scholar Archives - Prindle Institute

October 23, 2014December 14, 2022

Envisioning Zero Waste at DePauw: Where do flip phones go to die?

Guest post by Anthony Baratta, Sustainability Director at DePauw University. Check out the Office of Sustainability on Facebook and Twitter.

Soulja Boy CDs, broken office chairs, flip phones, jean shorts, used plastic forks, Capital One junk mail, and homemade Christmas gifts from ex-girlfriends. What do these items have in common? No one wants them.

Technological advances, fashion trends, and the allure of the “new” banish some of these items to discounted bundles on eBay and spots on nostalgic Buzzfeed lists. Unfortunately, though, most of them are simply thrown away, tossed in a black garbage bag when Dad decides that it’s time to clean out the basement, or a high school locker is cleared out, or a dorm room is packed up in May.

But where is “away?” What will happen to the items purchased by many of us on Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Where will iPhone 6s, black leggings, and Hunger Games tote bags be five years from now? Where do toothpicks, Gatorade bottles, and receipts go now, and why should we care?

The answer to these question matters, and it’s why DePauw’s theme for 2014-15 is “Envisioning Zero Waste.” Most of these items end up in a landfill or incinerator, creating more greenhouse gas emissions and harming air and water quality. The production of these items is not benign, either, often involving unethical extraction of resources in other countries with assembly in unsafe factories. The scenario is much more complex than a glossy Best Buy advertisement.

What is zero waste? We define the term as an ideal, where everything that could be reused, repurposed, or recycled would be kept out of a landfill or incinerator. The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, Facilities Management, Environmental Fellows, and others are partnering with the Office of Sustainability to consider zero waste this year.

DePauw students are leading the way. Many of DePauw’s 20 Eco-Reps—students who gather weekly and work on small group sustainability projects—are taking on various initiatives related to zero waste. Mary Satterthwaite ’18 and Anna Muckerman ’15 are doing a recycling audit of campus, and Nick McCreary ’15 and Eric Steele ’15 have worked tirelessly with members of the Campus Sustainability Committee and Facilities Management to implement recycling at home football tailgates. The juniors in Environmental Fellows are considering a parternship with Bon Appetit and local farmers on compost efforts too.

We invite the DePauw community to participate in our “Envisioning Zero Waste” theme year. Reduce, reuse, and recycle, at the office and at home. For a more complete set of goals and context to the theme year, please check out a recent DePauw web story on the project. And please consider coming to any of the What a Waste! Reclaiming the Value of People and Things events, led by Professor Jennifer Everett. On November 17^th at 4pm, we will be screening Terra Blight in Watson Forum, a documentary about the harmful effects of “recycled” electronics sent abroad. You can watch the trailer below.

It’s issues like these that we should consider as we prepare for the upcoming holiday season, for Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. When you make your purchase, please consider: where will this item be in five years?

October 7, 2014December 14, 2022

Can moral laws exist without God? A brief introduction to “Robust Ethics”

Last week we published the abstract of Erik Wielenberg’s new book, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism. In this guest post, Wielenberg, Professor of Philosophy at DePauw University, follows up with a more in-depth discussion of the book and some of the philosophers that have influenced his thinking on moral realism and God’s existence.

In 1977, two events that would significantly impact my life took place. First, the film Star Wars was released. Second, two prominent philosophers, J.L. Mackie and Gilbert Harman, unleashed some influential arguments against moral realism. My book is about the second of these two events.

In his famous argument from queerness, Mackie listed various respects in which objective values, if they existed, would be “queer.” Mackie took the apparent queerness of such values to be evidence against their existence. One feature of objective values that he found to be particularly queer was the alleged connection between a thing’s objective moral qualities and its natural features: “What is the connection between the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate cruelty — say, causing pain just for fun — and the moral fact that it is wrong? … The wrongness must somehow be ‘consequential’ or ‘supervenient’; it is wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty. But just what in the world is signified by this ‘because’?” (1977, 41) Mackie was also dubious of the view that we could come to have knowledge of the objective moral qualities of things. He wrote that friends of objective moral values must in the end lamely posit “a special sort of intuition” that gives us knowledge of objective values.

