Author: Michael LaBossiere

 

As J.S. Mill and others have argued, freedom of expression is a fundamental liberty and the people working at crisis pregnancy centers have that right. But crisis pregnancy centers purport to offer an alternative to abortion—though they seem to routinely engage in deception rather than honest persuasion. This raises moral questions about freedom of expression.

To get the obvious out of the way, those who work for crisis pregnancy centers have the moral right to express their views on abortion. They also have the moral right to try to persuade others to accept their views. A key part of the freedom of expression is the freedom to engage with others who are willing to listen. So, the freedom of expression of these centers is not in dispute.

One concern, which was addressed in my previous essay, is the ethics of deceit. While people do have the right to express their views, freedom of expression is not a license to lie. But it must be noted that there is an important distinction between making an untrue claim and lying.  While there are many forms of lying, the common form requires that a person believes they are making an untrue claim and that they have the intention to deceive. So, if the those at the centers believe the untruths they tell women, then they are not lying. However, this does not get them off the moral hook completely as there is also an ethics of epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Just as there is a moral obligation, as per Thomas Aquinas, to consider one’s actions before acting, there is also an obligation to confirm one’s beliefs before trying to get others to accept them. The seriousness of this obligation, as with actions, is in proportion to the seriousness of the likely consequences of the belief. Being epistemically irresponsible about knowing birth control’s efficacy or the medical effect of abortion is morally unacceptable. As with any liberty, there are also associated responsibilities. Due diligence and honesty in the claims one makes are part of these responsibilities. That is, freedom of expression is not freedom from truth and proper research (which is more than just Googling while under the influence of confirmation bias).

A second concern is values. While people do not have a right to their own facts, they do have the right to their own values (and the responsibility of the consequences of those values). While some embrace the self-defeating notion that relativity of values requires tolerance (it self-defeats because claiming tolerance as an objective value contradicts relativism), it would beg the question to assume that values are objective (or subjective). Even if values are objective, there is still the problem of sorting out which values are right. Because of this, it is more difficult to show that someone has the wrong values. There do seem to be some clear exceptions: those who advocate for rape and genocide have indisputably gotten things wrong. However, moral philosophy has vast tracts of disputed territory and rational moral disagreement helps warrant the freedom of expression. Since we do not always know what is right, it would often be both foolish and wrong to silence people with differing views.

While the various sides on the abortion issue tend to believe they have the objective truth; the issue is morally complicated and an area of reasonable moral dispute. Those who think they have the right answer still have an excellent reason to accept this, if only on pragmatic grounds. Even if they are winning now, they might be losing tomorrow and need the freedom to make their case. If they are losing now, they would want the freedom to make their case. So, the center folks have the right to present their values as do those who disagree with them.

The final concern I will address is the matter of compelled listening. While there have been some legal cases involving compelled speech, there is also the moral question of compelled attention. The easy and obvious view is that people have no general right to expect others to listen to them, although there are contexts where there can be such an expectation. People also do not, with some notable exceptions, have the right to harass people under the guise of free expression. To use an analogy, you have a right to swing a knife around as much as you wish as long as you are not slashing at other people. Likewise, you can express yourself however you wish, provided that the expression is not aimed at harassing, coercing or harming others. I admit there is a problem with sorting out what counts as harassment, coercion and harm. This must be addressed by considering specific types of cases and by developing general guidelines. For example, college students don’t have grounds to claim that a speaker they dislike is automatically harming them because they dislike what they hear. As another example, a student who is shouting a speaker they dislike is both violating the speaker’s right to free expression and endeavoring to compel others to listen to them over the speaker, and are in the process of trying to violate two rights.

Returning to the centers, they do have every right to try to persuade, but the tactics that are coercive, deceptive or harassing are not protected by moral freedom of expression. While they do have the right to express their views, they do not have the right to trick, harass or coerce others into listening to or accepting their views. Naturally, the general principles at work here apply generally, especially to the freedoms of people I disagree with.

 

 

While I think abortion is morally tolerable and should be legal, I recognize that there are competing moral views that can be held in good faith. Proponents and opponents of abortion have the right to argue for their views and influence others. So, I have no moral objection against the idea of a pregnancy crisis center that provides accurate information about alternatives to abortion and assistance to women who elect to not have an abortion. Unfortunately, pregnancy crisis centers often seem to engage in willful deceit.

