A reader writes to offer a suggestion about how to communicate about stuff that really matters, so that people know why it matters, based on his experience as a flight school instructor:
Early in the training for a private pilot certificate we were required to introduce the student to stalls and their proper recovery. If I introduced the lesson by announcing that we were going to take a detailed look at the aerodynamics of stalls and an associated condition known as a spin, the response was always one of polite attention but with the eyes rolled back into the head.
In “The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure” (Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley goes beyond the usual complaints about tenured lecture room mediocrities to say,
Tenure means not having to worry about having to find new employment in middle age, and that means a lot to professors. As the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains, “In a lot of academia, once you’re over 50 it’s hard to get another job, even if you’ve done well.” He compares it to being a computer programmer, where age seems to be a disadvantage no matter how talented you are. Taking an academic job without the promise of tenure is what Cowen calls “a massive risk.” So there would have to be a lot of money on the front end to make up for it.
In the long term, though, the costs might even out. Read More ›
At Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Shea profiles Patricia Churchland, author of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton University Press), who explains “I would read contemporary ethicists and just feel very unsatisfied. It was like I couldn’t see how to tether any of it to the hard and fast. I couldn’t see how it had anything to do with evolutionary biology, which it has to do, and I couldn’t see how to attach it to the brain.” As an eliminative materialist (there really is no “you”), she is confident that evolutionary biology will help us understand morality. With what result?
The element of cultural relativism also remains somewhat mysterious in Churchland’s writings on morality. In some ways, her project dovetails with that of Sam Harris, the “New Atheist” (and neuroscience Ph.D.) who believes reason and neuroscience can replace woolly armchair philosophy and religion as guides to morality. But her defense of some practices of primitive tribes, including infanticide (in the context of scarcity) —as well the seizing of enemy women, in raids, to keep up the stock of mates— as “moral” within their own context, seems the opposite of his approach.I reminded Churchland, who has served on panels with Harris, that he likes to put academics on the spot by asking if they think such practices as the early 19th-century Hindu tradition of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres was objectively wrong.
