My Facts Trump Your Facts

Here's a relatively simple example of a big problem we have to deal with in some way: Sarah Palin misquotes a Wall Street Journal story to back up her earlier incorrect analysis of grocery store prices.

The actual details of the story aren't all that exciting. She said in a speech in Phoenix that grocery store prices had risen substantially. This was shown not to be the case by a journalist from WSJ, and she quoted the WSJ as supporting her statement: a quote from an article that actually contradicted her statement.

Grocery store prices aren't my concern here. Neither is Sarah Palin. In a minute when I start talking about government, don't think I mean Palin. What is my concern is that this case gives us an example of disagreements on two different levels. The first level, what do we do about the set of facts that we are faced with. That's a healthy, robust, necessary discussion. The second level, what the set of facts are. That is a dangerous, dangerous place to have a disagreement.

It's dangerous because disagreement on level 1 and disagreement on level 2, you'll find, are often used as mutually-supportive. When this happens, when two sides of a disagreement don't even have a common arena (e.g. the factual world) in which to disagree, the whole conversation is a lost cause.

What happens? No conversation. (In fairness, I should juxtapose that link with this one).

What's lost in all of that is that these disputes are being held at the level of governance. Which means, underneath some rather infuriating, obstinate fist-pounding ("My facts are the real ones, yours aren't!"), are real ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, who would rather have a functional government with some elasticity to handle the inevitable crises on our horizon.

But now we're faced with the problem of trying to sort out whose facts are correct (and convince the people who thought they had them that they really didn't. Good luck!). That can't be done perfectly, i.e. completely, but "most of the way done" or even half way would really be significant progress.

So, let me put on my Nostradamus hat for a second and predict that all kinds of candidates are going to be accused of blocking up the political process in 2012. When that happens, please remember, it's actually everyone's fault. Even ours.

I'll Back That Horse

Half as many 18-29 year-old voters came out in 2010 as came out in 2008. That wouldn't have turned the tide last night, I don't think. But I think it does tell us a heck of a lot about the demographic.

Not surprisingly, the young vote goes liberal (58% Democrat yesterday). Now, in 2008, 18% of voters were in that demographic, and this time 9%. In 2008, Obama was polling ahead of McCain, Democrats were projected to take over the Senate and the House, etc. The young vote backed the winning horse, after they had already been told who it would be.

Anecdotally, in 2008, when I voted, I saw several people in my generation at the polls. Yesterday, I was the youngest person in the building by a good 30 years.

This year, the projections were mainly in favor of the GOP, and young voters didn't turn out. Why? Well, it seemed like a lost cause to them. Of course, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in practice.

I stopped paying attention to baseball back in June when it was clear that the Cubs weren't going to put it together this year. The idea is the same: you minimize your feeling of loss if you make yourself apathetic about it ahead of time. And if you're apathetic about it, you'll certainly not bother to invest any effort, like voting.

Nevermind all of that "civic duty" talk, we don't want to hear any of that either. It reeks of Kant to those of us who know anything about Kant, and to those of us who don't, it sounds a heckuva lot like you're trying to tell us what to do. Well, buster, we are self-determining fully-fledged individuals, and goodness knows, we don't take orders from some vague concept like "duty".

I think the best way of getting my generation energized to vote isn't to hold Get Out the Vote rallies, or any of that. It clearly doesn't work. Instead, you should lie to us, and tell us we've got a sure thing here. We're going to win.

Heck yeah, I'll back that horse!

Oh my....

I'm posting a lot this week, but here goes...

In case you missed it, Glenn Beck claimed on his radio show that the theory of evolution is ridiculous and that he's never seen a half-man half-monkey before.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I do so love when people who clearly have no clue what methodological science is all about pretend that their opinion of scientific theory matters. Let me explain something to you: scientific theories are arrived at and adopted by the scientific community. There are loads of criteria that determine their acceptance of any given theory: falsifiability--the logical possibility that the theory make a prediction that comes out false, fecundity--the property of a theory to create new avenues of research, explanatory value--the property of a theory to account for (at least as much, if not) more phenomena than its predecessor, & ontological cost--the number of things that the theory requires us to say exist in order to use it. That's a short list. (See Phillip Kitcher's "Believing Where We Cannot Prove" for more).