Some years ago, John Oliver did a show on the deceptive practices of these centers. While Oliver is a comedian, his claims were backed up with evidence: these centers often trick women. One common technique is masquerading as an abortion clinic or health care provider by locating close to such places and using similar names. They also tend to use the trapping of professional medicine to create the illusion they are a clinic despite not being licensed to provide medical care. Another tactic is to make untrue claims about abortion, such as the claim that abortion increases the risk of cancer and infertility.

While centers are usually allowed to give ultrasounds, they seem to routinely mislead women about the results. While there is a shortage of funding for women’s health, many states provide public money to these centers. This should worry people who profess to favor small government and to oppose public money being used for ideological causes. After all, one of the arguments advanced against public funding of Planned Parenthood is that public money might be used for something some people find morally or religiously unacceptable. The same logic should apply to these centers.

On the face of it, deceit seems morally wrong and centers that engage in it are acting immorally. This is especially ironic given these centers tend to be affiliated with religious organizations and the bible is clear about lying. That said, one can argue in favor of the approach of these centers.

It can be argued that such deceit is justified on moral grounds because the end justifies the means. The obvious moral theory to use here is utilitarianism: the action that creates the most good and the least harmful is the right action. In the case of the centers, they could accept that deceit is generally not a good thing, but that the harm of deceiving the women and girls is exceeded by the good of misleading them so that they do not have an abortion. To use an analogy, lying to a murderer to keep them from murdering would be morally right on utilitarian grounds.

Even if one accepts the utilitarian approach, there is still the question of whether the centers are doing their moral calculation right: is the good they claim to do outweighing the harms to the women and girls they deceive? Obviously, pro-choice people would disagree. There is also my usual line: why lie if the truth will suffice? In the case at hand, if abortion is truly as evil as the center folk believe, then telling women the truth should suffice to convince them. If they must lie to people, then one would suspect that they must not have faith in their own reasons and arguments. They could, of course, reply by doubling down on the utilitarian approach and contend that people are not swayed by good reasons nor are they drawn to the right thing without being led there by deceit.

Accepting utilitarianism does create its own problem: if the ends justify the means in terms of deceiving to prevent abortion, then the same principle also applies to abortion. As such, abortion would be subject to the same utilitarian calculation and could turn out to be acceptable on these grounds. In any case, its wrongness would be conditional upon the harms and benefits.

The centers could reply that they are not utilitarians; they just hold that the end justifies the means when it comes to lying about abortion. They could hold that abortion is inherently worse than lying and it is acceptable to do lesser evils to prevent greater evils. While this is a consistent position it is morally problematic as there are non-deceitful ways to reduce abortions, such as providing cheap and effective birth control, funding quality sex-education, improving support services for women and girls who have babies, and so on. After all, it is hard to justify doing evil to stop evil when there are viable non-evil alternatives. If someone gladly embraces deceit to advance their cause when morally better alternatives exist, one must question their ethics.

 

 

In philosophy, there are many varieties of skepticism which are distinguished mainly by their degree of doubt. A relatively mild case of skepticism usually involves doubts about metaphysical claims. A rabid skeptic would doubt everything, even their own existence.

While philosophers have attempted to defeat skepticism, these attempts seem to have failed. This is not surprising as skepticism seems unbreakable. The arguments for skepticism have an ancient pedigree and can be distilled into two simple arguments.

The first addresses the possibility of justifying a belief and attacks the view that knowledge requires a belief that is true and justified. If a standard of justification is presented, then there is the question of what justifies this standard. If an answer is given, the question can be raised to infinity and beyond. If no justification is offered, then there is no reason to accept the standard. Either way, skepticism remains undefeated.

The second argument is that any reasonable argument that we can have knowledge can be countered by an equally reasonable argument against it.  Some folks, such as Chisholm, have contended we should assume we have knowledge and begin epistemology from that point. However, this seems to be on par with grabbing the first-place trophy without bothering to compete. But perhaps he is right and the only way to “beat” the skeptic is to assume they are wrong.

Like most philosophers, I tend to follow David Hume’s approach to skepticism in the normal parts of my life. I am not a skeptic when I am doing my taxes, suffering through a committee meeting, or eating pizza. However, like a useless friend, skepticism shows up when it is not needed. It would be nice if skepticism could be defeated or a least rendered irrelevant.

Our good dead friend John Locke has an interesting approach to skepticism. While, like Descartes, he wanted certainty, he settled for a practical approach to skepticism. After acknowledging that our faculties cannot provide certainty, he asserted that what matters is being able to use our faculties for our preservation and wellbeing.

