I took out a rare book on the Philosophy of Food yesterday with the intent of reading the aesthetics chapters as preparation for my next essay. When I saw that Scruton had a chapter on manners, though, it was inevitable that I’d end up reading that first. It’s available online here. I think it summarises quite well how I find him simultaneously insightful and infuriating. First, the insight:

When manners are forgotten, the meal as a social occasion disappears, as is already happening. People now eat distractedly before a TV screen, replenish their bodies in the street, or walk around the workplace with a sandwich in their hands. When I first taught in America, I was shocked to find students carrying into the lecture hall pizzas and hot dogs, which they proceeded to stuff into their faces while staring in mild curiosity at the dude on the dais. Later, colleagues told me that this behavior didn’t spring from the university ethos; it began at school—it began in the home itself. Already the most important moment of social renewal—on which families depend for their inner self-confidence, and out of which serious friendships grow—was becoming marginal for the young. Eating was shrinking into a function, and it is not surprising if a generation of children brought up in this way should find it difficult or alien to settle down in any relationship other than a provisional and temporary one.

This is hyperbolic, of course, and one can wonder whether it’s an appropriate source of anguish when there are so many other issues in the world competing for our attention. But I don’t feel at all uncomfortable embracing the idea that food is essentially social in its function, and viewing it purely nutritionally is to in some way miss out on key human experiences. One of the more obvious holes in my life since I’ve been single is the loneliness of meal times. On the few days a week when I do have friends over to share over wine whatever it is that I’ve cooked, the experience is inevitably heightened in countless ways. And we shouldn’t shy away from saying that insofar as this happens less often nowadays, that’s a shame and a sad thing for us to be missing.

I also feel that Scruton is spot on when he draws an analogy with manners in the sexual realm:

Even in these days of hasty seductions and brief affairs, sexual partners have a choice between fully human and merely animal relations. The pornography industry is constantly pushing us toward the second option. But culture, morality, and what is left of piety aim at the first. Their most important weapon in this battle is tenderness. Tender feelings do not exist outside a social context. Tenderness grows out of care and courtesy, out of graceful gestures, and out of a quiet, attentive concern. It is something you learn, and politeness is a way of teaching it. Not for nothing do we use the word “rude” to denote both bad manners and obscene behavior. The person whose sexual strategies involve coarse jokes, explicit gestures, and lascivious embraces, who stampedes toward his goal without taking “no” or “maybe” or “not yet” for an answer, is looking for sex of the wrong kind—sex in which the other is a means to excitement, rather than an object of concern. Entered into in this frame of mind, sex is not an accepting but a discarding of the other, a way of maintaining an iron solitude in the midst of union. That is why it is so deeply offensive, and why women, especially, feel violated when men treat them in this way.

I suspect that this sort of talk worries liberals, but look. Nothing here commits one to claiming that casual sex should be outlawed and clamped down upon. It is perfectly consistent with acknowledging freedom to also recognise that certain modes of interaction are more valuable, and Scruton is more charitably read as offering an argument here for the superiority of pleasure delaying. And that doesn’t even have to be moral superiority. I think it suffices for us to agree with his claim that we only believe such sexual relationships end up being more emotionally fulfilling and enriching. Despite the modern world’s comfortable relationship with casual sex, I think it may be surprising how many people even of my generation agree with the thrust of his position here. Very few of my friends consciously affirm the value of one night stands. The majority concede that they only repeat such acts insofar as they forget that they seldom bring real pleasure.

But now for the infuriation:

The rudeness of the glutton and the face stuffer are obvious. Equally ill-mannered—though it is politically incorrect to say so—is the food faddist, who makes a point of announcing, wherever he goes, that just this or this can pass his lips, and all other things must be rejected, even when offered as a gift. I was taught to eat whatever was placed before me, choosiness being a sin against hospitality and a sign of pride. But vegetarians and vegans have now succeeded in policing the dinner table with their non-negotiable demands, ensuring that even when invited into company, they sit down alone.

This is where he loses me. If I’m right in reading the implication here to be that the previous values that I was willing to recognise must always be decisive rather than weighable considerations, so that it’s somehow necessary to preserve the social function of food even if it’s at the cost of eating meat which causes agony to animals and destroys the future of the planet, then this must be the most preposterous proposition Scruton has penned. How could the value of manners and sharing food ever trump avoiding having that kind of evil stacked high on your plate?

His observations are reasonable. He just takes them too far.

That’s how many animals are slaughtered to feed global meat-eating, all year round. It amounts to about 60 billion annually. When I became vegetarian last month it was strictly with environmental reasons in mind. Greenhouse gas considerations provided ample support for the conclusion that meat-eating was unjustifiable. It’s only now that I realise just how morally overdetermined my decision was, and how I was blind for years to the equally powerful arguments from animal welfare. And when the number of animals slaughtered annually outnumbers the human population tenfold, and when as Westerners our demand is disproportionately higher than any crude mean figure could convey, it’s clear that the argument that one individual’s demand makes no difference will never gain logical traction. Those eating meat regularly will be responsible for the pain of at least ten animals a year.

These unfathomable numbers only intensify when fish are factored into the equation. Peter Singer explains the findings of a recent report:

The most startling revelation in the report, however, is the staggering number of fish on which humans inflict these deaths. By using the reported tonnages of the various species of fish caught, and dividing by the estimated average weight for each species, Alison Mood, the report’s author, has put together what may well be the first-ever systematic estimate of the size of the annual global capture of wild fish. It is, she calculates, in the order of one trillion, although it could be as high as 2.7tn.