Harman, for his part, noted an apparent contrast between ethics and science. He compared a case in which a physicist observes a vapor trail in a cloud chamber and forms the belief “there goes a proton” with a case in which you observe some hoodlums setting a cat on fire and form the belief “what they’re doing is wrong” (1977, 4-6). Harman was happy to classify both of these as cases of observation (scientific observation and moral observation respectively), but he noted that the moral features of things, supposing that they exist at all, seem to be causally inert, unlike the physical features of things. Harman thought that this feature of moral properties suggests that we ought to take seriously the possible truth of nihilism, the view that no moral properties are instantiated (1977, 23). But others have drawn on Harman’s premise to support not nihilism but rather moral skepticism, the view that we do not (and perhaps cannot) possess moral knowledge. It is the latter kind of argument that I discuss in my book.

Some have suggested that theism provides the resources to answer these challenges. Mackie himself, although an atheist, suggested that theism might be able to answer his worries about the queerness of the alleged supervenience relation between moral and natural properties. In his 1982 book The Miracle of Theism, he suggested that “objective intrinsically prescriptive features, supervening upon natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful God to create them” (1982, 115-6). More recently, Christian philosopher Robert Adams suggests that the epistemological worries that arise from Harman’s contrast between science and ethics can be put to rest by bringing God into the picture (Adams 1999, 62-70).

Thus, an interesting dialectic presents itself. Mackie and Harman, who do not believe that God exists, see their arguments as posing serious challenges for moral realism. Some theistic philosophers argue this way: if we suppose that God does exist, then we can answer these challenges to moral realism. Without God, these challenges cannot be answered. Since moral realism is a plausible view, the fact that we can answer such challenges only by positing the existence of God gives us reason to believe that God exists.

I accept moral realism yet I believe that God does not exist. I also find it unsatisfying, perhaps even “lame” as Mackie would have it, to posit mysterious, quasi-mystical cognitive faculties that are somehow able to make contact with causally inert moral features of the world and provide us with knowledge of them. The central goal of my book is to defend the plausibility of a robust brand of moral realism without appealing to God or any weird cognitive faculties.

A lot has happened since 1977. A number of increasingly mediocre sequels and prequels to the original Star Wars have been released; disco, mercifully, has died. But there have also been some important developments in philosophy and psychology that bear on the arguments of Mackie and Harman sketched above. In philosophy, the brand of moral realism criticized by Mackie has found new life. In psychology, there has been a flurry of empirical investigation into the nature of the cognitive processes that generate human moral beliefs, emotions, and actions. As a result of these developments the challenges from Mackie and Harman sketched above can be given better answers than they have received so far — without appealing to God or weird cognitive faculties. That, at any rate, is what I attempt to do in my book. In short, my aim is to defend a robust approach to ethics (without appealing to God or weird cognitive faculties) by developing positive accounts of the nature of moral facts and knowledge and by defending these accounts against challenging objections.

Works Cited
Adams, Robert. 1999. Finite and Infinite Goods. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harman, Gilbert. 1977. The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mackie, J.L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin.
Mackie, J.L. 1982. The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

October 6, 2014December 14, 2022

Will climate divestment work?

Guest post by Rich Cameron, Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePauw University

Scott Wisor recently wrote a post titled “Why Climate Change Divestment Will Not Work” over at the blog for the journal Ethics & International Affairs (EIA). The post is quite provocative. Visit the EIA blog, here, to read it.

Wisor presents himself as convinced that climate change is happening, poses a grave threat, and makes ethical demands on us all. Nevertheless, as his title suggests, he believes that one prominent strategy for generating mass action on climate change is destined for failure: the movement – led by Bill McKibben and his 350.org – to get large universities and investment funds to divest from fossil fuel companies. If fossil-fuel divestment efforts are doomed to fail, then McKibben’s movement functions as a costly distraction from our pressing ethical obligation not just to act but to act effectively. As Wisor puts it, “why spend half a decade or more on a tactic that at best won’t make a difference? Why not direct attention to the more urgent and effective task of placing a price on carbon?”

