Thomas Rodham Wells

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“As Children Grow Up And Become More Like People…They Seem To Become Less Valuable”

January 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

At 3 Quarks Daily, Thomas Rodham Wells, that bearded philosopher, delivers a spanking to adults who imbue small children with greater value than they would others. At first blush, it seems a pedestrian argument. Little ones, still dependent, need us more, so they are prioritized. Pretty sensible. But as Wells makes clear, the cult of children informs moral decisions and perspectives in ways that may be out of proportion.

I think at the heart of issue is that we hold out hope that babies will turn out better than the rest of us did, and we’d like to enable that opportunity. Once they’ve grown and fallen into the middle of the pack like most do, that hope extinguishes. It certainly can’t just be that we like to make ourselves feel good by protecting those who are more defenseless because a lot adults, impoverished or ill, also fit that category. An excerpt:

Children are special in one particular, their extreme neediness. They have quite specific often urgent needs that only suitably motivated adults can meet, and the younger they are, the greater their neediness. That makes children’s care and protection a moral priority in any civilised society – there are lots of things that aren’t as important and should give rightly way to meeting children’s needs. As a result, children create multiple obligations upon their care-givers, as well second-order obligations on society in general, to ensure those needs are met. 

Yet the fact that you should give way to an ambulance attending an emergency doesn’t mean that the person in the ambulance is more important than you; only that her needs right now are more important than you getting to work on time. Likewise, the immanence of children’s neediness should often determine how we rank the priorities of actions we want to do, such as interrupting a movie to attend to a baby’s cries. But such an action ranking is not a guide to the relative worth of children and adults, or of babies and teenagers. There will surely be times when something even more urgent occurs – such as someone having a heart-attack in front of you – that requires a baby’s cries be neglected for the moment. 

II

The confusion of neediness with worth is only one source of the confusion though. The other major source is rather more blameworthy: the valorisation of psychological immaturity. For a peculiarity of the moral priority we grant to the neediness of children is that we do not apply it to equally needy adults, most obviously those whose mental and physical faculties decline in old age in a somewhat symmetrical way to the development of those faculties in children. If we only cared about neediness we would care more about, and take on more personal responsibility for, meeting the needs of the disabled in general without regard for their age. 

Of course we don’t do that. We seem to place a special value on children because of their blankness, the fact that they have not thought or done anything interesting or important yet and that their identity – their relationship to themselves and to others – is still unformed. (Some abortion activists make a great deal of the innocence of foetuses, the ultimate non-achievers.) As children grow up and become more like people, with a life of their own – friends and favourite things and secrets and dreams and ideas of their own – they seem to become less valuable. 

I can’t explain this bizarre phenomenon.•

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“It Will Come To Seem An Expensive And Elitist Affectation”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

History professors who’ve lectured about Luddites have, in some instances, become Luddites themselves. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS) threaten to disrupt universities, largely a luxury good for mostly economy shoppers. It’s a deserved challenge to the system, and that’s the type of challenge that wrankles the most. From Thomas Rodham Wells’ essay on the subject at the Philosopher’s Beard:

“The most significant feature of MOOCs is that they have the potential to mitigate the cost disease phenomenon in higher education, and thus disrupt its economic conventions, rather as the recorded music industry did for string quartets. Of course MOOCs aren’t the same thing as residential degree programme classroom courses with tenured professors. In at least some respects they are a clearly inferior product. But then, listening to a CD isn’t the same experience as listening to a string quartet, nor are movies the same as theatre. But they are pretty good substitutes for many purposes, especially when the difference in price between them is so dramatic. And, like MOOCs, they also have non-pecuniary advantages over the original, such as user control and enormous quality improvements on some dimensions.

I think this cost advantage is the real challenge the opponents of MOOCs have to address. Why isn’t this cheap alternative good enough? Given that one can now distribute recordings of lectures by the most brilliant and eloquent academics in the world for a marginal cost of close to zero, the idea that a higher education requires collecting millions of 18-25 year olds together in residential schools in order to attend lectures by relative mediocrities and read the books collected in the university library needs a justification. Otherwise it will come to seem an expensive and elitist affectation. Like paying for a real string quartet at your party, or a handmade mechanical watch rather than just one that works.”

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“The classroom no longer has anything comparable to the answers outside the classroom”:

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“This Chicken’s Beak Was Cut Off, Causing It Intense Pain Until Its Death”

January 2, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

Are there any butcher shops in major American cities that still have dead animals hanging in the window? That used to be de rigueur, but suffering and death are bad for business; it’s better to focus on the finished product and disappear all the unpleasantness. The opening of “The Case for Ethical Warning Labels on Meat,” from Thomas Rodham Wells at the Philosopher’s Beard:

“Like cigarettes, meat and dairy packaging should include no nonsense factual warnings about the negative consequences of one’s consumption choices. Just as with cigarettes, there is a strong case that exercising one’s sovereign right to free choice on personal matters requires that people be adequately informed about the significant negative implications of their choices by someone other than the manufacturer that wants them to buy the product. In this case the significant consequences relate to living up to one’s ethical values rather than safe-guarding one’s prudential interests in long-term health. But the principle is the same.

Ethical warning labels would inform consumers of the physical and mental suffering involved in producing the animal products they are considering buying. I envisage labels like this:

This chicken’s beak was cut off, causing it intense pain until its death

and

This cow’s babies were taken away and killed to keep it producing milk.

Servers of cooked animal products, from lowly hot-dog stands to the fanciest restaurants, would also have to include these ethical warnings prominently on their menus.”

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