This was an awful lot of fun. C.S Soong is a genius at his job. It airs at noon pacific time.
Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio airs on KPFA 94.1 FM in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and on KFCF 88.1 FM in Fresno and California's Central Valley. It also broadcasts worldwide via kpfa.org.
Community radio!
ReplyDeleteI can imagine several teenagers in Oakland who you lit on fire with that performance, they aren't getting any sleep, everything is changing.
Derek Parfit's arguments aren't often enough appreciated as completely mind blowing, I am glad you have touched on what's at stake in momentary ethical decision-making -- as Parfit says, every moment we are deciding who will be born and who will never be born in the near and distant future. It seems that your grounding ethical resonance in present-moment awareness and immediacy forestalls Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. Your reliance on immediacy leaves you vulnerable to objections, however. At time T, you acknowledge the impossibility of considering the infinities of beings who are present. Then at time T' you focus on a particular cigarette butt and a particular tree as justifications for ethical action. You make this seem like a necessary move from an ethics rooted in epistemology to one rooted in ontology, a kind of embodied ethical resonance theory, if you will. But I can imagine Parfit saying Hold On Tim!, don't discharge the uncertainty of your embodied ethical obligations so fast! "Tuning" into strange strangers through spontaneous ethical-aesthetic coupling is intensely 'unique' and has an element of the arbitrary, of selective consideration stamped for approval by desire and aversion. Non-violence as a criteria for selecting from possible actions may work for the individual, but it seems less valuable for collective decision making, where visions of non-violence are likely to vary wildly in a frenzy of uniqueness. Collective democratic discussions of a large set of adjacent possible futures that seem both desirable and non-violent -- is that not a violent venue???