Wisdom, Chapter 1 of The Science of Virtue: Why Positive Psychology Matters to the Church

The day before I started this chapter I played flag football with some of my doctoral students. Though I am thirty years their senior, I tried my best to keep up for three hours of great fun. Today my sore muscles scream any time I try to move. My wife, Lisa, would say they are reprimanding me for my foolishness. Typing on the keyboard is about the only motion that doesn’t hurt. It seems both fitting and paradoxical to begin writing about wisdom the morning after punishing my body in the name of a good time. Hopefully I haven’t just destroyed any credibility I have on the topic

Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist

The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the measurement problem in quantum theory and the problem of relating consciousness to the rest of physics. I survey some recent promising ideas on possible solutions to the measurement problem and explain what a proper physical understanding of consciousness would involve and why it would need new physics.Comment: Article for "Science Into The Next Millennium", a millennial issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Londo

The Social Epistemology of Consensus and Dissent

This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations ‎between ‎knowledge ‎and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their ‎own, but ‎also have ‎practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant ‎role in ‎informing public ‎decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. ‎When is a ‎consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may ‎we ‎legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise ‎epistemically ‎justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific inquiry, and if so, what ‎kind of ‎consensus? How should dissent be handled? It is argued that a legitimate inference ‎that a ‎theory is correct from the fact that there is a scientific consensus on it requires taking ‎into ‎consideration both cognitive properties of the theory as well as social properties of ‎the ‎consensus. The last section of the paper reviews computational models of ‎consensus ‎formation.

Law, Literature, and the Celebration of Authority

Richard Posner\u27s new book, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, is a defense of “liberal legalism” against a group of modern critics who have only one thing in common: their use of either particular pieces of literature or literary theory to mount legal critiques. Perhaps for that reason, it is very hard to discern a unified thesis within Posner\u27s book regarding the relationship between law and literature. In part, Posner is complaining about a pollution of literature by its use and abuse in political and legal argument; thus, the “misunderstood relation” to which the title refers. At times, Posner suggests that this is the major thesis of the book-he simply wants to rescue literature from its misuse by critics of legalism. By the end of the book, however, it is clear that Posner has no real passion for his claim that great literature is never really about law, that it is always about more exalted things, and that its use in legal or political arguments therefore is improper. Rather, Posner\u27s real concern is the celebration and vindication of liberal legalism, and he is as happy using literature to celebrate liberal legalism as are its critics in making their attack. I will argue that Law and Literature ought to be read primarily as an impressionistic and impassioned celebration of legalism-liberal or conservative-and that the book contributes little to an understanding of either the works of literature or the legal and literary theories which it discusses. Although Posner\u27s interpretations of pieces of literature that deal with legal themes are sometimes surprising and often interesting, those interpretations are transparently dependent on his main agenda, which is a spirited celebration of legalist virtues. Posner\u27s book nevertheless should be of great interest to professional and academic legal audiences. It tells us something important about the distinguishing commitments of liberal legalism and the type of personality which it attracts. That alone, and entirely apart from the merits or demerits of the literary interpretations Posner presents, makes the book\u27s celebration of legalism of great interest. More specifically, I will argue that the “liberal legalism” celebrated and passionately defended in Law and Literature rests on two essentially conservative convictions: (1) that our present law is, for the most part, as it should be, and (2) that our present law is, for the most part, as it must be. Legal authority, as it is presently constituted, Posner teaches, is generally both necessary and desirable; neither can we, nor should we, make fundamental changes in our law. Indeed, the book\u27s impassioned celebrations of legal authority and of what Posner calls the “morality of obedience” to legal authority well illustrate the Critical Legal Studies movement\u27s central and most controversial claim about liberal legal orthodoxy: that it is an essentially conservative and “Panglossian” faith in the virtue and necessity of existing authority-including, but not limited to, legal authority-that motivates as well as defines liberal legalist thought. The lasting importance of Law and Literature may turn out to be that its celebratory and conservative endorsement of authority unwittingly proves at least this aspect of the critics\u27 case. I will also argue in this review that Law and Literature tells us something important about what motivates liberal legalism and what kind of personality is attached to it. It is often assumed, at least in the Critical Legal Studies movement, that the “Panglossian attitude” unique to liberal legalism-the distinctive faith in the virtue and necessity of legal authority-is motivated by “sentimentality,” and, more specifically, by a sentimental view of the relation between our ideals and our law. According to the critics, this sentimentality is reflected in a paradigmatic type of argument, which I will call the “sentimental argument,” in liberal legalist discourse. Thus, liberal legal arguments, according to their critics, typically begin with some independent value or moral ideal, such as efficiency, procedural fairness, or legal equality, as the first premise. The emotional need expressed by this second argument for liberal legalism-and the need which, I will argue, Posner\u27s book makes fairly explicit-is not the sentimental need to see actual authority as perfectly congruent with our moral ideals; rather, it is the need to constrain the individual will by an external authority. If Posner\u27s account of liberal legalism is at all representative, then the appeal of liberal legalism may be that it gives voice to the deep and human need to identify the individual\u27s will, worth, power, and fate with the judgment of a higher, nonnatural, or simply “other” authority. If so, then liberal legalism may continue to resonate in the law school culture despite the barrage of debunking criticism directed against it, because it is the only ideology to do so

