Celebrating Dinner Table Digest № 50 with a Blast from the Past - Dinner Table Don'ts 1.0 Circa 2004-2009
I can't believe I'm on my 50th Dinner Table Digest!
Some of you may know that this Dinner Table Don’ts, is not the first version of Dinner Table Don’ts. In the early 2000’s, during the heyday of the blogging era, I had a Blogspot site also called Dinner Table Donts. I posted there regularly between 2004 and 2009, and took the blog down in 2010 as a part of the vetting process to become the NDP candidate in Kitchener Centre.1 When I started this version of the Substack in February 2020, I had no idea what form it would take, but I was excited to have a new place to not only do some writing and curatorial journalism, but also to get paid a little bit for that work.
For my 50th Digest, I thought that I would share with you three posts from the OG Dinner Table Donts. While I can’t link to them, I’ll post them in their entirety below. I am going to pick posts that highlight things that were important to me in that part of my life: burgeoning philosophical thinking, my evangelical faith, and my increasingly progressive politics. Interspersed throughout the following are photos that I took in the early 2000’s and, at the time, had posted to a separate blog.
Sections
Family Visits Toronto / Obligation and Commitment / Alberta Canola Fields / Mad / Wreck Beach Sunsets / Bad Health Care Arguments
To those of you who have paid to read my work over the past three years, I am eternally grateful for your financial support. Being paid gives me a little bit of extra pride in my work, knowing that others find it valuable enough to pay a small something for my content.
💛 Thank you💛
August 2005 - Family Visiting Toronto for the First Time
December 23, 2004 - Obligation and Commitment
This piece, which generated quite a few comments at the time, seems rather juvenile to me now, especially given my own experiences with having become disabled. Please with-hold your judgement to the end of the show 😉
At work today, there was some discussion going around about a particular problem. Most of them were thinking in merely practical terms, but I thought the question was intrinsically a moral question, and involved various intricacies at the theoretical level. So here goes...
Suppose you have been dating your significant other for a relatively long time, say four years. In that time there has not been an engagement; you are not married. Suppose that there is an accident, and your significant other is rendered a vegetable. He/she cannot do anything for themselves, they are rendered completely helpless. Would you stay with that person, or would you bugger off?
Now, on the face of it most people might say, 'of course I would stay!' But why? I think the question should not be would I say with that person, but rather, am I obligated to stay with that person? And if the answer is no, then it seems there is nothing wrong with taking off, perhaps committing that person to a home, throwing some cash at the home, and disappearing. It is important to stress that you are not married. If you are married, there there is a contractual obligation to the other person. It would therefore be immoral to ditch your significant other in the case of marriage. But if you have been dating for four years, there is also a level of commitment that goes beyond say 6 months. What about a common-law relationship that spans 25 years?
The question is: When, exactly, am I morally obligated to stick with, care for, love, and provide for a significant other? And if the answer has something to do with the act of marriage, then is it wrong to bolt in the case of a serious accident, if you are not married?
I'm going to attempt to give my answer, as weak as it might be, and I invite comments. I think that the would question for me depends on the mental stability of my significant other. If she has wrecked her body, but is still fully there intellectually, I would likely stick around. Its hard to say how long though. Is 'love' truly undying like the fairy tales say? If she has lost her mind and her body, I wonder if I would, or if I could. I would like to think I would, but put in that situation, I just don’t know. As far as moral obligation, I wonder if engagement might be the point at which I am morally obligated to stick with that person. I have not made any specific vows, but the intention is there. I'm a fan of intention based theories, and it seems to me that my intention, coupled with her intention to spend the rest of our lives together, and to partake in the marriage vows is enough to morally contract me to my girlfriend, in the case of an accident. Should I be dating someone for four years and not be engaged (highly improbable for me), I don't think I would be obligated to stay with her. It is merely a bonus if I do. But that is over and above my moral requirements to my girlfriend. If I was living with her (again, highly improbable for me), or if we had children (again, improbable), perhaps there might be more incentives to work through it and support her, but I still think that until intentions have been declared in some sort of a formal manner, then there is no moral obligation to that person.