So that’s at least 32,000 fish a second, on top of the 2,000 animals. And Singer adds why this is also a moral issue:

There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed fish. Fish caught in nets by trawlers are dumped on board the ship and allowed to suffocate.

PETA claim that “scientists who study pain are also in complete agreement that the pain response in fish is basically identical to the pain response in mammals and birds.”

There’s also an interview in The Observer today with PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk. This part stood out to me:

Is it Peta’s strategy to upset everyone, I ask Newkirk. “No,” she says. “Our mission is to provoke thought. People have been taught to disregard what happens to pigs or chickens, to not think about the suffering they go through. Our job is to make them think. We’re not out to be popular.”

Sometimes raw numbers provoke thought best.

Try guessing who it is mapping out the logic here:

If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “when sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “the liberty protected by the Constitution”?

That was written by none other than Scalia in his dissenting opinion for Lawrence v. Texas.

The reason he doesn’t embrace the conclusion he maps out, of course, is that he doesn’t accept the antecedent in this conditional. Scalia believes the state does have an interest in enforcing morality, and he further believes that homosexuality is an example of immorality.

Interestingly, I think I am with him on the former claim. It’s just the latter that I obviously reject. I’ve just finished a political philosophy essay on the concept of a right to do the wrong thing. My conclusion, roughly, is that contrary to Waldron’s and Dworkin’s claims there is no such thing. If something is wrong, then it is always going to be an open question whether or not the state should interfere with it. But I don’t think this has any illiberal implications because all the things we wish to tolerate are not, upon reflection, genuine examples of wrongdoing.

I’ll link to the paper when I can. I just have to wait a few weeks for the submission deadline to pass.

Here’s a quick question. When we invoke the value of privacy to defend why some law or enforcement procedure is inappropriate, surely we mean to reference the fact that we will feel watched and uncomfortable, and we worry that the power we are granting the state is ripe for abuse and overreach?

I thought so, and I would think Justice Kagan was with me when she claimed that a person’s home is their most “intimate and familiar space”. It’s clear that live CCTV recordings in one’s living room, for instance, could be rejected on these grounds, even if crimes like domestic abuse would consequently decline.

But if that is all true, I wonder how the value of privacy is also supposed to motivate a ban on drug-sniffing dogs and the taking of thermal images. These detect heat and smells as a means of finding crime. They don’t observe us or reasonably intimidate us in any obvious way. What is protected by ruling that the police even need a warrant for these?

If Chief Justice Roberts is to be believed, it’s impossible. Here are his comments this week on Obama’s decision to keep implementing DOMA despite deeming it unconstitutional:

If he has made a determination that executing the law by enforcing the terms is unconstitutional, I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions… rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait ’til the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’

I speculate here, but it doesn’t seem too hard to work out what Obama’s logic will be. Let’s give this a go.

The American political system is built on a divisions of powers such that one body makes laws, another enforces them and another checks that those laws are constitutional. Liberty and prosperity have been built for centuries on those involved with government adhering to these designated roles and respecting the system. The day the President starts picking which laws to enforce, rather than following the decrees of the courts and Congress, is the day the system starts to dismantle. This holds even if the President believes a law is unconstitutional, because the point is that it’s not his place to make such decisions.

The most shocking thing is that the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice is apparently incapable of seeing the value of respecting law and power separations. Instead, he implies that the President is cowardly for fulfilling his constitutional duties.

This Bill Keller column on Bradley Manning is a few weeks old now, but I found it saved and unread on my iPad yesterday. I was struck how, on the one hand, Keller naturally suggests The Times greatly appreciates the work of whistleblowers, and would always be open to publishing their leaks if they contained information of public interest. And yet Keller also quotes The Times’s Max Frankel on a past scenario analogous to Manning’s:

When the government moved to prosecute Ellsberg, we felt no obligation to assist him… He was committing an act of civil disobedience and presumably knew that required accepting the punishment. We were privately pleased that the prosecution overreached and failed, but we did not consider ourselves his partner in any way.

This position strikes me as insufferably schizophrenic, and possibly not even coherent. Yes, First Amendment rights may apply to the press in a way that they don’t to government officials, but if you recognise the strong reasons for and value of political transparency, it’s hard to see how you can defend your own right to be free from prosecution whilst thinking the source essential to your work can fairly face the full wrath of the law. How can a crucial part of a valuable and legal activity itself be rightly illegal? If you have no obligation to assist a source and their punishment is required, why would one be ‘privately pleased’ when prosecution failed? Any reason for punishment of the whistleblower will also be a reason counting strongly against The Times’s recognised right to air such information. It worries me greatly that the paper views their relationship with sources in this way.

Roger Scruton has a typically conservative column in the NYT warning against the dangers of sweeping social and institutional changes, which were often well-intentioned but brought misery. World War One, Afghanistan and maybe even the Arab Spring seem like arguably reasonable examples. But he ludicrously adds to this gloomy list the movement for marriage equality:

What could be more sensible than to extend marriage to homosexuals, granting them the security of an institution devoted to lifelong partnership? The result will be improvements all around – not just improved toleration of homosexuals, but improvement in the lives of gay couples, as they adapt to established norms. Optimists have therefore united to promote this cause, and, as is so often the case, have turned persecuting stares on those who dissent from it, dismissing them as intolerant, “homophobic,” “bigoted,” offenders against the principles of liberal democracy. Of course the optimists may be right. The important fact, however, is that hope is more important to them than truth.

People interested in truth seek out those who disagree with them. They look for rival opinions, awkward facts and the grounds that might engender hesitation.