Jokingly, he challenges “the dreamer” to put his hand into a furnace. This would, he claims, wake him “to a certainty greater than he could wish.” More seriously, Locke contends that our concern is not with achieving epistemic certainty. Rather, what matters is our happiness and misery. While Locke can be accused of taking an easy out rather than engaging the skeptic in a battle of certainty or death, his approach is appealing. As I have accumulated numerous injuries that I feel while running, I will use them to illustrate my view.

When I set out on a run, I can feel all the damage I’ve accumulated over the years. While I cannot be certain that I have a body with a spine and nerves, no amount of skeptical doubt makes the pain go away. In terms of feeling the pain, it does not matter whether I am a pained brain in a philosophical vat, being deceived by a demon, stuck in the Matrix or really a runner in the real world. In all these scenarios, I would be in pain, and this is what matters. I also enjoy running; the pain is mild and fades quickly.

When I run, it seems I am moving in a three-dimensional world. Since I live in Florida (or what seems to be Florida) I usually feel warm and get that Florida feel on the run. I will also eventually be thirsty and some fatigue. Once again, it does not seem to matter much if this is real. Whether I am really bathed in sweat or a brain bathed in some sort of nutrient fluid, the run will feel the same to me. As I run, I take pains to avoid cars, trees and debris. While I do not know if they are real, I have experienced what it is like to be hit by a car (or as if I was hit by a car) and experience involving falling (or the appearance of falling). In terms of navigating through my runs, it does not matter whether it was real. If I knew for sure that my run was really real for real that would not change the run. If I somehow knew it was all an illusion that I could never escape, I would still run for the sake of the experience of running. After all, even in the Matrix I would still have time to fill. As such, while skepticism cannot be defeated, it does not matter in terms of how I would live my life.

My view that skepticism does not matter might seem a odd. After all, when the hero (or victim) of a story finds out that they are in a virtual reality what usually follows is disillusionment and despair. Intuitively, it does matter whether the skeptic is right because if what I do is not real, it does not matter.

One way to support this view is to use the illustration of a dream: if I dream that I won a gold medal in the Olympics, this means nothing. I have not really won, and it would be bizarre to brag about winning a medal in a dream. They would refute my prideful boasting with the obvious counter: you did not win for real.

As another illustration, imagine that I am see a baby being swept away in a flood. I rush into the water and save the baby, only to find out that it is a realistic plastic doll. While I could be said to have acted bravely (albeit in ignorance), if I claimed I saved a child, I would be dismissed. Retrieving the plastic might make me an eco-hero, but it would not make me a hero because the “baby” was not real.

So, if my life is not real, everything I do is like that Olympic dream and all my good deeds are like rescuing that piece of plastic. So, the skeptic must be defeated if life is to have any meaning. This, shows that it does matter whether skepticism is right. While this objection is formidable, there is a reasonable reply.

My view of what matters in life has been shaped by years of gaming. These include tabletop games (BattleTech, Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, etc.) and video games (Zork, Doom, Starcraft, Warcraft, Destiny, Halo, Diablo, etc.). When I am pretending to be a paladin, the Master Chief, or a Guardian, I know I am doing something that is not really real for real. However, the game can be enjoyable or unpleasant. This enjoyment or suffering is as real as enjoyment or suffering caused by what is supposed to be really real for real—though I believe these are just games game. Knowing that I am “just” playing games does not diminish the value of the experience, although I concede that what I do in a game does not make me heroic or a “winner” in the “real” world.

If I knew that I was trapped in an inescapable virtual reality, then I would simply keep playing the game as gaming is what I do. It would get boring if I stopped playing. If I somehow knew that I was in the really real world for real, I would obviously just keep doing what I am doing.

 Since I might be trapped in a virtual reality or I might not, the rational thing to do is keep playing as if it is really real for real. That is the most sensible option in this dilemma. In practical terms, the reality of the world I think I exist in does not matter. The skeptic does not need to be refuted for life to be meaningful. After all, gaming can be meaningful. The play, as they say, is the thing.

 

Sex workers can face the attitude that because they work in the sex industry, they are excluded from having certain basic rights. This is often based on the view that sex workers are an inferior sort of person and not entitled to the same rights and treatment as the “better sort of people.” As put by Cardi B, “So what? You’re a ho. It don’t matter.” Misogyny and other bigotry can be factors here as well. One problem with addressing any philosophical issue related to sex is that people tend to approach this topic irrationally, but I will endeavor to do so in a rational and objective manner. As my focus is on ethics, to avoid possible red herring diversions in the form of debates about legality, I will focus on legal sex work, such as that done by porn actors.