I have a number of responses to Wisor’s specific arguments, but in this post I’d like to offer two more general reflections aimed at tempering his conclusions. The line of criticism I’ll be pursuing in this post is an odd one – that Wisor’s arguments and conclusions are all too plausible. More specifically, his argumentative target is ill-defined and appears too easily established. When looked at more closely, the real difficulties movements face in achieving success also require more nuanced arguments that a particular movement will fail.

My first point begins by noting that a sober look at the evidence certainly suggests that Wisor’s conclusion is likely to be true. Pick any successful social movement from the past – the civil rights movement, the movement for India’s independence from England, etc. Scholars of social change frequently note that while those movements were in process the odds seemed stacked against them. Moreover, even movements we know (with hindsight) to have been successful seemed destined to fail almost right up until they managed – somehow – to succeed. Indeed, all large scale and eventually successful movements for social change have faced armies of naysayers claiming that the tactics they employed (e.g., non-violent resistance in the cases I’ve mentioned) would not work and that those movements’ efforts served as distractions from other, allegedly more effective measures that people genuinely devoted to the cause should be supporting instead. Perhaps the most eloquent response to this kind of criticism comes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s justly famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” We’re on your side, his critics said, but your tactics are wrong and will backfire.

Antonio Gramsci made a similar point in saying, “I’m a pessimist because of intellect, but an optimist because of will.” The idea in Gramsci’s quote is that rational reflection on the odds of social change will almost always result in a thoroughly justified pessimism. If you’re aware of the obstacles and think about the circumstances carefully you’re sure to come up with a thousand reasons why social change just doesn’t stand a chance. Gramsci acknowledges that effective advocates for social change need to face up to this grim fact. They need the “pessimism of the intellect” so that they know what they’re up against – without this they will be ineffective idealists tilting at windmills. But social change movements do sometimes succeed, and without the benefit of hindsight it’s extremely difficult to tell which movement, if any, is going to pull off a major victory. And that means that people devoted to the hard work of social change need more than just the pessimism that comes from clear-sightedness of the long odds we face. They also need the “optimism of the will,” the willingness to work against long odds with the hope and confidence that some apparently doomed strategy will eventually succeed. To quote Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Without the benefit of hindsight, a strong case can be made that all social movements are doomed to failure, and if that is all Wisor is arguing in the case of the fossil fuel divestment movement then his arguments are both unsurprising and should be of little interest to committed and thoughtful activists. If Wisor is arguing for an interesting claim, it must be not just that we’re justifiably pessimistic about the divestment movement’s odds of success. He must argue for the stronger claim that the movement is actually tilting at windmills, that it is so clearly out of line with reality that it should be viewed as a waste of time even by those with intimate knowledge of the challenges all social movements face.

My second response to Wisor’s argument is generated by asking a simple question: when can we say that a movement has succeeded, that its efforts have “worked”? Wisor’s blog post seems to imply a very demanding standard for movement success – a movement must solve the problem it’s designed to address (in this case climate change). And if this is what success requires then once again Wisor is arguing for a conclusion that is simply too easy. It is widely acknowledged that there are no silver bullets with regard to large problems like this, and in the case of climate change it is also widely acknowledged that it’s too late to “solve” the problem anyway: what we’ve already done commits us to enough warming that dangerous impacts are already unavoidable. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t still succeed in mitigating climate change and heading off even more catastrophic impacts, but no one heading up the fossil fuel divestment movement is under the illusion that their efforts will “solve” the problem in this sense.

Still, this isn’t the only metric for success. Activists often view movement success not in these all-or-nothing terms but as, instead, accruing piecemeal, slowly, and building over time. A social movement that doesn’t “solve” its intended problem in the first sense may nevertheless raise awareness (and so make future solutions easier to institute). Movements may build networks of effective and motivated actors (who may work better together in the future because of their present experience). They may convert major institutions and groups to take stands that they otherwise would not have taken (and so, again, make future change more likely). And so on.