I can tolerate and even often embrace a conservatism which urges caution when pushing for progressive values without concern for their likely consequences. And I’d even go further than most in strongly defending Scruton against the allegation that his position is built on bigotry. But it does become very hard to take his objections to marriage equality sincerely when he implicitly compares it to the Bolshevik Revolution. The failure of his argument lies in his own claim that the movement is built on hope whilst being blind to truth. The reason marriage reform differs so drastically from all the catastrophic social projects he highlights is that we do have evidence that it won’t cause harm. And that means that the weight of the liberal arguments should even convince conservatives, unless they insist on the sort of implausibly severe skepticism that Scruton seems to support.

I think David Frum’s transformation on this issue captures the point best:

[T]he case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test.

Since 1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact.

If people like me had been right, we should have seen the American family become radically more unstable over the subsequent decade and a half.

Instead — while American family stability has continued to deteriorate — it has deteriorated much more slowly than it did in the 1970s and 1980s before same-sex marriage was ever seriously thought of.

What is Scruton’s response to this? How is it that marriage equality’s defenders do not care about the truth? As Ezra Klein noted this week, opponents cannot even rely on the lack of a sociological consensus about the impact gay couples adopting has on children. This is from the American Sociological Association’s amicus curiae brief, submitted to the Supreme Court:

The claim that same-sex parents produce less positive child outcomes than opposite-sex parents—either because such families lack both a male and female parent or because both parents are not the biological parents of their children—contradicts abundant social science research. Decades of methodologically sound social science research, especially multiple nationally representative studies and the expert evidence introduced in the district courts below, confirm that positive child wellbeing is the product of stability in the relationship between the two parents, stability in the relationship between the parents and child, and greater parental socioeconomic resources. Whether a child is raised by same-sex or opposite-sex parents has no bearing on a child’s wellbeing.

The clear and consistent consensus in the social science profession is that across a wide range of indicators, children fare just as well when they are raised by same-sex parents when compared to children raised by opposite-sex parent.

(Video: a Dish reader asks Andrew Sullivan if any empirical evidence would change his mind about marriage equality.)

So preparing from scratch two five thousand word essays in just over a month has proven harder work than I imagined, especially when a week spent house hunting for next year is factored in. I barely have time to read journals right now, nevermind devoting hours to writing about things. So I’m not sure when I’ll be back. There’s probably not much point checking in here for a while though. À bientôt.

Right now I wish I could just fast forward to June. I have five Springsteen concerts in one month lined up. I’m standing for all of them. I intend on queuing from early morning onwards every time, so I have a great chance of making the front row at least once. London, Glasgow, Coventry, London, Cardiff. I saw him play four times last summer, and twice four years ago, so I’m almost doubling the number of times I’ve seen him play. And since each gig lasts well over three hours, I can expect to hear around eighteen hours of music for my money. I can’t think of anything I’d rather have on the horizon.

Michael Brendan Doughtery thinks it’s inevitable that dirt will be dug up about Bergoglio:

Are we to believe that Buenos Aires has been spared the moral rot and corruption found almost everywhere else in the Catholic clergy? Or, more likely, do we have another Cardinal who looked the other way, and studiously avoided confrontation with the “filth” in the church, no matter the danger to children or to the cause of the church?  Presumption and detraction are sins, but Catholics should gird themselves; the sudden spotlight on his reign may reveal scandal and negligence.

On that note, an old Hugh O’Shaughnessy column is doing the rounds. The manner in which Bergoglio aided the government crackdown on revolutionary figures, which Catholic liberation theologians of the time backed and sometimes even joined, seems deeply disturbing:

The extent of the church’s complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship’s political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio’s name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to choose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment.

Not too surprising, is it? You’d think the man chosen to hold the most special relationship with God would at least set a better moral example than me.

There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavour with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.

– Cicero.

Peter Singer checks in on Oxfam’s new project to evaluate the ethics of the major companies that supply our food. Most score poorly on every issue, but especially on the environment:

[T]he big brands receive low grades from Oxfam, mostly for failing even to track the emissions for which they are directly or indirectly responsible. Nestlé was the only company to achieve a “fair” rating, with Associated British Foods at the bottom, with a “very poor” rating.

Singer’s take-away:

The changes that have already occurred show that if big corporations know that their consumers want them to act more ethically, they will do so. To be effective, such a campaign requires individual consumers to take it upon themselves to become better informed about the food and beverages that they consume, to make their voices heard, and to make purchasing choices that are influenced by ethics as well as by taste and price.

So this is not what vegetarians who aren’t vegans with a concern for animal welfare want to hear. I thought I was in the ethical clear insofar as I avoid those caged eggs in crap packaging – which also taste inferior – and always pay extra for free range. Turns out there is good reason to think “not caged”, “free range” and so on are far from guarantees that chickens are roaming freely and being treated well. The food industry appears to twist the meaning of these terms and ensure the bare minimum is done to meet the requirements. A little access to the outdoors and the absence of a cage is sufficient to merit the labels, even if overcrowding ensures the inhumanity persists. I need to look into this a little more. I’m sure there will be simple ways to get better eggs that are worth taking.

Update: Viva confirms that the same bleak situation applies to Britain. (Hat tip: Lou Federer). I’m going to find some local suppliers in town tomorrow and see how many questions they’ll answer.

“To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.” -A. Bourdain

— HuffPost Taste (@HuffPostTaste) March 13, 2013

Seriously?

By the way – I think I discovered the ultimate vegetarian dish last night. The prep work is insanely lengthy, as is the cooking time, but letting vegetables stew and slowly bake to make soft and sweet ratatouille is really the way to go. This one was, of course, from Ottolenghi’s Plenty. The recipe and instructions are online here. It was just marvellous. Courgette, aubergine, butternut squash, peppers, parsnips, potatoes and much more create some wonderful mixtures of taste and colour. Just serve it with basmati rice and try it.

