bearing blog

Moral expenditures.

Megan McArdle is writing about her decision to eat only humanely raised meat, on ethical grounds.    The comments on her posts are interesting.  Here's a selection of the relevant posts in chronological order:  1 2 3 4 5   

But it's not specifically humanely raised meat that interests me.  What she's writing about can be generalized to elective moral decisions of all types:  decisions to modify one's behavior in order to avoid remote co-operation with evil and to promote the good as we perceive it.  (Note I'm talking about remote, not direct, cooperation with evil -- the kind of choices that depend on our perception of a proportionate response.) 

First, does our behavior have to be logically consistent?  That is, let's say moral calculus A has logical consequence B.   If we change our behavior because we accept moral calculus A, are we hypocritical because we don't go farther and change our behavior further to accommodate B as well?    (In Megan's discussion, this type of question shows up as "Should vegetarians wear leather?")Second, does our choice to modify behavior in some ways and not in others imply a hierarchy of morality -- we "really care" about the things that we change our behavior for, and "don't really care" about the others?  If a person won't eat foie gras but doesn't bother boycotting Nestle products, does that mean he cares more about geese welfare than about worldwide breastfeeding?  Or does it simply mean that he enjoys chocolate milk more than he likes pate?   

Megan writes

Is it true that there is some implied censure in the decision not to eat meat, or not to eat factory-farmed meat? Well, given that I have concluded that refraining from the purchase factory farmed meat is the ethical thing to for me to do, then it is indeed logically implied that I also think it is the ethical thing for you to do.

However, polite society thrives on people with ethical differences agreeing to live and let live. I leave room for the possibility of errors in my own judgment, for differences in situations and priorities, and for the fact that no human relationship can survive a strict accounting of every value difference. I think it would be nice if everyone thought hard about how much moral weight to give to the suffering of animals, and gave up meat for a month or so in order to find out how hard it would be to live without it. (Answer: not nearly as hard as you think. I eat meat perhaps a few times a month, and honestly don't much miss it--and I like to eat.)

On the other hand, I also think it would be nice if everyone tried hard, every minute, to be as nice as possible to those around them; volunteered with homeless children in their spare time; and supported a robust free market regime. I don't live up to all of these ideals, however, and living in society means understanding that others make differing value judgments. I presume you know better than I do whether you are really doing your best to do what is right. I'm not going to lecture you on your moral obligations. In return, I would very much appreciate it if people would refrain from attempts to argue me out of doing what I believe is right because they would enjoy their own value judgments better if they had more company.

I wonder if most humans' moral effort -- what they would expend in behavioral changes in order to avoid remote cooperation with evil, or to promote good -- is a limited resource.   (Again, I'm not talking about avoiding direct evildoing or about meeting positive obligations.  I'm talking about the sorts of things we don't have to do but that we can choose to do.) Maybe a little bit analogous to  the money we donate to various charities.   

Our family gives away a certain fraction of our income each year as charitable donations.  Each year the church gets some; a certain pro-life charity gets some; the Catholic high school that gave Mark a scholarship gets some; a scholarship fund at the public university that gave both of us scholarships gets some; and other charities that catch our attention that year get the rest.  This year, for example, our local inner-city YMCA branch, where we have a family membership, had a capital campaign to update their facilities, which are woefully substandard.  This year we sent the largest proportion of our donations there.

If you asked me to name the number one most important evil to fight today, though, I wouldn't name substandard facilities at nonprofit community gymnasiums now, would I?  No, I'd say abortion -- what else could I say? So isn't it a bit hypocritical of us to give even one dime to the Y, or to the scholarship funds, when we could instead give more to fight the culture of death in its most horrible form?  We have limited resources but we can decide where to put them -- why aren't we sending all of them where they are needed most?

Maybe it is just hypocrisy.   

And yet we feel a certain specific obligation to the Y, to the schools, because we ourselves have received direct benefit from them.   This Y, not any other, is the Y in our neighborhood; and this year, not any other, is the year they're asking for extra money.  My children take swimming lessons there.  My neighbors' children receive child care and hot lunches there.   The neighborhood teenagers can use it as a safe after-school hangout.  As for the schools we mention, they provided scholarships to me and to my husband personally.   The personal connection gives us a certain personal obligation.  Subsidiarity in action:  going out from me are concentric circles of people and connections, and I have the most responsibility toward the individuals (and organizations) who fall within the nearer circles.   

