cincinnatus_c_

"Why do we now show dewpoint temperature on the Waterloo Weather Station? It is part of our campaign to encourage the Canadian public to use dewpoint temperature as a measure of the amount of water in the air. Sure you can use relative humidity, but it's so... relative, the nature of relative humidity makes it heavily dependant on the temperature. For example, you can have a relative humidity in the summer of 100%, but you can also have a relative humidity in the winter of 100%, as well there might be a similar relative humidity in Vancouver as there is in Waterloo, but because of the temperature difference, there is a lot less moisture in the air in Waterloo."
http://weather.uwaterloo.ca/info.htm

(So they're not quite up to the presentation standards of Dave Phillips, Environment Canada Media Superstar. I love this site.)

On the other hand, one of the discussion bulletins on Emily from the US National Hurricane Center today pointed out that Emily would not make it past the mountains of north-central Mexico. (Is it impossible? I dunno, storms do make it over the mountains from the Pacific onto the Canadian Prairies.)

High temp today, here: 27. Dewpoint at that time: 23. High dewpoint: 23.
High temp today in TO: 29. Dewpoint at that time: 23. High dewpoint: 24.
Highest dewpoint I've ever noticed at Toronto Pearson. Poking around today, the highest dewpoints I found were in Hong Kong and Bangkok, in the upper twenties. In Riyadh, on the other hand, the dewpoint hit a high of 3 while the temperature was in the mid-40s.

The hawk was back today, eating a small bird. No mammals were to be seen. Perhaps they'd been warned. An excellent photo of the evil hawk of doom, as well as one of its poop, was obtained, and might appear eventually.

Today's moral luck update: read Scott A. Davison, "Moral Luck and the Flicker of Freedom" (American Philosophical Quarterly 36, no. 3, 1999). This article isn't actually about moral luck so much as it's about the problem of moral responsibility and determinism. Basically (speaking of commentaries on commentaries on commentaries), it's a response to someone named Fischer's responses to a bunch of responses to an argument from Harry Frankfurt (he of recent On Bullshit celebrity) to the effect that the "Principle of Alternate Possibilities" (PAP)--holding that you can only be morally responsible for an act to which there is an alternate possibility, i.e., when you could've done something else--is false.

Frankfurt apparently bases his argument on a thought experiment in which a judge is passing sentence on a guy; guy has a gizmo in judge's brain that will inform guy if judge is going to convict, and enable guy to make judge acquit. Frankfurt says: PAP is false because if judge freely decides to acquit, he's responsible for doing so, even though he couldn't actually have done otherwise. The responses say the example doesn't show that PAP is false, because there's a "flicker of freedom" in the moment that the judge makes up his mind; for a split second, he can decide to convict, which is a real alternate possibility. (I don't remember what Fischer's response is.)

Frankfurt, by the way, in addition to being a philosopher of bullshit, is a philosopher of religion, and I'd suspect that there's some kind of theological thing going on in his original piece. It's kind of interesting, anyway, if you spin it that way: if God ordains everything that everybody ever does, people can still be morally responsible for their actions, as long as God doesn't actually intervene to make them do what he would make them do if they weren't going to do it on their own.

Anyway, the moral luck bit--and it is just a bit--comes in at the end of the piece, where Davison gives an example of two guys, Unlucky Jim and Lucky Tim, who both form an intention to steal pears from a neighbour's tree, but Jim gets struck dead by lightning before he gets to the tree. The idea is, Jim and Tim are equally guilty, equally blameworthy, as long as it's the case that they've both formed the intention; you can move the lightning strike all the way back to the split second that Jim forms the intention--it's his flicker of freedom--and he's still just as guilty as Tim. Davison concludes: "Hence there is an argument from cases of moral luck for the conclusion that the 'flicker of freedom' strategists have focussed on the crucial element with respect to moral responsibility. These reflections in the Augustinian (or Kantian) vein reinforce the suspicion that Frankfurt's counterexamples are not ultimately successful, and that there is something true in the neighborhood of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities after all."

Ba-doom tish.

The odd thing about calling the Jim & Tim example a "case of moral luck" is that Davison just takes the Kantian side--which is to say, the side that there's just no such thing as moral luck. (He does say, somewhere along the line, that we can't hold Jim responsible for stealing pears, but that's beside the point.)

So, as far as getting up on the Literature on Moral Luck goes, that article was a complete waste of time.

In other news, I finished my dissertation today. La dee da.

Finished, pending revisions required by committee members other than my supervisor, that is. It's in their hands, now. Tomorrow will be the first day in ... I dunno, years, that I will not be supposed to be doing some kind of work on my dissertation.

To celebrate, I'm going grocery shopping.

My dissertation is not on, about, or anywhere near moral luck. This is one possible reason that I am now so (apparently) interested in moral luck. (If not for my (mostly former) colleague Domsky, though, I never would've been close to this interested, which points toward something interesting in academic dynamics.) I have been yearning lately to write the sort of philosophy paper in which there is a problem, and one tries to solve it.