The first comment, which I now think is probably pretty accurate, rather bluntly said this:
Seriously though, it's pretty obvious that you have never had love for long enough to answer this question outside the theoretical realm. The thing about it is, if you LOVE someone, then a moral obligation or (especially!) a contractual one, would have next to no bearing on a decision like this.
I would say that if you were in a situation like the rhetorical one you stated, a feeling of moral or contractual obligation would be your first and best clue that you really should just get the hell out! Commit this poor individual to the care of someone who will truly care for them and go surfing or something.
He was right. Ironically I spent the entire next post trying to argue about why he was wrong. Alas, growth often requires time and experience.
August 2006 - Alberta Canola Fields
January 26, 2005 - Mad (Or That Time I Was a Bigot and Got Called Out For It)
As it turns out, I was a bit of a bigot in my undergrad years. I hope that the last 15 years or so of unequivocal support for the LGBTQ+ community at least makes up a little bit for the damage done.
A little over an hour later, after my Human Rights class, one of my classmates had the nerve to come up to me after class and say "Peter, you know, I think I would have to classify you as a bigot." hmm... The topic of discussion had been how the courts make it possible for minority groups to make sure that their 'rights' were not trampled on. The obvious topic that came up is the 'right' of homosexuals to marry. Since I like to take controversial positions and tend to advance them forcefully, I made some argument against these types of minority groups, I don't even remember what it was. My professor suggested that these minority groups might call that type of argument bigoted, and I agreed, though I in no way said that they were right to refer to that argument or view as bigoted.
I just couldn't believe that someone who didn't even know me, who had never taken the time to talk to me, to hear me out, or to discuss political or philosophical ideas with me in a rational manner would be so rude as to come up to me and classify me as a bigot to my face. I suggested she could think what she wanted, and turned back to talkking to my friend, and she started to explain herself. I turned back to her and suggested that she go away, that I was not interested.
*sigh* Then I had to turn around and walk into Ashworth's medieval philosophy class....
August 2005 - A Wreck Beach Sunset, Vancouver
July 30, 2009 - Dismantling Bad Arguments in the Great Health Care Debate of 2009
This post was written as the new President of the United States, Barack Obama, looked to pass his Affordable Health Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare. As we know, the final proposal passed by Congress and signed by the President was a significantly watered down version of what was originally a relatively decent improvement to the American health care system.
A very interesting, though badly argued editorial appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal claiming that there exists no such thing as a right to health care. The article claims that the problem with the health care question is that it has been framed in terms of rights, rather than in terms of best organizational practices. Being that I have some interest in the question of health care as a human right, I thought I would take a stab at dismantling the arguments presented by the author.
The first argument the author makes is an oldie, but a goodie. Theodore Dalrymple asks, “Where does the right to health care come from?” From this the author suggests that if there was a right to health care, it would have been discovered long ago by our ancestors, who were no less intelligent that we are.
Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to dismantle this argument. There was a time, not too long ago, when we thought the world was flat. We’ve since discovered that it is indeed round, and that it travels around the sun, rather than the sun travelling around it, as was also thought. There was also a time when some humans believed that the colour of one’s skin determined their personhood. This persists, in some circles, even to this day, though science has conclusively proved that skin colour doesn’t determine whether or not someone belongs to the human race. There was a time, as recently as 50 years ago, that the thought of being able to use radio waves to speak to one another wirelessly would have been totally beyond the realm of possibility. Now I have a job selling cellular telephones, which transmit radio waves and translate them into sound waves. In fact, electronic information now travels along the same radio waves in the form a data, allowing access to the internet (did they have internet back in the 1500’s?) over our mobile phones. I could go on, but I don’t think I have to. It’s quite obvious, but in case you missed it, I’ll just come out and say it – the fact that something was not discovered by our ancestors does not, in any way, preclude its existence.
