Sexism Sells

Via Feministing: the Women's Media Center has launched a campaign to publicize the absolutely unacceptable blatant sexism in mainstream media. I don't take a stand for one Democratic candidate or the other--but regardless of which you support, this attitude is beyond the pale.

You can sign a petition here.

Skepticism about Climate Change

Yesterday I posted a quote from a book review by Freeman Dyson. Dyson thinks that climate change skeptics have been misunderstood and are too quickly dismissed:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Now, I think Dyson is right to consider whether the hype about global warming distracts from other important environmental and social issues. In fact, environmental problems are not all of a piece: a solution to one problem can exacerbate others.

Still there's a problem here with Dyson's assessment. He says "Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists." But is this true?

I have yet to meet someone who is both skeptical of the climate science that supports anthropogenic global warming and is a passionate environmentalist. The position that Dyson describes--a person who thinks that the climate change hype is overblown--is not necessarily skeptical. This person just has their values ordered so that addressing climate change is not the primary value. The skeptics that I've met take one of these positions:

1.) They are ignorant of and threatened by science, sometimes as an extension of a general anti-intellectualism or anti-secularism.

2.) They think that there is a more subtle political motivation for the climate change hypothesis. For instance, that liberals are really anti-corporate, anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, etc. and this scientific hypothesis is an excuse to get political support for their views or their candidates. Often the skeptics in this camp don't doubt the climate change evidence but do doubt that the cause is anthropogenic. The argument goes that if it's not anthropogenic then we need not change any of our practices.

Climate change: Ethics, politics, economics

Next year I'm teaching an "Introduction to Ethics" course with an emphasis on sustainability issues.

One inevitable pitfall will be the temptation to be distracted from the discourse of ethics by the details of policy. My students, most of whom prefer technical problems to theoretical questions, will be tempted by this distraction. And since I'm usually so concerned to show that theory matters to practice, I will be too. But it's a lower-level course, not a place for settling what policy should be for specific cases.

Another pitfall will be overcoming both apathy and skepticism. In just about every class or lecture where the question of global warming comes up, there is one (and usually only one) skeptic. I hope that I can pull the ever-present skeptic into a debate on the ethics of the issue instead of the facts. I personally believe the facts are settled, but there is no time in a philosophy course to teach all the science--both basic and complex--that is needed to place trust in the consensus of climate scientists. (For example, one student this year insisted that since Mars is warmer than the earth, and Mars has no humans on it, climate change on earth can't possibly be caused by humans.)

Freeman Dyson has a piece in the New York Review of Books discussing an economic evaluation of climate change policies in the book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. The author, William Nordhaus, holds that the more ambitious plans, such as Al Gore's call for a drastic reduction in emissions, will not be cost-effective in the long run. That is, they will cost more to implement than the economy will benefit from climate stabilization. (This evaluation seems to ignore the ethical question of whether the costs of failure to act are disproportionately paid by the vulnerable.) On the other hand, doing nothing could be disastrous. Nordhaus says that any policy proposal which tries to avoid raising the price of carbon (and doesn't that translate into allowing gas prices to rise?) is simply not serious.

Dyson also takes on the question of the global warming skeptics, as I'm sure I'll have to do. The main argument in their favor is the problem of induction that attacks any scientific generalization, plus the philosopher of science's skeptical metainduction: any scientific inference could be wrong, and in the history of science many have been wrong. So maybe the climate scientists, with all their evidence for anthropogenic causes of global warming and the even greater consensus that, human-caused or not, the current warming trend will be fueled by positive feedback mechanisms, are just wrong. Maybe. But the idea of inductive risk does hold that skepticism in check: if we're wrong, we'll be in really bad shape.

Dyson's concern is that the global warming issue distracts from other environmental issues. He writes:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Classifying the Sciences

In the last week I've encountered two expressions that bug me. Both have to do with classifying the sciences.

"The hard sciences."
In an e-mail, a philosopher pointed to the necessity of a curricular requirement for courses in "the hard sciences." No one younger than a certain age talks this way. No social scientist talks this way. And I've never heard a natural scientist talk this way, either. From the context, it seemed as though the philosopher was indicating math and physics. These are taken to be the sciences that aren't "soft." But why are those other areas of study called soft? Because they're easier? (They're not.) Because the object of study is less concrete? (But consider fluid dynamics.) Or because they aren't as male dominated? Plenty of people have made a case for the latter.
So the term "hard sciences" is at least disrespectful of the social sciences and possibly also disrespectful of women.
A more accurate division is into the "life" and "physical" sciences. Is that so hard?

"The human sciences."
I've seen this used twice in the philosophy of science book I've been reading. I think it's used to indicate the social sciences but I can't tell if it's also meant to capture some or all of the humanities and some or all of the biological sciences. Certainly, it's used in a context where the social sciences are more problematic than the natural sciences because they supposedly lack objectivity. But I've never heard anyone refer to their own work as being in "the human sciences," and I have no colleagues who identify themselves as "human scientists."
I can't explain why this term is used. I can only think that its purpose is to appear neutral while being subtly disparaging. Or maybe it's an old-fashioned term. I can imagine that some would use it so as to make an implicit reference to the Geisteswissenschaften--but in the philosophy of science I'm reading, that would be beside the point.

The use of terms like these by philosophers points, I think, to the distance between (some) philosophers and their colleagues elsewhere in the academy.

Logic Textbooks Cost Too Much

And Rob Helpychalk has a good idea about not buying into their hype with a quick review of some open source books.

I used Hurley this year for both logic and critical thinking courses, which was convenient. But just about all the texts out there are good enough for my purposes, so I doubt that I'll assign such an expensive text again anytime soon.

My local paper ran an article last month about the out-of-control prices on college textbooks and a New York Times editorial calls on Congress to intervene. Apparently the NYPIRG recently released a report about this problem.

Higher Education and honorary doctorates

I was going to refrain from spending too much time on Washington U's decision to award an honorary doctorate to Phyllis Schlafly, until a professor on facebook reminded us all of this, among many, particular gems by Schlafly, from just a few years ago:

How does it make you feel to know that 547,667 places in U.S. colleges were occupied by foreign students in the academic year just ended?

Seeing this quote prompted me to think several things. First, the answer: It makes me incredibly proud to be in service to higher education.

But then I pondered the decision of WashU to honor the author of that statement, not just with a platform, which I'd celebrate, but with a degree, before some of the very "foreign students" she would deny. And then, I felt very ashamed to be in service to higher education, if this is our practice.

Perhaps this is not an issue for a blog devoted to science, feminist philosophy, and environmental philosophy, but at such times, I feel compelled to reflect on the atmosphere in which we conduct our inquiry.