Dinner Table Digest № 71

The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!

May 01, 2024

Sections: The Language of Medical Aid in Dying / Is monogamy on its way out? / Is Polyamory just Monogamy Plus?/ Navigating Chronic Illness.

May 1st in Known as Walpurgis Day across much of Europe. here in German Folk metal band Faun with their song Walpugisnacht, which celebrates the medieval practice of using bonfires o ward off evil from the community.

Words Matter: From Assisted Suicide to Medical Aid in Dying

The below was written as a part of my stroke recovery threrapy. My Speech, Language and Cognitive therapist and I read the article together, and thern I wrote the summary below, in an effort to improve my reading comprehension, along with reinforcing and sharpening my writing and editing skills. which were somewhat dullened due to the brain damage suffered as a result of my brain bleed/stroke. So if you see any errors in my writing I do hope that you will forgive me and cut me some slack as I work to recover full cognitive functionality after my brain injury.

In this New York Time article, Rachel Gross looks at how 'Assisted suicide' lost the word 'suicide' and came known instead as ’Medical Aid in Dying’. After sharing the story of an AIDS victim who was adamant that the medical support they wanted was to help end their life did not amount to suicide, Gross quotes Dr. Matthew Wyna, who claims that there is a significant, and meaningful difference between someone who is suicidal due to mental health issues, and a terminal patient who is seeking support to hasten their death.

. . "The term “medical aid in dying,” some activists claim, is meant to emphasize that someone with a terminal diagnosis is not choosing whether to die but rather how to die. That is, that they are motivated to pursue a particular kind of end of life experience, not that they are motivated to end their life prematurely. That is, as far as I can tell, the distinction between the two is found in whether the patient is choosing death itself, or whether they are merely looking to hasten the inevitable.

The problem with this distinction, of course, is that since death is a certainty for everyone, it looks an awful lot like everyone who pursues support in bringing about their death is merely hastening the inevitable. And thus, the proposed distinction fades into a distinction without a meaningful difference. When the Death With Dignity Act passed in Oregon in 1993, Gross suggests that the language around assisted death began to change, in particular the tendency to describe assisted death in medical terms, rather than explicitly moral ones, with proponents arguing for what they perceived as the more neutral language of Medical Aid in Dying. By disconnecting the concept of physician assisted death..from the concept of suicide, proponents felt they could highlight the reality that someone who avails themselves of MAID is not choosing to die, but is instead making a choice about how …they wish to die. Once again, though, this change in language doesn’t do as much heavy lifting as proponents might suggest, if only because the difference between choosing when to die and choosing how to die is not as clear cut as one might imagine it to be. Why should someone who has a terminal illness be allowed to choose the how and when of their death, when, as a society, we actively discourage folks from taking their own lives,an action that we invest millions of health dollars to prevent, that we call suicide, which is, it seems to me, precisely the accusation that proponents of MAID are looking to evade. In other words, if the distinction between choosing when to die and how to die is maintained in an effort to prop up MAID policy, then it appears that we should make MAID available to anyone, at any time in their life, and we should avoid stigmatizing suicide.

Wht do you think? Should Aid in Dying be available to anyone? Does the shift in language from Assisted Suicide to Medical Aid in Dying have moral implications or are they just different words to say the same thing?

Is Monogamy Over? Inside Love’s Sharing Economy - Michelle Ruiz - Vogue

In Dinner Table Digest № 69 I introduced non-monogamy1 as a legitimate relationship approach, one whose success is highly dependent on the active participation of all members in the relevant relationships. I’m very aware that this concept is not only jarring to many folks, but may also strike some as having moral implications. It’s not as simple as nodding your head when someone tells you that they know that they are able to love and maintain relationships with more than one person at a time. Where the piece I shared in № 69 was more practical in nature, this Vogue feature from 2022 takes a more story-based approach, taking readers through the lives of several folks who went through the process of ‘opening up’ their relationship.