At least that's one theory.  Hypocrisy is still a big possibility.   Anyway, what I'm getting at is that money is limited; and maybe moral effort is too; and so maybe we expend effort on causes that we feel we are  personally moved by, even personally called to work for, rather than on causes that we view intellectually as most important.   Still, there's a certain disconnect there, and I can't deny that it is troubling.

The answers here aren't clear, but then, nobody said either morality or economics was easy to map; and so why should the intersection be?

ADDED.  I'm not really happy about the structure of this blog post and would like to rewrite it, especially to give a little more emphasis to the unwiseness of judging each other's priorities based on what we do and don't boycott, on what we do and don't give to charity.    But I don't really have time to rewrite, and so it's going to have to stand for now.  

Composed salads.

Last night I was putting together salads for dinner, and I reflected on how dinners at my house have gotten more streamlined and simple as the years have gone by and the children have arrived and we have embarked on the homeschooling journey.   I still enjoy cooking complicated dishes from new recipes, but all that has gotten shifted onto the weekends.  I am striving now to make delicious and interesting foods that are straightforward to produce and trivial to reproduce:  the stew that simmers all day, the quickly and perfectly steamed vegetable, the rapidly sauteed and simply-sauced cutlet, the stir-fry with only a few well-balanced ingredients.   Last night, for example, we had meatballs (made and frozen last week out of extra meatloaf mixture) simmered in plain tomato sauce in the slow cooker, spaghetti, broccoli (blanched in the pasta water then sauteed quickly with olive oil and garlic)... and then there was that salad.

The salad is the one exception to my "simplify simplify" trend.  As my meals have gotten less and less time and attention paid to them, the side salads have received more and more individual attention.  It's attention I enjoy lavishing on them.   I'm not sure why.

Back when I made more complicated dinners, side dish salads (if I made them) were generally a big pile of one kind of lettuce  tossed in a bowl with vinegar and oil, or sometimes a lemon-and-onion dressing I make shaken up in a jar.  Main dish salads were another matter -- more complicated -- but I still served them all mixed up in a large salad bowl to be dished out at the table. 

But nowadays, my large, beautifully seasoned wood salad bowl gathers dust on the top of the cabinets. I begin by washing up two or three kinds of greens, cutting up carrots, celery, always a cucumber, maybe some purple cabbage, whatever bits and ends of vegetables there are.  Sometimes I grate cheese or cook bacon for crumbles, or find dried fruit or nuts.  I get five bowls:  big ones for Mark and me, a smaller bowl for the seven-year-old, a ramekin for the four-year-old, a plastic bowl for the baby.  And then I make a salad for each one of us.

Big handfuls of greens for the adults.  A medium handful for Oscar, but torn into smaller pieces.  Just a few for the littler kids.  Each of us gets a couple slices of cucumber, except Milo, who gets nearly half of one because it's one vegetable he loves.  He also gets a few baby carrots.  Onions for Oscar and Mark.  Carrots cut into little matchsticks for the baby.  Extra nuts and bacon for Mark, and definitely hold the olives.  Extra blue cheese for me.  I get vinegar and olive oil on my salad.  Everyone else really  wants bottled dressings, so those go on the table.  And there are the salads, composed for each family member, just exactly what each person would want.

Now there are never second servings of salad when I do it this way, but no one seems to mind.  We're more likely, too, to eat the salad as a first course and then move on to the rest of the dinner.  The pace is a little slower too.   It's not surprising, either, that my family eats more salad when they each get one that's got just what they want in theirs.  But the odd thing is, I really enjoy doing this.   It seems as if it ought to feel too crazy to spend the last five minutes of food prep putting a bit of this in his bowl and a bit of that in her bowl, but it really doesn't.  It feels like a little ritual to make these individual salads.  One of those places where it pays off, I guess, to create a tiny loveliness in a tiny part of the day.   

Dialogue.

HANNAH:  I just heard Oscar telling a story about John the Baptist and exploding locusts.  Do you have any idea what that's about?

ME:  Uhhhhhhm.  Let me go check.

(I enter the dining room where her three children and my three children are having tuna sandwiches.  Ben, 8, and Oscar, 7, are giggling.  Between giggles Oscar is declaiming.)

OSCAR:  ...so you see that if you read the Bible you will learn how to be a very good soldier...

