The universe without us: a history of the science and ethics of human extinction

This dissertation consists of two parts. Part I is an intellectual history of thinking about human extinction (mostly) within the Western tradition. When did our forebears first imagine humanity ceasing to exist? Have people always believed that human extinction is a real possibility, or were some convinced that this could never happen? How has our thinking about extinction evolved over time? Why do so many notable figures today believe that the probability of extinction this century is higher than ever before in our 300,000-year history on Earth? Exploring these questions takes readers from the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, through the 18th-century Enlightenment, past scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century like thermodynamics and evolutionary theory, up to the Atomic Age, the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1970s, and contemporary fears about climate change, global pandemics, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Part II is a history of Western thinking about the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction. Would causing or allowing our extinction be morally right or wrong? Would our extinction be good or bad, better or worse compared to continuing to exist? For what reasons? Under which conditions? Do we have a moral obligation to create future people? Would past “progress” be rendered meaningless if humanity were to die out? Does the fact that we might be unique in the universe—the only “rational” and “moral” creatures—give us extra reason to ensure our survival? I place these questions under the umbrella of Existential Ethics, tracing the development of this field from the early 1700s through Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, the gloomy German pessimists of the latter 19th century, and post-World War II reflections on nuclear “omnicide,” up to current-day thinkers associated with “longtermism” and “antinatalism.” In the dissertation, I call the first history “History #1” and the second “History #2.” A main thesis of Part I is that Western thinking about human extinction can be segmented into five distinction periods, each of which corresponds to a unique “existential mood.” An existential mood arises from a particular set of answers to fundamental questions about the possibility, probability, etiology, and so on, of human extinction. I claim that the idea of human extinction first appeared among the ancient Greeks, but was eclipsed for roughly 1,500 years with the rise of Christianity. A central contention of Part II is that philosophers have thus far conflated six distinct types of “human extinction,” each of which has its own unique ethical and evaluative implications. I further contend that it is crucial to distinguish between the process or event of Going Extinct and the state or condition of Being Extinct, which one should see as orthogonal to the six types of extinction that I delineate. My aim with the second part of the book is to not only trace the history of Western thinking about the ethics of annihilation, but lay the theoretical groundwork for future research on the topic. I then outline my own views within “Existential Ethics,” which combine ideas and positions to yield a novel account of the conditions under which our extinction would be bad, and why there is a sense in which Being Extinct might be better than Being Extant, or continuing to exist

Outside the Lines of Gilded Age Baseball: Profits, Beer, and the Origins of the Brotherhood War

In 1890, members of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players elected to secede from the National League and form their own organization, which they called the Players League. The players objected to several business practices of the National League, including aspects of the reserve clause in player contracts, the Brush Classification Plan to control their salaries, the buying and selling of players, and fines for various infractions. This dissertation explains how these events combined to produce the revolt by the players at the conclusion of the 1889 season. It also examines various other important aspects of 1880s baseball, including abuse of alcohol, treatments of umpires, physical training techniques, violence on the field, cheating, gambling, mascots, team finances, and racism in baseball. The dissertation illuminates various Social and economic aspects of life in Gilded Age America as well. Finally, it helps explain the importance of a little-understood era in the baseball’s history that lasted from 1885-1889 and contributed to confirming baseball’s status as America’s national sport

Bowdoin Orient v.125, no.1-25 (1994-1995)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1006/thumbnail.jp

Stand Up and Be Counted: The Black Athlete, Black Power and The 1968 Olympic Project for Human Rights

The dissertation examines the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), a Black Power attempt to build a black boycott of the 1968 US Olympic team that ultimately culminated in the infamous Black Power fists protest at the 1968 Olympics. The work challenges the historiography, which concludes that the OPHR was a failure because most black Olympic-caliber athletes participated in the 1968 games, by demonstrating that the foremost purpose of the OPHR was to raise public awareness of “institutionalized racism,” the accumulation of poverty and structural and cultural racism that continued to denigrate black life following landmark 1960s civil rights legislation. Additionally, the dissertation demonstrates that activist black athletes of the era were also protesting the lack of agency and discrimination traditionally forced upon blacks in integrated, yet white-controlled sports institutions. The dissertation argues that such movements for “dignity and humanity,” as progressive black activists of the 1960s termed it, were a significant component of the Black Power movement. The dissertation also examines the proliferation of the social belief that the accomplishments of blacks in white-controlled sports fostered black advancement and argues that the belief has origins in post-Reconstruction traditional black uplift ideology, which suggested that blacks who demonstrated “character” and “manliness” improved whites’ images of blacks, thus advancing the race. OPHR activists argued that the belief, axiomatic by 1968, was the foremost obstacle to attracting support for a black Olympic boycott. The manuscript concludes with a discussion of the competing meaning and representations of Smith and Carlos’s protest at the Olympics