Both children of divorce, Megan and Marty committed to monogamy, vowing—especially after their children were born—that their marriage would last forever.
However ironically, it was that pledge that began cracking the long-closed door of their union. By 2018, Marty started to notice, as he told Megan, “your heart is off.” Determined to reawaken his wife’s deadened spirit, Marty suggested splashes of novelty. They went on dinner dates in which they pretended, for hours, not to know each other: “I got to see him in that ‘new person’ light,” Megan says. The couple had always shared their crushes with each other—“we realized, just because we were married, it didn’t mean that we didn’t find anyone else attractive,” Megan says—but they started fantasizing about inviting anonymous people, or even people they knew, into their bed for shared sexual experiences, a practice long known as “swinging.” “Part of what’s sexy about it is how open you feel,” Megan says of their conversations. Things escalated when Marty found a private party organized through a local swingers group: The Bhatias’ behavior there was “vanilla,” Megan says, with Marty seeking her permission to kiss another woman. Megan nodded him on, and soon after, was kissing the woman herself.
Swinging offered a jolt of newness, but the Bhatias craved something more than hookups. Megan divulged to Marty her simmering attraction to a new, single friend, Kyle Henry, a man-bunned, contemplative complement to Marty’s magnanimous presence. The couple had recently met Henry at a mutual friend’s party in Chicago and talked to him for hours, with Megan walking beside him under the twinkly lights of a holiday festival at Lincoln Park Zoo. “One person can’t be everything for someone else. It was clear that my all was not good enough,” Marty would later explain on Megan’s podcast, Amory. “There was something missing, and I couldn’t provide it.”

It’s important to remember that every person’s experience with non-monogamy is unique. One of the most freeing aspects to the non-monogamous approach to relationships is that there are as many possible ways to do non-monogamy as there are people who are non-monogamous. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t intense challenges that come with living this way. In particular, it is a big mistake to think that non-monogamy just means having the freedom to have lots of sex with whoever you want:

… cake is another symbol linked to CNM: a nod to having it and eating it too. And yet CNM is not without complications. The English designer Tina’s first CNM relationship fell apart due to a lack of communication: “We didn’t check in with each other. We just thought, Well, if something is not working, we could go get it elsewhere.” (Tina only half jokes that CNM is “99 percent talking and 1 percent sex.”) Opening relationships that are already flailing rarely saves them—“like having a kid to fix a relationship, it’s not going to work,” said Moors—and social stigma persists. Members of the CNM community worry that they could be ostracized by family, attacked as parents, or lose their jobs, as polyamorous people are not legally protected from discrimination.

If there are any questions about non-monogamy that you wish to ask, or would like access to further resources, but would like to maintain your privacy, feel free to simply reply to reply to the email (if you have received this in your inbox) or to email me at peter (at) peterthurley (dot) ca.

Is Polyamory simply ‘Monogamy Plus’? - Luke Brunning

Continuing the discussion on the ethics of non-monogamy, I wanted to highlight this paper from Luke Brunnning, published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy in 2018 the fulltext of the paper can be accessed here in .pdf format.

The below was written as a part of my stroke recovery threrapy. My Speech, Language and Cognitive therapist and I read the paper together, and tern i wrote the summary below, in an effort to improve my reading comprehension, along with reinforcing and sharpening my writing and editing skills. which were somewhat dullened due to the brain damage suffered as a result of my brain bleed/stroke. So if you see any errors in my writing I do hope that you will forgive me and cut me some slack as I work to recover full cognitive functionality after my brain injury.

n this paper, Luke Brunning wants to make an argument about why polyamory ought to be considered a unique and reasonable relationship style. He begins with an overview of the dominant cultural relationship norm of monogamy, before considering some of the ways monogamy and polyamory have been positively and negatively compared to each other. Brunning ultimately wants to argue that comparing monogamy and polyamory distorts and conceals the unique nature of polyamorous relationships.
In introducing polyamory as a relationship style, Brunning notes that some theorists have suggested that the basic axiom of polyamory is honesty. Polyamorous relationships are characterized by complete and transparent honesty about feleings, desires, and expectations. The honesty allows participants to shape their relationship boundaries with some partnerships taking on a hierarchical form while others eschew explicit hierarchy.

Brunning also notes that polyamory has broad political appeal, both in the way it priveleiges the fulfillment of individul desires à la liberalism and in the way it brings together a communitarian vision of wider intimate groups without limiting intimacy to the traditional dyad. Brunning is quick to note that polyamory isn’t simply monogamy +. It is a qualitatively different way of organizing relationships. He notes that polyamorous people place value on the process of exploring human intimacy rather than on any particular outcome of that exploration. He says that polyamory suits people whose attractions disrupt the binary of the intimate and non-intimate.
Another important distinctive of polyamory that sets it apart from other non-monogamous dynamics, like swinging, is the emphasis on engaging in the emotional life of the participants. This emotional work involves the management of other’s emotions. According to Chesire Calhoun, this emotional work is a familiar moral activity that escapes moral recollection and reflection and is a from of moral mediation that aids people to manage their agency by helping others to interpret their mental life. Brunning notes that polyamory generates a range of emotions, some of which are difficult to process. He adds that this emotional work has several constitutive features, key among them is the ability to clearly and non-confrontationally communicate with partners using assertive language. According to Brunning, this strategy of non-confrontationl assertiveness allows participants to fully feel their feelings, instead of avoiding them or otherwise deprioritizing them.

