I'm sure many of you have been following the story of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's visit to the U.S. He was given the opportunity to speak at Columbia University (although he was slammed pretty hard when he was introduced by Columbia's President) and initially he was planning on visiting the Ground Zero site. This suggestion (that he'd visit the World Trade Center site) caused quite a stir. Should we allow him to visit the site?
If you don't know much about Ahmadinejad, he is an outspoken, vocal critic of US policy and the non-Islamic West in general. He is a holocaust denier as well. There's lots of reasons to not like this guy.
Fortunately, he backed down and decided not to visit the site... but what if he hadn't? That's the question I'm after: what should we have done if had pushed it and wanted to see the site? What's your call? Say you are the mayor of NYC or some other position that could make a power play on this decision. If he wanted to visit the site (as thousands of people do all the time -- I've been there three different times), should we allow him to?
This is a tough one. We've been debating it here in the philosophy department all week and we are rather split on it. What are your thoughts?
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Woman has her breasts removed
Check out this story here.
Turns out this lady, Lindsay Avner, decided to have her breasts removed so that she has no future risk of breast cancer.
This one seems to spark passionate positions on both sides. Where do you come down?
Ethically, is it right for her to do this? Is it acceptable?
Turns out this lady, Lindsay Avner, decided to have her breasts removed so that she has no future risk of breast cancer.
This one seems to spark passionate positions on both sides. Where do you come down?
Ethically, is it right for her to do this? Is it acceptable?
Monday, September 24, 2007
The future lies in Asia?
A good read on the future of international affairs. Notice the use of "post-national West"...
The New York Times
September 21, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Lost at Sea
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
THE ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to hasten the arrival of the Asian Century.
While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and our European allies continue to starve their defense programs, Asian militaries — in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea — have been quietly modernizing and in some cases enlarging. Asian dynamism is now military as well as economic.
The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance. A few years down the road, according to the security analysts at the private policy group Strategic Forecasting, Americans will not to the same extent be the prime deliverers of disaster relief in a place like the Indonesian archipelago, as we were in 2005. Our ships will share the waters (and the prestige) with new “big decks” from Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Then there is China, whose production and acquisition of submarines is now five times that of America’s. Many military analysts feel it is mounting a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode our qualitative one. Yet the Chinese have been buying smart rather than across the board.
In addition to submarines, Beijing has focused on naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving objects at sea, and technology that blocks G.P.S. satellites. The goal is “sea denial”: dissuading American carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever we like. Such dissuasion is the subtle, high-tech end of military asymmetry, as opposed to the crude, low-tech end that we’ve seen with homemade bombs in Iraq. Whether or not China ever has a motive to challenge America, it will increasingly have the capacity to do so.
Certainly, the billions of dollars spent on Iraq (a war I supported) would not have gone for the expensive new air, naval and space systems necessary to retain our relative edge against a future peer competitor like China. But some of it would have.
China’s military expansion, with a defense budget growing by double digits for the 19th consecutive year, is part of a broader, regional trend. Russia — a Pacific as well as a European nation, we should remember — is right behind the United States and China as the world’s biggest military spender. Japan, with 119 warships, including 20 diesel-electric submarines, boasts a naval force nearly three times larger than Britain’s. (It is soon to be four times larger: 13 to 19 of Britain’s 44 remaining large ships are set to be mothballed by the Labor government.)
India’s Navy could be the third-largest in the world in a few years as it becomes more active throughout the Indian Ocean, from the Mozambique Channel to the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. South Korea, Singapore and Pakistan all spend higher percentages of their gross domestic products on defense than do Britain and France — which are by far Europe’s most serious military-minded nations.
The twin trends of a rising Asia and a politically crumbling Middle East will most likely lead to a naval emphasis on the Indian Ocean and its surrounding seas, the sites of the “brown water” choke points of world commerce — the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the Bab el Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea, and Malacca. These narrow bodies of water will become increasingly susceptible to terrorism, even as they become more and more clogged with tankers bringing Middle Eastern oil to the growing middle classes of India and China. The surrounding seas will then become home territory to Indian and Chinese warships, protecting their own tanker routes.
