Wednesday, March 17, 2004 Paying for Wrongful Incarceration?!? By Diana Hsieh @ 8:58 AM I just heard about this astonishing story on the "Political Grapevine" section of Special Report with Brit Hume. Apparently, Britain's Labor Home Secretary is attempting (via the courts) to force people wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit to pay for the costs of their incarceration. So the more of your life that was taken from you, the more you owe the government for the privilege of eating prison food and sleeping in prison beds. Of course, you were likely financially ruined by the trial and appeals... and you weren't exactly raking in the dough in prison. But pay up, brother! Here's one man's story: Robert Brown was just a 19-year-old from Glasgow when he was jailed for life for murdering a woman called Annie Walsh in Manchester in 1977. He served 25 years before he was finally freed in 2002, when the courts ruled him innocent of the crime. He is now facing a bill of around £80,000 for the living expenses he cost the state. For Brown, it is the final straw. An interim payment he was given pending his full compensation offer is exhausted; his mother recently died; his relationship with his girlfriend has fallen apart and he is facing eviction from his home following a mix-up over benefits. "I feel like ending my life," he says. "I've tried to maintain my dignity, but the state has treated me with nothing but contempt – now they are asking me for money for my bed and board in jail. "I never contemplated suicide once while I was in prison, but it's different on the outside. I have received no counselling or support. Society is treating me like something you'd wipe off the bottom of your shoes, but I'm an innocent man and a victim of a terrible injustice. "It's horrific. I've been out of jail for 14 months and in that time the state has put me through a war of attrition that it never needed to conduct. I feel my life is disintegrating around me. "Making me pay for my bed and board is abhorrent. I was arrested, fitted up and held hostage for 25 years and now they are going to charge me for being kept as their prisoner against my will. John McManus of the Scottish Miscarriage of Justice Organisation put his finger on the issue in saying that the government seems "to want to punish people for having the audacity to be innocent." Well, perhaps that's no surprise, given that they also want to punish people for the audacity of defending themselves against criminals. Link / Noodles / Trackback Tuesday, March 16, 2004 Deconstructing Batman By Diana Hsieh @ 11:16 PM Have you ever wondered about the true meaning of the Batman theme song? Well, wonder no more! This analysis plunges into the depths of meaning and symbolism. It's quite batty, actually. Link / Noodles / Trackback Too Damn Funny By Diana Hsieh @ 7:39 AM A few months ago, Paul sent me this great link to the Law & Order Coloring Book. If you need a good laugh, I just can't recommend it highly enough. Also, this Random Law & Order Plot Generator pretty much sums up why the original series is no longer worth watching. Well, I admit that the boring characters are another reason; Lenny Briscoe and Jack McCoy ought to have been killed off years ago. But still, the naturalistic and predictable "ripped from the headlines" plots do suck. Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, March 15, 2004 So Much Information, So Little Knowledge By Diana Hsieh @ 11:00 PM This page from Divorce Magazine offers almost every conceivable statistic on divorce imaginable. It's quite amazing, although not exactly enlightening. A running joke in our household is that Paul and I no longer love each other, that our sham of a marriage has become totally unbearable, and that divorce is just around the corner. It's all rather funny, although if either of us did really want a divorce, we might have trouble convincing the other of our seriousness. Ironically, perhaps the best indication of trouble in our marriage would be the end of threats of divorce. Heh. Update: Paul (who is sitting on the couch next to me) just read this post and then asked "What do you mean you don't love me? I'm very sad. I'm going to have to call my mommy." HEH. Link / Noodles / Trackback Materialism Versus Objectivism By Diana Hsieh @ 8:35 AM Every once in a while, I hear that Objectivism endorses materialism in metaphysics. For example, I recently ran across this 2003 comment by Greg Swann: Like Ayn Rand, I am a materialist, and like Ayn Rand, this creates a real problem for me with respect to will, volition, free moral agency. Rand got around it by waving her hand and raving about axioms. Most thoughtful Objectivists get around it by saying "compatibilism", which to me looks like hand-waving wrapped in a fig leaf. If Objectivism had a materialist metaphysics, the philosophy would be unable to explain not only "will, volition, free moral agency," but also consciousness itself. Yet there is a small problem with this criticism of Objectivism, namely that Objectivism does not have a materialist metaphysics in any way, shape, or form! Not only has no deeply Objectivist philosopher ever endorsed materialism, but it is explicitly denied in a number of core texts. For example: In her 1963 review of Herman Randall's book Aristotle, Ayn Rand spoke positively of Aristotle's view of the mind in writing: And consciousness is a natural attribute of certain living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action--not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension. In 