The Swan reports that legal proceedings have been halted between Shannon and St Hugh’s after an offer from the latter to negotiate an out of court agreement. Since the mainstream media seems to have either lost interest or missed this development, I thought it was worth flagging. Damien sent me The Swan’s piece, so I can confirm that it’s accurate.

I eagerly await news of whether these discussions reap rewards. For Damien’s sake, I hope they do. I also hope any offer he receives is explicitly precedent-setting and opens the door to policy review and reform. First, so that this injustice doesn’t befall any future applicants. Second, so that Damien doesn’t face any unnecessary personal dilemma of conscience.

Fortunately, an ad hoc, isolated offer in breach of requirements that will nevertheless continue seems quite unlikely. But I also would have thought that Oxford, inevitably suffering from an image problem when stories like these develop, would avoid paying a QC to make their case when Damien is presenting himself in court. The contrast was offensively stark. But we will see. I’ll post as soon as I hear anything else.

[There are] no cost-free, risk-free ways of finding such huge sums of money [for investment]. Not at a time when Labour left the cupboard bare and we still have the second highest deficit in Europe, behind only Greece.

That’s Conservative party rhetoric, but it’s straight from the mouth of Nick Clegg. He gives off the appearance of still being wholly under the austerity delusion. So the job of tugging government in the right direction is left to the lower Liberals like Cable. But insofar as Clegg and Danny Alexander speak and act as if they swapped seats in Parliament, what’s the point right now in seeing this as a fruitful coalition built on conflict? On fiscal policy, the unity is clear and complete.

It seems that in conceding that the national economic debate was lost and that the coalition’s philosophy was here for good, I may have joined many in being too pessimistic too soon. Cameron and Osborne are not for turning, but it may not be up to them much longer. It looks increasingly possible that a mood is developing which could finally facilitate the axing of austerity. A coup could be in the works.

First, the public seems to have finally shaken off the silly notion that this pain they are suffering is essential, courageous medicine. As of today, a poll indicates only one in five still back this futile self-flagellation. In contrast, three in five believe that austerity is causing harm. Even Conservative voters are split fifty-fifty. Many more polls like this and Westminster will start taking note.

Meanwhile, Cable is growing bolder in his blatant opposition to current fiscal policy. His fellow Cabinet ministers, even on the Conservative side, are losing discipline and opposing cuts contrary to their own departmental interests. The triple A downgrade still lingers in the memory. Theresa May, it seems, is already slowly sowing the seeds for a future leadership bid. And as The Guardian reported last Saturday, UKIP’s emergence in the Eastleigh by-election is creating anxious bums on the Tory backbenches. It would take only 15% of the Conservative parliamentary party to force a leadership contest and make this government self-implode.

When you add to that the embarrassment of the OBR publicly rebuking Cameron’s lie late last week, insisting that they do and always did grant that austerity harms growth, you can start to share my hunch that there are green shoots to be grabbed here.

Who knows what the fallout would look like if they were grabbed. The coalition has in principle locked itself in for a five year term, but if the PM is ousted it’s hard to imagine a new regime lasting two years. And yet both coalition parties will, clearly, have a strong interest in avoiding a return to the polls any time soon. Both could get ready for a beating.

But it’s not like the alternative is any better. Economic sense has finally infected the electorate. It seems inevitable now that it will have to seep up to Downing Street at some point.

(Graph via Krugman).

A friend sent me this. There’s not much to say, really. Just watch.

It’s Machiavelli himself, of course. Alexander Lee explains:

Although we should be wary about dismissing The Prince as entirely insincere, Machiavelli’s arrest warrant helps to explain the work’s apparent incongruity. More a bid to suck up to those who had robbed him of everything than a true divergence from his republican tendencies, The Prince was a cri du coeur born of suffering and despair, but lacking any necessary links with his other works. Seen in this light, Machiavelli himself appears much less the puzzling proponent of cynical monarchism, and more an innocent victim searching for hope. Indeed, in the end, it seems that Machiavelli was far less ‘Machiavellian’ than we might like to think.

Let’s not forget that Rousseau knew and noted this a good few centuries ago:

Machiavelli was a proper man and a good citizen; but, being attached to the court of the Medici, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country’s oppression. The choice of his detestable hero, Caesar Borgia, clearly enough shows his hidden aim; and the contradiction between the teaching of the Prince and that of the Discourses on Livy and the History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has so far been studied only by superficial or corrupt readers. The Court of Rome sternly prohibited his book. I can well believe it; for it is that Court it most clearly portrays.

[From The Social Contract].

So over the next two months I need to read about from scratch and write 5,000 words on each of two topics: the idea of the right to do wrong, and the argument that food can be an aesthetic. Diverse, and both fun. But hey – now I’m not doing a doctorate, I can afford to take risks and try new topics, even if it means lower marks in comparison to developing the essays I’ve written during term time.

I plan on blogging about both of these as I begin to explore the literature shortly, but for now a rough overview of what’s going on in each and what I presume to be at stake.

—

The idea of the right to do wrong comes up in a lot of liberal political theory. The claim is that there are plenty of things that we can coherently class as wrong – like not donating a lot of money to charity to relieve poverty – but which we should nevertheless have a legal right to do. We should tolerate such immoral behaviour. A liberal state shouldn’t enforce the demands of morality.