The “Constitution in Exile” as a Problem for Legal Theory

How does one defend a constitutional theory that’s out of the mainstream? Critics of originalism, for example, have described it as a nefarious “Constitution in Exile,” a plot to impose abandoned rules on the unsuspecting public. This framing is largely mythical, but it raises a serious objection. If a theory asks us to change our legal practices, leaving important questions to academics or historians, how can it be a theory of our law? If law is a matter of social convention, how can there be conventions that hardly anybody knows about? How is a constitution in exile even possible? This objection is overblown. Legal rules don’t always directly reflect common agreement; they can also reflect those agreements indirectly, through conventions that operate at a higher level of abstraction. (We can have social agreement that we’re bound by the Internal Revenue Code, even though we don’t all agree on—let alone remember—everything the Code requires.) So long as we share certain conventions that lead to unconventional conclusions, out-of-the-mainstream theorists can accurately claim to describe our own legal system rather than a foreign or invented one that they hope to impose. The theorists’ job is to identify shared premises and to show that they really are shared, even in the face of widespread disagreement at the level of conclusions. In any case, if this kind of objection did have force, it wouldn’t be a problem just for out-of-the- mainstream theories like originalism. Virtually no modern legal theory accepts every change in constitutional practice as actually changing the Constitution. Because history moves at its own pace, any theory with meaningful conditions for legal change will often be violated in practice. In other words, any Constitution worth its salt will spend a good bit of time in exile

IT’S NOT THEM, IT’S YOU: A CASE STUDY CONCERNING THE EXCLUSION OF NON-WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

My purpose in this essay is to suggest, via case study, that if Anglo-American philosophy is to become more inclusive of non-western traditions, the discipline requires far greater efforts at self-scrutiny. I begin with the premise that Confucian ethical treatments of manners afford unique and distinctive arguments from which moral philosophy might profit, then seek to show why receptivity to these arguments will be low. I examine how ordinary good manners have largely fallen out of philosophical moral discourse in the west, looking specifically at three areas: conditions in the 18th and 19th centuries that depressed philosophical attention to manners; discourse conventions in contemporary philosophy that privilege modes of analysis not well fitted to close scrutiny of manners; and a philosophical culture that implicitly encourages indifference or even antipathy toward polite conduct. I argue that these three areas function in effect to render contemporary discourse inhospitable to greater inclusivity where Confucianism is concerned and thus, more broadly, that greater self-scrutiny regarding unexamined, parochial western commitments and practices is necessary for genuine inclusivity

Marxist Origins of the Anti-Third World Claim

This Essay is an experiment — a try-out — of an argument. The argument concerns what I regard to be the most serious of the claims made by the critics, namely, the claims concerning the relationship between the WTO and international trade law, on the one hand, and the Third World, on the other hand. The claim is this: the WTO is anti-development, and international trade law helps tilt the playing field on which the great game of trade is played against developing countries. It is the most serious of the claims, I think, because the giant and still growing divide between the First World and the Third World is the most important challenge facing the multilateral trading system in these first few decades of the new millennium. Trade officials representing the governments of nearly four or five billion people, and the critics that sympathize with them who work in various United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions, seem to harbor doubts about the extent to which the system can accommodate the development needs, or even promote sustainable, balanced growth