Now, when it comes to what we teach in our schools, the choice ought to be no choice at all. If we're teaching science, we teach what scientists use. We do this because we are preparing children for reality beyond elementary and high school. If your school board decides to teach Intelligent Design rather than Evolution, or alongside Evolution, as equivalently valid, when you get to a university and learn that Intelligent Design doesn't follow logically, requires that the Theory of Evolution be true, and isn't taken seriously by hardly anyone in the scientific community, you'll be in for a rude awakening, from a pragmatic point of view.

What the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant. What percentage of people accept evolution is irrelevant. If you'll pardon the vacuities, science is science, and opinion is opinion.

To teach anything but evolution (at least for the time being, barring the eventual replacement of Evolution by some other theory that better satisfies the criteria on the above list) is reprehensibly irresponsible.

Likewise, it is irresponsible to argue via a straw man against evolution. There is no claim that humans evolved from monkeys, or even apes. The contention is that we share common ancestry. We also share common ancestry with sewer rats.

One other point I'll make, regarding another idiotic thing Beck says in that clip: yes, it absolutely was difficult to convince people that the earth is round. Aristotle's cosmology is a concentric sphere model, which was a prevailing model between Ptolemy and Copernicus, yet still, in 1492 CE, the lay person thought the Earth was flat, scholars couldn't convince them, and people are still lied to about Columbus' grand vision of a round planet. Then again, between Copernicus and Newton, people were killed over claiming that the Earth revolves around the sun.

One more: look up the history of Einstein vs. the early quantum theorists, and that famous quote of Einstein's, "God does not play dice."

Yes, people are extraordinarily resistant to further developments in scientific theory. Luckily, science isn't interested in your opinion, it amounts to diddly-squat.

Jimmy McMillan Remix:

The Great Manipulation

It is truly a sad thing to have to acknowledge, but it's time we stopped laughing at the Tea Party, and started to think seriously about what's going on. It could be that people such as Christine O'Donnell are making a mockery of running for the Senate. Or, it could be a genuine grass roots movement made up of people with genuine beefs with our government. Or, it could be a way of manipulating people.

Today, I'd like to consider the possibility that the Tea Party is just a way of manipulating people. Let me be clear, though, on what I mean by manipulating, because it is obvious that we are all manipulated in all sorts of ways on a nearly constant basis: there are peer pressures, societal pressures, gender norms, advertisers, and so on. Being manipulated in this sense isn't always bad, e.g. educators manipulate the minds of their students, or a well-written novel plays your heartstrings like a harp (and no, anti-feminist Twilight novels simply don't cut the mustard).

But I mean the more insidious sort of manipulation. These people--the followers, the people attending the rallies, and not the pink-faced speechmakers--are being manipulated.

That sure seems obvious. Especially when you ask these people questions about their criticisms, and you find that the criticisms are vague and targetless. However, the charge of manipulation is much easier to make than it is to substantiate.

What is clear, is that our attitudes and beliefs are influenced and manipulated by all sorts of things. What is also clear is the link between what we believe and what we do. What is less clear, is any specific causal relation between a particular influence and a particular action. Unless, of course, you specifically cite Glenn Beck as the reason for your action. Even in that case, there is a problem with the reliability of self-reporting. It's terribly easy to lie to yourself about your motivations.

So, we're left with open questions. If these people are being manipulated, who is manipulating them? And to what purpose?

None of that is really clear. Nevertheless it is a very effective accusation to make, given the state of our discourse, because no one wants to think that they're being manipulated. We all like to think that we're in the driver's seat of our own lives. We all like to think the best of ourselves, and when you have a vague sense that something is wrong in the world, and someone hands to a pre-packaged diagnosis of what's wrong, there is a strong pull to go with that diagnosis. You shouldn't, you should think critically about what you've been told. Clearly, people don't do this.

