The California Attorney General has sued McDonald’s and Wendy’s for failing to put warning labels on their french fries telling customers that they contain chemicals that (at very high doses) might cause cancer or other health problems.

According to the article,

The lawsuit alleges that companies have violated a state law passed in 1986 requiring companies to provide warnings before exposing people to known carcinogens or reproductive toxins.

In 2002, scientists found potatoes and other starchy foods cooked at high temperatures contained low levels of acrylamide. Other studies have discounted the potential toxicity of acrylamide to humans…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is studying the impact of acrylamide levels in food. In a March press release, the FDA said “acrylamide can cause cancer in laboratory animals at high doses, although it is not clear whether it causes cancer in humans at the much lower levels found in food.“

(Emphasis mine.)

Need I say more?

A few days ago, I was searching the wonderfully helpful Non-Contradiction.com for the source text of Aristotle’s distinctions between first potentiality (e.g. “I am the sort of being that is able to learn Russian”), second potentiality/first actuality (e.g. “I am able to speak Russian, but I am not presently doing so”), and second actuality (e.g. “I am presently speaking Russian”) for my paper on the marginal humans argument for animal liberation/rights. (Really, it’s quite relevant!) In the process, I surfed to this page on Aristotle’s Catfish. I’d heard the basic outline of the story from someone some time ago, but so I was delighted to read the details about this vindication of Aristotle’s biology. However, I was even more delighted to see that the first of the two listed sources was none other than “‘Aristotle as Scientist’ lecture given by Dr. Allan Gotthelf, August 1989″ — with the link to the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

(Obviously, that lecture is still on my “To Do” list — now bumped up a few notches! Unfortunately, it’s not yet available on CD. Since I’ve discovered the joyful ease of listening to lectures on my iPod, I don’t wish to buy any more tapes.)

This spring, Boulder’s “Rocky Mountain Student Philosophy Conference” will have not one but three keynote speakers:

Linda Martin Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1987. Linda Martin Alcoff works primarily in continental philosophy, epistemology, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. Her books include Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993), Thinking From the Underside of History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Epistemology: The Big Questions (Blackwell), Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory of Knowledge (Cornell, 1996), Identities (Blackwell, 2002). She has written over forty articles concerning Foucault, sexual violence, the politics of knowledge, and gender and race identity, and is at work on a new book forthcoming with Oxford entitled Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. She has served as Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and Chair of the APA Committee on Hispanics.

Claudia Card received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University and is Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also Affiliate Professor in Jewish Studies, LGBT Studies, Women’s Studies, and Environmental Studies. She is author of The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford, 2002), The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Temple 1996), Lesbian Choices (Columbia 1995), and more than 100 articles and reviews; editor of Feminist Ethics (Kansas 1991), Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy (Indiana 1994), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge, 2003), On Feminist Ethics and Politics (Kansas 1999), and a special issue of Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy (1992). She has delivered over 100 papers at conferences, colleges and universities and has been featured in 10 radio broadcasts.

Uma Narayan received her B.A. in Philosophy from Bombay University and her M.A. in Philosophy from Poona University, India. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1990. She is a Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. She is the author of Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism. She has coedited Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives with Prof. Mary L. Shanley, Having and Raising Children with Prof. Julia Bartkowiak and Decentering the Center: Postcolonial and Feminist Challenges to Philosophy with Prof. Sandra Harding. She regularly offers courses on Contemporary Moral Issues, Social and Political Philosophy and Feminist Theory in the philosophy department. She frequently teaches courses for the Women’s Studies program, such as Introduction to Women’s Studies and Global Feminism.

No comment required, I think.

Since Don Watkins is gone for the weekend, I suppose that I’ll do a round up:

• I love making fun of the enemy. (Via GeekPress.)
• On a related note, you might think that I named this blog “NoodleFood” based upon the idea that it offers “Philosophical Food for Your Noodle!” However, I think it’s time for me to confess my up-to-now secret worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. NoodleFood is actually my daily sacrificial offering to the His Noodliness; my unworthy words feed him. So, I hereby declare my total agreement with Bobby Henderson’s open letter to the Kansas School Board: If Intelligent Design is to be taught in government schools, then FSM-ism ought to be taught too.
• Given that the libertarian movement embraces a diversity of philosophic foundations for liberty, it’s hardly surprising to find increasing disagreement about political issues amongst libertarians. I keep an eye out for these disputes, as they make handy talking points when I explain why I’m not a libertarian. Some well-known and standard ones include whether governments necessarily violate rights, whether abortion is murder, whether a defensive war violates the rights of innocents in the aggressing country, whether law should be legislated, whether intellectual property rights exist, whether using my absent neighbor’s hose to put out the fire consuming his house violates his rights, and so on. So here’s another: libertarian animal rights. Although these rights-for-beasts libertarians are not terribly common at present, they seem to be growing in number. (As a happy coincidence, I’m presently writing a paper on the errors of the argument from marginal humans discussed in that essay. Don Watkins’ essay on broken units helped me sort out significant confusions about species normality, I should mention.)
• The Charlotte Observer has a short article on BB&T Bank’s recent one million dollar donation to UNC Charlotte’s College of Business. Happily, Objectivist businessman extraordinaire John Allison has been very successful selling this “moral foundations of capitalism” package to business schools.
• I’m quite amused by Dennis Hardin’s recent SOLO article “Nathaniel Branden vs. Ayn Rand on Morality.” Hardin does not merely fail to anywhere mention that the whole essay is a response to my recent post “Nathaniel Branden’s Campaign Against Objective Moral Judgment.” He also borders on plagiarism by copying the structure and even lifting some text from my post. He does mention me in passing, but not even by name. He just writes — totally out of the blue and toward the very end — that “one observer contends that Branden espouses this notion with the hope others might want to ‘take responsibility for his [i.e., Branden's] moral depravity.’” The included link is not even to the relevant post, but to August’s huge monthly archive.

  Just by way of contrast, I clearly identified and linked to all of Nathaniel Branden’s relevant writings in my post. I even explicitly defended that practice as necessary against a stupid, dishonest troll on Objectivism Online — on the grounds that my readers need to judge the fairness and accuracy of my criticisms for themselves. I’m not afraid that honest readers will reject my criticisms if also given easy access to the primary sources. Dennis Hardin doesn’t seem so confident — and rightly so. Also, the voluminous comments on Hardin’s essay are informative: they show an almost universal lack of concern for Ayn Rand’s actual views on moral judgment from these supposed “Sense of Life Objectivists.”

• I have just a few more days to finish up my flurry on posts on the various false friends of Objectivism. Yikes! (I’ve set myself a deadline of August 31st, as I don’t want it drag on and on forever.) Although working through these issues in writing has been very helpful to me, I’m looking forward to focusing on more positive philosophical concerns.