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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.

There is a minimum income needed to survive, to pay for necessities such as food, shelter, clothing and health care. To address this need, the United States created a minimum wage. However, this wage has not kept up with the cost of living and many Americans do not earn enough to support themselves. These people are known, appropriately enough, as the working poor. This raises an obvious moral and practical question: who should bear the cost of making up the difference between the minimum wage and a living wage? The two main options seem to either employers can pay employees enough to live on, or taxpayers will need to pick up the tab. Another alternative is to simply not make up for the difference and allow people to try to survive in desperate poverty. In regards to who currently makes up the difference, at least in Oregon, the answer was given in the University of Oregon’s report on “The High Cost of Low Wages in Oregon.”

According to the report, roughly a quarter of the workers in Oregon made no more than $12 per hour. Because of this, many workers qualify for public assistance, such as SNAP (better known as food stamps). Not surprisingly, many low-paid workers are employed by large, highly profitable corporations.

According to Raahi Reddy, a faculty member at the University of Oregon, “Basically state and taxpayers are helping these families subsidize their incomes because they get low wages working for the companies that they do.” As such, the answer is that the taxpayers are making up the difference between wages and living wages. Interestingly, Oregon is a leader in two categories: one is the percentage of workers on public support and the other is having among the lowest corporate tax rates. This suggests that the burden falls heavily on the workers who are not on public support (both in and outside of Oregon).

The authors of the report recommended shifting some burden from the taxpayers to the employers in the form of an increased minimum wage and paid sick leave for workers. Not surprisingly, increasing worker compensation is unpopular with corporations. After all, more for the workers means less for the executives and shareholders.

Assuming that workers should receive enough resources to survive, the moral concern is whether this cost should be shifted from the taxpayers to the employers or remain on the taxpayers.

One argument in favor of leaving the burden on the taxpayers is that it is not the moral responsibility of the corporations to pay a living wage. Their moral obligation is not to the workers but to the shareholders and this obligation is to maximize profits (presumably within the limits of the law).

One response is that businesses are part of civil society and this imposes certain moral obligations on all members of that society. These obligations include providing at least a living wage to full-time employees. It could argued that it is fairer that the employer pay a living wage than to expect the taxpayer to make up the difference. After all, the taxpayers are not profiting from the labor of the workers, so they would be subsidizing the profits of the employers by allowing them to pay workers less. Forcing the taxpayers to make up the difference is unjust and is robbing them to increase corporate profits.

It could be countered that requiring a living wage could destroy a company, thus putting the workers into a worse situation, that of being unemployed rather than underpaid. This is a legitimate concern, at least for businesses that would be unable to survive if they paid a living wage. However, this argument would not work for business, such as Walmart, that have robust profit margins. It might be claimed that there must be one standard for all businesses, be they a tiny bookstore that is barely staying open or a megacorporation that hands out millions in bonuses to top management. The obvious reply is that there are already different standards that apply to different businesses based on the differences between them and some of these are even reasonable and morally acceptable.

Another line of argumentation is to show that there is, in fact, no obligation to ensure citizens have a living income. In this case, employers would would have no obligation. The taxpayers would also not have any obligation, but they could elect lawmakers to pass laws authorizing that tax dollars be spent supporting the poor. That is, the taxpayers could chose to provide charity to the poor. This is not obligatory, but merely a nice thing to do. Some business could, of course, also choose to be nice, they could pay full-time workers at least a living wage. But this should, one might argue, be entirely a matter of choice.

Some folks would, of course, want to take this even further: if assisting other citizens to have a living income is a matter of choice and not an obligation, then tax dollars should not be used to assist those who make less than a living wage. Rather, this should be a matter of voluntary charity, and everyone should be free to decide where their money goes. Naturally, consistency would require that this principle of free choice be extended beyond just assisting the poor.  After all, free choice entails that people should decide as individuals whether to contribute to the salaries of members of the legislatures, to the cost of wars, to subsidies to corporations, to the CIA, to the FBI and so on. This does, obviously enough, have some appeal as the state would operate like a collection of charity recipients, getting whatever money people wished to contribute. The only major downside is that it would probably result in the collapse of civil society.

 

 

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.

While the police are supposed to protect and serve, there are grave concerns about policing in America. Back in 2015, Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager shot Walter Lamer Scott to death after what should have been a routine traffic stop. While the video does not show what happened before Scott started to flee, it shows Scott was no threat to Slager: he was unarmed and running away. The video also shows Slager dropping an object by Scott’s body, what appears to be Slager’s Taser. When Slager called in the incident, he described it as a justifiable shooting: he claimed Scott grabbed his Taser and he had to use his service weapon. Obviously Slager was unaware that he was being recorded as he shot the fleeing Scott.

As I am friends with former and current law enforcement personnel, I know there are good officers. As such, I will not offer a sweeping condemnation of all police. However, this incident raised concerns about policing in the United States.