I am sticking with manipulation. It is otherwise too great an irony for these people to be paying for tickets to hear Palin tell them how the government is taking their money.

False or Trivial?

Monday night, Sam Harris was on the Daily Show promoting his new book on how science can help us to determine our moral values: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. I wanted to say a bit about this because I'm disappointed in Harris.

There are two ways of taking what it seems that he's arguing for (I confess, I haven't read the book, but only seen interviews with him about it). The first way of taking his thesis is what I wrote above, that science can determine our values for us. This isn't what he seems to be talking about in the interviews, however. He seems to be speaking, rather of using science as a tool for determining what the best methods for maximizing our moral values are, specifically, human well-being; the old utilitarian standard.

Now, in the first case, there is a rather serious problem known as "the naturalistic fallacy" or sometimes the "Is/Ought" fallacy, first argued for by my boy David Hume in A Treatise on Human Nature when he was a lad of my age, or younger in the 18th century. It is a widely accepted principle. Simply put: you cannot derive normative statements from descriptive ones. Or, to make it stronger: you cannot derive any single normative statement from any set, however large, of descriptive statements. It can't be done. In which case, Harris' thesis would be a non-starter.

The second possible thesis is much more reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that it has been argued for over and over again for nearly as long as the naturalistic fallacy has been known. Most recently, in The Life You Can Save Peter Singer has argued for it. In which case, Harris' thesis gives us nothing new at all.

Dubious options, indeed.

I can only speculate about what Harris' intentions are for writing this book. So, what follows is nothing more than speculation. What it seems to me is that the only purpose of this book is to run afoul of people who adhere to theologically-grounded moral theories, rather than to challenge the theories themselves (although, I'm sure he does a bit of that, too). My conjecture is that Harris (and Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens) feel as though the remaining bits of the picture need to be filled in for a comprehensive atheism. But secular ethics has been around for centuries. That's nothing new.

Perhaps the attempt is to further raise the authority of science. But, as I say, it must have it's limits. They are logical limits, and cannot be broken.

Brief Word on Moderation

Yglesias: "I don't think that kind of narrowly partisan thinking gets you very far in the long run."

In response to those who think it may be a good thing for the Democrats for the Tea Party candidates to have won those primary races.

As I say, a center-oriented moderate government, with moderates on either side of the aisle, gives us our only hope of being able to effectively deal with the problems we find before us.

Cheers!

It's About Time!

I don't have much of anything to say about Qur'an burning, other than it seems that Rev. Jones was involved in no more than a cheap publicity stunt to me, riding the publicity tidal wave as far as he possibly could making heinous threats without going through with the heinous deed.

He is no more than a hissing kitten.

I don't have much of anything to say about the Governator's Russia-hunt, other than it was worth a good chuckle, and I don't think it was meant to be worth anything more than a good chuckle anyway. So you might have been offended, saying that it wasn't Palin, but Tina Fey as Palin, who said they could see Russia from their house. I'll tell you how much I think it matters:

Doodly-squat.

Ahem.

I do have something to say. That is: thank goodness for Meghan McCain. Yes, I said it. Her new book Dirty Sexy Politics is more than a memoir about being the daughter of a former presidential candidate, but is, additionally, a call to Republicans to establish the party they could have. That is a good thing.

It has seemed far too much, and for far too long that we have a party of fairly reasonable do-gooders on the one side, and a party of game-playing, point-scoring lunatics on the other. And, if you watched Obama's speech near Cleveland, Ohio this week, the idea of Republicans as a party of point-scoring lunatics would have been reinforced for you. With good reason, too.

I tweeted, At his speech in Cleveland, the President praised Reagan. Does that mean the GOP has to hate Reagan now?