Another constituitive feature of the emotional work is the ability to contain one's own difficult emotions. This is important bcause it allows an individual to analyze their emotions without recriminations. One example that Brunning suggests is the ability to manage so-called New Relationship Energy, (NRE) where one's ability to analyze that NRE allows the inividual to support their partners emotional understandings of the situation, establishing themselves as a cooperative, mediating prescence. Finally, moreso than monogamous relationships, polyamory requires that partners make time to check in with each of their partners, as a part of their regular communicative practices, if only to ensure that other features of the emotional work receive the time and wok they need.

Further advancing his argument of the distinctivness of polyamory vis a vis, monogamy, Brunning notes tht polyamory exposes individuals to emotional work that they may not have otherwise even needed to think about, such as how one relates to one's partners partners. Unlike the exposure of infidelity in monogamous relationships, the relational emotions are often poitive in nature, even if they are unfamiliar.

Ultimately, this heavy emotional work helps to maintain the comitment to honesty and integrity. Quoting Anapol, Brunning notes that polyamory, as it was originally conceived cannot exist in the prescence of deception or cocercion, no matter how many sexual partners there may be. The emotional work of polyamory, and in particular,an individual's ability to emotionally engage their partner and their partner's partners is significantly different than the kind of emotional work done in monogamous reltionships, in that it supports the commitment to openness and honesty with one's partners about how one's own feelings, thoughts and desires relate to the relevant others. The positive feelings that one might have towards ones partner's partners is typically called 'compersion' but Brunning notes that it is understudied and little understood.

Brunning then turns to reviewing the objections to polyamory, before concluding that the distinctiveness of polyamorous relationships is found in the complexity of managing emotions across multiple relationships, including relationships with the third parties of one's partner's partners. Brunning is clear that he does not conceive of polyamory as somehow more ethical or moral than monogamy, it's just different in what is prioritized across relationships.

What do you think? Is polyamory just monogamy plus? Why o Why No? Do you think polyamorous relationships are distintive in nature? What do you mke of Luke zBrunning’s Argument?

How to Navigate a Chronic Illness - Rachel Katz - Vox

I’ve been living with a chronic disability for more than 8 years now and now that i'm living with the effects of a stroke I expect I’ll likely remain disabled for some time to vom. There's no cure for chronic illness. it just is. While the specific difficulties are very different now than they were when I was first released from the hospital in 2015 after my first near death episoode, when a large tumour took over my abdomen causing my bowels to burst, necessitating life saving surgery to remove the tumour and stitch my insides back together, I've been livng in a state of ‘less-than’ has been exhausting since day one. I’ve written before about how I have updated the classic Spoons Theory to better describe my situation, preferring instead to talk about how much battery I have on my proverbial smartphone, but there is ultimately no analogy that can accurately describe what life is like for someone with chronic illness. This Vox article provides some practical advice for folks who may be new to a life of chronic illness, whether as the disabled person or as a partner or caretaker. I wanted to highlight this section about the importance of creativity and community:

Vercillo has since interviewed hundreds of chronically ill women about using crochet and knitting as part of their healing process, and has found that, for many people, these creative acts offer a sense of purpose. “We all need purpose. Making things and gifting things to people gives us that. Even when I am at my lowest, I can find this way to contribute, and that helped pull me out, helped rebuild some self-esteem, helped distract me.”
For people with chronic illnesses, finding new ideas like this often comes from connecting with others who are having similar illness experiences. Vercillo has found this through a vibrant crochet community.

bullshit activities Kenny Easwarren

I'm looking forward to reading the full pAper!here's the write up from New Work in Philosophy