ME:  Oscar?  What is that all about?

OSCAR (with a big cheesy grin, squinting):  Noooooothiiiiiiiiiiing.

BEN (stifling giggles):  We are talking about something else.

ME:  Uh, what was that about John the Baptist and, uh, locusts and soldiers?

(Ben and Oscar confer for a minute in whispers)

BEN:  He was talking about John the Bombtist.

Letting someone else do my blogging for me.

This morning I was grumbling about needing to put a blog post up and not wanting to compose one.  Actually I have a topic in mind but it's a bit long and complicated and I want to think about it some more, but nothing else sprang to mind.  So I was glad to find an email from a friend/reader giving me some suggestions of interesting things to read and blog about.

One is this:  Face of Pro-Life Movement, a collection of photographs from San Francisco -- I assume from the annual March for Life.   

As I look at the photos I can't help but think about how much media coverage of the presidential campaign has assumed that white women, in general, are lining up uniformly to vote for Hillary Clinton while black women, according to a recent  puke-inducing CNN story, are supposedly conflicted not about any issues (life or otherwise) about whether to vote "their race or their sex," i.e., for Obama or for Clinton. 

Apparently no women are likely to be voting in the Republican primaries, or at least that's the conventional story.  (In an effort to find some stories I searched for "conservative women" in the Google box on CNN.com, and the only sites that came up that used the phrase are dating services.) 

Diet and fertility.

An article in Newsweek, re: a new book.  Actually touches on a concept that I hardly ever see in any mainstream press:  Certain dietary restrictions that are good for some conditions (e.g. heart disease) are not good for other conditions (e.g. ovulatory infertility). 

What's that?  You mean there isn't a perfect diet that everybody ought to be eating?  BBBBBBBut.... the food pyramid!  It's so... monumental!  Sigh.

If you know me, you know I believe in butterfat for women of childbearing age (and women at risk of osteoporosis... and children...).  How nice to see it getting some attention:

The more low-fat dairy products in a woman's diet, the more likely she was to have had trouble getting pregnant. The more full-fat dairy products in a woman's diet, the less likely she was to have had problems getting pregnant.

I thought I detected a little sleight-of-hand re: saturated fat, as in "hey, the data seems to indicate that saturated fat is good for fertility too... but we can't have you eating more of that stuff, now, can we?  so we'll just pretend it's about fat and not saturated fat, and emphasize that you should eat enough healthy unsaturated fat..."  It was a bit hard to tell, though.

Poopblogging.

(Also known as the seedy underbelly of mommyblogging.  Read a mommyblog, and sooner or later, you have to read about poop.  And I'm practically certain I've used that post title before.)

I am most definitely not dogmatic about morally perfect infant poop management.  Do I sound like the sort of person who would insist on going diaper-free, or using elimination communication (EC), or practicing natural infant hygiene (take your pick which trendy term to use; it means "hold your baby over a potty and make a sssss noise").   OK, we do this some, but the truth is that we use whatever works at the moment.  Cloth diapers?  Yes, lots.  Disposables?  Frequently, especially when traveling or when somebody's sick.  Peeing-on-cue?  Yes, some of that too. At least with the latter two kids.  Therein lies the point of this post.

Three kids are still anecdotes, not data.  Nevertheless here are my anecdotes, and I couldn't get the nice little table to work, so you get two ordered lists instead.

Elimination communication:

1. Never did any at all, just cloth diapers. 
2. Made half-hearted attempt to teach peeing on cue, got lazy and quit about age 9 months, kept the potties around though, mostly used cloth diapers
3. Made half-hearted attempt to teach peeing on cue, got lazy and quit about age 6 months, kept the potties around though, used about 75% cloth and 25% paper diapers

Age kids became interested in using the toilet:

1. Nearly 3 years old
2. 18 months old (and was completely toilet independent by age 2)
3. 17 months old (i.e., now.  Wish me luck, we're going with it)

What I'm thinking is that a half-hearted attempt at teaching kids to pee on cue might pay off later on.    Because we only sort-of practiced it, "elimination communication"  saved us 10% of diapers, at most, while we were actively choosing it while those babies were young.  Ten percent is not much of an improvement on landfill space or water-heating energy.  But... if it's the early practice in peeing-on-cue that made the difference between toilet training beginning to succeed at 18 months old, and toilet training beginning to succeed at 34 months old... well, that's a lot of diapers.  That does make a difference. 

