Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 267
May 20, 2014
Mental Health Break
Like a moth to a flame:
Shame On NYU
The cover story in yesterday’s NYT exposed the deplorable conditions of the laborers who built New York University’s new satellite campus in Abu Dhabi, where Bill Clinton will address the first graduating class this Sunday. Overworked, underpaid, living in squalor, with their passports confiscated, no rights or recourse to justice… gee, they sound just like other migrant workers in the Gulf. But NYU had claimed they would do better. Joe Coscarelli sums up the university’s lame response:
A spokesperson for NYU said this was the first they’d heard about unrest among the workers and that the school is “working with our partners to have it investigated.” The executive director of campus operations for NYU Abu Dhabi added, “We’re not involved in the negotiation of the contracts that the partners are doing, just as they’re not in the negotiation of the contracts that we’re doing. We have a relationship with our partners, and so we have to trust that what they’re coming up with are the reasonable wages on their end.”
“I just don’t think that universities and museums should be working like Wal-Mart,” one NYU professor told BuzzFeed, speaking for the many critical of the long-planned expansion. “I think the opportunity for students to be in the Middle East and North Africa, you know, is wonderful. I believe in global education. But I think you also need to question the terms of production.”
That the NYU administration thinks anyone will buy the line that they just “have to trust” their contractors not to exploit workers is laughable. It’s called due diligence, and they clearly didn’t bother with it. But I’m also a bit shocked that anyone is shocked by this; as Keating points out, it is depressingly common for international institutions that do business in the Gulf to take advantage of these countries’ lack of labor protections:
When internationally renowned architect Zaha Hadid, designer of the largest of Qatar’s World Cup stadiums, was asked to respond to reports that over 382 Nepali migrant workers had died in construction related to the World Cup on top of the more than 500 Indian migrants who have died in the country in 2012, she replied, “I have nothing to do with the workers. I think that’s an issue the government—if there’s a problem—should pick up.”
Most of the large institutions setting up shop in the Gulf probably wouldn’t be quite so callous as to say that working conditions simply aren’t their problem, but it’s nonetheless the case that as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have given free reign and enormous resources to cultural institutions like NYU, the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and FIFA, and turned themselves into architectural playgrounds for the likes of Hadid, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, and I.M. Pei. The well-known fact that the Gulf’s construction boom depends on foreign migrant workers enticed by false promises into near-slave labor conditions has often been conveniently brushed to the side.
The administration has since apologized, but Coscarelli is not impressed:
NYU President John Sexton, the man who struck up a partnership with Abu Dhabi’s royal family, called the treatment “if true as reported, troubling and unacceptable … They are out-of-line with the labor standards we deliberately set for those constructing the ‘turn-key’ campus being built for us on Saadiyat Island and inconsistent with what we understood to be happening on the ground for those workers.” (Most worked for contractors, not the university directly.)
The apologies are all well and good on the PR front, but as one worker, waiting more than a year for his last six months of pay, told the Times, “When will the money come? If the money comes it will be O.K.” Sorry doesn’t feed a family.
Neither is Erik Loomis:
NYU could have had someone on site monitoring the labor conditions that would actually try to find out what was going on rather one who papered over problems to make the client happy. It could employ these workers directly and be the responsible party for paying them. It could have constructed its own dormitories for these workers. But of course it did none of these things. NYU administrators were just following the cash. It contracted out the labor and completely forgot about it until the news reports about the exploitation came out. If NYU wants to take real responsibility, it will take on liability for these workers. Otherwise, this falls into the empty “I’m sorry we were caught” category of apology.
And neither am I.
May 19, 2014
Beards Of The Week
Deschutes County’s first same-sex couple to get a marriage license! I’ll have more tonight on @KTVZ pic.twitter.com/2LHBQgpsSq
— Samantha O’Connor (@SamanthaKTVZ) May 19, 2014
A reader flagged it:
As a proud Oregonian, I couldn’t help but think of the Dish when I saw this.
Previous BOTDs here.
“Refined Religion”
In an interview with Gary Gutting, philosophy professor Philip Kitcher – who describes himself as “a humanist first and an atheist second” – offers a view of religion he calls a “halfway house” between belief and thorough secularism (NYT):
P.K.: … I think there’s a version of religion, “refined religion,” that is untouched by the new atheists’ criticisms, and that even survives my argument that religious doctrines are incredible. Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed.
