Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

I'm reading the ethical works of John Charles Harsanyi (1920-2000) in chronological order, beginning with "Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-Taking" in 1953. Harsanyi is a rule utilitarian and a preference utilitarian. One reason he is less read than other utilitarians is that his essays are heavy on mathematical symbolism.

Harsanyi, who was born in Budapest, Hungary, had a remarkable academic record. He won a national Mathematics prize for high-school students in 1937. He then earned a diploma in pharmacology. In 1947, he earned a doctoral degree in philosophy, with minors in sociology and psychology, from the University of Budapest. In 1953, having moved to Australia, he earned a master's degree in economics from the University of Sydney while working in a factory. (Harsanyi's English was poor, and Australian universities did not recognize Hungarian university degrees.) Finally, in 1958, he earned another doctoral degree, this time in economics, from Stanford University. His dissertation director at Stanford was Kenneth Arrow, who went on to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (informally known as the Nobel Prize in Economics) in 1972.

Mathematics, pharmacology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and economics: what an amazing combination of disciplines! Harsanyi won his own Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his work in game theory. One of Harsanyi's subsequent academic positions was at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, which is where I earned two of my advanced degrees (history and law) in 1983.

As you may have surmised, I love reading the works of older philosophers such as Harsanyi. Many of today's philosophers are in the grip of various forms of political correctness, which makes their writings all but unreadable. They are also caught up in the leftist echo chamber. Some of them have lost their capacity to analyze and argue impartially, probably because everyone around them shares their moral and political views. (Unexercised muscles get flabby.) I'm glad I'm near the end of my academic career rather than at the beginning. Academia has become a stifling place, intellectually, and frankly, that makes it boring. It used to be a place of open inquiry, challenging ideas, and robust debate. Offense was expected and accepted. Nobody cared about anyone's race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. What mattered was the quality of one's ideas.

I wish I could say that the stultification of academia is a passing fancy, but I fear that it is permanent. Ultimately, taxpayers and alumni will have to decide whether they wish to continue funding indoctrination of students, vilification of dissenters (from leftist orthodoxy), and dogmatism.

Here are highlights from Stage 1 of the Tour of Oman.

I'm not even 61 yet, but I've lived under 12 of the 45 United States presidents. I was born on 7 April 1957, less than three months after Dwight David Eisenhower took office for his second term.

The Letter/Neon Rainbow (1967).

Click to enlarge. Is this some sort of sick joke? There is nothing presidential about this image, but then, there was nothing presidential about Barack Obama. He was Thug in Chief for eight years.

Negotiations on DACA have begun. Republicans want to make a deal and Democrats say they want to make a deal. Wouldn’t it be great if we could finally, after so many years, solve the DACA puzzle. This will be our last chance, there will never be another opportunity! March 5th.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 13, 2018

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Endless Wire (2006).

Argument about vivisection has often missed the point because it has been put in absolutist terms: would the abolitionist be prepared to let thousands die if they could be saved by experimenting on a single animal? The way to reply to this purely hypothetical question is to pose another: Would the experimenter be prepared to experiment on a human orphan under six months old, if it were the only way to save many lives? (I say "orphan" to avoid the complication of parental feelings, although in doing so I am being overfair to the experimenter, since the nonhuman subjects of experiments are not orphans.) A negative answer to this question indicates that the experimenter's readiness to use nonhumans is simple discrimination, for adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more conscious of what is happening to them, more self-directing, and, so far as we can tell, just as sensitive to pain as a human infant. There is no characteristic that human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree.

(It might be possible to hold that what makes it wrong to experiment on a human infant is that the infant will in time develop into more than the nonhuman, but one would then, to be consistent, have to oppose abortion, and perhaps contraception, too, for the fetus and the egg and sperm have the same potential as the infant. Moreover, one would still have no reason for experimenting on a nonhuman rather than a human with brain damage severe enough to make it impossible for him to rise above infant level.)

The experimenter, then, shows a bias for his own species whenever he carries out an experiment on a nonhuman for a purpose that he would not think justified him in using a human being at an equal or lower level of sentience, awareness, ability to be self-directing, etc. No one familiar with the kind of results yielded by these experiments can have the slightest doubt that if this bias were eliminated the number of experiments performed would be zero or very close to it.

(Peter Singer, "Animal Liberation," review of Animals, Men and Morals, ed. by Stanley Godlovitch, Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris, The New York Review of Books 20 [5 April 1973]: 17-20)

Note from KBJ: Singer was 26 years old when this review was published. It is his first publication (of many) on the moral status of nonhuman animals.

Here.