An easy reply to the view that sex-workers do not matter is that the burden of proof rests on those who make this claim. After all, they are people and should be assumed to be entitled to the same moral rights that we get simply by being people. To disprove thus, it would need to be argued that by being engaged in sex-work, people forfeit these basic rights. While there are biases against sex-workers, there do not seem to be any compelling logical reasons that their choice of profession robs them of their basic moral rights.

One example of a perceived lack of rights is the view that sex workers do not have the right to complain about being sexually harassed or being expected to provide sex when they do not want to do so. While it might seem odd for a sex-worker to have the right to complain about being sexually harassed or having to engage in unwanted sex, there are at least two reasons this is as legitimate for them as any other worker. The first is that profession does not matter when it comes to the person’s basic rights. Just because a person is a sex-worker, it does not follow that they cannot be sexually harassed. To use an analogy, just because a person is a football player who engages in a violent sport for a living it does not follow that they cannot be assaulted. The same holds for sex-workers.

The second is that the sex-worker’s work is sex, so their being sexually harassed or being pushed to engage in sex when they do not wish would be compelled labor. If the director of a hospital coerced their doctors into giving her free medical services during their off hours, then that would be unacceptable. Or if the manager of a fast-food restaurant made their workers cook meals for them at home for free, then that would be wrong. The same applies to sex workers: they have the same right as any other worker to refuse to engage in compelled labor.

Another area of concern for sex-workers is their working conditions, broadly construed. This includes the acts they are expected to engage in, how they are treated, what language is used, and so on. While some might think that a sex-worker should expect to simply work with whatever conditions they are subjected to, this same attitude is not applied to other workers. At least by people with a sense of moral decency. As such, sex-workers should have the right to reject the conditions they wish to reject, without fear of retaliation. Obviously, this can have legitimate career consequences, and there is the question of what working conditions should or should not be considered acceptable. But this subject would go far beyond the scope of this short essay.  

An obvious criticism of this view is to argue that sex-workers’ work is, by definition, sex. As such, they must expect to engage in sex. To use an analogy, if a person is working as an engineer, then they must expect to engage in engineering when they are at work. If they do not want to engineer things, then they need to find another line of work. Likewise, for sex-workers. While this reply does have some intuitive appeal, it does fail.

While a sex-worker must expect that their work in sex involves sex, that does not entail that they must accept any conditions in their field. To use an analogy, a professional boxer must expect that they will be punched. As such, if a boxer does not want to get punched, then they need to find another line of work. However, if after agreeing to a normal match and they are confronted by a knife wielding opponent and expected to fight in a pool of pudding, then they have the right to refuse the fight. Also, if they enter into an agreement to fight a normal match, and then things are changed on them during the fight, they would have the right to refuse to continue. So, just as agreeing to box does not entail that a boxer must accept whatever violence might be done to them, agreeing to sex-work does not entail that the sex-worker agrees to everything that might be done to them.

Some might think that worrying about how sex-workers are treated is silly or a waste of time, but that view is exactly the problem. To think that sex-workers somehow lose their basic rights because they are sex workers is the problem. Sex workers are as entitled to basic moral rights as anyone else who works for a living.

 

While science fiction has intelligent trees and fantasy has its ents and dryads, the idea of trees thinking has often been used to mock philosophers. But scientists now seriously consider the question of whether trees have mental states, such as feelings. This scientific acceptance allows a non-mocking philosophical discussion of the issue.

From a philosophical standpoint, the issue is whether a tree can have a mind. Unfortunately, philosophers do not agree on the nature of the mind. I will consider whether some of the main theories of mind would allow for thinking trees. There are a variety of philosophic theories which attempt to explain the mind. Some of the better-known ones include identity theory, substance dualism, property dualism and functionalism. The implications of each will be considered in turn.

Identity theory is a materialist theory of mind; the view that the mind is composed of matter. Identity theorists assert each mental state is identical to a state of the central nervous system. So, the mind is the central nervous system and its states. Given identity theory, trees cannot think. This is because they lack a central nervous system of the sort humans possess. But this could be criticized as human-centric, and it could be argued that a tree can have mental states that are identical to the relevant physical states of its body.

Substance dualists claim reality contains two fundamental types of substances: material and immaterial. On this view, which was embraced by Descartes, the mind is an immaterial substance which has a causal relation with its body. This mysterious relation enables the mind to control and receive information from the body and allows the body to affect the mind. On this view, a tree could have a mind. A tree having an incorporeal mind connected to its material shell is no more mysterious that a human having an incorporeal mind. It is also no less mysterious. The popular version of substance dualism is that a person is their soul and this soul brings life to the body. A tree having a soul is also no more (or less) mysterious than a human having a soul.

