The Case Against Fairness: Why Favoritism, Not Fairness, Should be The Ethical Standard for The 21st Century

April 6, 2013 • Insight • by
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Imagine that a father said to you, “I would strangle everyone in this room if it somehow prolonged my son’s life.” You might be immediately repulsed and understandably doubt his capacity as a father. But bear with me. After a minute of reflection, you might think, “well, perhaps he’s just ignorant. Or perhaps very selfish. Maybe I could understand where he’s coming from, even if I think he’s wrong.” After some time to reconsider, the father only intensifies his earlier claim: “I realized that I meant it—I would choke them all.” Now imagine that that father is a philosopher who justifies that action using ideas from some of the greatest minds in the Western canon and got his argument published in a prestigious peer-reviewed university press.

In his recent book Against Fairness, Columbia College Chicago professor of philosophy Stephen T. Asma is just that philosopher-father and makes just this case for favoritism. He contends that all of the wishy-washy, kumbaya lessons we learned in kindergarten about the Golden Rule and only bringing treats if there’s enough for everyone are antithetical to the way human life was meant to be lived. According to Asma, we as a species have been making a category error for most of our existence by looking for the answers of how to live in abstract principles from ethical philosophy and religion when we should have been listening to our instincts for favoritism.

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“The Closing of the American Mind” Reconsidered After 25 Years

October 20, 2012 • Insight • by
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In 1987, philosopher Allan Bloom authored his presumptuously titled book, “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” After 25 years in press, this influential work deserves reconsideration.

Initially written as a reflection on Bloom’s own academic career in the University of Chicago’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought, the book was not expected to be a game changer. But, after being reviewed by several important critics, it was widely read in and outside of academia, selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months. On account of its popularity and highly influential message, one critic has called Closing “the first shot in the culture wars” that still rage on between liberal and conservative critics and academics.

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Dapper Disputes: What the %$#! Happened to Comics?

October 8, 2012 • Insight • by
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Dapper Disputes is a feature where editors at The Airspace debate the merits and purpose of relevant issues in culture, technology, and scholarship.

From May 18-20, 2012, all eyes were on Chicago, and not just watching NATO protestors. The conference Comics: Philosophy & Practice brought together seventeen of the world’s most famous cartoonists for three days of lectures and panel discussions on the future of the genre. The event, which took place at the University of Chicago’s new Logan Center for the Arts, was called “historic” by the Chicago Tribune and drew an international audience [1]. By hosting cross-disciplinary dialogue between figures like the “grandfather of comics,” Art Spiegelman, and up-and-coming underground comic artists, this conference was to comics what Woodstock ’69 was to rock. Editors Blake J. Graham and Jon Catlin watched the conference via webcast and share their thoughts on the conference below.

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Batman Decoded: Perspectives on The Dark Knight Rises

September 3, 2012 • Film & Television • by
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With The Dark Knight Rises, director Christopher Nolan completed the epic triptych he began with Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). An experienced filmmaker before these films clapped on more awards, Nolan explained his choice to take up the stagnated Batman series: “Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn’t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously” [1].

We too are strong Batman exclusivists and think Nolan’s films bring to life the hero’s mythic potential in important ways. In this article, Airspace editors analyze and critique Christopher Nolan’s latest film from the perspectives of social justice, psychology, and cinematography.

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Yuck! Disgust and the Case for Same-sex Marriage

August 27, 2012 • Insight • by
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A friend of ours recently told us a story that raised important questions about an everyday emotion: disgust. He was walking through Chicago’s Lincoln Park holding hands with his boyfriend when a boy around age eight passed the couple on his bike. “Eeewww!” the little boy burst out, making an unmistakable expression of disgust. The men were wearing ordinary clothing and, besides holding hands, seemed generally inoffensive. There were also several heterosexual couples holding hands in the park, but the boy did not react to them. Why, we wondered, did the boy exhibit such a strong emotional reaction to this harmless display? What cognitive processes inspired the boy to act this way, and are they unique to him or common to everyone?