This was because of the way this impression is so reinforced in the discourse (even as right-skewed as the discourse has become). For years I have been wondering what happened to all of the sensible, intelligent Republicans I knew in the late 90s. They were, I think, pushed into hiding when, on this date 9 years ago, the power of emotional, non-rational thinking was demonstrated to all of us, and, well, the rest is history. We were left with the shrill, fear-mongering, maniacal rhetoric.

So it has seemed that we are faced with a choice between reason and unreason, and not a choice between reason and reason. A choice between two fairly reasonable options is a tough choice, but it is a choice I could happily make, knowing, at least, that some responsible decisions are going to be made either way. A choice between two fairly reasonable options forces the options to be better, to work harder, and to try and win us over with argument rather than try to scare us out of our wits.

The smart Republicans have been in hiding, as I say. But, thank goodness for Meghan McCain for reminding us that they are still there.

Now, when are they going to come out to play?

Call Me a Sewer Rat, Then

It is hard not to agree with the Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Becks of the world when they say things that amount to "Our country is going to hell in a handbasket."

We've known that for a long time. It might be the only sentence in American English about which there is a consensus. Kurt Vonnegut put his finger on this in an article about the 1972 Republican National Convention*.

During the Nixon and Johnson years, or the Nam years, tons of kids, youngsters of all walks of life, staged hundreds of protests against the war. Each of them came home learning the same bitter lesson: our government just isn't interested in our opinion anymore.

That was, I think, when we all should have thrown our hands up. Which reminds me, now, of the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama ran, and won, on the word "Hope". Hope sells. Sex, like hope, sells. Unlike hope, sex is something we can have.

Our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

It's not hard to agree with Beck and O'Reilly about that. It is hard to agree with them about why our country is headed there. They think we're headed there because our disenfranchised few are trying to stake out some part of the American Dream for themselves. They aren't so up front about that. They try and push the idea that "equal under the law" is a property of socialism or communism, which is true. It is true in the same way that "having a tail" is a property of sewer rats.

According to FOX logic, a horse is trying to be a sewer rat because a horse has a tail.

That's the logic. People buy it. And so, our country is going to hell in a handbasket.

*"In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself", in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons

A Revolution of Thought

I have decided, after much thought, to write a book. The purpose of this book is to advocate a revolution of thought. I think this sort of a revolution is what we need desperately in our world (not just our country), and so, I have decided to advocate strongly for it.

Let me start, I guess, by saying what a revolution need not be. The American Revolution was an example of what a revolution need not be. A group of rebels, who we now oxymoronically call “patriots”, fought against their government and gained their independence from it. The sort of revolution I am challenging you to take part in is not that sort of revolution.

Instead, the sort of revolution I am challenging you to take part in is much more akin to what Thomas Kuhn calls a “Scientific Revolution”. A large upswing and re-valuation of things.

As I hope to make clear, we are in desperate need of just such a revolution. A revolution of thought.

In the early part of the 20^th century, there was a revolution of physics. It began simply in 1905 with Swiss patent clerk publishing some thoughts he had about what makes the universe tick away. This launched, of course, the Theory of Relativity. At one time, you might be considered a genius if you read this theory and understood what it was all about.

Within thirty years, Relativity found itself in combat with Quantum Mechanics. The history of physics ever since has been one attempt to reconcile these two theories after another. What is important, what makes this so revolutionary was that Einstein’s thoughts, in large measure, junked the physical theory that had preceded: Newtonian Mechanics.

Suddenly, Newtonian mechanics was only so good. It will still suffice if you plan to build a bridge, but will not suffice if you want to talk about space-time, gravity, stars, and the like. It will also not suffice if you want to talk about the behavior of electrons, neutrons, gluons, and the like.

In short, a good revolution takes the old with it, even though the old may seem less useful.