All of these things plausibly constitute social movements succeeding, but none of Wisor’s specific arguments for why the fossil fuel divestment strategy “will not work” undermine the idea that the movement has already succeeded – that it has “worked” far beyond the dreams of most movements. According to a report by Arabela Advisors, “181 institutions and local governments and 656 individuals representing over $50 billion dollars have pledged to divest to-date.” Think too of the marches, meetings, media attention, position papers, etc. the movement has generated, and what they mean for better advocacy for policies of all sorts in the future. The point is just that by reasonable standards the divestment movement is already a success, and nothing in Wisor’s piece suggests this movement (and others) can’t build (piecemeal, and bit by bit) on their successes in the future.

Moreover, it is important to note that when Wisor suggests alternative efforts that he thinks stand a greater chance of succeeding he mentions only a “price on carbon” and unspecified “regulatory efforts” to combat climate change. The problem here is that Wisor’s suggested solutions do not constitute ideas for building a movement. To generate a movement you need to mobilize masses of people and institutions and organize them around applying political pressure for change. Of course we should put a price on carbon – but how exactly does Wisor propose that we build the political movement to get that done? When Wisor has an idea for building a powerful movement around putting a price on carbon (or his favorite regulations) and he can show, further, that his new strategy is likely to generate more traction, enthusiasm, and support from grassroots activists and major institutions than the divestment movement has already succeeded in generating then will he have a strong real case for saying that there are more effective strategies we should be pursuing. Saying simply that we should put a price on carbon isn’t even in the same ballpark as building the movement to divest from fossil fuels, however. McKibben’s fossil fuel divestment strategy may not be a silver bullet guaranteed to succeed (no social movement in history ever has been, of course), but it has been a concrete and already effective strategy for bringing together a new, strong, and powerful coalition on climate.

I realize that my fairly general criticisms of Wisor’s post don’t address the specifics of his arguments. For all I’ve said here it remains possible that his specific objections to the fossil fuel divestment movement’s strategies are indeed damning. That is, I have not argued that the fossil fuel divestment movement is not tilting at windmills in a way that anyone who cares about climate action should shun, nor have I argued that it is only beset by the perfectly ordinary sort of “pessimism of the intellect” that beset all social movements (even ones that have succeeded). Still, I hope I’ve clarified the way in which Wisor’s argument seems to aim at a conclusion that is both too easy and too unsurprising. If his arguments are to be of service to his claimed allies in the incipient climate movement they will need to show more than just that there are good reasons for pessimism. He’ll need to show that the divestment movement tilts at windmills. With regard to the former task Wisor’s arguments (unsurprisingly) succeed. With regard to the latter task I’m much less sure.

September 2, 2014December 14, 2022

Abolitionists Unfrozen

This article, by DePauw History professor David Gellman, originally appeared in Historians Against Slavery on August 15, 2014.

If all the great abolitionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were cryogenically frozen, who would you reanimate to help liberate the world from the scourge of slave labor and human trafficking today? Frederick Douglass? William Lloyd Garrison? Harriet Tubman? Are there any antislavery activists you would just as soon leave in cold storage?

The culminating paper assignment in my “The American Experience: Abolishing Slavery” course asks students to contemplate such questions in order to thread history together with contemporary society. When we think of the millions of present-day victims of bondage, neither triumphalist narratives nor facile condemnations of the past remain satisfying. But, if I have done my job right over the course of the semester, the students have figured that out already and just need a final prompt to confirm the urgency of history as a tool for reimagining and reconstructing the world.

The actual written text of the topic is less glib than my opening paragraph suggests. Slavery is a somber subject. Still, one walks a fine line engaging 19 year-olds. I want them to take the subject and themselves seriously. Common sense and humility, however, tell me that writing a college paper is not saving the world—that almost all traditional writing assignments are exercises, indeed games, through which students play at being the intellectuals, leaders, activists, and citizens that they are in the process of becoming. The assignment reads more like this:

Apply what we have learned from attempts to abolish slavery in colonial America and the nineteenth century U.S. to the problem of contemporary slavery. Which types of people, organizations, and ideas from the past does the world most need now? Which ideas, people, organizations, and ideas would you transport from the past to the present if you could?

But when explaining the assignment verbally or when pushed to answer the inevitable student questions What do you want? and What are you looking for?, the cryogenic conceit of the assignment becomes more explicit. The disciplined imagination that scholar James Axtell identified as the stuff of good history is also, the topic proposes, the stuff of social and political engagement. Or put another way, this final paper topic gives me one last chance to drive home to students that there is no readily searchable right answer to really important questions, just the answers that they wrestle out of themselves from within.