That may sound plausible, but note some strange implications. Naturally, the right to do wrong can’t cover things like murdering and raping people. And it seems that the best explanation of why we have no right to do these things is precisely because they are wrong. So what’s going on here? What determines the scope of the right to do wrong? Why does it apply to some demands of morality and not others?

This inquiry is completely open-ended to me. I arrive with few prior commitments as to what the answer should be. My only suspicion is that those who argue for such a right want to do so so that practices like owning pornographic material can be legally defended, despite being wrong. But my natural reaction here is to think, no – if pornography is genuinely wrong, then of course we have no right to it. We only have a right to it on the condition that it isn’t immoral, as most modern liberals believe. We concede too much ground – and unnecessary ground – if we grant the immorality of such activities.

Then again, it looks like plenty of big dogs are on board with such a right – not least Jeremy Waldron and David Enoch. So I may be easily misunderstanding something. And I have no clue how I wish to tackle the charitable donations case. But I’ll be pursuing this path on the advice of Cecile Fabre, who told me that she suspects that whilst the right to do wrong is readily and frequently invoked by liberal theorists to justify the legality of various practices, the theory underlying it may be fishy. We will see. But it will by implication raise broader questions about the relationship between law and morality and the foundation of legal rights, so I look forward to being able to indulge in Hart, Dworkin and all the other great thinkers in this field.

—

Second, looking at food in aesthetics was inevitable given my recent interests. So many key questions arise in this discussion. For instance, there’s the question of whether aesthetic experiences require some sort of intellectual activity like contemplation, where the object of the experience conveys meaning. If so, maybe it looks like food’s status is in trouble. But then most want to say that music can be both meaningful and aesthetic, and it’s not clear why tastes couldn’t work similarly obscurely but genuinely. And isn’t that precisely what happens when, for instance, a romantic lover cooks a lamb casserole on Valentine’s Day, as opposed to preparing a mere cheese sandwich? Regardless, it’s not even clear whether this intellectual picture is even necessary for aesthetic experiences. Music could surely be aesthetic without it.

Then there’s questions like: can food be aesthetic without being artistic? If it is, then it would work roughly like natural beauty in sunsets. The point would be that flavours are intrinsically aesthetic without any human intent or activity underpinning them. But that doesn’t look likely. I’ve been most inclined to insist food can be aesthetic at the moments when I’ve tasted a really grand dish in an excellent restaurant, and immediately wondered about the thought that must have under-lied its execution in the mind of the chef that chose to mix particular textures and flavours. Could tasting a strawberry alone be aesthetic, or is this property properly reserved for more complex tastings?

There’s the question of whether food can’t be aesthetic because it is purposive. That is, our practical interest in consuming it for nutrition ruins things, because art is about detached appreciation. That seems implausible. Buildings can be beautiful even when we use them. And anyway, wine tasters are notorious for not actually swallowing the drink, but spitting it out after savouring the flavours.

And how about whether we can sufficiently account for why food seems to be aesthetic in terms of the fact that dishes often look beautiful, so it is in fact an ordinary form of visual aesthetics. Or is there more to it than that? Could food be aesthetic in a blind-tasting session? Some Spanish restaurants serve food in the pitch black, I believe, at least if Almodovar’s Broken Embraces was accurate (it’s in a deleted scene).

Oh, and a friend informed me today that Heston Blumenthal calls himself a scientist rather than an artist. The logic is something like this. He tests dishes to see what works using established practical techniques. The kitchen is a laboratory. This looks absurd to me. Chefs don’t aspire to find the ‘truth’ in any ordinary sense. And if practical knowledge of the sort they have suffices to nullify the aesthetic dimension, then painters and filmmakers and so on look rather screwed too insofar as they have knowledge of the technical sides of their respective crafts. Still, the guy does this for a living. It’s worth considering if there’s any truth in what he thinks about his own job.

I have much firmer prior commitments on this one. I feel very strongly that food can be aesthetic. But I suspect I’m going to face one paradox that will be particularly acute. On the one hand, I want to see the chef as essential to the process. The real aesthetic experiences when eating arise because of our recognition of the fact that someone thought carefully and succeeded in producing and executing a great recipe. However, I also strongly want to resist the intellectualist picture which claims that the aesthetic is about conveying meaning. Food is not about that. When I had roasted parsnips and swede with dukkah, yoghurt and grapes at NOPI the other week, the sensations it induced were undoubtedly and exceptionally aesthetic, but they weren’t saying anything to me. So I seem to want a conception of the aesthetic for food that involves human input but retains the simplicity of natural phenomena. I don’t know if that will work. And I retain respect for the sceptical view that there simply must be something that distinguishes looking at a Cezanne painting from eating a good dinner.

Drum wonders what explains why the NYT’s Green blog failed:

[T]he reason they [have axed it] is almost certainly that the blog wasn’t getting much traffic (and, therefore, not generating much advertising revenue). So a more constructive question is: Why do readers—even the well-educated, left-leaning readers of the Times—find environmental news so boring? Is it because we all write about it badly? Is it something inherent in the subject itself? Is it because most people think we don’t really have any big environmental problems anymore aside from climate change? Or is it because it’s just such a damn bummer to read endlessly about all the stuff we should stop doing because, somehow, it will end up destroying a rain forest somewhere?

First off, if this is the real reason the Times axed the blog, that’s quite sad, isn’t it? One would hope what mattered was only that the newspaper made money taken as a whole. Within that framework, I hoped and thoroughly expected that cross-subsidisation would go on, so that the popular fashion pages, say, would help fund and keep running the less well-read environmental pages that matter. If the owners of The Guardian in Britain adopted this philosophy, the whole paper would vanish. At the moment, its losses are only capped by transferring profits across from another more profitable magazine - Autotrader. The Guardian itself is a total sap on profits. And yet, it’s an important institution. The day journalism is exclusively governed by financial forces is a dangerous one. We’d end up with no investigative reporting that keeps the wheels of democracy rolling. We’d just have The Sun.