But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both. To say that God made a covenant with Abraham doesn’t mean that, long ago, some very impressive figure with a white beard negotiated a bargain with a Mesopotamian pastoralist. It is rather to commit yourself to advancing what is most deeply and ultimately valuable, as the story says Abraham did.
G.G.: And so, since they don’t regard them as factual, refined believers don’t have to deny the stories and metaphors of other religions.
P.K.: Right, they don’t have to pick and choose among the religions of the world. They see all religions as asserting that there is more to the cosmos than is dreamed of either in our mundane thoughts or in our most advanced scientific descriptions. Different cultures gesture toward the “transcendent” facets of reality in their many alternative myths and stories. None of the myths is factually true, although they’re all true in the sense that their “fruits for life” are good. Prominent examples of refined believers include William James, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and, in our own day, Karen Armstrong, Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor. When refined religion is thoroughly embedded, religious tolerance thrives, and often much good work is done.
Face Of The Day
A forensic expert holds up part of a human skull found in a mass grave some 10 kilometers from the Iraqi central shrine city of Najaf on May 19, 2014. The bones of 27 people, believed to be victims of the 1991 Shaaban Revolt, will have their DNA tested for identification purposes. The Shaaban Revolt was a series of popular rebellions in northern and southern Iraq in March and April 1991 after the Gulf War that was quashed by the regime of then president Saddam Hussein. By Haider Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images.
Should Future Generations Have A Vote Now?
Arguing that our current political system doesn’t do enough to take the interests of future citizens into account, philosopher Thomas Wells calls for 10 percent of all votes to be set aside for “trustees” acting in their interests:
Trusteeship has played a political role before – indeed it is the very model for the role of elected legislators that Burke himself advocated, as did the British political economist John Stuart Mill a century later. All the same, we would certainly need to introduce some new rules and legal instruments to ensure the success of this novel kind of political trusteeship by organizations, and especially to protect them from improper ‘presentist’ influence by partisan or commercial interests. To ensure their independence, these organizations might have to demonstrate popular support (say 50,000 unique citizen members), be non-profit-making, comply with electoral campaign financing legislation and so forth. …
[T]he presence of trustee voters has the potential to benefit democratic deliberation in general. They would make sustainability an unavoidable political topic, one that politicians have to treat in a way that is credible to these cognitively sophisticated agents. The improved quality of politicians’ attention to the future would also help the merely human voters who struggle to turn their moral concern for the future into effective political choices. At least to some degree, the myopia built into the institutions of democracy would be overcome.
Alex Tabarrok favors a different mechanism:
Robin Hanson’s government of prediction markets (“futarchy”) is a better approach. It is now well understood that relative to other institutions, prediction markets draw on expertise to produce predictions that are far-seeing and impartial. What is less well understood is that through a suitable choice of what is to be traded, prediction markets can be designed to be credibly motivated by a variety of goals including the interests of future generations. …
We can also incorporate into our measure of welfare predictions of how future generations will define welfare. We could, for example, choose a rule such that we will pass policies that increase future environmental quality unless a prediction market in future definitions of welfare suggests that future generations will change their welfare standards. It sounds complicated, but then so is the problem.
Meanwhile, Corey Robin is dismissive of the whole idea:
We could also give votes to people in the past. While one can’t change the experiences of past folks, one can still satisfy their preferences. If past folks expressed particular preferences regarding future outcomes, those preferences could also be given weight in an overall welfare definition.
We could even give votes to animals. One way is to make some assumptions about what outcomes animals seem to care about, pick ways to measure such outcomes, and then include weights on those measures in the welfare definition. Another way is to assume that eventually we’ll “uplift” such animals so that they can talk to us, and put weights on what those uplifted animals will eventually say about the outcomes their ancestors cared about.
We might even put weights on aliens, or on angels. We might just put a weight on what they say about what they want, if they ever show up to tell us. If they never show up, those weights stay set at zero. Of course just because we could give votes to future folks, past folks, animals, aliens, and angels doesn’t mean we will ever want to do so.