What made this incident unusual is not that a situation involving a black man and white officer escalated. It is also not very unusual that a black man was shot by a police officer. What was unusual at the time was that it was videotaped and the public got to see what happened, as opposed to what was claimed by the officer. If the incident had not been recorded, this would have bene just another case of a suspect attacking a police officer and being shot in self-defense. The recording, however, transformed it from the usual to the unusual: a police officer being charged with murder for shooting a suspect.

Since I teach critical thinking, I understand that the story of one incident, however vivid, is just an anecdote. I am also aware that to generalize from one incident is to commit the fallacy of hasty generalization. That said, the videotape provided grounds for being suspicious of other incidents in which suspects have been shot while (allegedly) trying to attack an officer. Since we know that it has happened, we know that it can happen. The obvious and important concern is the extent to which this sort of thing has happened and is still happening. That is, what needs to be determined is the extent to which officers have engaged in legitimate self-defense and to what extent officers have gotten away with murder.

This videotape showed, rather dramatically, that requiring police to use body cameras can be a good idea. People are somewhat less likely to act badly if they know they are being recorded. There is also the fact that there can be evidence of misdeeds. Cameras can sometimes benefit officers as video evidence might show when the use of force was legitimate.

What was also usual about this incident is that there was intense focus on the fact that Scott had a criminal record and legal troubles involving child support. This was part of the usual strategy of trying to show that the victim of a police shooting was “no angel” and perhaps to suggest that the shooting was, in some manner, justified. Or, at the very least, not as bad as one might think. However, Scott’s background had no relevance in this incident: his past legal troubles did not justify the shooting.

What was also usual was the reaction of Bill O’Reilly and some of the other fine folks at Fox, which I learned about back in 2015 from Professor Don Hubin’s reaction and criticism. Rather than focusing on the awfulness of the killing and what it suggests about other incidents, O’Reilly’s was worried that some people might use the killing to “further inflame racial tensions” and he added that “there doesn’t seem to be, as some would have you believe, that police are trying to hunt down black men and take their lives.” While this is not a claim that has been seriously put forth, O’Reilly endeavored to “prove” his claim by engaging in a misleading comparison.

He noted that “In 2012, last stats available, 123 blacks were killed by police 326 whites were killed.” While this shows that police kill more whites than blacks in total numbers, the comparison is misleading because O’Reilly leaves out a critical piece of information: the population at the time was about 77% white and about 13% black. This sheds a rather different light on O’Reilly’s statistics: they are accurate, yet misleading. In total numbers, more whites than blacks were killed by police. But blacks were killed at a disproportionately higher rate.

This point is usually countered by the claim that blacks commit more crimes than whites and thus it is no surprise that they get shot more often than whites. After all, one might point out, Scott did have a criminal record. This reply has a certain irony to it. After all, people who claim that blacks are arrested (and shot) at a disproportionate level claim that the police are more likely to arrest blacks than whites and focus more on policing blacks. As evidence that blacks commit more crimes, they point to the fact that blacks are more likely (adjusting for proportions) than whites to be arrested. While one would obviously expect more blacks to be arrested if they committed more crimes (proportionally), to assume what is in doubt (that policing is fair) as evidence that it should not be doubted is circular reasoning.

O’Reilly also used another stock defense: “You can’t … you can’t be a perfect system. There are going to be bad police officers; they’re going to make mistakes; um .. and then the mistakes are going to be on national television.” O’Reilly is using the perfectionist fallacy: the system cannot be perfect (which is true), therefore (he infers) we should not be concerned that this could be evidence of systematic problems. Or perhaps he just means that in an imperfect system one must expect mistakes such as an officer shooting a fleeing suspect. O’Reilly was also concerned that the mistakes would be on television. perhaps his concern was that people would fall victim to a hasty generalization from the misleading vividness of the incident. That would be a fair point if he operated in good faith. However, the message O’Reilly seemed to conveying is that this incident was an isolated one that does not indicate a systemic problem. Even though these “isolated” incidents happen with terrible regularity.

I will close by noting that my objective is not to attack the police. Rather, my concern is that the justice system should be just. It should also be important to all Americans, after all, most of us pledged allegiance to a nation that is supposed to offers liberty and justice to all.

 

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

Some states have passed or are considering laws that would restrict what government aid can be used to purchase. One apparently pro-active approach, taken by my adopted state of Florida, has been to weed out drug users by requiring recipients of aid to pass a drug test. In Missouri, there has been an effort to prevent food stamp recipients from using their aid to buy steak or seafood. In Kansas a proposed law forbids people receiving government assistance from using those funds to visit swimming pools, buy movie tickets, gamble or get tattoos.

While these proposals and policies are fueled by unwarranted stereotypes of the poor, it is possible to argue in their favor and two such arguments will be considered. Both arguments share a common principle, namely that the state needs to protect certain citizens from harm (which is a reasonable principle). The first argument centers on the need for the state to protect the poor from their poor decision making. The second focuses on the need to protect the taxpayers from being exploited by the poor.