I wish I could say that it was all part of my plan, the half-hearted EC'ing, as the Slacker Mom's Method of Toilet Training, but I'm afraid that I stumbled across it while I was, you know, looking for the easy way to do stuff.

Of course, it's also possible that the presence of older siblings had something to do with it.   Or maybe I'm just getting better at this as I go along.  (Yeah, that must be it.)

What amused me yesterday.

Simcha cracked me up yesterday with her number six answer to this book meme:

6. One book that you wish had been written: Addendum to the NFP Manual: Vatican Okays You-know-what.

I got the joke the way she intended it, but apparently not everyone else did, necessitating a post entitled "About #6."    Also worth reading...

Me, I'm much better at the ZER than at the ZET.

C.J. at Light and Momentary gives a name to one of my favorite discipline techniques.

Some national coverage.

Popular Mechanics covers the I-35W bridge collapse and findings, briefly.

You know, PM is a pretty good magazine.  After my seven-year-old started reading last year, I started looking for magazines to subscribe to, you know, stuff with text and interesting pictures that could be lying around waiting to be picked up and looked at.  I thought PM might fit the bill:  interesting for the adults in the house, not too high a reading level, and possibly having material that would be good for a mechanically-inclined kid to flip through.

Then I bought a paper copy and saw the ads in the back.

Um.  NO.   They are not, how you say, family friendly.  (Much like the Skiing Magazine that I can't seem to convince Mark to cancel, only because we got it when the other, good skiing magazine went out of business and transferred our account, prepaid for like the next ten years)

I've had some other suggestions (Smithsonian; National Geographic) but have dropped the project in the meantime...

What the dental hygienist told me while I was in the chair.

This is really the first time you've ever had novocaine?  No cavities at all at age 33?  You're doing pretty good.

I actually work on a lot of people that it's the first time they ever had novocaine.  Sometimes the first time they ever had dental work too.  A lot of recent immigrants.  People who don't speak much English.  Makes it hard to communicate sometimes.  I remember this one guy, he brought in his elderly father.  After his shot, while we were working on him... well, I never saw anyone in the dentist's chair with such a big smile!  The whole time we were working he had this big grin.  The son was interpreting for him.  They were from Ethiopia originally, I remember that.  The son told me that his father thought it was magic that it didn't hurt.  Can you imagine that?  Magic.

But we don't let family members be interpreters anymore.  We used to, but I brought it up in a staff meeting once and said it made me uncomfortable.  And so now we use non-related interpreters.  Ever since that staff meeting.  It was after just about the worst day I ever had.

This man and his wife came in.  The wife didn't speak English at all, and the husband was interpreting for her.  Well, the cleaning was causing her a lot of pain, and I mean a lot.  I could barely work on her, she kept jumping out of her skin, like you were before your shot, but much worse.  Tears were just running down her face.  And I suggested that we give her some anesthetic, you know, a shot.  And the husband said, "I'll talk to her."  And he spoke to her.  Really sternly.  And then he said to me, "She does not want the painkiller.  Go ahead."

Well, I went on with the cleaning, but she was still flinching and jerking a lot.  It was really hurting her.  So I stopped and I told him that I really thought she would be more comfortable if I could give her a block.  And he spoke to her again, really harshly again, and then he told me "She will be fine.  She says she does not need a pain killer."

And I started to feel really bad about it.  I couldn't ask her what she wanted.  I only had his word for it.  But she was crying so badly.  I felt like I was abusing her.  And I couldn't really do my work with her jumping and flinching and crying in pain.  I have refused to work on people who refused to take a painkiller, because you just can't if they're jumping every time you touch them.  So I told him that I would not be able to work on her anymore unless she received anesthetic.

He said, "Give me a moment."  And he spoke to her for a long time.  Very harshly.  And when it was all over he said to me, "She will be still now."  And... she was.  I finished the cleaning, and she didn't.  Move. A. Muscle.  Not one more peep out of her the whole time.  I was so glad when it was over.

And I just felt sicker and sicker about it all day.  I should have refused to treat.  I should have refused to treat her without her getting some anesthetic.  But, you know.  I could have gotten in trouble for that too, maybe.  And at the end of the day I brought it up at the staff meeting, and I said I didn't want family members to serve as sole interpreters anymore.  And so, now they don't.