The second argument that Dalrymple (a pen name for Anthony Daniels, a British physician) uses is a straw man argument. He does it by pointing out a fallacy (circular reasoning) that proponents of health care as a human right might use:When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”
When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.Not only is this a sweeping generalization about people who do view health care as a human right, but it claims that the only answer a proponent might have is a circular one, namely that people have a right to health care. Dalrymple is certainly correct in pointing out the circular argument at play, though he is most certainly wrong when he claims that the reason why people should not be left to die in the streets is because they have a right to health care (which, if he were right, would be a circular argument and thus no argument at all). There are plenty of empirical reasons why it’s bad for people to be left to die in the streets that go beyond health care. Typically the overall health of a society is directly correlated to the wealth of that society; moreover, more equal societies tend to have better overall health. 'Now aren’t you appealing to health care?' you might ask. Note that I used the word health, not the words health care. Health is a descriptor of a human being’s state of normal, species-typical, biological function. Health care describes the institution responsible for the maintenance of normal species-typical biological function. Thus, when I talk about the relationship of health to social and economic ‘success’, I speak of a human being’s state of normal, species-typical biological function. Put simply, our state of biological function matters when it comes to social and economic success. If this is true (and if you do not believe me, I would urge you to have a look at Richard Wilkinson’s 1992 study on the social determinants of health, published in his 1996 book Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality), then there are very good social and economic reasons that affect society as a whole that suggest that we should not form the habit of leaving people to die in the streets. Once these reasons have been established, once could plausibly make an argument for health care as a human right, though it wouldn’t come from the appeal to ‘not leaving people dying in the streets’ but rather from the empirical evidence that suggests that good health contributes to the social and economic success of a particular society. That is, investment in the maintenance of good health and the prevention of bad health is, shockingly, good for society!
There are many other non-health related reasons why it is a bad idea to let people die in the streets. I leave these reasons to the reader to think of – I suspect it will not be terribly difficult.
There are two final tidbits of the column that are worth addressing. The first is the assertion that the health care question is not a question of rights, but rather best organizational practices. This is something I addressed at length in my thesis – it matters a great deal whether health care is a right or not, because the things that are human rights are things that we, as a society, find ways to accommodate, whether we like it or not. That is, rights are moral in nature – they impose specific reasoned responsibilities and obligations on both the claimant of a right and the person or group of persons duty-bound to provide what is claimed. If one takes the view that the only relevant question about health care is how it is practically organized, moral questions become mere afterthoughts, removed entirely from the basic building blocks of the health care question. This absolves anyone involved in the implementation of health care strategies of any real responsibility towards patients served, towards society as a whole, and towards health care professionals. By making the claim that the health care question is entirely about organizational practice, questions of right and wrong become irrelevant – all that matters is how the institution is structured and organized such that it meets certain amoral criteria. I suspect that when the consequences of this view are teased out, not even the most ardent opponents of health care as a human right would be able to stomach them (just think of the consequences for contemporary issues in bioethics!). This does not mean, however, that the proponent of health care as a human right doesn’t have organizational questions to worry about. They most certainly have lots of those questions to answer, some of which are harder than others – for more on what some of these questions might be, please see Chapter 4 of my thesis document.
The second concerns Dalrymple’s claim that equality is not desirable in itself. He is certainly right when he says “To provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality.” The insinuation here is that this serves as a nail in the coffin of the appeal to equal care. However the empirical evidence suggests that it is more desirable, over the breadth of a society, for there to be equal access to health care services, regardless of ability to pay than it is to have all the access to the best, greatest and most technologically advanced health care services be concentrated in the hands of the few. In fact, if this is the case, that society has a tendency to be less healthy, less wealthy, and as my mother would say, less wise.
The author concludes his piece with a nifty little one-liner, that, one assumes, must have been written with a smirk on his face: “There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month.” The only problem is that he’s not even come close to successfully arguing against health care as a human right. All he’s done is provide one bad argument after another in support of a conclusion that he wants to be true, rather than engaging the many good reasons that exist that might lead one to think that health care is a human right. For a sampling of some of those reasons, I would invite at least a cursory glance at my M.A. thesis. I don’t pretend to think I’ve solved all the problems or answered all the questions, but I do think it provides a good overview of some of the better arguments in favour of health care as a human right, arguments that I would invite Dr. Daniels to consider in any future piece he may write.
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As you can imagine, intellectual growth requires the revision of yesterday’s confident assertions of fact when faced with new or emerging evidence. In the past, I held - and wrote about - some homophobic views. After checking with me to make sure that I no longer held those views, the party asked me to delete my blog in order to prevent those views from being discovered by opposition researchers. We agreed that I would make it a private blog, as well as de-index it so that it doesn’t show up in search results. To this day only myself and my wife have access to the blog. That’s the way it will stay.