The first argument is essentially an appeal to paternalism: the poor are incapable of making their own good decisions and thus the wisdom of the lawmakers must guide them. If left unguided, the poor will waste their limited government support on things like drugs, gambling, tattoos, steak and lobsters. This approach has a philosophical pedigree. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, argued that the compulsive power of the state should be used to compel the citizens to be virtuous. Other thinkers, usually those who favor totalitarianism, also find the idea of this paternalism appealing.

Despite the pedigree of this approach, it is always reasonable to inquire as to whether a law is needed or not. In the case of a law that forbids, the obvious line of inquiry is to investigate the extent to which people engage in the behavior that is supposed to be forbidden by the law.

Despite the anecdotal evidence of Fox News’ infamous welfare surfer, there seems to be little evidence that people who receive state aid are blowing their state aid on strip clubs, drugs, steak or lobster. Rather, the poor (like almost everyone else) spend most of their money on things like housing and non-luxury food. In regard to drugs, people on support are no more likely than anyone else to be using them. As such, unless it can be clearly shown that a significant percentage of aid recipients are engaged in such “poor choices”, these laws would seem to be, at best,  solutions in search of a problem.

It is also reasonable to consider whether a law is morally consistent in regard to how all citizens are treated. If the principle at work is that recipients of state money must be guided by the state because they cannot be trusted to make their own decisions, then this must be extended to all recipients of such money. This would include farmers getting subsidies, companies getting government contracts, government employees, recipients of tax cuts and so on. This is all government aid.

This is a matter of moral consistency. If some citizens must be subject to strict restrictions on how the state money can be spent and perhaps pass a drug test before getting it, then the same must apply to all citizens. Unless, of course, a relevant difference can be shown.

It could be argued that the poor, despite the lack of evidence, are simply more wasteful and worse at spending decisions than the rest of the population. While this does match the stereotypical narrative that some like to push, it does not match reality. One does not need to spend much time on Google to find multitudes of examples of how non-poor recipients of state money wasted it or blew it on luxuries. Also, surviving in poverty requires using very limited resources well.

It could be argued that extending this principle to everyone would be a good idea. After all, people who are not poor make bad decisions with state money and this shows that they need the guiding wisdom of the state and strict control. Of course, this would result in a paternalistic (or “nanny” as some prefer) state that so many self-proclaimed small government freedom lovers profess to dislike.

Obviously, it is also important to consider whether a law will be more harmful or more beneficial. While it could be argued that the poor would be better off if compelled by the state to spend their aid money on what the state decides they can spend it on, there is still the fact that these policies and proposals are solutions in search of a problem. That is, these laws would not benefit people because they are typically not engaged in wasteful spending to begin with.

There is also the moral concern about the harm done to the autonomy and dignity of the recipients of the aid. It is, after all, an assault on a person’s dignity to assume that she is wasteful and bad at making decisions. It is an attack on a person’s autonomy to try to control him, even for his own good.

It might be countered that if the poor accept the state’s money, then they must accept the restrictions imposed by the state. While this does have some appeal, consistency would (as noted above) require this to be applied to everyone getting state money. Which includes the rich. A tax cut is still a handout. And the people passing such laws, since they are paid by the state. Presumably they would not like to be treated this way and consistency would seem to require that they treat others as they would wish to be treated.

The second main argument for such restrictions is based on the claim that they are needed to protect the taxpayers from being exploited by the poor. While some do contend that any amount of state aid is too much and is theft from the taxpayers (the takers stealing from the makers), such restrictions at least accept that the poor should receive some aid. But this aid must be for essentials and not wasted, otherwise the taxpayers’ money is being (obviously enough) wasted.

As was discussed above, an obvious point of concern is whether such waste is occurring at a level that justifies the compulsive power of the state being employed. As noted above, these proposals and policies seem to be solutions in search of a problem. As a general rule, laws and restrictions should not be imposed without adequate justification and this seems lacking in this case.

This is not to say that people should not be concerned that taxpayer money is being wasted or spent unwisely. It, in fact, is. However, this is not a case of the clever poor milking the middle-class and the rich. Rather, it is a case of the haves milking the have-less. One prime example of this is wealthfare, much of which involves taxpayer money going to subsidize and aid those who are already quite well off, such as corporations. So, I do agree that the taxpayer needs to be protected from exploitation. But the exploiters are not the poor. This should be obvious: if the poor were draining significant resources from the rest of the citizens, they would no longer be poor.

But some might still insist, the poor really are spending their money on steak, lobsters, strip clubs and gambling. One not unreasonable reply is that “man does not live by bread alone” and it does not seem wrong that the poor would also have a chance to enjoy the few luxuries or fun that their small amount of aid can buy.  Assuming, of course, that they are not spending everything on food and shelter. I would certainly not begrudge a person an occasional steak or beer. Or a swim in a pool. I do, of course, think that people should spend wisely, but that is another matter.  

 

 

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.