Thanks in large part due Chairman Bob Pasnau, the Boulder philosophy department is well on its way to recovery from the exodus of faculty in recent years.

The Department has announced five new faculty appointments:

Mitzi Lee, associate professor, formerly at Illinois/Chicago. Mitzi works in ancient philosophy, and has just published a book with Oxford entitled “Epistemology After Protagoras.” She will begin teaching in the fall.

Robert Rupert, assistant professor, formerly at Texas Tech. Rob works in philosophy of mind, has published papers with many leading journals, and is working on two book manuscripts. He will be in Boulder beginning this summer, but has an NEH Fellowship for next year, and so will not begin teaching until Fall ’06.

Eric Chwang, PhD Princeton/MD Baylor. Eric works in ethics and political philosophy, and has a special interest in medical ethics. For the next year and a half he will be taking an NIH postdoc, and so will not be in residence in Boulder until Spring ’07.

Chris Heathwood, PhD UMass. Chris works in ethics, and although he is just finishing his PhD, he has already published numerous papers. He will be arriving early this summer, and begins teaching in the fall.

David Barnett, assistant professor, formerly at University of Vermont. David works on metaphysics and language and has published numerous papers in the leading philosophy journals. He begins in the fall.

Five new hires in a year is pretty damn astonishing, particularly for a cash-strapped university like Boulder. (I am particularly eager to meet Mitzi Lee, our new ancient philosophy hire!)

However, these new hires don’t really solve the basic problem facing many of us already well into our Ph.D coursework, namely that of finding a well-suited dissertation advisor. I have only one more semester of coursework, so I won’t have too much interaction with the new hires, not even with those arriving in the next academic year. Moreover, most of the new faculty are too green to supervise a dissertation.

I’m sure that I’ll be able to work it out to my reasonable satisfaction. But until then, it’s all a bit worrisome.

Some of you might be interested to read my recent posts to an Objectivism Online thread on the meaning and propriety of a joking comment about romantic availability. (Note that the linked thread actually starts in the middle of the discussion, since it was siphoned off from another thread. However, Post #16 on the first page has a summary of the original exchange.)

Basically, a poster joked that the women reading the board were missing out because he was romantically unavailable to them. He was attacked for making such a comment in jest on the grounds that it betrayed a lack of self-esteem and confidence, particularly a lack of security in his own value to women. Notably, those critics also claimed that making such a comment seriously would be entirely appropriate for a rational man.

I was pretty thoroughly appalled by the grand psychologizing of the poor joker, particularly in public and particularly under the guise of “helping” him. In my view, his joke did not at all betray the psychology so easily attributed to him. But even if it had, the public castigation was entirely improper. Perhaps (and I stress that “perhaps” since the parties were strangers) private discussion might have been appropriate. (Happily, one critic did apologize.)

I was also rather astonished that anyone would regard a serious comment like “Too bad for you ladies that I’m unavailable” as anything other than absurdly rude, disrespectful, and presumptuous. As I repeatedly argued, it ignores the optional values of the women in earshot, values which are critical to romantic relationships and unlikely to be satisfied by some random, unknown man, even if a perfect Objectivist. Such a comment also presupposes a substantially intrinsicist view of value: a good man just is a value to all good women, whether or not they are even aware of his existence. In fact, values are human identifications of the facts by the standard of life, not goodies to be plucked off of trees. So before Paul and I met, say when he was a sophomore at MIT and I was in second grade at Barley Sheaf Elementary School, neither one of us was a value to the other. We became values to each other only after we met.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the debate was my last exchange with “iouswuoibev.” After commenting on his total change of subject from serious comment back to joking comment, I wrote, “That’s fine, I really have no desire to say any more on the topic.” He replied, “That’s unfortunate because we haven’t finished.” Now perhaps he wasn’t finished with the discussion, in the sense that he had more that he wanted to say. But I was certainly done. I’d said all that I wanted or needed to say, particularly given his sudden reversal of topic and particularly given the time available to me. So that “we haven’t finished” was almost as insufferably presumptuous as the hypothetical under discussion.

True to that form, “iouswuoibev” seems to have moved on to telling a someone who inquired about his (reasonable) feelings of loneliness that his problem is second-handedness. Really, I kid you not.

(I don’t mean to pick on this poor young man too much, since I don’t think that he is malicious. Nonetheless, he is doing very real damage. If he won’t stop, he ought to be publicly opposed.)

Available here. This movie is going to be awesome…

I recently found this interesting commentary on the likely response to the impending birth control pill for men by Glenn Sacks on the ifeminists site. He writes:

Women have long lamented the unequal burden they shoulder in the area of contraception. Today researchers are reportedly close to perfecting a male contraceptive that is free of side effects, easy to take, and reversible. But do women really want a male birth control pill?

…while women legitimately complain that biology has condemned them to bear the burden of contraception, this burden also gives women control over one of the most important parts of any human being’s life–reproduction. The male birth control pill will shift much of that control from women to men. Is the following conversation far away?

Woman #1: “My [husband, boyfriend, significant other] is selfish. He’s on the pill and won’t get off. I’ve asked him to stop taking it but he always says he’s not ready. He just won’t grow up. I don’t know what to do.”

Woman #2: “That’s what the pill has given men–a right to be perpetual adolescents. It’s given them veto power over women who want to have children.”

Despite the stigma that will develop against men who take the pill, the pill will be a success. While most women are responsible and want to have children with a willing, committed partner, studies show that lack of reproductive control can be a major problem for men today. For example, the National Scruples and Lies Survey 2004 polled 5,000 women in the United Kingdom for That’s Life! magazine. According to that survey, 42% of women claim they would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of the wishes of their partners.

…According to research conducted by Joyce Abma of the National Center for Health Statistics and Linda Piccinino of Cornell University, over a million American births each year result from pregnancies which men did not intend.

The article then briefly considers the serious, years-long burden of child support which may be imposed upon unwilling fathers. A male birth control pill could obviously put an end to much of that.

At present, women certainly do have a double power over procreation not enjoyed by men. First, the most reliable form of birth control, i.e. the pill, is taken or not by the woman, often out of the sight of the man. Second, only women have the power to opt out of pregnancy via abortion or out of child-rearing via adoption. A male birth control pill would offer men substantial control over contraception — and thus obviate much need (or wish) for abortion and adoption. Even with a male birth control pill, I still think that men ought to be able to opt out of fatherhood in the case of accidental pregnancy. Men ought not be placed into indentured servitude for 18 years due to bad luck.

I do suspect (and hope) that the author is wrong that a “stigma… will develop against men who take the pill”; the hypocrisy of that view would be too much for any reasonable person to bear. I’m sure that some women would lament the loss of their capacity to trick their man du jour into fatherhood. However, I suspect that such lamentations will be largely private, as they would reveal a rather twisted soul.

I love Wendy’s hamburgers, so I’m pleased to hear that the woman (Anna Ayala) who claimed to have found a finger in her chili has been arrested on various charges. She seems like an all-around horrible person:

The investigation into the severed finger prompted the second criminal charge against Ayala, who authorities said sold a mobile home that was not hers to a woman who spoke only Spanish. The victim in that case lost her life savings of $11,000, police said.

The reward money for information about the source of the missing finger still stands.