To wit, China is giving Pakistan $200 million to build a deep-water port at Gwadar, just 390 nautical miles from the Strait of Hormuz. Beijing is also trying to work with the military junta in Myanmar to create another deep-water port on the Bay of Bengal. It has even hinted at financing a canal across the 30-mile Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that would open a new connection between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Oddly enough, the Pacific, as an organizing principle in world military affairs, will also encroach upon Africa. It’s no secret that a major reason for the Pentagon’s decision to establish its new Africa Command is to contain and keep an eye on China’s growing web of development projects across the sub-Saharan regions.
Still, measuring budgets, deployments, and sea and air “platforms” does not quite indicate just how much the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Military power rests substantially on the willingness to use it: perhaps less so in war than in peacetime as a means of leverage and coercion.
That, in turn, requires a vigorous nationalism — something that is far more noticeable right now in Asia than in parts of an increasingly post-national West. As the Yale political scientist Paul Bracken notes in his book “Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age,” the Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese have great pride in possessing nuclear weapons, unlike the Western powers that seem almost ashamed of needing them. Likewise, the right to produce nuclear arms is something that unites Iranians, regardless of their views of the clerical regime.
Mending relations with Europe is only a partial answer to America’s problems in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, since Europe itself continues to turn away from military power. This trend was quickened by the Iraq war, which has helped legitimize nascent European pacifism. People in countries like Germany, Italy and Spain see their own militaries not so much as soldiers but as civil servants in uniform: there for soft peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
Meanwhile, Asia is marked by rivalries that encourage traditional arms races. Despite warming economic ties between Japan and China, and between Japan and South Korea, the Japanese and Chinese have fought wars of words over possession of the Senkaku (or, as the Chinese have it, Diaoyutai) Islands in the East China Sea; just as Japanese and South Koreans have over possession of the Takeshima Islands (Tokdo Islands to the Koreans) in the Sea of Japan. These are classic territorial disputes, stirring deep emotions of the sorts that often led to war in early modern Europe.
Despite these tensions, the United States should also be concerned about the alternative possibility of a China-Japan entente. Some of China’s recent diplomatic approaches to Japan have been couched in a new tone of respect and camaraderie, as it attempts to tame Japan’s push toward rearmament and thus to reduce the regional influence of the United States.
Asia’s military-economic vigor is the product of united political, economic and military elites. In Asia, politics often does stop at the water’s edge. In a post-George W. Bush America, if we do not find a way to agree on basic precepts, Iraq may indeed turn out to have been the event that signaled our military decline.
Preventing that will require continued high military expenditures combined with an unrelenting multilateralism of a sort we have not pursued since the 1990s. In the vast oceanic spaces bordering the Pacific and Indian Oceans, air, sea and space power will be paramount both as means of deterrence and of guarding the sea lanes. A global power at peace still requires a navy and an air force deployed as far forward as possible. That costs money. Even with the gargantuan cost of Iraq, our defense budget is still under 5 percent of our gross domestic product, low by historical standards.
Furthermore, the very vitality of nation-states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans will take us back to an older world of traditional statecraft, in which we will need to tirelessly leverage allies and seek cooperation from competitors. Thus we should take advantage of the rising risk of terrorism and piracy in order to draw the Chinese and Indian Navies into joint patrols of choke points and tanker routes.
Still, we should be careful about leveraging Japan and India too overtly against China. The Japanese continue to be distrusted throughout Asia, particularly in the Korean Peninsula, because of the horrors of World War II. As for India, as a number of policy experts leaders there told me on a recent visit: India will remain non-aligned, with a tilt toward the United States. But any official alliance would compromise India’s own shaky relationship with China. Subtlety must be a keystone to our policy. We have to draw China in, not gang up against it.
Because we remain the only major player in the Pacific and Indian Oceans without territorial ambitions or disputes with its neighbors, indispensability, rather than dominance, must be our goal. That, continuing deep into the 21st century, would be a stirring achievement.
Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic and a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy, is the author of “Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea and on the Ground.”
The New York Times
September 21, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Lost at Sea
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
THE ultimate strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to hasten the arrival of the Asian Century.