A second type of dualism is property dualism: the mind and body are not distinct substances. Instead, the mind is made up of mental properties that are not identical with physical properties. For example, the property of being the feeling of sadness could not be reduced to a physical property of the brain, such as the firing of certain neurons. So, the mind and body are distinct, but not different substances.

This sort of dualism would allow for trees to think. This is because the theory does not require the physical properties of the body be the same properties that make up the human nervous system. All that would be needed is the right sort of mental and physical properties. Again, that trees could have this metaphysical makeup is no stranger than the belief that humans do.

The last view to be considered is functionalism. There are many varieties of functionalism, but they all have a common foundation: mental states are defined in functional terms. A functional definition of a mental state defines that mental state in terms of its role/function in a mental system of inputs and outputs. To illustrate, a mental state, such as being in pain, is defined in terms of the causal relations it has to external influences on the body, other mental states, and bodily behavior.

Functionalism is usually taken to be a materialist view of the mind because the functional systems are supposed to be physical systems. While identity theory and functionalism are both materialist theories, they differ in a critical way. For identity theorists, each mental state, such as being sad, is identical to a physical state, such as the state of neurons in a specific part of the brain. For two mental states to be the same, the physical states must be identical. So, if mental states are states of neurons in a certain part of the human nervous system, then anything that lacks this sort of biological nervous cannot have a mind.

The functionalist has a different view: a mental state, such as feeling sad, is not defined in terms of a physical state. Instead, while functionalists believe each mental state is some physical state, for two mental states to be the same they need only be functionally identical.  So, if mental states are defined functionally, then anything that can exhibit these functions can have a mind. While trees obviously lack the brain and nervous system of a human, they could have physical systems that function in analogous ways. To use an analogy, different computer hardware can run the same programs. For example, this essay can be read using on a wide variety of hardware platforms including an Android phone, an Xbox One and perhaps even an old Macintosh with a Motorola chip. 

While the issue of whether trees do think or not remains, this essay has addressed the issue of whether they could have minds within the context of modern philosophy of mind. If dualism, property dualism or functionalism is correct, then trees could have minds and think. However, if identity theory is correct, then trees cannot think. Unless, of course, a tree philosopher has an identity theory for trees.

 

Back in 2018, President Trump proposed executing certain types of drug dealers as a solution to the opioid epidemic. As Trump remains Trump, it is likely he will make a similar proposal when he returns to the White House. But this does raise the issue of whether executing drug dealers is a good way to address drug addiction. Put crudely, can the United States kill its way out of this problem.

From a practical standpoint, a key question is whether executing drug dealers would reduce drug addiction in America. It will, of course, be assumed that the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies manufacturing and distributing opioids will not be executed. For those interested in a career in drug dealing, the best option is to get congress to legalize your dealing. The second best is to run your drug dealing as part of the legal business of your large corporation. This way you will probably never do any time no matter how much you do crime. At worst, you’ll be forced to pay a percentage of your profits in a negotiated settlement.

Intuitively, execution could impact addiction. As a great philosopher once said, “if you kill someone for doing something, they won’t do that again.” Killing drug dealers would reduce their numbers and could reduce the extent of drug addiction in America. This would require killing new dealers if they stepped in to replace the dead ones, but this is a practical problem in the logistics of killing.

There is also the deterrence factor. On the face of it, one might believe the threat of execution would deter people from dealing drugs. This assumes drug dealers are suitably rational actors, and their calculation of the risks and benefits will guide them to stop dealing. This would also assume that they have better options available. Alternatively, it could be argued that fear of execution would suffice to deter them. People do fear death and try to avoid it. As such, one could conclude that we could kill our way out of this problem. However, we do not need to rely on speculative arguments about how potential drug dealers might respond to threats of execution. We can look at the data about the effectiveness of the threat execution as a deterrent.

We have extensive data about the death penalty, thanks to America’s enthusiasm for killing people. The evidence is that it is not an effective deterrence, which runs contrary to what intuitions about death and threats of death would suggest. So, it seems unlikely that we can kill our way out of this problem. In addition to the practical issue of whether this approach would work, there is the moral question about its ethics.

On the face of it, the moral issue has been settled by the practical issue: if the death penalty would not deter drug dealers, then the deterrence argument does not morally justify executing them. However, the retribution argument remains: killing drug dealers could be morally justified as retribution for their crimes.