With regards to why green news is not particularly popular though, it strikes me as self-evident that people just find it boring. I’ve confessed to this myself. It took a long time for me to appreciate its importance. Because green issues are inherently so macro in their implications, we much prefer to opt for the individual interest stories. But surely what would maintain The Times’s status as a great newspaper is if it didn’t bow down and have its content determined by our demand. What we want is to be told what matters. This isn’t a market stall. It’s deliberative democracy, and the fight to keep climate change at the top of the agenda gets even more desperate every time these decisions are made.

(Hat Tip: The Dish).

I should be back now for the foreseeable future. I had a lazy Sopranos-stuffed week after finishing the environmental essay, and since I wasn’t reading much news or philosophy there was little worth posting here. But now I’ll be beginning my vacation essays (more later), and plan on seeing what’s happened in the world, I should have plenty to say.

Anyway, the environment essay is here. It’s not a masterpiece, but it says succinctly in clear terms what I’ve come to believe about this issue. In short, your individual emissions make a difference, you should certainly reduce them to prevent harm, and you should be very open and loud about the fact that you are doing this. You make your act civic by sharing it this way, and you increase the likelihood that others will follow suit and greater political action will begin. Yes, I think the ethicist’s contribution to this topic is rather simple and minimal.

Over two weeks in, my vegetarianism is going extremely well. I had a ridiculous relapse nightmare involving KFC, but it’s worth emphasising that it was a nightmare. And the main theme was my rationalising to myself with stupid reasons why eating the chicken was perfectly acceptable, and the source of dread was the prospect of being spotted. Which goes to show that declaring this publicly has evidently helped my will power.

But I really feel like I’ve already completely adapted and have no cravings. The notion that I’m being deprived of a great pleasure in life is ludicrous. I’ve realised that I really enjoyed meat most when it was used as a vehicle for other flavours – herbs and spices – through the use of marinades. News flash: tofu can serve that function too, and there’s a whole world of vibrant mouth-bursting meat-free recipes out there which are both filling and exciting. I miss the texture of meats somewhat, and there’s no real replacement for that. But it’s hardly central to happy eating. I’m experimenting a lot more. Eating is actually better now, not least because of the moral weight that has been lifted off my plate.

BTW – Anyone interested in vibrant vegetarian cooking absolutely must purchase Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty. It was inevitable that I’d develop a soft spot for a philosopher vegetarian chef with a Guardian column and hip restaurants in London, but the guy’s creativity really is an inspiration. He’ll often name-drop obscure, outrageous ingredients like dried fennel pollen, but most of the time with a little searching I’ve been able to hunt everything down. And it’s hard to explain just how rewarding it is when you effectively execute something extravagant that both tastes and looks sublime. Last night I tried his sweet potato wedges with lemongrass crème fraîche, the balance between the two working a treat:

A few days back I did baked aubergine with lemon thyme, Greek yoghurt and pomegranate:

And tonight, asparagus mimosa:

Then for breakfast, I’ve been frying spinach and chopped cherry tomatoes briefly in olive oil. It’s surprising how much something so simple adds to your conventional poached eggs on toast.

Seriously, who needs bacon?

I’m not a logician or philosopher of language, but on the off chance anyone reading can smell bullshit in this argument I’ve just written, let me know:

The argument that individual emissions make no difference faces a form of the Sorites paradox. If it is true that my individual emissions make no difference, it is also true of your individual emissions and anyone else’s that they also make no difference, since these are relevantly similar. However, if nobody’s emissions make any difference, then total emissions make no difference, because total emissions are just everyone’s individual emissions. But total emissions do make a difference, so an individual’s must too.

Update: This also feels possibly problematic, but I’ve been staring at this thing for too long to keep sight of its flaws by now:

If it is true that we have no duty to reduce or offset our individual emissions because they make no difference, it is hard to see how Sinnott-Armstrong and Sandberg can consistently claim that the state should nevertheless pass laws that force us to reduce our emissions, and that we should obey these laws. This would require the state to forcibly prevent me from doing something that is harmless and that I have no duty to stop doing. But on an ordinary understanding of state legitimacy, states should only use force to prevent harm, and to make us do what we ought to do. On Sinnott-Armstrong’s and Sandberg’s view, neither of these conditions hold, so state coercion would be illegitimate. But state coercion wouldn’t be illegitimate, so their view must be wrong. Our individual emissions do cause harm and we ought to prevent them from doing so.

Update 2: I feel much prouder of this paragraph:

If we campaigned for the state to make it illegal for us to emit greenhouse gases at the level we currently do, whilst continuing to eat meat, fly, take long showers and so on, then our campaign will never be persuasive. If Sinnott-Armstrong is correct, it may be philosophically consistent to act in this way. But since few people are perfectly rational, the appearance of hypocrisy will impede an effective campaign. If the British branch of Greenpeace flew to Australia for their conference and discussed their opposition to current levels of greenhouse gas emissions whilst eating steaks, then this would be laughable. The ordinary phrase claiming that we should ‘lead by example’ is true. Crucial to civic campaigning is effectively demonstrating individual commitments.

I just caught up with the fight in the Commons earlier. Balls had a brutal line against Osborne, bluntly summarising the absurdity of the situation:

‎He has gone in a weekend from saying we must stick to his plan to avoid a downgrade, to saying the downgrade is now the reason we must stick to his plan.