Wife, Mother, And Novelist
In an interview about her debut novel, Cutting Teeth, which follows a group of thirty-something Brooklyn parents and their young children on a weekend trip to the beach, Julia Fierro explores how being a woman and young mother informed the story she told:
The focus of the book is on relationships, and I’m always surprised when women writers complain about their book being tagged by bookstores, book sites, and blogs with “relationships” and “women.” I understand the larger issue that’s upsetting them, and thank goodness we have the VIDA numbers to act as a neon sign broadcasting the truth about gender inequality in the literary world, but I am a woman, and I will always write about relationships. I am inspired by psychology and emotion, conflict and drama. The world is most significant to me as a web of relationships. If a story isn’t filtered through a psychological lens, you’ll have trouble keeping my attention. Humanity’s individual, and collective, fears and needs and desires are the only religion I’ve got and I am obsessively devoted. So I try to embrace the fact that I am a woman writer writing (mostly) about women, although the male characters in my work are often “liked” most by readers (even if they commit the worst crimes—how about that?). Recently, I even had a brief thought—maybe I am writing with women readers in mind? I am, after all, living a life that only another woman could truly understand. I am going through a phase of life—early motherhood—that is complex in a way that is unique to a woman’s experience. What I feel in my body, in my thoughts, and the ways I interpret the world uniquely, all stem from my experience as a woman. But I have to think more on that before I commit.
In a self-interview, Fierro explains how she wrote a novel and founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, all while raising two children:
My lifelong insomnia has been a blessing in disguise. I pretty much sleep four hours a night, and am doing my best to ignore conspiracy theories like this, that simultaneously attempt to cut my productivity in half and promise my inevitable doom.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you abandon all household chores that aren’t absolutely essential. Sure, we’re living in chaos, but mom’s making great progress on her next novel and the number of Sackett Street writers attending classes has doubled in the last three years. It turns out that women can “have it all”—they might be miserably tired, suffer from high blood pressure, and not have enough time to eat well, exercise or have meaningful relationships, but you can do anything when you don’t give yourself a reason not to.
Read a sexy excerpt from Cutting Teeth here.
Before And After
Kate Good shares the story of her husband’s physical transition from female to male, writing that she’s “learned that ‘transgender’ is a ridiculously large catch-all”:
There’s no such thing as gender reassignment surgery, despite what various government and news agencies seem to think. There’s a menu of therapies, medications, and surgeries, and people pick what combination works for their body, their health, their mental and emotional needs and, not least, their finances. The government as a whole doesn’t have a good grasp on what it means to be transgender, and definitions and regulations vary wildly from office to office and day to day. What it really takes to get a passport issued is anyone’s guess. Even in the time we’ve been together these things have improved, thanks to hard-working activists, but there’s still a lot of work to do both in writing new regulations and clarifying existing ones.
There’s not a line — before here he was female, after he is male. I think he’s still deciding on how to think about the person he was before transitioning. Every once in a while I see a picture of him before he cut his hair and changed his name and how he dressed, before he was the man I married. It’s an odd feeling. It’s him but not him. I don’t dwell on it.
I don’t dwell on my own sexuality either.
I’m straight. I wasn’t attracted to him when he started transitioning, when there was still a feminine curve to his cheeks and hips. If you had asked me then if we would ever date I would have said no. It took two years of being friends before I realized I liked him (liked liked him). One day he asked me out and I thought well, why not? And then we fell in love, fast. We were almost immediately talking about our future, marriage, kids. His being transgender faded to the background. It sounds unbelievable but I still sometimes forget. He has to remind me that people he met in the past might not know who he is now. I don’t know, or care, what loving him means for my placement on the Kinsey scale, or whatever spectrum is the going standard. If I lost him I would undoubtedly date cis-men. I love him, and I love being his wife. Figuring out what that labels me as seems like a waste of time.
Creepy Ad Watch
Vauhini Vara flags a new campaign by Coca-Cola featuring guest workers in Dubai:
In March, Coke installed five special phone booths in Dubai labor camps that accepted Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins. In exchange for the cap from a bottle of Coke—which costs about fifty-four cents—migrant workers could make a three-minute international call. The ad shows laborers in hard hats and reflective vests lining up to use the machine—and grinning, for the first time in the video, as they wait. “I’ve saved one more cap, so I can talk to my wife again tomorrow,” one man tells the camera. More than forty thousand people made calls using the machines. Then, in April, after the booths had been up for about a month, the company dismantled them.