On the one hand, this does have some appeal. Drug use does result in some deaths, and some of the blame for some deaths can be placed drug dealers. If a business knowingly provides a dangerous product to customers, then they are morally accountable for at least some of the harms. This is true in the case of legal products, such as tobacco and prescription opioids, and especially true for products that are illegal because they are harmful, such as illegally trafficked opioids.

While drug dealers do deserve punishment for distributing harmful products (such as tainted drugs), the punishment must fit the principle of proportionality: the punishment must be warranted by the severity of the harm done in the crime.

A drug dealer that intentionally sold contaminated products that killed users would be directly responsible for those deaths. The same would apply to a company that knowingly sold fatally flawed legal products that killed people, such as defective cars. Obviously, the criminal could face legal consequences for their crimes, but from the moral perspective, the legality of the actions is not the primary concern. It would be causing death that matters morally. It would be these case that would most plausibly merit execution, on the principle that the punishment (death) should match the crime (causing death). However, selling someone a fatally defective product is morally distinct from directly killing them, such as by stabbing them to death. As such, executing those who knowingly sell defective products that could cause death would raise moral concerns.

Drug dealers probably do not intentionally sell defective products to kill their customers, if only because they want repeat business. But illegal drugs are often harmful, and this is morally relevant. The harms of illegal drugs can be numerous, ranging from health issues to death by overdose. Many legal products, such as alcohol and tobacco, are also harmful. As such, the question is whether it is morally acceptable to execute someone for providing a harmful product that can potentially kill the user. Once again, the legal issue is distinct from the moral—after all, all any drug could be legalized tomorrow, but this would not change the basic moral concern. The easy and obvious answer is that while knowingly selling harmful products is wrong, this level of wrongness does not merit execution. As such, killing drug dealers for dealing drugs would be no more ethical than killing the owners of Heineken or R.J. Reynolds for distributing legal products that cause significant health issues and contribute to the ruin of many lives.

My name is Dr. Michael LaBossiere, and I am reaching out to you on behalf of the CyberPolicy Institute at Florida A&M University (FAMU). Our team of professors, who are fellows with the Institute, have developed a short survey aimed at gathering insights from professionals like yourself in the IT and healthcare sectors regarding healthcare cybersecurity.

The purpose of The Florida A&M University Cyber Policy Institute (Cyπ) is to conduct interdisciplinary research that documents technology’s impact on society and provides leaders with reliable information to make sound policy decisions. Cyπ will help produce faculty and students who will be future experts in many areas of cyber policy. https://www.famu.edu/academics/cypi/index.php

Your expertise and experience are invaluable to us, and we believe that your participation will significantly contribute to our research paper. The survey is designed to be brief and should take no more than ten minutes to complete. Your responses will help us better understand the current security landscape and challenges faced by professionals in your field, ultimately guiding our efforts to develop effective policies and solutions for our paper. We would be happy to share our results with you.

To participate in the survey, please click on the following link: https://qualtricsxmfgpkrztvv.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8J8gn6SAmkwRO5w

We greatly appreciate your time and input. Should you have any questions or require further information, please do not hesitate to contact us at michael.labossiere@famu.edu

Thank you for your consideration and support.

Best regards,

Dr. Yohn Jairo Parra Bautista, yohn.parrabautista@famu.edu

Dr. Michael C. LaBossiere, michael.labossiere@famu.edu

Dr. Carlos Theran, carlos.theran@famu.edu

 

While assessment is embedded into the body of education, when it first appeared I thought it would be another fading academic. When it first appeared, a modified version of the classic insult against teachers sprung to mind: “those who can do; those who can’t do teach; those who can’t teach assess.” In those early days, most professors saw assessment as a scam: assessment “experts” getting well-paying positions or consulting gigs and then dumping the tedious work on professors. Wily professors responded by making up assessment data and found no difference between the effectiveness of their fictional data and real data. This was because they were both ineffective. I, like many professors, found myself in brave new world of assessment.

I eventually got dragged into assessment. At the start, I did the assessment paperwork for the Philosophy & Religion unit at my university. In 2004 I was given an eternal assignment to the General Education Assessment Committee (GEAC) and then made a co-chair. This resulted in me being on all the assessment committees. As such, I now have over 20 years of assessment experience.

On the one hand, I retain much of my old skepticism of assessment. Some of it still seems to be a scam and other aspects a waste of time. There is money to be made in this area, money that is taken from other areas of education. Assessment also takes faculty time that could be used for teaching or research. There are also good questions about the effectiveness of assessment, even when it is done sincerely.