You might ask, then, what sort of thing is the “old” if our revolution is to be a revolution of thought. You might guess things like faith. That is on the table, certainly, but hardly captures the thought-less-ness of our day. Faith, like Newtonian mechanics, we will keep. For those of you who may be expecting a Hitchens-esque story of how faith is ruining our world and the antidote is reason, I am sorry to disappoint you. The moral of this story is not that faith is ruining our world. The moral of this story is that a lack of thought is ruining our world. To save it, we must think, but to think, we do not need to abandon faith. If faith is what you have, it no doubt serves a psychologically necessary function in your life.

Many of things I think we should be wary of are also things that serve psychologically necessary functions in our lives. The danger they represent is not intrinsic to them, but is rather found in their use. And the way in which they are used threatens us in ways that are not at all apparent.

I talked about this some last time. The antidote is not to abandon those things we have which are psychologically necessary: faith, distraction, &c. The antidote, I think, is to revalue our thinkers, and to create an environment where thinkers are free to do the work we desperately need them to do. We need to promote rational inquiry rather than dollar accumulation. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that we need to promote rational inquiry as well as the other things we already promote. The survival of our society, in a few short decades, is going to depend on an environment of rationality emerging now.

So, I'm going to write a book about it. Perhaps, I will even post its contents here. Stay tuned.

Time to Cook

My friend Josh Jones has recently written something similar to this. I don't want to detract from his point, but rather support something along the lines of the point he is making:

We have a problem. Even as I am typing this up, I am guilty of participating in that problem. Here it is: we overvalue our entertainment. We are far too invested in giving ourselves thrills. I started on this topic a few years ago. Here's the anecdote in a nutshell:

Me and a friend at my previous job were quoting lines from Caddyshack for yuks one day in the break room. He said, "Comedy is what makes the world go round." I responded, "No, comedy is what makes us forget that the world goes round."

He has since told me that he still quotes that line to people. Again, in the novel I've been working on (which, as a working title is now called "Outhouse Rat"), the main character, like me, was enrolled in an accelerated learning program as an elementary school student. He was branded a nerd and subsequently outcast.

It is more socially acceptable, the story goes, to be LD than LA.

Our problem is that we are so invested in our sources of entertainment, and so underinvested in the sorts of enquiry that we need to be taking much more seriously, that we are running an enormous risk.

Think about how much the sum of all the salaries of Major League Baseball players for one season is. It is absurd. Now consider a recent PEW Poll that found, among other things, that less than 25% (of American respondents) know who the Prime Minister of the UK is.

You often hear about people who work on alternative fuel sources for automobiles. The catch, they say, isn't getting the cars to work, but on having the infrastructure to make it economically viable to sell them. Well, all right, then why aren't we building the infrastructure that we desperately need?

People are far too invested in watching talking kittens on YouTube, is the answer.

We aren't just "dumbing down", we are cramming our lives with willful apathy. Furthermore, because we can't be bothered to invest ourselves in knowing more or thinking more, we are basing our vital decisions on less evidence and worse arguments. We are grounding ourselves in our emotional responses to things, rather than on rational argument or evidence. This means that we are more inclined to accept materially false claims, and more inclined to base our decisions on misinformation. When we base our decisions on misinformation we are more likely to make mistakes. And, obviously the bigger the decision, the more deadly the mistake can be.

Now, this is why: emotions are much more exciting than rational arguments. This is why this is a problem that is nearly impossible to resolve. Its only possibility of resolution has to come from decisions of individuals who decide to think more seriously about the information and claims that are given to them. Which means giving up some Facebook and Twitter time (which I evidently can't do) in favor of digging into the facts and considering what we are being told. But it's worth sacrificing a bit of wasted internet time to do this.

We have bigger fish to fry, and, to continue the metaphor, if we don't start cooking, we're going to be cooked.

"Dark Ominous Clouds on the Horizon"

Yesterday, two different people told me of the foreboding e-mails they received from a certain philosophy professor at Indiana University Southeast. The subject of these e-mails was "Dark Ominous Clouds on the Horizon".

When I was in his class, the e-mail subject line was "Time is Short, and the Water Rises".

I think you get the picture.

