Author Archives: KerrieMcCabe

Is Donald Trump Setting Up the GOP for his Biggest Prank Yet?

by KerrieMcCabe Posted on September 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Putting to rest GOP concerns about a possible independent run by reality television tycoon Donald Trump, Republican party insiders say that the frontrunner in their presidential contest has agreed to sign a loyalty pledge, promising to back the party’s eventual nominee and not mount an outside effort.

The benefit for Trump is that it removes a line of GOP attack against him. The move signals he is a serious candidate who plans to stay in the race and is not campaigning on a lark. But is Trump the deal-maker pulling a fast one? After all, the actual pledge looks neither legal nor binding.

If there’s one guy who knows about how to escape from or alter a contract, it’s Trump. He has sued many people on assorted grounds, attempting to hold others liable for questioning his wealth, for insulting a building that he considered building (but didn’t), and for allowing airplanes to be loud. (That’s just a partial list.) Since he announced his candidacy, Trump has lost a number of business partners, and he has sued most of them. He sued celebrity chef Jose Andres for $10 million after Andres, an immigrant who recently became a US citizen, pulled out of a plan to build a restaurant in Trump’s new Washington, D.C. hotel. Trump also launched a $500 million lawsuit against Univision for dropping the Miss Universe pageant.

And watch out, GOP; the number of successful lawsuits against Trump for breaching contract are surprisingly few. In 2013, an 87-year-old Illinois woman accused Trump of making false promises concerning investment possibilities regarding a Chicago condo tower he was developing. During his testimony, Trump seemed to enjoy the contentious exchanges with the plaintiff’s attorney and deftly sidestepped demands for information about the construction of the building. According to the Chicago Tribune:

“(The judge) told the chatty Trump to narrow his responses and stick to the questions asked of him. She told (the plaintiff’s attorney) to simplify his questions about the complicated condo deal at the heart of the dispute.

“I’m going to give you both time to catch your breath,” the judge said. “… Do you think the jury likes this? If you do, I can tell you they don’t.”

Over the two days of testimony, Trump dodged and weaved, trying to distance himself from specific knowledge of the condo development plans, often trailing off into lengthy observations about his many hotels. Trump also took every opportunity he could to tell the jury that a clause in the contract allowed him to change plans and that (the plaintiff) had asked for that right to be removed. Yet her request was refused, and she bought two condos anyway, he said.

“And then she sued me! Unbelievable!” he said, his voice rising as he lifted his arms and grimaced in a moment reflective of the Trump the nation has come to know from his network TV reality show.”

Trump’s attorneys argued that the woman was actually a sophisticated investor and should have known that Trump might change the terms of the agreement. He won.

Republicans ought to remember that during the 1992 presidential contest, billionaire H. Ross Perot, after ending an independent bid, said he was out of the race, but then he changed his mind shortly before the election in October. Perot never garnered enough support to have a shot at winning, but he drew 19 percent of the general election vote, and many analysts believed this assured Bill Clinton’s defeat of President George H.W. Bush.

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Is Donald Trump Setting Up the GOP for his Biggest Prank Yet?

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Here’s Why No One Cares About Modern Philosophy

by KerrieMcCabe Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via someone on the right (I don’t remember who, sorry) I learned of a minor tempest over at Vox.com. One of their editors asked a Swedish philosopher, Torbjorn Tannsjo, to write a piece defending the “repugnant conclusion,” which Tannsjo describes thusly:

My argument is simple. Most people live lives that are, on net, happy. For them to never exist, then, would be to deny them that happiness. And because I think we have a moral duty to maximize the amount of happiness in the world, that means that we all have an obligation to make the world as populated as can be.

There are a number of caveats in the piece, but that’s basically it. Vox ended up rejecting it, partly because they decided not to launch a planned new section for “unusual, provocative arguments,” and partly because they were squeamish about the implications of a piece which argued that “birth control and abortion are, under most circumstances, immoral.”

Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, was appalled:

If you solicit a piece from a philosopher, knowing what their work is about (as was clearly the case here), you have an obligation to publish it, subject to reasonable editing. What you can’t do, if you are an even remotely serious operation (and not an echo chamber), is reject it because someone not paying attention might think the argument supports a conclusion they find icky.

I’ll confess to some puzzlement about this affair. Leiter is right that Vox editors must have known exactly what Tannsjo was going to write. That was clear from the start. So why did they get cold feet after seeing the finished product? On the other hand, Leiter is dead wrong that any publication has an obligation to publish every piece it solicits.1 That doesn’t pass the laugh test, whether the writer is a philosopher or not. Stuff gets rejected all the time for a million different reasons, potential offensiveness among them.

But here’s the part I really don’t get: Why on earth would anyone take Tannsjo’s argument seriously in the first place? The entire thing hinges on the premise that we all have a moral duty to maximize the absolute amount of felt happiness in the universe. If you don’t believe that, there’s nothing left of his essay.

But virtually no one does believe that. And since Tannsjo never even tries to justify his premise, that makes his entire piece kind of pointless. It would have taken me about five minutes to reject it.

I dunno. Too many modern philosophers seem to revel in taking broadly uncontroversial sentiments—in this case, that we have an obligation to future generations—and then spinning out supposedly shocking conclusions that might hold if (a) you literally care only about this one thing, and (b) you take it to its absurd, ultimate limit.2 But aside from dorm room bull sessions, why bother? That just isn’t the human condition. We care about lots of things; they often conflict; and we always have to end up balancing them in some acceptable way. Nothing in the real world ever gets taken to its ultimate logical conclusion all by itself.

I suppose this kind of thing might be interesting in the same way that any abstract logic puzzle is interesting, but it’s not hard to see why most people would just consider it tedious blather. If this is at all representative of what Vox got when it started looking around for unusual, provocative arguments, I don’t blame them for deep sixing the whole idea.

1Depending on the publication and the type of article, they might owe you a kill fee for the work you put into it. But that’s all.

2Well, that and ever more baroque versions of the trolley problem.

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Here’s Why No One Cares About Modern Philosophy

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