On the other hand, my reading of Aristotle and experience shows there is some merit in properly done assessment. The good and proper purpose of assessment is to evaluate the effectiveness of education. This is reasonable—as Aristotle noted in his Nicomachean Ethics, if one aims to become a morally good person, one needs an index of progress. In the case of virtue, Aristotle used pain and pleasure as his measure: if you feel increasing pleasure at doing good and increasing pain at doing wrong, then you are making progress. This indirect measure (to use an assessment term) enables one to assess moral progress. In the case of education, there must also be assessment. Otherwise you don’t know how well you are doing in your role as an educator.

One mantra among the assessment elite is “grades are not assessment.” While this has been challenged, it remains a common belief. To be fair, there is some truth to this. One concern is that grades can include factors irrelevant to assessing the quality of work. Professors sometimes give extra credit that is not based on merit. Factors such as attendance and participation can go into grades. For example, my students can get +5 points added on to a paper grade if they turn the paper in by the +5-bonus deadline. If I used the extra credit grade for assessment, it would not be accurate. However, it is easy to adjust grades so that they serve a legitimate role in assessment. For example, knowing that the +5 bonus papers have a +5 bonus allows me to assess them using the grades by subtracting 5 points. I, of course, assess the papers using rubrics, if only to avoid getting a lecture on why grades are not assessment.

Another concern is that professors can be inconsistent in their grading. For example, the way I grade papers is different from my colleagues because I am a different person with different experiences. A paper I grade as an 84 might be graded as a 79 or even a 90 by a colleague. Part of this can be due to a professor being a harder or easier grader; part of it can be due to different standards. While this is a concern, the same problem applies to “non-grade” assessment. Different assessors will be harder or easier in their assessment. While having a standard rubric can help offset this, the subjectivity remains whether you call it a grade or an assessment. Another approach is to have several faculty assess the same class work. While a good idea, schools rarely compensate faculty for this extra work and assessing the work of multiple classes would be a part time job by itself.

There are also concerns that some faculty are bad at properly grading work and hence their grades are not legitimate assessments. While it is true that some faculty are bad at grading, this is not a problem with grading but a problem with the faculty. Addressing the shortcoming would fix two problems: bad grades and assessment. There is also the fact that people can be just as bad at assessment, especially when people are assigned to assess work outside of their field. For example, if an English professor were asked to assess philosophy papers for critical thinking or an engineering professor were be asked to review biology lab reports for written communication.

In closing, assessment can be ineffective and a waste of resources. But it seems to be a fixed feature in education, although the support and enthusiasm for it seems to be fading. In my adopted state of Florida, the Republican legislature is far more concerned with ideology in education and ensuring that faculty are compelled to teach the right content and forbidden to bring up taboo subjects.

 

When the survivors of the Parkland school shooting started speaking against gun violence, conspiracy theorists launched the theory that they were crisis actors. In this context, a crisis actor is someone who pretends to be a victim and does so in service to some secret power. The crisis actor is, by their appeals to pity, supposed to help advance the secret agenda of their secret masters, such as destroying the Second Amendment and taking away peoples’ guns.

As with the false flags discussed in the previous essay, the claim that there are crisis actors presents an epistemic problem: how does one know if the person is a real survivor or an actor serving a secret force? There is also the possibility that a person is a real survivor yet has been recruited to serve the agenda of the secret force.

When sorting out the matter of crisis actors, the same methodology used to address false flags should be applied: when writing about miracles, Hume contends that the certainty one places on the truth of any matter of fact should be proportional to the strength of the evidence. As such, the key question is where the weight of the evidence lies: for or against crisis actors. Naturally, each case needs to be considered on its own, but a general assessment is possible.

When it is alleged that someone is a crisis actor, the usual evidence offered is photographic: the alleged crisis actor has allegedly appeared at the scene of multiple crises. As a method, this is certainly credible: if it can be shown that the same people keep appearing at different events, then it would be reasonable to be suspicious.

However, the first step is to establish that the people are, in fact, the same people. Conspiracy theorists will usually find images that seem to support their claim: what appear to be photos of the same person at different events. However, the photos tend to be low-quality pictures of people with faces distorted by emotion and who have similar hairstyles. Obviously, people in the images can look alike without being the same person. There is also the fact that resemblances between people are not uncommon, especially when the images are of people in the same age range. Snopes has done an analysis of one such case, nicely debunking the claim that the same woman is in all the photos.