The idea for this paper came from my period of online teaching in the Spring of 2021 - after re-organizing the readings in a philosophy of language class I had taught several times, I happened to juxtapose Austin's "Performative Utterances" and Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" in consecutive weeks. I noticed a superficial similarity between the way the two of them characterized their topics. Austin notes that while philosophers of language have often taken truth and falsity to be central, a lot of utterances function to do something in a way that doesn't depend on truth or falsity, and he calls them "performatives" - "Hello" greets someone, "Watch out!" warns someone, "I do" results in getting married, but truth or falsity is at best secondary to what is going on. Frankfurt notes that what we ordinarily refer to as "bullshit" often takes the form of someone making a bunch of utterances without being particularly concerned about whether they are true or false - a local dignitary speaking at a Fourth of July event might go on and on about the "divine inspiration" of the "great founders of the country", without actually thinking about whether or not what he is saying is true, just because he wants people to see him as the kind of patriotic person who would say that kind of thing. A superficial glance at this similar characterization might make someone think that Austin's performative utterances would always count as bullshit in Frankfurt's sense. A slightly more sophisticated look might make someone think that Austin's performative utterances could never count as bullshit in Frankfurt's sense. But it seemed clear to me that, while performative utterances typically aren't bullshit, they sometimes are. A friend shouting "Watch out!" unexpectedly in order to laugh at your unnecessary cowering seems like they're bullshitting you, even though there was no content in the utterance of the sort that could have been true or false even in the normal case. The idea I pursue in this paper is that Frankfurt's focus on truth and falsity is just an instance of the same phenomenon Austin was reacting to in his own work a few decades earlier. Philosophy traditionally takes place in the form of sequences of declarative statements, each of which is aimed at the truth, and philosophers mistook this for a general feature of all language. While Austin helped many philosophers pay more attention to all the many linguistic phenomena that aim at goals other than truth, Frankfurt was still just looking at declarative statements. A more general characterization of bullshit, that takes forms other than declarative statements, should plug in these other goals (and their opposites) in the place where Frankfurt puts truth (and falsity). Much of the paper takes the form of some rough attempts to characterize the goals that play the role of truth for speech acts other than statements, and then to give examples of utterances of these forms that would count as bullshit. Whether or not you agree with my analysis, I hope you find many of the examples fun - they were certainly fun to come up with! (In any case, I aim to have provided a lot more relatively concrete examples of bullshit utterances than Frankfurt provides in his paper, which really doesn't have any other concrete example than the Fourth of July orator mentioned above.) Along the way, I address the fact that it's easy to hear "How are you doing?" as a bullshit question (you don't actually want to know if I'm not doing well!), but I suggest that it's better to think of it as an honest greeting - the grammatical form is misleading, but suggests some era when it might actually have been a bullshit question. In the last section of the paper I note that nothing about my account requires bullshit to take place in speech acts - any sort of act that has some characteristic goal (like truth for a statement, establishing conversational availability for a greeting, or coming to know for a question) could be classified as bullshit if it is done for some other purpose, particularly in order to put on certain appearances as of having that characteristic goal. I argue that TSA security screenings really are bullshit in something quite close to Frankfurt's sense, even though speech is a relatively small part of it. I then end with some discussion of David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs - I show that there is some significant overlap between his analysis and mine, though they are not precisely coextensive. Like Frankfurt and Graeber, I don't claim to be giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of the ordinary language word "bullshit" - instead I aim to be doing something more in the spirit of William James or Rudolf Carnap, identifying a theoretically interesting concept that is somewhere in this vicinity, but allowing that there might be many others nearby. I think of my analysis as a refinement of Frankfurt's, while I think Graeber is aiming at something slightly different, as are Gerry Cohen, Michael Wreen, and others that have criticized Frankfurt's account in the past. For most of the time that I was writing this paper, I thought of it as a foray into topics far from my other philosophical interests (mainly in probability and decision theory, and recently some thinking about collective agency). But as I was reflecting on some alignments and contrasts with Graeber, I realized some important connection to other things I've been thinking about, which leads to what I expect to be the most controversial idea I express in the paper. While we usually think bullshit is bad, I claim that bullshit is often an important part of making the world a better place. One category of bullshit job that Graeber identifies is what he calls the "box-ticker" - someone tells the company they have to have a diversity officer, so the company hires someone with the title "diversity officer", even though they don't care about the work that person is supposed to do. I noticed that this is a common motivation for bullshit of all forms - my canonical example of bullshit warnings are the warning signs California's Proposition 65 mandates, where a business owner who isn't worried about car exhaust or trace amounts of bisphenol A still has to post a sign warning customers about their presence. I noted that since the 2018 modification of this proposition, the signs are now required to say specifically which chemical from the list is present, and how customers might be exposed, so there might actually be some customers who are noticeably helped by a warning that was just bullshit from the point of view of the person posting it. Similarly, the bullshit TSA security protocol might sometimes achieve something worthwhile, and I argue that Jennifer Lackey's classic "creationist schoolteacher" example can be tweaked into a case where bullshit does some good. We have negative associations with bullshit because, in ideal cases, people do something valuable because they are motivated by the right reasons, and bullshit involves people being motivated for the wrong reasons. But I claim that, while it would be ideal if we were all motivated by the real effects of our actions on all the billions of people in the world to do what is actually the right thing, it's still better if we all do some approximation of the right thing because we are forced to do so than if we all just act authentically on our own individualized motivations. Bullshit is a natural feature of complex collective agency.

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