Jonathan Portes has been linking on Twitter to an old post of his which shows this is nothing new. Every time there is bad economic news which Osborne said his policies would help us avoid, he twists it and takes it as evidence that his policies are even more necessary now than they were before. Portes quotes Popper and compares this to Marxism in terms of pure ideology, detached from any desire to be checked by empirical reality:

[It] is no longer a science; for it broke the methodological rule that we must accept falsification, and it immunized itself against the most blatant refutations of its predictions. Ever since then, it can be described only as nonscience—as a metaphysical dream, if you like, married to a cruel reality.

John Van Reenen joins in:

[T]he loss of the rating is like the canary in the mineshaft – it reflects the real problem that the UK economy has shrunk by over 3% since 2008. This is a worse growth performance than the Great Depression with lacklustre growth forecast ahead on current policies. The government cannot duck its responsibility for this awful performance as the speed of austerity has been too swift. There would have been benefits from a more sensible profile were deficits paid back when the economy’s recovery was more secure.  Even the IMF has recognised that austerity in a recession is counterproductive when interest rates are near zero and other countries are also fiscally contracting.

My introduction for the paper is pasted in below. I’ve just titled it “Climate change ethics -
Individual acts and global disasters: what you should do and why, even if nobody else does.”

—–

You might expect climate change ethics to be simple. Science tells us that greenhouse gas emissions cause the world to warm up, and warming will cause great harm for people through floods, droughts and heat waves. Since our actions currently depend on greenhouse gas emissions and we can change this, ethics surely says that we should prevent these harms. Furthermore, economics tells us how this can be done politically. Externality theory suggests that taxing or marketising carbon would reduce emissions. Meanwhile, if we all become vegetarians and fly less, or if we offset our emissions, then this would also help.

Despite this, philosophers disagree deeply about what we should do.

Stephen Gardiner believes that the unequal distribution of burdens and benefits that climate change involves means that it is a question of justice. He claims that the United States especially should change its behaviour.

John Broome also believes that climate change raises questions of justice, but instead because your carbon emissions cause harm for individuals. He claims you have a duty to offset your emissions, even though he accepts you could do more good in other ways.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Joakim Sandberg deny that individuals have duties to reduce or offset their emissions, because they deny that an individual’s emissions make a difference. Whether I become green or not, global warming will happen. They believe that global warming is a political issue.

Dale Jamieson and Stephen Gardiner worry that our ordinary moral concepts, such as responsibility, fail to account for the severity of the moral crisis global warming presents.

These philosophers raise distinct issues, and I want to respond to several of them. This paper will proceed as follows.

First, I outline Broome’s argument that we have a duty of justice to offset our emissions, which takes priority over doing good. I object to this by showing it has implausible implications. I suggest Broome’s mistake was to separate duties of justice from duties of goodness. Considerations of justice should be understood as a limited component of goodness, which can be overridden. Offsetting emissions is good, but it is better to just emit less and donate the money to effective charities.

Second, I consider Sinnott-Armstrong’s and Sandberg’s claim that individual emissions do no harm. I agree that on one plausible interpretation, this is true. However, Sinnott-Armstrong and Sandberg misjudge the implications of this. It is still the case that we should reduce, or at least offset, our emissions. This is because our emissions probably cause harm, and because reducing or offsetting emissions is a morally important civic expression. I also claim their rigid distinction between duties of the state and duties of individuals has implausible implications, which I outline.

Third, I consider Jamieson’s and Gardiner’s claim that our ordinary moral concepts need reforming. I try to clarify what this claim could mean before rejecting it. It is true that people are worryingly indifferent to climate change, but this is a defect in us, not our moral concepts. The problem is analogous to inaction on global poverty. I suggest ways that our wills could be strengthened so that we do what we believe we should do.

Finally, I pick up on Broome’s claim that we should reduce our emissions when it is ‘at little cost to [ourselves]’. I raise a problem about vagueness here. I suggest that we need to analyse the concept of an ‘unreasonable burden’.

Most probably, anyway. I’m starting to write now, so it depends how long these 5,000 words take. Given the size of my green archives on here, however, I’m not expecting to lack things to say. I’ll be back soon, and will link up to the paper once I’m done.

From today’s Guardian Editorial:

There are many criticisms that can and many caveats that should be made about the ratings agencies. The agencies are taken too seriously. They are players in the market as well as judges of the market. The different agencies don’t always agree with each other. They sometimes have a lousy record, especially with the pre-bust banks, about whose prospects they were all wilfully bullish…

If Mr Osborne had made some or all of these points over the past few years, he might have been intellectually entitled to dismiss the Moody’s verdict in the same way that Mr Cable did yesterday. But Mr Osborne never even went close to embracing a more nuanced view. On the contrary, for political rather than economic reasons, he fetishised the elimination of the deficit and fetishised the protection of the AAA rating. He was wrong to do so. Like the credit ratings agencies themselves, he misread the economic signals, persuading himself that tight fiscal policy would succeed in a global environment in which most other large economies were tightening too. Now they are discovering they all got it wrong together. The current recession is different and deeper. As Moody’s said last week, and as Mr Osborne will be forced to confirm in next month’s budget, sluggish growth (ie no real growth) will continue until past 2015.

But at least his own job is secure, even if it’s at the cost of everyone else’s.

