Surely a sign of the coming armageddon

On the highway today I saw a Hummer Limo. Yup.

Somewhat suprising, maybe, but true

I realize this is a little late, but I'd like to state my first gut reaction that Rush Limbaugh made a classy move yesterday. He gets respect from me for that.

Appalling, isn't it?

Yes, today is my birthday. Thanks very much for all the happiness in comments on the coffee post. Thanks also to Amanda for the birthday blog-plug. Umm... it feels like I need to have something important to say. Something... controversial. After sitting on that paragraph for ten minutes, I conclude that right now I've nothing. I'll come back with something interesting to say eventually, I promise.

Ah, chemical dependence...

I started drinking coffee in the summer of 2002. I blame/credit Jones McClure Publishing, my then-employer. Mornings were difficult, and coffee helped. I also discovered around that time that coffee tastes good. I usually had two cups throughout the day at work. Around that time, I also acquired my own coffee-maker, which resulted in additional home coffee. Soon thereafter I discovered the joy of Starbucks and other caffeine vendors -- and let's not forget the best non-alcoholic beverage in the history of civilization, ca phe sua da, which is the only bit of Vietnamese I know (iced coffee with condensed milk). One day, for some odd reason, I didn't have any coffee, and developed a terrible headache. I determined with a bit of shame and a bit of excitement that I was addicted to caffeine in the literal, physiological sense. There are worse things that could happen. I just remembered to have coffee a lot, and to reach for a cup if I started getting a headache and hadn't had any in a while. This worked for a long time. This fall, coffee started being a little less nice to me. For the first time, it made me jittery, and also seemed to upset my stomach. I decided it was time for a change. I stopped making coffee, and I stopped going to coffee shops (for which I also had an independent financial reason). I tempered the non-coffee with a couple different kinds of caffeinated tea, and those only when necessary. I went nearly an entire week without coffee, starting last Friday. It really wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd feared. By yesterday, I'd gotten to the point where I could consume zero caffeine and not suffer a headache. Today I decided to re-introduce some moderation, and I bought myself a grande nonfat no-whip hazelnut mocha before my Thomas Reid seminar. The seminar was fun, and I made both good points and jokes. I'm now in a much better mood than my recent average. It seems I failed to consider the fact that there are other potential effects of caffeine withdrawal than number and severity of headaches. I think I prefer it this way -- if one's going to be slightly depressed, it's best if it's for an easily-remedial chemical reason.

Can I declare speed limits illegal in my car, too?

I read an interesting article in today's Brown Daily Herald. It began like this:

Opposition to the Patriot Act brought together Republicans, concerned residents and students alike last night at a public hearing in city hall. The Civil Liberties Resolution, a motion supported by Ward One Councilman David Segal, proposes to outlaw the Patriot Act within the city of Providence.

I'm no expert on how the various levels of government interact with one another, but I'm pretty sure that somebody once wrote that a local or state government can't override a federal law. So what's going on? I can think of three possibilities:

1. I'm confused about the Constitution of the United States.
2. The author of the BDH article is confused about what the Providence City Council is trying to do.
3. The Providence City Council is deliberately passing an unconstitutional law as a kind of protest.

I don't think that (1) is the explanation, although I hope that if it is, someone will clarify things for me. I do find some evidence for (2). At the end of the article, we're given a very different characterization of the resolution than we are at the beginning:

"This resolution says to the federal government we don't think this is a good law and we think you should change it," Secretary of the Rhode Island Green Party Greg Gerritt told The Herald. "People are not happy with the policy coming out of Washington."

Now this version sounds much more reasonable. I found what I think to be the text of the resolution at citizeninfo.org. There's a lot of whereases and indirect language in there, but at least most of the actual "resolved" text seems not to fall into the category of "making the Patriot Act illegal". But there is one interesting paragraph:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That the City Council of Providence urges the city administration and its citizens during the course of their daily life to be guided by the collective responsibility and obligation of safeguarding the constitutional protections afforded all people of our city. The Council recognizes that this is the paramount responsibility of local law enforcement personnel, appointed and elected government offices that are ultimately responsible for upholding the solemn oath they have taken to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the State of Rhode Island...

Does this mean to be read as "we urge government officials and citizens not to obey the Patriot Act because we think it's unconstitutional?" It is certainly interesting language, anyway... it's fun to hear a government encourage me to break the law. But I still don't see the "making the Patriot Act illegal". I'm curious as to how successful a strategy (3) would be likely to be. In case anyone's wondering, I give a "thumbs down" to the Patriot Act because I give a "thumbs up" to civil rights. My other question is, why is the Brown Daily Herald published weekly?

I'll give you 9:7 against assassination

Last July, there were two or three days in which the biggest national news story was the Department of Defense's "PAM" program -- the "Policy Analysis Market" was supposed to predict terrorist attacks by allowing people to invest in possible future events. I read about it on Crooked Timber. There was a big uproar about creating a "market in terror", and Congress removed its funding. Then everybody forgot about it. Today, while reading another high-quality academic internet publication, I discovered that it's back in a non-governmental form. I greet this announcement much as I did the original program's explanation. It's not reprehensible, just stupid. Because the people who would be investing don't know anything about terrorist plans. But hmm -- now that I look more closely at it, it's a bit of a sketchy web site that's doing the announcing. www.policyanalysismarket.com. "In the two months since, solid reporting has conveyed that PAM was never intended as a 'Market in Terror'. In addition, many individuals have expressed the wish that PAM be reestablished beyond government involvement. PAM will open for trading in March 2004 free of government involvement." Emphasis added. By me. There's also a link to email whomever's in charge there. Anyone know anything about this?

Reflective Equilibrium, Moral Realism

A reader named jdsm made this comment on my post about reflective equilibrium:

I'm curious as to how you defend your utilitarianism given that you seem to accept ethics itself has serious problems. If your starting intuition is that we all seem to want happiness, that's a far cry from saying happiness is \"good\". It is just saying it is desirable.

jdsm is responding to my comment, recognizing that it's not easy to see why intuitions should be given any weight at all when forming (moral and other) theories. There are a few quick responses that I think are important: (1) I've never tried to "prove" utilitarianism using a universal desire for happiness as a first principle. Those arguments have been made throughout the history of ethics, and are correctly regarded by most as more or less garbage. (2) In my defenses of utilitarianism in my blog, I've been defending the theory against arguments that are based in moral intuition. I have not really been trying to argue against the person who doesn't believe in ethics (or in the use of intuitions in ethics). This is because the comments that got me started on utilitarianism in the first place assumed moral realism. (3) A parallel case will demonstrate that it's not absurd of me to continue thinking in terms of utilitarianism, even though I'm not entirely solid on the basis of moral realism. I believe that there are very old general skeptical concerns that have yet to be answered. Two excellent and famous examples will suffice -- Descartes's argument that we can't know anything about the external world, and Hume's argument that there is no justification for belief in the principle of induction. Both arguments, I think, have never been adequately refuted. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do physics anyway. Likewise, I believe it is appropriate to work on a moral theory, even if one hasn't yet justified morality in general. If I eventually discover something about morality that is incompatable with what I've been assuming (such as, for example, that it doesn't exist), then obviously I'll take back everything I've said about utilitarianism being true. But I'm not going to wait around until I'm positive that ethics is justifiable before thinking any further, any more than I'd want science to come to a screeching halt until somebody figures out how to justify induction. If it'll make you feel better, think of all my moral theorizing as a giant conditional. "If moral realism is true and something like reflective equilibrium is an appropriate tool for the discovery of moral truths, then I hold the following beliefs and use the following arguments."