In this article, Jon Catlin and Melissa McSweeney examine disgust from psychological and philosophical perspectives and ultimately call out its inaptness as a basis for important social and political decisions, particularly denying same-sex couples the right to marry.

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The Selfless Gene: Evolutionary Theory Reconsidered

July 4, 2012 • Science • by
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Harvard University myrmecologist—that’s right, he studies ants—Edward O. Wilson has created a deep schism in the field of evolutionary biology. His latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth [1], released this April, advances a theory of group selection, at odds with the field’s former consensus and, indeed, Wilson’s own fifty-year corpus of Pulitzer Prize-winning books and groundbreaking research. Opposing Wilson stands Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, famous (before his radical atheist days) for his theory of “inclusive fitness,” also known as kin selection, which he proposed in his landmark 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Now, the two are duking it out in an article war that started with Dawkins’s biting review of Wilson’s recent traitorous book.

After thirty years of relative unanimity, the field of sociobiology is split between its two fathers, and the resulting debate has profound implications for our understanding of human nature. From Dawkins’s perspective, human society is nothing more than an accumulation of selfish individuals. From Wilson’s, it’s a sea of ambivalent individuals perpetually torn between serving self and society. I daresay we hope the latter to be the case.

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The Examined Life and the Task of Public Philosophy

June 3, 2012 • Insight • by
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“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Apology 38a)

This phrase is over 2400 years old, dating back to 399 BC when Socrates first uttered the words at his infamous defense trial, and retold by his pupil Plato around 387 BC in the Platonic dialogue the Apology of Socrates. Beyond modeling the examined life himself, Socrates pressed ordinary Athenian citizens to question their notions of justice, virtue, piety, and love, and never held set definitions himself. Since Socrates, the aphorism of the “examined life” has given rise to analogous sayings such as “life of the mind,” vita contemplativa, and “learning for learning’s sake,” and is the subject of countless books. One could even consider the project of philosophy, which itself began with Socrates, one of calling this phrase into question.

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Against Cyber-utopians

April 10, 2012 • Insight • by
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In my last article, I presented the primary argument for Internet regulation that Cass Sunstein makes in his book Republic.com: In no public domain can absolute freedom of speech be rationally or constitutionally defended, nor, contrary to popular belief, has it ever been. With the ice broken, I want to explore the dangerous potential of the internet and the primary reasons why total Internet freedom is problematic: namely extremism and defamation.

Independent researcher Evgeny Morozov raises many of these questions in his work, noting the benefits and costs of a system of user-generated content. Wikipedia, for example, has generated more reliable information than could ever have been possible without user contributions. But by the same token, extremist bloggers and conspiracy theorists have generated almost as much misinformation. Morozov notes that the current shift to social search, user-generated content from social networks appearing in search results, will only allow further dissemination of misinformation.

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Correcting Cyberspace

March 13, 2012 • Insight • by
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Since its 1950s predecessors and the opening of the World Wide Web in 1984, the Internet has come a long way and truly revolutionized our world–likely in more ways than we can know. It has widened perspectives around the globe in ways totally unforeseen and unique from those of any other medium. In the words of Bill Gates, “The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” You’ve all heard this story and personally reaped some of the benefits of this amazing network (namely, of course, The Airspace).

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The Tree of Life: Genesis Retold

February 26, 2012 • Film & Television • by
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The Tree of Life (2011) is American director Terrence Malick’s fifth feature film in his 38-year career. After more than a decade of shooting and moving the film’s namesake 65,000 pound oak tree into the small town of Smithville, Texas, Malick has left us with a true masterpiece. The film debuted at the 2011 Cannes Film festival, where it won the prestigious Palme d’Or and is now nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography.

The Tree of Life is a story of truly epic proportions. Malick employs awe-inspiring imagery in a highly experimental, non-linear narrative to weave together the story of one human life and attempts at the grandest of metaphysical questions. Malick simultaneously takes us on two journeys—one humanist and cosmological, one temporal and infinite—all through the lens of the Christian paradigm.

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