While the American government has been occupied in Mesopotamia, and our European allies continue to starve their defense programs, Asian militaries — in particular those of China, India, Japan and South Korea — have been quietly modernizing and in some cases enlarging. Asian dynamism is now military as well as economic.
The military trend that is hiding in plain sight is the loss of the Pacific Ocean as an American lake after 60 years of near-total dominance. A few years down the road, according to the security analysts at the private policy group Strategic Forecasting, Americans will not to the same extent be the prime deliverers of disaster relief in a place like the Indonesian archipelago, as we were in 2005. Our ships will share the waters (and the prestige) with new “big decks” from Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Then there is China, whose production and acquisition of submarines is now five times that of America’s. Many military analysts feel it is mounting a quantitative advantage in naval technology that could erode our qualitative one. Yet the Chinese have been buying smart rather than across the board.
In addition to submarines, Beijing has focused on naval mines, ballistic missiles that can hit moving objects at sea, and technology that blocks G.P.S. satellites. The goal is “sea denial”: dissuading American carrier strike groups from closing in on the Asian mainland wherever and whenever we like. Such dissuasion is the subtle, high-tech end of military asymmetry, as opposed to the crude, low-tech end that we’ve seen with homemade bombs in Iraq. Whether or not China ever has a motive to challenge America, it will increasingly have the capacity to do so.
Certainly, the billions of dollars spent on Iraq (a war I supported) would not have gone for the expensive new air, naval and space systems necessary to retain our relative edge against a future peer competitor like China. But some of it would have.
China’s military expansion, with a defense budget growing by double digits for the 19th consecutive year, is part of a broader, regional trend. Russia — a Pacific as well as a European nation, we should remember — is right behind the United States and China as the world’s biggest military spender. Japan, with 119 warships, including 20 diesel-electric submarines, boasts a naval force nearly three times larger than Britain’s. (It is soon to be four times larger: 13 to 19 of Britain’s 44 remaining large ships are set to be mothballed by the Labor government.)
India’s Navy could be the third-largest in the world in a few years as it becomes more active throughout the Indian Ocean, from the Mozambique Channel to the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. South Korea, Singapore and Pakistan all spend higher percentages of their gross domestic products on defense than do Britain and France — which are by far Europe’s most serious military-minded nations.
The twin trends of a rising Asia and a politically crumbling Middle East will most likely lead to a naval emphasis on the Indian Ocean and its surrounding seas, the sites of the “brown water” choke points of world commerce — the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the Bab el Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea, and Malacca. These narrow bodies of water will become increasingly susceptible to terrorism, even as they become more and more clogged with tankers bringing Middle Eastern oil to the growing middle classes of India and China. The surrounding seas will then become home territory to Indian and Chinese warships, protecting their own tanker routes.
To wit, China is giving Pakistan $200 million to build a deep-water port at Gwadar, just 390 nautical miles from the Strait of Hormuz. Beijing is also trying to work with the military junta in Myanmar to create another deep-water port on the Bay of Bengal. It has even hinted at financing a canal across the 30-mile Isthmus of Kra in Thailand that would open a new connection between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Oddly enough, the Pacific, as an organizing principle in world military affairs, will also encroach upon Africa. It’s no secret that a major reason for the Pentagon’s decision to establish its new Africa Command is to contain and keep an eye on China’s growing web of development projects across the sub-Saharan regions.
Still, measuring budgets, deployments, and sea and air “platforms” does not quite indicate just how much the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Military power rests substantially on the willingness to use it: perhaps less so in war than in peacetime as a means of leverage and coercion.
That, in turn, requires a vigorous nationalism — something that is far more noticeable right now in Asia than in parts of an increasingly post-national West. As the Yale political scientist Paul Bracken notes in his book “Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age,” the Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese have great pride in possessing nuclear weapons, unlike the Western powers that seem almost ashamed of needing them. Likewise, the right to produce nuclear arms is something that unites Iranians, regardless of their views of the clerical regime.