1968, Robert Efron published a strong critique of reductionism in biology, particularly as related to consciousness, in The Objectivist. In his lecture course on the history of philosophy from the 1970s, Leonard Peikoff argued that materialism is an excellent theory of physics, but a horrible metaphysics. After all, physics is concerned only with matter, whereas philosophy must also account for consciousness. (Peikoff said much more, but I haven't yet transcribed this bit, as I only recently found it the Q&A of Lecture 2. In any case, Peikoff is quite clear that Objectivism rejects materialism.) These are just a few examples, all during Ayn Rand's lifetime and under her guidance. A more detailed discussion of these issues (although outdated in some ways) is found in my paper Mind in Objectivism. Objectivism wholly rejects materialism in metaphysics -- and for good reason. Compatibilism thus is not a thoughtful response to some conflict in the Objectivist metaphysics, but evidence that a person either does not grasp or does not agree with that metaphysics. In my experience, the basic error of "Objectivist compatibilists" lies in their view of causation. They hold (implicitly or explicitly) an event-based view of causality, such that any given event is necessarily caused by antecedent events. On that view, genuine freedom of the will is impossible and contrary to causation. In contrast, Objectivism (with Aristotle) holds that causation consists of entities acting according to their natures. Part of human nature is our capacity to be aware of and regulate our own conscious processes. So human freedom of the will is just a type of causation, not in conflict with it. (It's not even an unusual type of causation, as all biological systems are self-regulating.) Of course, all sorts of interesting scientific questions about the underpinnings of human volition remain to be answered. Yet science will never find any answers unless it recognizes the event-based model of causation for what it is: wrong. Link / Noodles / Trackback A Good Philosophy Joke By Diana Hsieh @ 8:33 AM An eccentric philosophy professor gave a one question final exam after a semester dealing with a broad array of topics. The class was already seated and ready to go when the professor picked up his chair, plopped it on his desk and wrote on the board: "Using everything we have learned this semester, prove that this chair does not exist." Fingers flew, erasers erased, notebooks were filled in furious fashion. Some students wrote over 30 pages in one hour attempting to refute the existence of the chair. One member of the class however, was up and finished in less than a minute. Weeks later when the grades were posted, the student who finished in one minute got an A. The rest of the group wondered how he could have gotten an A when he had barely written anything at all. This is what he wrote: "What chair?" Link / Noodles / Trackback Sunday, March 14, 2004 In Other News By Diana Hsieh @ 7:50 AM A fellow graduate student at Boulder forwarded this story about a criminal teaching ethics to the grad list: LONDON (Reuters) - A scientist dubbed the "Safeway poisoner" and jailed for trying to poison his wife has been employed by a British university to lecture students on ethics, the institution said on Thursday. Paul Agutter served seven years of a 12-year sentence for attempted murder after he laced his wife's gin and tonic with deadly nightshade in 1994 and then tried to cover his tracks by spiking drinks in a Safeway supermarket. The University of Manchester said it followed "due process" in hiring Agutter to teach adult education classes, including a one-day course on "Therapeutic Cloning: Ethics and Science." Medical ethics lecturer Piers Benn told Reuters criminal convictions and teaching ethics were not necessarily mutually exclusive. "Normally people who get into moral philosophy do so because they care about making the world a better place or putting things right," said Benn, of Imperial College London. "But I can't see any logical contradiction between being able to think about ethical questions and being able to do rather criminal acts." Manchester University said it had not decided whether an April course on evolution taught by Agutter would go ahead. Really folks, I just couldn't make this stuff up. Link / Noodles / Trackback Moral Character By Diana Hsieh @ 7:44 AM Well, it looks like I was right about the moral character of the woman charged with murder for refusing a c-section and thereby allowing her near-term fetus to die. Earlier, I wrote that "the woman's choice indicates significant character defects, defects which will likely strongly impact the quality of her parenting." As it turns out, the woman has a prior conviction for an incident in 2000 in which she "she punched her daughter several times in the face after the toddler picked up a candy bar and began eating it" in the supermarket. According to witnesses, the woman screamed, "You ate the candy bar and now I can't buy my cigarettes." (She got five years probation for simple assault, reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child. That child and another now live with their father's parents.) In good news, the surviving twin has already been adopted. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, that twin tested positive for cocaine and alcohol. This woman is the poster child for short-range, irrational egoism. And what a revolting spectacle that is! Link / Noodles / Trackback

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