Today, while killing time on Reddit, I find an article hinting at the rumor that there is a price on the head of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

I don't know if there really is a price on his head, but it wouldn't surprise me. The fact that there is a rumor going around about it means, minimally, that someone has thought about it.

Here is the dark ominous cloud on our horizon: we live among people who would rather kill to remain in ignorance.

Have a nice day.

An Open Letter to Country Music Singers

Dearest Country Music Singers,

Ordinarily, I would not be writing to you. However, my co-workers are unaware of the meaning of the phrase "appropriate volume", and so I have been bombarded with your songs for months now. After all of this, I feel that there is something that you should know:

I already know the name of the country in which I live. I do not need to be reminded.

Imagine this: a single country song may use the word "America" twice per chorus. That chorus is repeated four or five times per song. Let's go with four. That song is repeated on the radio station every three hours (because I guess they lost their other tapes?). In a given workweek I am forced to hear your song 13 times. That's 106 occurrences of the word "America" from one song per week. Now, there are four or five different songs with this same pattern.

Let me repeat that, since repetition doesn't seem to annoy you people like it does the rest of us: four or five different songs from the same playlist all with the same pattern. 424-530 occurrences of the word per week! Just from the radio!

It's like you have nationalistic Tourette's. Yes "nationalistic", not "patriotic". Using the name of your country unnecessarily to make a quick buck in your niche market wouldn't be too patriotic, now, would it?

Have a nice day.

-SCM

Hanging in the Balance

I'm just going to riff on this. If you happened to see Jon Stewart's takedown of Ken Blackwell this week, you already know about the book he's co-authored (Blackwell has, that is), The Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.

A question that came out during the interview that I want to address somewhat is the tension between individual liberty and common good. Senator Blackwell wants to have the debate, so let's have it.

First, I'd like to make a point that good ol' Tommy Hobbes made in his Leviathan some time ago: in order to establish a society, or have any sort of common good, man must lay down some individual liberties. Common good always presupposes a sacrifice on the part of individual liberty. What is total individual liberty? Hobbes' state of nature, the condition of war of all against all, the "solitary, nasty, brutish, poor, and short". A lawless state.

But what is the other side of the coin? A state purely devoted to common good, with no individual liberty? 1984 comes to mind. The purpose of Orwell's "thought crime" was to show how far a deprivation of individual autonomy can be taken, and what horrors result.

No one would advocate either wholly pursuing individual liberty, or wholly pursuing common good. So, I'd like to point out to Senator Blackwell, and his conservative friends, that the choice we have to make is not one or the other. I don't think they seriously think it is. I am simply attempting to frame the discussion. Clearly, what we want is some kind of balance between the two things. There must be a balance point between individual liberty and the common good.

What our debate must ask is two questions: first, where is that balance point? Second, is that point fixed? Both of these questions speak to our current political discourse, whether it be over healthcare reform, financial reform, appellate court appointees, or what have you.

I'm not sure how to answer that first question, but let me attempt to answer the second question: No. The balance point between common good and individual liberty should not be fixed. It must be possible to move it according to the needs of our society, and the possibility of expansion on either side of the equation. A mass upswing on the individual liberty side, say, in a "free" market system where banking institutions are betting against the very stocks they are selling, carries with it a mass downswing on the common good side. Adjustments must be made to balance things, and keep them in balance.

This maybe provides a glimpse at how we might go about answering the first question: since neither thing is absolute good, sacrifices have to be made on either side. They must be made whenever one side of this balanced equation overtakes the other side, and threatens it.

How much does Obama's administration threaten the side of individual liberty? As far as the eye can see, not very much at all. Blackwell's inability to give Stewart one specific example of how the administration is threatening it, even after ostensibly writing a book on the subject, is a strong testimony to that very fact.

Tenets of the Blah Blah Blah Party

1. Our Platform: political platforms are quite useless.

People use positions on "salient issues" to determine who they will vote for. These positions rarely make any difference at all in terms of how things actually turn out.