Mending relations with Europe is only a partial answer to America’s problems in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, since Europe itself continues to turn away from military power. This trend was quickened by the Iraq war, which has helped legitimize nascent European pacifism. People in countries like Germany, Italy and Spain see their own militaries not so much as soldiers but as civil servants in uniform: there for soft peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
Meanwhile, Asia is marked by rivalries that encourage traditional arms races. Despite warming economic ties between Japan and China, and between Japan and South Korea, the Japanese and Chinese have fought wars of words over possession of the Senkaku (or, as the Chinese have it, Diaoyutai) Islands in the East China Sea; just as Japanese and South Koreans have over possession of the Takeshima Islands (Tokdo Islands to the Koreans) in the Sea of Japan. These are classic territorial disputes, stirring deep emotions of the sorts that often led to war in early modern Europe.
Despite these tensions, the United States should also be concerned about the alternative possibility of a China-Japan entente. Some of China’s recent diplomatic approaches to Japan have been couched in a new tone of respect and camaraderie, as it attempts to tame Japan’s push toward rearmament and thus to reduce the regional influence of the United States.
Asia’s military-economic vigor is the product of united political, economic and military elites. In Asia, politics often does stop at the water’s edge. In a post-George W. Bush America, if we do not find a way to agree on basic precepts, Iraq may indeed turn out to have been the event that signaled our military decline.
Preventing that will require continued high military expenditures combined with an unrelenting multilateralism of a sort we have not pursued since the 1990s. In the vast oceanic spaces bordering the Pacific and Indian Oceans, air, sea and space power will be paramount both as means of deterrence and of guarding the sea lanes. A global power at peace still requires a navy and an air force deployed as far forward as possible. That costs money. Even with the gargantuan cost of Iraq, our defense budget is still under 5 percent of our gross domestic product, low by historical standards.
Furthermore, the very vitality of nation-states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans will take us back to an older world of traditional statecraft, in which we will need to tirelessly leverage allies and seek cooperation from competitors. Thus we should take advantage of the rising risk of terrorism and piracy in order to draw the Chinese and Indian Navies into joint patrols of choke points and tanker routes.
Still, we should be careful about leveraging Japan and India too overtly against China. The Japanese continue to be distrusted throughout Asia, particularly in the Korean Peninsula, because of the horrors of World War II. As for India, as a number of policy experts leaders there told me on a recent visit: India will remain non-aligned, with a tilt toward the United States. But any official alliance would compromise India’s own shaky relationship with China. Subtlety must be a keystone to our policy. We have to draw China in, not gang up against it.
Because we remain the only major player in the Pacific and Indian Oceans without territorial ambitions or disputes with its neighbors, indispensability, rather than dominance, must be our goal. That, continuing deep into the 21st century, would be a stirring achievement.
Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic and a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy, is the author of “Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea and on the Ground.”
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
A Stranger or your Dog: REDUX
I've made this post now three times. Now that we've got a new crop of students, it's fun to throw it out there again. It always produces interesting answers. For my old bloggers, I'm curious if your answers to any of these questions has changed. (And, of course, if they have changed, why do you think that is?)
So here it is...
In the following scenario imagine you are in some weird situation wherein you can only save one of the the two options given in each question. There is no possible way to save both, nor would sacrificing yourself help in any way towards saving them and they will both die. If you do nothing, they will both die (and, I suppose, that is an option). You know that when you save one of them, the other will most certainly die (or be destroyed). Assume there is no other relevant information than that given for each question (i.e., in the child or adult question, assume they have the same status otherwise in all ways that may affect your decision, the only difference being that one is a child and one is an adult). You can only rescue one of each of the following, which do you save?
a) A child or an adult
b) A stranger or your dog
c) Your entire family or the entire canine species
d) A bottle with the cure for cancer or your brother/sister
e) Lassie or A Convicted Murderer/Rapist
f) Your spouse or a Nobel Laureate
g) A petry dish with 15 fertilized human eggs or 1 small child
h) A dog or a rat
i) A dog or a fish
j) A dog or a jellyfish
k) A dog or a human being on life support who has been declared "brain dead"
l) Your spouse or the greatest artist of all time (in your favorite genre)
m) A young child you don't know or a 95-year old adult that you know well
n) A stranger or the greatest piece of art ever created by human hands
o) A dog or a human being on life support in a perpetual coma (with no chance of ever coming out of the coma, although they are not technically brain dead).
p) Lassie or Hitler
q) 1 of your fellow soldiers from your unit or 25 injured enemy soldiers who have surrendered
Perhaps we can give two answers to each (if they are different): 1) what do you think you would actually do and 2) what do you think should or ought to do.
