Philosophical Friendship, The Definition of Death, and Migrant Labour in Ontario - Dinner Table Digest № 67

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!

Nov 29, 2023

It’s been a busy few weeks, so parts of this Digest has been sitting in my drafts for a bit. Nonetheless, I think each of the pieces I’ve chosen have something to offer us. The first is a missive from philosopher Helen DeCruz on the philosophical value of friendship. It’s not so much about the concept of friendship, but instead about how friends often help us think better about the philosophical issues we are interested in. The second piece is an optimistic look at the future of death, an article that seems to accept that death may be something that can be overcome with the right kind of medical knowledge and technology. Finally I share a piece from local rabble-rouser Fitsum Areguy on the oppressive conditions faced by migrant labourers in Ontario.

Sections: Philosophical Friendship / Science Fair: The Series / What Is Death? / Migrant Labour Conditions in Ontario

Philosophical friends and epistemic partiality in friendship - Helen DeCruz

Friendship has always been very philosophically interesting to me, going all the way back to my undergrad days reading Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Books 8 and 9. While I don’t remember the specifics, I do remember that I wrote a term paper for my Ancient Philosophy class on why Aristotle would count internet friendship as true friendship, despite the fact that physical proximity is important to him. In this excellent Substack, philosopher Helen DeCruz looks at what it is about friendship that makes it valuable from the perspective of developing good ideas and arguments - that is, how being a good friend might make one a better philosopher.

“In the epistemic partiality literature, started by an influential paper by Sarah Stroud (2006), the thought is often that we should (or in fact should not) lower the epistemic bar for our friends. Stroud fleshes this out in the following way: the distinctive phenomenology and attitudes of friendship prompts us to adopt a set of unique doxastic practices that apply to our friends, such as believing them more readily then we would strangers, or treating negative accounts about our friends with excessive scrutiny. Differently put, we are biased when we deal with our friends. Epistemic partiality in friendship might mean that we “violate the standards of epistemology,” as Sandy Goldberg summarizes it.
But I wonder if we should flatten the epistemology of friendship in this way as just adopting different (lower) standards to certain propositions. Philosophical friendships show that the epistemology of reasoning with your friends indeed is subject to a distinctive set of norms and practices, but these do not merely amount to lowering the bar.” …
Philosophical friends, because of their benevolent attitude toward each other, do not need to be as concerned about reputation and about appearing smart. This doesn't mean the concern disappears entirely. For example, a friend can disappoint another when she does something the other deems vicious or incomprehensible, as expressed in the devastating phrase, “I expected better from you.” Indeed, such situations can test (sometimes end) friendships. Still, in normal situations we can be free of distracting self-directed thoughts. This is why philosophical friends are valuable, and why philosophical friendships have such a deep influence on the history of philosophy. They make a kind creativity, unhindered by thoughts about the ego, possible and they give us the benefits that reasoning in social contexts afford.

Over the past few weeks, I have felt particularly lucky, as a friend and I have been going back and forth about the Israel-Gaza situation, and have done so relatively peacefully in part because we are epistemically partial to each other - we have an implicit understanding that the other, as a friend, not only assumes the best in the other person, but also believes the other person to be acting with integrity. Friendship can grease the wheels of philosophical thinking precisely because it offers a haven of safety from the judgement of others who might not be inclined to understand you in the most charitable light.

Science Fair: The Series

In Grade 4 I participated in a science fair for the first time, building a working dam while explaining hydroelectric power generation. After hearing that starting in Grade 7, students could win a trip to the Canada Wide Science Fair, I made it my goal to get there. Despite restarting my project at the last minute, my Grade 7 project on catalysis garnered me a trip to Whitehorse, YK to represent the Fraser Valley at the Nationals. Quite frankly, I’m pretty sure that I peaked right then and there!

What is Death? - Rachel Nuwer - MIT Technology Review

This piece, written by a journalist nominated to the Pulitzer Longlist for her work on wildlife trafficking, paints a morbidly optimistic picture about the future of death - or should I say, “sufficient advancement to bring [humans] back [from the dead].” But before we get to the promise of life after death, the following animal experiments might have had me wide-eyed, mouth agape, torn between abject horror and fucked-up curiosity:

In 2019, scientists reported in Nature that they were able to restore a suite of functions in the brains of 32 pigs that had been decapitated in a slaughterhouse four hours earlier. The researchers restarted circulation and cellular activity in the brains using an oxygen-rich artificial blood infused with a cocktail of protective pharmaceuticals. They also included drugs that stopped neurons from firing, preventing any chance that the pig brains would regain consciousness. They kept the brains alive for up to 36 hours before ending the experiment. “Our work shows there’s probably a lot more damage from lack of oxygen that’s reversible than people thought before,” says coauthor Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University. In 2022, Latham and colleagues published a second paper in Nature announcing that they’d been able to recover many functions in multiple organs, including the brain and heart, in whole-body pigs that had been killed an hour earlier. They continued the experiment for six hours and confirmed that the anesthetized, previously dead animals had regained circulation and that numerous key cellular functions were active. “What these studies have shown is that the line between life and death isn’t as clear as we once thought,” says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine and senior author of both pig studies. Death “takes longer than we thought, and at least some of the processes can be stopped and reversed.”