At first glance, the ad may seem innocuous, even sweet, until you consider how Coke is exploiting these workers’ misery to burnish its friendly image:
I sent links to the ads to Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied labor conditions in Dubai. I was interested in his take on the questions of appropriateness and ethics that some viewers had raised. The videos, he said, were “odious.” For one thing, he said, Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—to use the special phone booth. On top of that, he feels that the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will. “If this was two hundred years ago, would it be appropriate for Coke to do adverts in the plantations of the Deep South, showing slaves holding cans of Coke?” he asked. “It is a normalization of a system of structural violence, of a state-sanctioned trafficking system.”
The Dish recently looked at the conditions of guest workers in Dubai and other Gulf states here.
Can You Teach A Robot Right From Wrong?
The Office of Naval Research is spending $7.5 million to find out:
“Even though today’s unmanned systems are ‘dumb’ in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we’ve seen before,” Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. “For example, Google’s self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake.”
The United States military prohibits lethal fully autonomous robots. And semi-autonomous robots can’t “select and engage individual targets or specific target groups that have not been previously selected by an authorized human operator,” even in the event that contact with the operator is cut off, according to a 2012 Department of Defense policy directive. “Even if such systems aren’t armed, they may still be forced to make moral decisions,” Bello said.
Since the robotic future of warfare has to some extent already arrived, and the danger of getting it wrong is so great, this seems worth the money to me, but Suderman doesn’t see how an ethical military robot is possible:
Obviously Asimov’s Three Laws wouldn’t work on a machine designed to kill. Would any moral or ethical system? It seems plausible that you could build in rules that work basically like the safety functions of many machines today, in which the specific conditions result in safety behaviors or shut down orders. But it’s hard to imagine, say, an attack drone with an ethical system that allows it to make decisions about right and wrong in a battlefield context.
What would that even look like? Programming problems aside, the moral calculus involved in [waging] war is too murky and too widely disputed to install in a machine. You can’t even get people to come to any sort of agreement on the morality of using drones for targeted killing today, when they are almost entirely human controlled. An artificial intelligence designed to do the same thing would just muddy the moral waters even further. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine even a non-lethal military robot with a meaningful moral mental system, especially if we’re pushing into the realm of artificial intelligence.
Meghan Neal entertains the argument that killer robots might actually be more ethical than human soldiers:
For one, killer bots won’t be hindered by trying not to die, and will have all kinds of superhero-esque capabilities we can program into machines. But the more salient point is that lethal robots could actually be more “humane” than humans in combat because of the distinctly human quality the mechanical warfighters lack: emotions.
Without judgment clouded by fear, rage, revenge, and the horrors of war that toy with the human psyche, an intelligent machine could avoid emotion-driven error, and limit the atrocities humans have committed in wartime over and over through history, [roboethicist Ronald] Arkin argues. “I believe that simply being human is the weakest point in the kill chain, i.e., our biology works against us,” Arkin wrote in a paper titled “Lethal Autonomous Systems and the Plight of the Non-combatant.”
But, of course, as Zack Beauchamp points out, that same lack of emotion prevents a robot from disobeying orders to commit an atrocity:
Charli Carpenter, a political scientist at the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, makes a compelling argument that robots could commit war crimes — because war crimes, contrary to what we might prefer to believe, are often not committed by rogue soldiers as crimes of passion but as deliberate tools of terror engineered by top commanders. In the Bosnian War, for example, Bosnian Serb soldiers were ordered by their commanders to use rape as a tool of terror, and soldiers who refused were threatened with castration.
Robots, unlike people, always do what they’re told. Carpenter’s point is that human-rights abusing governments could program robot warriors to do whatever they’d want, and they’d do it, without compunction or thought. If the reality of war-time atrocities is that they tend to be intentional, not crimes of passion, then that’s a huge count in favor of banning military robots today.
Filip Spagnoli engages both sides of the moral dilemma:
It’s true that robots can be programmed to kill indiscriminately or to kill all brown people. But history is full of human commanders giving exactly the same kind of orders. If robots are programmed in immoral ways, then that’s an easier problem to solve than the prejudices or emotional failures of scores of individual soldiers and commanders. Of course we’ll have to monitor the people who will program the robots. But is this more difficult than monitoring the immoral orders by human leaders? Obviously it’s not. It’s true that monitoring will be easier in democracies, but if dictators want killer robots there’s not a lot we can do to stop them or to convince them to use robots in a ethical manner.
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