

the serrated sword, where the very serving cups

were bone. As a grown man, I’ve heard that Nod

never was a nation—of Cain’s offspring, or anyone—

but a mistranslation of “wander,” so Cain

could go wherever, and be in Nod. Far more

than in God, I believe in Cain, who destroyed

his own brother, and therefore in any city

could have his wish, and be alone.

Source: Poetry (May 2011).