So then the practical questions become: What sorts of readings do I deploy during the semester to prepare the students for this capstone encounter with today’s global slavery? What, as the course ends, do the students have inside that they can start to pull out and craft for the printed page?

I organize the course around biography. I feature the lives of women and men who played significant roles in the struggle against slavery in North America from colonial times through the Civil War. The cast of characters rotates from one version of the course to the next, a combination of quality texts, thematic coverage, and representativeness guiding my selections: Douglass, Garrison, Sarah Grimké, and Angelina Grimké have been staples. Tubman, John Brown, and David Walker have stimulated lively discussion and debate. Quaker pioneers Anthony Benezet and John Woolman have made valuable appearances, and Samuel Sewall’s 1700 essay “The Selling of Joseph” provides a useful prologue. In the 2014 version of the course, Solomon Northup became an irresistible addition, particularly since we were able to bring the film 12 Years a Slave to campus that same semester. Marcus Rediker’s retelling of the Amistad rebellion extended the biographical reach of the course across the Atlantic. Thanks to Richard S. Newman, students found Bishop Richard Allen’s life as a “Black Founding Father” compelling. Weighing Abraham Lincoln’s role in emancipation consistently provides a provocative climax.

I should pause here to point out that no matter where the students come from, except for Lincoln, Tubman, and perhaps Douglass, these men and women are almost entirely new to them, a headshot and a sentence in a high school history textbook not counting for much. Thus, while there are many other ways to organize a course on abolishing slavery in the U.S.—economics, political structure, ideological development—using personal narratives to get at larger structures has distinct advantages. Not only does biography make abolitionism accessible, this genre also emphasizes how people go about making choices to resist, denounce, and organize against injustice. The final essay about the present then becomes a logical but not over-determined outgrowth of the history we have just finished studying.

Still, to enliven this distant world of texts—and make the connection to our own–human resources can help. Each time I have taught the course, we have taken a voluntary field trip to Conner Prairie, Indiana’s marvelous living history park, for the “Follow the North Star” program. For an intense hour, participants inhabit the roles of fugitives treading the knife’s edge between the underground railroad and re-enslavement.

The best classroom debate could never replicate this poignantly designed experience. One year, I began the course with the DeWolf family, not only screening the documentary Traces of the Trade about a white family coming to grips with the legacy of their slave-trading forebears, but also inviting into the classroom Thomas DeWolf, one of the participants in the film and author of his own memoir. The most recent time I taught the course, local folk music legend and retired math teacher Mike Van Rensselaer held my class spellbound playing classics from the abolitionist songbook on the banjo and guitar. And in 2012, Historians Against Slavery founder James Brewer Stewart graciously discussed his biography of William Lloyd Garrison with the class. Embodying the historic struggle against slavery through guests and field trips enhances the prospect of bridging then and now.

Finally, in the closing week of the semester, we jump from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century by reading arresting accounts of human trafficking around the world. I have featured a different book each time: Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy; Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd’s edited volume, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves; and David Batstone, Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade–And How We Can Fight It. These books have different strengths as teaching tools. Bales surveys the world with a combination of scholarly and journalistic acumen; Batstone functions as a latter-day abolitionist tract, as he portrays the heroic work of contemporary antislavery activists. But I found the Bales and Trodd collection of autobiographical accounts to be the best fit, dovetailing particularly well with the biographical theme of the course. Like the slave narratives of an earlier era, these accounts beckon to the reader’s moral imagination.

Still, the distance is unsettling. To go from the Civil War Amendments to children prostituted in Thailand and brick kiln laborers in the thralls of debt bondage in India, or to migrant laborers in Florida and housekeepers in Washington, D.C., does feel jarring. But I would argue that for students, history is always thus—an intimidating leap from then to now. No matter where one ends the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ story, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the unraveling of Reconstruction into Jim Crow, the light switch of the present must get flipped. My hope is that rather than feel frozen in their tracks by the horrors of the contemporary world, students will find the abolitionist footsteps they wish to follow.