The Oxford English Dictionary cites a circa 1915 letter by Percy Wyndham Lewis as the first use of the term ‘bullshit’. Lewis used the term as coarse slang for rubbish or nonsense — nonsense that is eloquent yet insincere. Harry G Frankfurt’s 2005 essay ‘On Bullshit’ explores the meaning of bullshit in more depth.

So, what is bullshit? Well, to bullshit is not to lie, Frankfurt argues. Liars have a concern for the truth insofar as they must know what is true to proffer what is false. The truth-teller and the liar are therefore ‘on opposite sides … in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands’.

The truth-value of a statement is of little interest to the bullshitter. The bullshitter is indifferent to how things really are, but hides his nonchalance. He makes assertions that suit the occasion, without concern for their correspondence with the truth. This is the ‘essence’ of bullshit. And it is dangerous because the normal concern for truth becomes ‘attenuated or lost’ as bullshit takes hold. The liar is certainly opposed to truth, but he is not as great an enemy of truth as the bullshitter. Bullshit is corrosive.

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Fodder, 18 December 2010 (AEDT)

• >> Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex writes in The New York Times that ‘modern cities are the real centres of sustainability’. In cities, resources used on infrastructure stretch further and all people are more productive — even the criminals. The one problem: everyday energy consumption skyrockets. The article also includes an interesting point on the difference between the life cycles of cities and companies.
• >> A post by Neil Levy at the Oxford Uni Practical Ethics blog on the rationality of Australian voters in the 2010 federal election: ‘Political epistemology and recent Australian experience’.
• >> On the WikiLeaks front, Assange is out on bail, looking happier than ever, and it’s Bradley Manning’s birthday.

Little Timmy likes cake. Mmm.

Have you come across the petty thief’s fallacy? It takes the following form.

1. It is wrong to breach principle P
2. Person B breaks principle P to a small degree
3. Therefore, person B has not acted wrongly

An example. Mother has just finished baking and icing a chocolate cake. She says to little Timmy, ‘Timmy, you are not to eat any of this delicious chocolate cake’. But then little Timmy thinks, ‘But if I only eat a small slice, it won’t be so bad. There’s lots of chocolate cake and I only want a small piece. There will be plenty of cake left over if I only take a small slice’. So little Timmy cuts himself a very small slice of cake and eats it. Mmm, that delicious chocolate cake. Here’s little Timmy’s reasoning:

1. Mother said it is wrong to eat any of the chocolate cake
2. I’ll only eat a small slice of the chocolate cake
3. Therefore, it’s okay for me to eat a small slice of the chocolate cake

But little Timmy’s reasoning is fallacious because he mistakenly thinks that the magnitude of his infraction matters — that it’s okay if he only takes a small slice of chocolate cake. Little Timmy’s fallacy turns on his belief that taking a small slice of the cake only constitutes a small breach of Mother’s orders. But any breach of Mother’s orders, large or small, is a breach of Mother’s orders. The magnitude of the breach does not matter.

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Here’s some sobering advice for philosophy PhD candidates from Michael Huemer at the University of Colorado. The page came to my attention through Leiter Reports.

Philosophers, not to mention philosophy PhD candidates, are prone to delusions of grandeur. So Huemer’s advice, though hard to swallow, is worth reading.

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WikiLeaks’ ‘Cablegate’ leaks were hosted on Amazon.com servers until 1 December when, The Guardian (UK) reports, Amazon bowed to political pressure and ceased hosting the main wikileaks.org site and the cablegate.wikileaks.org subdomain. The Guardian article sounds like a bit of a beat-up. In the past, WikiLeaks have used the Swedish-based hosting service PeRiQuito AB (PRQ). PRQ keeps a minimum of information about its clients and is protected by Sweden’s liberal media laws. PRQ is the natural choice for groups whose activities, if not illegal in other countries as is the case with its most infamous client The Pirate Bay, inhabit a legal grey area. Therefore, if WikiLeaks used Amazon’s hosting services it may have been in anticipation of a day like 1 December.

Amazon’s termination of its contract with WikiLeaks may not be so surprising. What is surprising is the response to WikiLeaks Editor in Chief Julian Assange’s tweet claiming that if Amazon is “so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books”. The Guardian article notes the response from ‘constitutional lawyers’, whomever they may be:

Although there are echoes of the censorship row between Google and China earlier this year, constitutional lawyers insisted it was not a first amendment issue because Amazon is a private company, free to make its own decisions.

This is also the response from lawyer Kevin Bankston at Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), a libertarian group aiming to keep the Internet open. He argued that Amazon’s actions were disappointing but not a breach of the first amendment. Fair to say that both Democrats and Republicans agree with Kevin’s second point. The analysis of the constitutionality of Amazon’s actions may be correct, but its implications are troubling.

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Trust Nietzsche to hit you with this, fifth fragment into his Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future:

Nietzsche (ca. 1875)

“What goads us into regarding all philosophers with an equal measure of mistrust and mockery is not that we are struck repeatedly by how innocent they are — how often and easily they err and stray, in short, their childish childlikeness — but rather that there is not enough genuine honesty about them: even though they all make a huge, virtuous racket as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched upon. They all act as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely insouciant dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest than the philosophers and also sillier — they talk about “inspiration” —): while what essentially happens is that they take conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, more typically, they take some fervent wish that they have sifted through and made properly abstract — and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such; for the most part, in fact, they are sly spokesman for prejudices that they christen as “truths” — and very far indeed from the courage of conscience that confesses to this fact, this very fact; and very far from having the good taste of courage that also lets this be known, perhaps to warn a friend or foe, or out of a high-spirited attempt at self-satire.”

Just when you’re jogging along; out of nowhere, a parked car. Achtung! philosophers.

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Oxford University’s Practical Ethics blog has weighed into the debate over the ethics of WikiLeaks ‘Cablegate’ leaks.

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The Index on Censorship has published the legal toing and froing that took place between Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Editor in Chief, and a Legal Adviser to the US Department of State (USDOS) prior to the public release of classified US Government documents. The correspondence is brief and worth the read.

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