Update: The presentation slides haven’t converted yet. They’ll be up soon.

It’s also interesting for metaphysical reasons related to defining life and death. I regularly teach a course called Life and Death; before getting to ethical issues related to death we spend the first few weeks of the class discussing just how difficult it is to define life and death. Our primary text is Fred Feldman’s Confrontations with the Reaper. 

Feldman argues that you cannot define death as ceasing to be alive, because he regards going into a state of suspended animation as an instance of ceasing to be alive, but not dying. Students respond to these thought experiments by pointing out the far-fetched nature of what they’re being asked to imagine. Generally, whenever I discuss counter-examples to theories, I try to find examples that are closer to reality. I now have one for my life and death class.

My first thought was, surely this isn’t anything like suspended animation in the sense that Feldman has. Surely the body is still functioning, and all crucial parts are operating in a manner that is measurable. If so, it’s difficult to see how we’d call this a case of being neither dead or alive. But then I got to this passage:

The technique was first demonstrated in pigs in 2002 by Hasan Alam at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues. The animals were sedated and a massive haemorrhage induced, to mimic the effect of multiple gunshot wounds. Their blood was drained and replaced by either a cold potassium or saline solution, rapidly cooling the body to around 10 °C. After the injuries were treated, the animals were gradually warmed up as the solution was replaced with blood.

The pig’s heart usually started beating again by itself, although some pigs needed a jump-start. There was no effect on physical or cognitive function (Surgery, doi.org/dvhdzs).

“After we did those experiments, the definition of ‘dead’ changed,” says Rhee. “Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It’s frustrating to know there’s a solution.”

Two interesting things to note about this: First, it does look like they think people will be brought to a state where there are no measurable signs of life. Second, it raises a very tough moral dilemma for the doctors with this knowledge. He is declaring these people dead, but suspects that he could suspend them with this technology. My guess is that it’s outside the purview of his IRB approval, but you might think – what’s the harm in doing this research on someone who you are about to declare dead?

In one experiment, a street canvasser attempted to solicit donations from passersby for a charity that aids impoverished children. Participants in one set were asked a leading question to prime a belief in moral realism: “Do you agree that some things are just morally right or wrong, good or bad, wherever you happen to be from in the world?” Those in a second set were asked a question to prime belief in moral antirealism: “Do you agree that our morals and values are shaped by our culture and upbringing, so there are no absolute right answers to any moral questions?” Participants in a control set were not asked any priming question.

In this experiment, participants primed with realism were twice as likely to be donors, compared to those primed with antirealism or not primed at all.

It’s interesting that the persons don’t need to believe moral realism is true, simply considering whether or not it is true yields the shift.  Here’s a link to the full journal article.

You can read the full announcement from the National Office here.

The deadline for nomination is May 31, 2014.

The traditional Lockean view about how someone comes to own physical property is roughly that by mixing your labor with a previously unowned resource gives you ownership rights over that thing. There are a number of puzzles and problems with how this works, but I think a lot people find it intuitive that some kind of special rights come into play when someone is the first person to mix their labor, even people (like me) who think there should be some restrictions on what the person is entitled to do with that resource.

It’s difficult to apply this reasoning to intellectual property, yet a number of philosophers have tried to do this. The problem is that intellectual property is not a physical object of the sort that the above Lockean reasoning most clearly applies to. What we typically think you have rights to when you write a novel, is not just the physical objects you mixed your labor with. Assuming that novels express abstract propositions, we think you have rights to the manner in which those abstract propositions are expressed. But how do you get ownership rights on abstract entities? You don’t mix your labor with abstract entities at all?

I’ve been trying to come up with an account that is Lockean in spirit, and I think there is a way to do this by thinking about intellectual property in terms of discovery rather than creation. 

However, we flesh out Locke’s mixing-labor theory it should account for how people can come to have rights over physical objects they discover that they have yet to mix their labor with. If a Bob is digging for gold and unearths some gold, but has not yet mixed his labor with the gold, intuitively he has some rights to that gold.

Where philosophy of art, metaphysics, and philosophy of language intersect there are interesting issues about the ontology of fiction and interesting questions about what works of fiction are. One popular view is that works of fiction are sets of abstract propositions. But you don’t create abstract sets of propositions. If you don’t create abstract sets of propositions, then it seems odd to say that artists and writer’s create works of fiction. They create things that semantically express fictions, but strictly speaking they don’t create the works of fiction themselves. A popular way to deal with this worry is to embrace the idea that author’s don’t create fiction, rather they discover them. Works of fiction are discovered via the creative process.

With this view about  fiction/artwork  we can say something plausible about how ownership rights might apply to abstract entities. Artists don’t mix their labor directly with the abstract entitites, but they do set out to discover them. They also invest time, effort, and resources in that discovery process, much like a prospector invests time, effort, and resources searching for gold. Once the prospector finds it, even if she hasn’t yet come into physical contact with it, she has some claim on it.

Here’s how it is a double-edged sword for the Hollywood and a potential win for American Artists.

If, as the MPAA insists, movies should be recognized as imports then so too should post-production work. That means visual effects work would be subject to the same subsidy-busting provisions which previously were primarily applied to physical goods like steel and lumber.

In other words, emboldened by the MPAA’s filing, the visual effects workers are now in a position to use the big studios’ own arguments to compel the government to slap trade tariffs on those studios’ own productions in high-subsidy countries. Those arguments will be especially powerful because the MPAA made them to the very same governmental agencies that will process the visual-effects workers’ case. Additionally, the workers can now take matters into their own hands.

I’m curious to see how this plays out.

My first impression is that this would be game changing, but they only let you “spritz” for a few sentences at 500 wpm. I’m curious how this would apply to more complicated texts. I doubt I could Spritz a philosophy article that quickly and have a clue as to what was going on.

It’s a pretty cool piece of technology, and I can imagine it being great for long, easy-to-comprehend things that you know you should read but don’t want to set aside the time for.

The Case of the Copyright Hoarder
Imagine someone developed a computer program to help them generate every possible combination of sentences of English. For each possible set, they set up a blog to post it to a website and then (of course) copyright it. The result is that anytime an author writes a short story, poem, novel, it will already be in their database of works that they have claimed copyright to. Do they have a moral claim to determine how all future written works of English are produced/distributed?

If you think moral claims to copyright are more stringent, when the content is generated by some cognitive effort, then change the case so that the person is near omniscient, can quickly think through all the possible combinations and have them uploaded to a database (or something like that).

I’m curious what your intuitions are about either case.