Now, after you've answered a) through q) can you provide some kind of principles or basis upon which you are guiding your decision making? Are the decisions consistent with one another? Are the principles consistent?
I think what is most fascinating about this exercise is that we are able to even answers these questions. That reveals, to me anyway, that we have incredible reserves of intuitions on these weird moral questions. Why is that? The difficult thing to do (and the profitable thing to do) is to try to "mine" those intuitions and see what is guiding them. Again: why do you answer the way you do on these??
Have fun.
So here it is...
In the following scenario imagine you are in some weird situation wherein you can only save one of the the two options given in each question. There is no possible way to save both, nor would sacrificing yourself help in any way towards saving them and they will both die. If you do nothing, they will both die (and, I suppose, that is an option). You know that when you save one of them, the other will most certainly die (or be destroyed). Assume there is no other relevant information than that given for each question (i.e., in the child or adult question, assume they have the same status otherwise in all ways that may affect your decision, the only difference being that one is a child and one is an adult). You can only rescue one of each of the following, which do you save?
a) A child or an adult
b) A stranger or your dog
c) Your entire family or the entire canine species
d) A bottle with the cure for cancer or your brother/sister
e) Lassie or A Convicted Murderer/Rapist
f) Your spouse or a Nobel Laureate
g) A petry dish with 15 fertilized human eggs or 1 small child
h) A dog or a rat
i) A dog or a fish
j) A dog or a jellyfish
k) A dog or a human being on life support who has been declared "brain dead"
l) Your spouse or the greatest artist of all time (in your favorite genre)
m) A young child you don't know or a 95-year old adult that you know well
n) A stranger or the greatest piece of art ever created by human hands
o) A dog or a human being on life support in a perpetual coma (with no chance of ever coming out of the coma, although they are not technically brain dead).
p) Lassie or Hitler
q) 1 of your fellow soldiers from your unit or 25 injured enemy soldiers who have surrendered
Perhaps we can give two answers to each (if they are different): 1) what do you think you would actually do and 2) what do you think should or ought to do.
Now, after you've answered a) through q) can you provide some kind of principles or basis upon which you are guiding your decision making? Are the decisions consistent with one another? Are the principles consistent?
I think what is most fascinating about this exercise is that we are able to even answers these questions. That reveals, to me anyway, that we have incredible reserves of intuitions on these weird moral questions. Why is that? The difficult thing to do (and the profitable thing to do) is to try to "mine" those intuitions and see what is guiding them. Again: why do you answer the way you do on these??
Have fun.
Stretched troops...
Check out this political cartoon:
Any thoughts?
Lots of underlying issues here:
If the situation in Iraq really does boil down to a civil war between different internal factions, is it our place to intervene? What's the right call here? Certainly France aided us in our revolutionary war, but should they have? How about our civil war? What's the difference?
This also brings up the question, in general, about "imposing" democracy on a people. I'm sure you've all heard it before, but there's this argument tossed around from time to time that contends that a people have to rise up and make their own democracy when they are ready for it -- that is cannot be forced on them. Is this the case? Always? What if a people are incapable of gaining democracy for themselves although they want it? How can we tell if this is the case? Is it bigoted of us to assume democracy is the best form of government for all people?
If the situation in Iraq really does boil down to a civil war between different internal factions, is it our place to intervene? What's the right call here? Certainly France aided us in our revolutionary war, but should they have? How about our civil war? What's the difference?
This also brings up the question, in general, about "imposing" democracy on a people. I'm sure you've all heard it before, but there's this argument tossed around from time to time that contends that a people have to rise up and make their own democracy when they are ready for it -- that is cannot be forced on them. Is this the case? Always? What if a people are incapable of gaining democracy for themselves although they want it? How can we tell if this is the case? Is it bigoted of us to assume democracy is the best form of government for all people?
...many other thoughts come to mind. Either way: a good cartoon.
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