Standard side effects: on the accidental architectures of fire-safety legislation

This dissertation reflects on building standardisation as a mode of design. Eschewing the architect’s conventional disdain for regulation - as an external constraint on creative freedom - the ambition here is to ask; by way of their standardisation, how do buildings exert a shaping effect on government? The research presented has been framed through a focus on fire-safety standards and is presented through a series of city case-studies. Each city study has an historical dimension. They begin by reviewing historical accounts of specific fires, identifying the governmental response that those fires prompted. That is, standards are presented here as historically and geographically specific instruments. Read together these studies offer insight into the plurality of means through which regulators and building designers have responded to the common concern of fire. The city studies each include an element of by-design analysis, studying the marks that fire-safety standards make on the built environment, and the way they interact with other shaping factors in building design. The ambition here is to explore the unintended consequences of regulation, and the way they come to be ‘captured’, redirected to novel ends. That process of capture is taken to be politically ambivalent; the effects and side-effects of standardisation are shown to be highly contingent, shaped by the interests of those actors that work closely with them. Finally, each city study has a theoretical dimension. Fire-safety standardisation is used here as a means to broker dialogue between two related discourses, Governmentality Studies and Infrastructure Studies. Key terms and concepts are drawn from those fields as a means to reflect on the challenges and opportunities provided by the built environment as an instrument of technologically mediated government. Accident plays an important role in this reflection: programmes of standardisation are shown to respond to accidents, often those that occur in or around buildings; the design process is seen to have an accidental character, shaped by the aggregate of decisions made by different people, in different places, at different times, and with different interests; and buildings themselves are seen to be comprised of accidental qualities, properties that appear essential to some stakeholders, not to others. All these forms of accident shape the thesis findings; drawing on the work of Susan Leigh Star, standardisation is here construed as the construction of a ‘Boundary Object’, a means to navigate, through material things, the overlapping concerns of diverse actors, so as to facilitate their ‘collaboration without consent’. The critical potential of this framing is to highlight the way building reveals fault-lines and powers of consolidation within particular ways of thinking. The concluding chapter reflects on the role that fire has played in shaping our govern-mentalities. It borrows a term from sociologists John Law and Anne-Marie Mol to describe the ‘fire-space’ of standards; it suggests that governmental ambitions, laws, and building designs interact, spread, and change in a fire-like way. Through a post-script, it uses this metaphor to engage with the ongoing Grenfell Tower Inquiry, and the way this threatens to shape future governmental, legal and physical architectures in the UK. That conditions of political possibility are shaped by buildings, fires, and fire-safety standards is brought into sharp relief by this particular case

God Wills It: Presidents and the Political Use of Religion

How have American presidents used religious rhetoric? Has it helped them achieve their goals? Why or why not? These are the main questions this dissertation attempts to grapple with. I begin my study by developing a typology of presidential religious rhetoric that consists of three basic styles of speech. Ceremonial religious rhetoric is meant to capture those times when a president uses religious language in a broad sense that is appropriate for the occasion. Examples would include holiday addresses and funeral eulogies. I label a second variant of religious rhetoric comforting and calming. A president will frequently use religious rhetoric as he tries to shepherd the country through the difficult aftermath of a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or a riot. The final kind I have called instrumental. A president uses instrumental religious rhetoric when he makes an argument founded on religious concepts or beliefs in an attempt to convince interested parties to support a goal of his, such as passing a piece of legislation. The majority of the project focuses on this last type. I propose a strict set of coding rules for both identifying when instrumental religious rhetoric has appeared and for gauging its possible impact. My measures of potential effectiveness focus on the president's three most important relationships- his relationship with the public, his relationship with the media and his relationship with Congress. The eight case study chapters include analyses of Eisenhower's calls for increased mutual security funding, Carter's rhetoric describing his energy policies and Clinton's rhetoric about the impeachment proceedings against him, among others. The limited number of case studies immediately yields an interesting finding: it turns out that presidents do not often make consistent religious arguments for their governmental objectives. Further, when instrumental religious rhetoric is used, presidents limit themselves to discussing certain issues where religion might be said to be naturally applicable- questions of national security, civil rights and scandal. As it is, two presidents, Truman and Nixon, never used a religious rhetorical strategy at all. Indeed, it appears that whether due to personal taste or political complications, almost all presidents are quite uncomfortable using instrumental religious rhetoric. Therefore, a crisis is shown to be a necessary condition for a president to engage in religious speechifying. The existence of a crisis seems to be needed to force many a president to overcome his reluctance to drape his goals in religious rhetoric. The main finding of this dissertation, however, is that instrumental religious rhetoric is not very helpful to a goal-oriented president. In nearly every case, public opinion does not respond to the president's religious pleas, the media reacts critically to both his ideas and his language and the reception of his proposals in Congress disappoints. This surprising conclusion displaces the results of earlier major studies of presidential religious rhetoric that claimed such language had a powerful force to it. A final experiment was designed to explore the causal dynamics behind the findings of the case studies. Why does religious rhetoric fail? Is it because it is simply unpersuasive? Or, rather, is the explanation found in the context (i.e. crisis situations) in which such rhetoric has appeared? The experiment was designed to decide between these two competing hypotheses. Student participants were given sample speeches containing either religious or secular arguments for a political goal. Treatments were designed to accurately mimic where and how religious rhetoric has historically been used. Results support the former interpretation; exposure to a religious policy argument has no effect on an individual's opinion. Exposure to secular rhetoric is slightly more impactful but, regardless, ideology and partisan affiliation are far more important than either type when it comes to explaining opinions. The religious dimensions of presidential leadership have been a constant throughout history, becoming even more visible in the post-war period. This dissertation greatly furthers our understanding of this important subject. It is valuable for anyone interested in either the challenges of presidential power or in the role that religion plays in contemporary American politics

WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978

This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war's end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations - the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness - in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood's representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a "good war" untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation's benevolence and might, attesting to the United States' right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation's military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war's cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division - the military's liaison with Hollywood - and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies

Speaches Seeming Fitt : Rhetoric and Courtesy in The Faerie Queene

The practice of courtesy was of the utmost importance in Renaissance England; courtesy was tied to social standing, virtue, and civility. Spenser joins in a rich tradition of courtesy literature by including the Book of Courtesy in The Faerie Queene. His presentation of courtesy goes far beyond the limited discussion of the concept by his predecessors and peers; instead of limiting his depiction of courtesy to “courteous” behavior, Spenser includes every aspect of courtesy, including courteous and completely discourteous behavior and effective and ineffective expressions of courtliness. Spenser’s courtesy involves layers of complexity that exist in various social spheres throughout The Faerie Queene. The wide-ranging nature of the poem enables Spenser to explore virtue in varied physical and allegorical contexts, thus allowing the reader to view courtesy in multiple contexts. Spenser’s conception of courtesy may be viewed in four discreet types of characters: moral courtiers, unrhetorical but inwardly courteous individuals, artful courtiers, and discourteous individuals. A close analysis of each type of courteous or discourteous character leads to a more nuanced and fuller understanding of Spenser’s portrayal of courtesy. This study reaches outside the Legend of Courtesy and views the virtue of courtesy throughout the entirety of The Faerie Queene. Focal characters include, but are not limited to, Arthur, Britomart, Florimell, Redcrosse, Salvage Man, Satyrs, the Salvage Nation and Brigands, Duessa, Archimago, and Malecasta. An analysis of each of these widely differing characters contributes to the reader’s understanding of courtesy and the relationship between courtesy and rhetoric in Spenser’s work

Bowdoin Orient v.123, no.1-22 (1992-1993)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1004/thumbnail.jp

Speaches Seeming Fitt : Rhetoric and Courtesy in The Faerie Queene

The practice of courtesy was of the utmost importance in Renaissance England; courtesy was tied to social standing, virtue, and civility. Spenser joins in a rich tradition of courtesy literature by including the Book of Courtesy in The Faerie Queene. His presentation of courtesy goes far beyond the limited discussion of the concept by his predecessors and peers; instead of limiting his depiction of courtesy to “courteous” behavior, Spenser includes every aspect of courtesy, including courteous and completely discourteous behavior and effective and ineffective expressions of courtliness. Spenser’s courtesy involves layers of complexity that exist in various social spheres throughout The Faerie Queene. The wide-ranging nature of the poem enables Spenser to explore virtue in varied physical and allegorical contexts, thus allowing the reader to view courtesy in multiple contexts. Spenser’s conception of courtesy may be viewed in four discreet types of characters: moral courtiers, unrhetorical but inwardly courteous individuals, artful courtiers, and discourteous individuals. A close analysis of each type of courteous or discourteous character leads to a more nuanced and fuller understanding of Spenser’s portrayal of courtesy. This study reaches outside the Legend of Courtesy and views the virtue of courtesy throughout the entirety of The Faerie Queene. Focal characters include, but are not limited to, Arthur, Britomart, Florimell, Redcrosse, Salvage Man, Satyrs, the Salvage Nation and Brigands, Duessa, Archimago, and Malecasta. An analysis of each of these widely differing characters contributes to the reader’s understanding of courtesy and the relationship between courtesy and rhetoric in Spenser’s work