New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

North Carolina’s new “anti-discrimination” law is unconstitutional, isn't it?

Yesterday was a long day, legally speaking.  First, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Zubick v. Burwell, which argues that it substantially burdens the religious beliefs of corporations to opt-out (by signing a form) of providing contraceptive coverage for their female employees, as mandated by the Affordable Care Act.  The argument is absurd on its face, because it relies on the premise that it is a “substantial burden” of religious freedom to announce that you are exercising your religious freedom by refusing to do something that everybody else has to.  But nevermind; according to everything I’ve read or heard about the session, it looks like the Court is heading for its first 4-4.  Sorry, women in the states covered by the 8^th Circuit! (UPDATE: this is somewhat oversimplified: the argument is that it makes the religious organizations "complicit" in immoral behavior.  This is subject, however, to an obvious reductio: presumably these women draw a salary, and they can use that money to fund their contraception and any form of sexual activity they desire.  Men of course also draw salaries, and there seems to be no worry about their sexual activities.  One question is whether less intrusive means are available to achieve the same ends.  See here and here).

Here in North Carolina, we began a special legislative to put a stop to a grave public health threat: allowing trans* individuals to use the restroom of the gender with which they identify.  Why now?  Because Charlotte passed a non-discrimination ordinance a few weeks ago allowing just that.  So there had to be a special legislative session before April 1 (when the ordinance would have become effective), because kids.  Or something.  I can't make sense of the law except as a display of trans* phobia.  First, something like 200 municipalities have adopted such rules, and there have been zero problems.  So we’re solving a problem for which there is not a scintilla of non-speculative evidence that it actually exists. That suggests that claims of state interest are wildly overblown.  The law is being used purely as an expressive device, even though it is about to make life more difficult for real people. Even if there’s a state interest here, I don’t understand how the statute does anything meaningful to advance that interest: predators would avoid public restrooms that are highly trafficked, and a law like this wouldn’t deter those predators (again, "predator" and "trans*" actually refer to different sets of people!) at less trafficked areas.

But the legislature likes to think big, and the bill does a lot more than restore restroom access: it sets up (for the first time) a list of things on the basis of which you’re not allowed to discriminate in NC.  This initially sounds promising; The Raleigh News and Observer reports:

“The bill would create a statewide law that would ban discrimination on the basis of “race, religion, color, national origin or biological sex” at businesses and other “places of public accommodation.” But the law wouldn’t include sexual orientation and gender identity as categories protected from discrimination”

And that's about where it stops sounding so promising: it bans local governments from going further and granting additional protections.  In other words, it specifically bans efforts to protect LGBTQ rights.  We should pause at "biological sex," which features in the statute, and which the state defines as the one written on your birth certificate.  The state points out that you can have that changed (assuming, I guess, you were born here, which a huge percentage of Charlotteans at least were not).  But this is an attempt to define trans* right out of existence: Caitlin Jenner was not born a woman, she became one.  The entire discussion brings to mind Judith Butler's remarks on "Gender Identity Disorder" and the way the state functions as part of a damaging dialectic of recognition.

Philosophy of Mind: What should we be teaching?

When I first took philosophy of mind at St Andrews in 2002 as an undergrad, we discussed the mind-body problem, behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, modularity, and qualia. I wrote my term paper on anomalous monism and strong supervenience, entitled: "Is it possible for someone to be in a particular mental state without having any propensity to manifest this in behaviour?" I answered "yes" (!) citing 16 articles, including works by Armstrong, Child, Crane, Davidson, Heil, Kim, Moore, and Quine. I argued that Davidson's arguments for strong supervenience ignored the possibility of circular causality and of acausal mental events, which I admitted might be undetectable. My closing remarks: "Anomalous Monists hold that it is impossible for a person to be in a particular mental state without having any propensity to manifest it in behaviour...I have shown that it is possible, where possibility includes unobservables, that a person be in a mental state without having any propensity to manifest this in behaviour. Whether the person in question can discover this mental state is a question of practicality: a matter for psychologists." 

Now, almost 15 years later, I am planning to teach my first course in philosophy of mind. But the field has changed, as have my intellectual leanings. In 2008 Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols published their "Experimental Philosophy Manifesto." In that same year I presented my first poster at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Taipei, which officially changed my research trajectory from philosophy of physics to empirically-informed philosophy of mind. In 2010 I presented a poster at my first Vision Science Society meeting, a meeting only rarely attended by philosophers. I now teach in an interdisciplinary program with neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers. In short, I have come a long way from boundary policing. Moreover, the field has come a long way from the metaphysical debates that caused so much excitement in the early aughts. So where is philosophy of mind now? What should we be teaching our students in philosophy of mind courses? This is where you come in. 

 

Donald Trump is the Perfect Expression of Contemporary Capitalism

There are a couple of emerging narratives about Donald Trump. One is that he is the unreconstructed id of middle-aged, white American men who were left behind by the economy. They aren’t quite sure who they’re mad at, but the list probably includes everybody who doesn’t look like them, women in general, and all those libruls who insist on the “political correctness” of being civil whilst in civil society. It also includes the Republican establishment, which Trump supporters have finally realized not only has virtually nothing in common with them, but also does not care about their actual interests. So the base devolves to all it has left: a generalized rage. The other narrative says that Trump is a European-style nationalist: you can have your social services, but you can’t have people who don’t belong to your tribe running around and using those services. These narratives have in common the idea that Trump is appealing because he is racist.

One should never underestimate the explanatory power of racism in American politics, but there’s a third narrative about Trump that belongs in the picture, because I think it adds some explanatory value that the other two don’t: Trump is also the perfect embodiment of contemporary capitalism, by which I mean brand capitalism. I want to take a little time to explain this via a detour into Saussure, but if you don’t want to go there, here’s the gist of it: Trump doesn’t have policy positions because he’s not selling any product other than himself, and there isn’t anything to him other than his being the embodiment of Trump^TM.