Election season

I try not to become too involved in politics. I have never been that interested in it, and it seems like it would take a lot of time to really keep up with it well enough to have any justifiable opinions. I'm not apathetic - I have (relatively strong) opinions on lots of issues, and I have my favorite candidates, etc. But, I am not involved enough to have any sort of meaningful conversation about most of the stuff that's going on. That being said, here are a few things that I have been paying just a little bit of attention to.

1. How many people in California have signs/T-shirts/stickers supporting Obama. I have a couple of comments. (i) I am not used to such overwhelming support for one candidate. This is not because Obama has more support than any candidate for any election I've been around for, but because I've been living in West Virginia, and not in California. Where I grew up, and where I went to school, there was a pretty even mix of signs/T-shirts/stickers for each presidential candidate. Some people may think that would be nice - to have a more heterogeneous mixture. But, it's not. You just get annoyed at the people supporting the candidate you're against. It's nicer to have everyone supporting your guy. (ii) I have a little laugh to myself at all the people in California that have signs/T-shirts/stickers supporting Obama. In this state, there doesn't seem to be a need to convince anyone to vote for a democrat in the presidential election. If it gets to the point that people need to bring in votes for Obama in California, he lost the election. (iii) I don't think there's anything wrong with this, but Obama signs/T-shirts/stickers seem to have become more of an accessory than an endorsement.

2. Proposition 8 seems to have a very good chance of passing. For those of you outside of California, proposition 8 would ban gay marriage. Here are the two arguments in favor of Prop. 8 that I've seen (on the "Yes on Proposition 8" website): (i) In 2000, 61% of voters in CA voted against gay marriage. Then, this year (maybe last year?) 4 'activist judges based in San Francisco' overturned that ruling, thus lifting the ban on gay marriage. (ii) CA public schools are required to teach children about marriage. So, if gay marriage is legal, then schools will have to teach children about gay marriage, and that it's just the same as straight marriage.

In response to (i), I have the intuition that that is not even the sort of thing that should go to vote. Imagine if it was put to vote whether or not to allow straight marriage. Now, of course, it would probably turn out that the overwhelming majority voted for straight marriage, but it would seem strange that it went to vote to begin with. Another example: imagine if it was put to vote whether or not homosexuals could vote. That seems like a horrible thing to put to vote. Voting is a right that everyone should have, regardless of whether or not most people want everyone to have it. It seems like the right to marry who you choose may be another one of these rights.

In response to (ii), I don't even know what to say. Gay marriage is just the same as straight marriage, essentially, because gay marriage is marriage. I don't think that children would be adversely affected if, instead of learning "Marriage is when a man and a woman decide to....(I don't even know what to fill in here)", they learned "Marriage is when two people decide to...".

Another problem people point to is that the pro-gay marriage people want to "redefine 'marriage'". I guess that's supposed to be an argument. To get to the conclusion that gay marriage is bad, we need a premise saying that redefining words, or even concepts, is bad. But, that's far from obvious.

The only (quasi-)defensible reasons I can see for being against gay marriage are religious reasons. These are defensible only because it is very hard to argue against them. More accurately, it is very hard to argue against religious reasons for thinking that gay marriage is bad. It is probably easier to argue against religious reasons for thinking that we should ban gay marriage. More accurately, it is probably easier to give good arguments against religious reasons for thinking that we should ban gay marriage. This, of course, does not mean that it will be easier to convince anyone who has religious reasons for wanting to ban gay marriage that we should not ban gay marriage.

3. I hate those stupid beach cruiser bikes everyone rides around on at USC.

Update

When I started grad school, I figured one of two things would happen: (1) I would post a lot more to this blog, or (2) I would basically stop posting altogether. It looks like (2); my first-year seminar has seen to that. We are getting some incredible training, which involves mulling over complicated issues in some classics (and some recent stuff discussing the classics) in analytic philosophy and answering questions, about half exegetical and half evaluative, about them, every week. So far, we've covered Frege's theory of indirect sense, Russell's theory of descriptions, Russell's 'Grey's Elegy' argument, Tarski's theory of truth, and now we're on Quine's "Truth By Convention". I've already written more for this class than I did for any class I had as an undergraduate.

If anyone who reads this blog is applying to graduate school in philosophy this fall, and has an interest in (i) language, (ii) metaethics, (iii) free will/moral responsibility, or (iv) early modern, I strongly encourage applying to USC. (This is not to mention metaphysics and epistemology - the first 4 are just the areas in which USC is pretty clearly among the elite programs in the country.) The professors here are super-available. Soames, for instance, is on campus all day, every day, and seems to teach something every semester (not to mention some undergrad courses). There are always several graduate students in the lounge, and they are always willing to talk about philosophy.