2. Party loyalty is absurd.

3. Patriotism is the plural form of patting yourself on the back.

4. Voting is really a waste of your time. The choice between showboat A and showboat B is non-substantive.

5. Every tenet of every political party, including this one, is false.

6. Our Agenda: We have no agenda.

Agendas do nothing but generate criticism. You either did enough, or you didn't do enough. You're either too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Whatever you do, it won't be what you planned, the way you planned it. As long as you had a plan, you failed to achieve it.

Simple and effective

The nasty influence of Rock Music

My, do things such as this ever crack me up.

Okay, so a group planned to kill a cop and then blow up all his cop buddies at the funeral. That's not funny. Claiming a religious basis for waging war on America, is also not funny.

What does is the description of the militant group's training video which included the line, "It is edited to a backing track of rock music."

Lincoln Waged War on Half the Country?

I've been trying to understand this whole tea party movement thing. I don't think I'll ever be successful in that project.

Short version of the story: I found this website, which led me to a story (linked below) with this quote:

"The president who had the least fidelity to the Constitution was Abraham Lincoln, who waged war on half the country, even though there's obviously no authority for that, a war that killed nearly 700,000 people. President Obama is close to that end of lacking fidelity to the Constitution."

-author and judicial analyst Andrew P. Napolitano

Lincoln the war-wager, eh? Not the man who said "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

A Consequentialist's Thoughts on John Travolta's trip to Haiti

To quote Kurt Vonnegut's Uncle Alex, "Well, if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

What's nice? This.

John Travolta uses his personal jet to fly supplies to the people of Haiti (I hope it isn't lost on you that I say "the people of Haiti" rather than "Haiti"). This is an action of positive moral value. Why? Because it will help people who need to be helped.

I am going to belabor this point, so bear with me.

It's moral value is not affected by being in accord or not being in accord with the man's principles, or the principles of Scientology. It may or not be, I don't even know. Would being in accord with said principles be the cause of the good done by the action?

It's moral value is not affected by being in accord or not being in accord with the principles of "Christian morality" (whatever they are supposed to be!). Again, would being in accord with these principles be the cause of the good done by the action?

It's moral value is not affected by the presence of the press. Even if he did this for the sake of publicity, it doesn't affect the moral appraisal. That is to say, his intent is not relevant. Would performing this action out of a desire to become famous preclude the good that is done by the action from being good?

What I want to say is the basis for evaluating Mr. Travolta's actions (and not just his, ours as well, and those of anyone else) ought to be the consequences of the action. There are problems with this standard, to be sure, just as there are problems with any other ethical or moral standard (if anyone wants to raise some of them, I'll happily try and defend myself).

Mr. Travolta's claim in this clip echos a standard of Peter Singer's ethics: If we can help someone in need, at relatively little cost to ourselves, then we ought to do so. In his book, The Life You Can Save Singer goes to great lengths to spell out exactly what "relatively little cost" means for acting to end world poverty. I think we can summarize it somewhat imprecisely by "whatever you can stand to lose anyway without altering your standard of living." That doesn't, of course, mean that there won't be sacrifices. A pet example of Singer's is drinking tap water rather than bottled water. Another is wearing canvas shoes rather than shoes that are a) more expensive and/or b) made from animal skins. We can lose these luxuries without changing our standard of living, however.

Further, the cost is "relatively little" compared to the harm that may result from failure to act in accordance with this principle. Not flying supplies to the people of Haiti, say, may be tantamount to allowing someone to die. We needn't pad the numbers, although surely more than one life can be saved by Travolta's action: just one life saved is sufficient to outweigh the cost of flying the supplies there yourself, in your own jet, especially if you have the time and resources to do so.

Now, we don't all have private jets, or millions of dollars. And if we all did, and we all flew supplies down there, we'd probably not be able to land our planes. My point in holding up this example as an example of an action with positive moral value is not to say that we should do what John Travolta did. But to say that we should act according to the principle that explains why his action is good.

Well done, Mr. Travolta, and thanks for the good news.