In the case of the Parkland students, it was claimed that David Hogg was a crisis actor because he appeared on the news in California. The conspiracy theory is that Hogg was pretending to be a high school student in California and is now pretending to be a Florida high school student. The problem with this narrative is that a person can, obviously enough, travel and be filmed or photographed in different places. Hogg really was in California, but not pretending to be a student. Photos can be found of many people that were taken in far apart locations, but this does not prove they are pretenders,

While investigating individual claims is important, it is also possible to make a general assessment of the likelihood of crisis actors existing. To use the example of David Hogg, he would have needed to establish a fake identity at Parkland. This would require that the other students, the teachers, the people in the community who allegedly knew him, and so on would all need to be active participants in the conspiracy. After all, if he was an actor, his cover would easily be pierced by simply asking people in Parkland about him unless they were also in on the conspiracy. Applying Hume’s principle, the issue is whether it is more likely that Hogg is a real student who survived a real shooting or that he is an actor, and the town is in on the conspiracy. The simpler and more plausible explanation is, obviously enough, that David Hogg was a real student. The same sort of reasoning can be applied to other cases involving alleged crisis actors.

People try to make sense of events by weaving narratives matching their world views. One awful example of this is when people claim school shootings are false flag attacks. In this context, a false flag attack is when the attack is claimed to have been conducted by a mysterious force (like the deep state) to advance some political goal (such as taking away guns). In some cases, the false flag is alleged to be entirely false: there was no attack. In other cases, it is claimed there was a real attack, but attackers were acting at the behest (wittingly or not) of this mysterious force.

From a philosophical perspective, these alleged false flags present an epistemic problem: how does one know an attack is a false flag? As would be suspected, those advancing false flag narratives are often short on evidence. While a complete investigation would require considering each case, David Hume offers a useful guiding principle. When writing about miracles, Hume contends that the certainty one places on the truth of any matter of fact should be proportional to the strength of the evidence. I will apply this principle to the falsest of false flags first, the fictional attack.

Some conspiracy theorists, such as Alex Jones and James Tracy, infamously claimed that no one was killed at Sandy Hook.  Despite the repeated debunking of this claim, conspiracy theorists usually double down in the face of efforts to disprove their claims. That said, it is worth considering the false flag claim in the light of Hume’s principle as well as using the standard inference to the best explanation.

Faking a school shooting would involve many people. The fake parents, fake students, fake police, fake teachers, and others would need to be in on the conspiracy and would need to maintain the façade in the face of years of investigation. School records, police records and such would also need to be faked. There would need to be fake funerals with fake bodies. And so on for a conspiracy that would involve hundreds of people. Given what we know about the ability of people to keep secrets, it is wildly implausible that such a conspiracy could occur and occur repeatedly, as the false flag conspiracy theorists allege.

While it could be countered that the secret force behind the conspiracy has the power and funding to engage in such massive fakery and maintain the fiction for years, this simply creates another problem: if this secret force is so powerful, so capable and so disciplined, then it should be able to easily achieve its political goals. If the conspiracy theory about school shootings being faked to justify banning guns were true, then guns should have already be banned. The theory, in a way, disproves itself.

That is the trouble with proposing such a force. It would have no need to remain a dark conspiracy when it could simply impose its will. The best explanation is that the shootings are not complete fiction. This, however, does leave open the possibility of a false flag that is not a complete fabrication.

Other school shooting conspiracy theorists advance the idea that some or all school shootings are real shootings, but the shooter is acting at the behest of the secret force that makes such things happen. In this case, only the shooter needs to be involved in the conspiracy—either willingly or by being manipulated. There is also the option that the real shooter is an agent of the secret force and then a patsy is put in their place, perhaps as a corpse.

Those arranging the attacks are supposed to be acting as architects of fear who hope to scare the public into backing attempts to destroy the Second Amendment and take away guns. On these theories, the conspirators might be liberals who hate guns so much that they are willing to murder children. Or they might be someone else. The theories vary.

As before, the way to assess this claim is to consider the evidence. An obvious problem is that conspiracy theorists will claim that evidence against their view is the work of Them and they will cherry pick their evidence to confirm their theory. But a more objective assessment indicates the conspiracy theory is less plausible than the alternative. After all, the conspiracy theory requires a secret force that can operate in an amazingly effective manner yet is somehow unable to achieve its alleged ends. It is both extremely capable and extremely ineffective, which is an odd combination. If this secret force is alleged to have control of the state, then it should be able to achieve its goals. If it is not in control of the state, then there is the obvious question of why the state remains ignorant of its operations or ignores them. Once again, the best explanation is that the alleged false flag operations are simply what they appear to be; awful murders.