How wonderful that this exists:

I just stumbled on it because I saw To the Wonder earlier today, and I’m searching for all things Malick in its aftermath. Given I hated The Tree of Life when I first saw it despite now considering it an all time great, I’ll be wiser this time and say nothing about To the Wonder until my feelings have blossomed and settled with time. But meanwhile, listen to Peter Bradshaw:

[To the Wonder is] a fascinating, flawed and vivid piece of work, in some ways a coda or companion piece to his previous. There is the same rapture, the same eerily beautiful cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki – at once driftingly impressionistic and pin-sharp – the same unapologetic concern with spiritual crisis and the same unfashionable Christian theme… Both Paris and the mid-American heartland look like something from another planet, something witnessed, in delirious detail, under the influence of a powerful drug. There is a rich excess in this movie, and the sensual profusion is not completely absorbed into its texture. Yet only a film-maker as intelligent and idealistic as Malick could have created this kind of surplus value.

Suppose George Osborne were to admit that austerity isn’t working. What, then, would be left of his claim to be qualified to do, well, anything? He has to stick it out until something turns up,no matter how many lives it destroys… [P]oliticians and pundits [are] alike letting the world burn — probably unconsciously, but still — because their personal position would be hurt if they admitted to past mistakes.

— Paul Krugman.

Speaking of pundits and intellectual humility, what is this from Fraser Nelson?

This, from @jdportes, is an important and powerfully-argued Keynesian critique of the austerity agenda. flip.it/CANf4

— Fraser Nelson (@frasernelson) February 23, 2013

Did he formally repent over his support for austerity, and I missed it? Nelson posted an attack on Balls as a ‘debt-addict’ the very same day that he tweeted this. I’m lost.

Check this chart:

The Atlantic has the details.

Go read Oxford’s Simon Wren-Lewis’s verdict on Osborne’s treatment of the British economy.

As Ta-Nehisi’s read-along of Hobbes continues, he is struck by it:

I am amazed by the hardness–the relentless physicality–of Hobbes’ world… Imagination is not some airy thing. It is the impression of some motion against your organs (sense) decaying. And this can be expounded upon by referencing still other physical phenomena… I don’t know if I have that right, but my larger point is that Hobbes is not abstract. Reading Leviathan is like watching a mechanic take a part an engine, lay it on the ground and explain how every piece interacts with all the others.

He also rightly recognises how this sort of talk led at the time to accusations that Hobbes was a closet atheist.

Andrew Sullivan’s recent attacks on the innovative advertising techniques that The Atlantic and Buzzfeed have been experimenting with seem to me to be spot on. It is, after all, hard for anyone to look at this and not weep for the future of journalism:

That one little yellow box aside, this ‘story’ appears indistinguishable from any ordinary Atlantic post. The claim that there is no intent to possibly mislead readers here – and make more money from advertisers accordingly – is literally incredible.

I’ve little new to add, but I did want to flag a line Sullivan ends one post with that captures the problem philosophically:

[I]f advertorials become effectively indistinguishable from editorial, aren’t we in danger of destroying the village in order to save it?

Exactly. It is disingenuous to say you are saving journalism by offering it a financial future if, in the process of doing so, you in fact corrupt journalism’s very soul. It would be like trying to keep Christianity relevant by repealing the doctrine that Jesus was God. Seriously, if you’re going to leave us with a digital world in which we must be forever alert to the possibility that what we are reading is driven by a desire to sell products and ideas, rather than to tell the truth, then what is the point of preserving that?

A reminder that despite the economic problems we face, the world has confidence that we are dealing with them.

Osborne, last summer, on Britain’s triple A credit rating which has now been removed.

And yet:

Just interviewed George Osborne about the AAA downgrading- he says it’s redoubled resolve to deal with debts – ie. he’s not for turning

— Sophy Ridge (@SophyRidgeSky) February 22, 2013

Fraser Nelson calls the news “politically devastating for George Osborne, given that he has asked us to judge him by the preservation of this rating (and made it a manifesto pledge).” He brings attention to the following part of Moody’s statement:

The country’s current economic recovery has already proven to be significantly slower — and believes that it will likely remain so — compared with the recovery observed after previous recessions, such as those of the 1970s, early 1980s and early 1990s.

And he provides the graph to prove it:

Sunny Hundal is watching for Labour’s response:

Austerity didn’t work for Osborne in delivering economic growth, nor in reducing the deficit and nor in saving our AAA-rating. All these factors are inter-related of course but the point is the cuts have been a disaster for the UK economy.

Therefore, it makes no sense for Labour to go into an election in 2015 promising they would match (as some have hinted) George Osborne’s cuts to spending. Such a stance would fundamentally undermine what Labour has been saying for the past 2 and half years.

As I always say, Balls evidently knows all of this. It’s just whether he has the courage to try to redefine the debate and tilt the rhetorical axis which the Conservatives have monopolised so effectively. Everyone believes cuts are necessary. Someone needs to start calling out the bullshit and hope we can pull ourselves out of this self-created swamp.

PM Carpenter points out a paradox:

[P]olitically it’s a wonder that conservatives, who have always purported a righteous superiority over grubbily material socialists, are in reality today’s most formidable materialists. They pay all the necessary lip service to what we might call higher values, but their political platform is indistinguishable from the Almighty Dollar. What you need is a tax cut, so you can buy, buy, buy.

Odd, isn’t it? I get why Mormons are like this, but how conservatism came to be in bed with libertarianism will forever baffle me. The latter is characterised by a radical commitment to the absolute morality of property rights even when they cause vast inequality and poverty, undermining social stability and personal security in our world to a staggering extent. The former is supposed to be about sustaining systems that work to shield us all from suffering, minimising if never entirely eliminating our vulnerabilities. Libertarianism has little that’s conservative about it.

Previous thoughts on this here.