Part of my job is to urge philosophy faculty to try out new technological teaching tricks (like blogs, for example). But the unholy secret is that most new tricks don't work. That is, if one keeps one's goals fixed and one's other procedures, requirements, routines fixed, any new trick is likely to be strangled in its cradle. The only way new tricks get a fair test is if one lets them nudge one's goals a bit and nudge one's procedures a bit. And of course if one lets those nudges happen, one loses the chance to scientifically compare the old way and the new way, in the same framework, addressing the same goals. One must instead do a qualitative comparison of the new way and the old way -- a very much more complex intellectual operation.
I was reading today in the New York Times about Vioxx and other drugs that promise (for a hefty price) to relieve pain as well as over-the-counter medications without promoting gastro-intestinal bleeding. These drugs have not been proven to work any better than the older and cheaper drugs for those people taking low dose aspirin. And lots of older people take low dose aspirin. Again, it turns out to be very difficult to evaluate the effect of a single factor, and, in practical terms, one may end up evaluating two incommenurable packages: "cheap drugs and more bleeding" versus "expensive drugs and less bleeding and no aspirin-protection."
There's a lesson here: it is easy to imagine the task of practical reason as a task of evaluating means to an end: which means gets me most of what I am aiming for? But the question that actually confronts us, in many forms, is this: which complex package of means and ends is all things considered the best package?
When people have contempt for biography and autobiography, for the documentation of lives, their problem is sometimes that such documentation is too messy to give clear guidance. But it may be that messy guidance is the only guidance we can hope for on large questions, that our only plausible job is to compare versions of teaching, versions of health, versions of relationship -- where each version is a package of means and ends that cannot be put on any common scale with any other package. And ethical philosophy faces just this challenge: does it dignify this sort of evaluation as ethical thinking or hold up some other, more scientific, model as "the real, careful stuff."
A weblog faithfully maintained will often present or betray the compromises and trade-offs of a particular life, over the long term. That is its strength, as an ethical document.
Posted by shea0017 at November 24, 2004 10:17 AM