Nuwer continues in this vein, describing a study on two comatose patients whose EEG readings apparently “showed all the hallmarks of consciousness” between the time their ventilators were shut off and the moment of brain death. Her naive optimism about what these findings might mean for the prospect of lengthening spans would be cute if it wasn't so strangely ableist. To see what I mean, put yourself on the guerney of a heart attack victim in your mind before reading the next two paragraphs:

The more scientists can learn about the mechanisms behind the dying process, the greater the chances of developing “more systematic rescue efforts,” Borjigin says. In best-case scenarios, she adds, this line of study could have “the potential to rewrite medical practices and save a lot of people.”
Everyone, of course, does eventually have to die and will someday be beyond saving. But a more exact understanding of the dying process could enable doctors to save some previously healthy people who meet an unexpected early end and whose bodies are still relatively intact. Examples could include people who suffer heart attacks, succumb to a deadly loss of blood, or choke or drown. The fact that many of these people die and stay dead simply reflects “a lack of proper resource allocation, medical knowledge, or sufficient advancement to bring them back,” Parnia says.

That last line there is quite the doozy, as if somehow death can be avoided if only we were ‘sufficiently advanced,’ which, it would appear, might be accomplished with ‘proper resource allocation [and] medical knowledge.’

In the past few years I have been forced to reckon with the reality that death is not something that can be avoided. Throughout the piece Nuwer inserts little comments that suggest that she knows how unrealistic the 'life-after-death project is. In the quote above, she notes that “everyone, of course, does eventually have to die…” Another expert, towards the end of the article, notes that “It’s important that we not overexaggerate and promise too much,” though, to my eyes, it sure looks like that is what this article is doing.

Treated Like Machines - Fitsum Areguy - By Blacks

In the Waterloo Region we are blessed with a number of folks who have what I like to refer to - in a callback to my more religious days - as ‘prophetic imagination.’ That is, their work asks us to consider what the world could be, all the while challenging us to leave behind the ways in which we hurt others, whether through systemic oppressions or through personal reflection. Through his herculean efforts to shine a light on racial oppression - particularly anti-Black racism - Fitsum Areguy has made a name for himself as a truth-teller. While he has taken more than a few bumps along the way, he has also been able to expand his reach through his unique approach to journalism. This piece, an exposé of Ontario’s atrocious migrant farm worker issue, is no exception.

Of the 28 conditions ESDC looks at for compliance, considerable emphasis is placed on ensuring that employers aren't taking jobs away from Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Before employers can hire temporary foreign workers they have to show in their Labor Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) applications that the worker is filling a role that can't be filled by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
Hennebry challenged the narrow scope of these evaluations and compliance criteria. “What are they actually inspecting? What is it compliance to? That matters, because it's not about whether workers have a room in their house that is well-ventilated and safe and not near chemicals, for example…it's actually about compliance to the parameters of the LMIA.”

An open letter, written by migrants at a farm near Brantford, details the conditions of their employment:

“One of our bunkhouses had wastewater overflowing and going through the bunkhouse, even into the kitchen. Our employer did nothing about it for several days, and even came into our bunkhouse and yelled at us for causing the problem. He said that we must have poured grease down the drain for this to happen.” …
If we get sick at work, it’s like it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t pay us any sick days and don’t help us if we are sick. They have not given us a health card yet and they have taken away our work permits and employment contracts.
We have been prevented from using the bathroom because it is “company policy” to go only on breaks. But sometimes we are not able to go to the bathroom even on our breaks because we are being moved from field to field.
The drinking water and bathing water at the farm is not safe. Sometimes it smells bad, like wastewater.
It has been very hot to work in the fields. But this employer still makes us work the same long shifts without any extra breaks, no water, no shade or cool areas. They don’t care that we are getting dizzy, or fainting, or ill. They just want us to work.

Areguy concludes his piece by tying these conditions, in part, to reglatory capture:

Regulatory capture refers to a situation where a regulatory body, established to act in the public's interest, is instead swayed and co-opted by the industries or sector it's meant to oversee, leading to decisions that prioritize industry needs over public interests. This concept offers a lens through which to scrutinize the enforcement actions and integrity of agencies like the ESDC.

Dinner Table Don'ts