Kevin Temple

This 91�Թ� writer won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

sgupta — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 10:37:46 +0000

This 91�Թ� writer won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize sgupta Wed, 04/29/2015 - 06:37

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“Conservatives have become enamored of the idea that politics is ultimately not about plans and policies, it’s about ‘gut feelings’ and ‘values’,” says Professor Joseph Heath

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Professor Joseph Heath's Enlightenment 2.0 aims to spark conversation about reason in public life

Mere weeks after winning the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s prestigious Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, Professor Joseph Heath of the department of philosophy and the School of Public Policy & Governance has been shortlisted for the Donner Prize.

Heath’s book, Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring the Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy, and Our Lives (2014) attacks the irrationalism he finds entrenched in Canadian and American conservatism and takes a fresh look at how to build reason back into our social and political institutions.Three other books are in the running for the Donner including Faculty of Law Professor Michael J. Trebilcock's Dealing With Losers: The Political Economy of Policy Transitions, published by Oxford University Press.

[Editor's note: Trebilock won the award April 29, 2015.]

Relaxing in his office at University College amidst neatly overflowing bookshelves, Heath admits surprise at being shortlisted for the Donner Prize, which tends to award scholarly works of public policy. Enlightenment 2.0, Heath’s fourth book aimed at a general audience, is less intent on recommending policies than on sparking a conversation about reason in public life.

In some ways, this conversation continues one begun in The Rebel Sell (2004), which Heath co-wrote with alumnus Andrew Potter, now Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief. While The Rebel Sell attacks the anti-institutional impulses latent in the counter-culture, it doesn’t answer leftist anti-rationalism with a positive account of reason.

“Enlightenment 2.0,” Heath explains, “fleshes out what we mean by reason and what a rational politics would look like.” This time, however, the target is anti-rationalism on the political right, which he writes has become “unhinged from reality.”

Heath begins Enlightenment 2.0 in a diagnostic mode, recalling television satirist Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, held on the National Mall in Washington D.C. in 2010. That rally, Heath writes, “was the first time, perhaps since the French Revolution, that reason had become the object of large-scale political mobilization in the West.” The problem, he says, is that “conservatives have become enamored of the idea that politics is ultimately not about plans and policies, it’s about ‘gut feelings’ and ‘values’.” They frame political discourse in simplified, base terms to appeal to our unreflective intuitions and sidestep rational thought.

Heath argues that the left cannot compete on these terms: many progressive ideas are inherently too complex to justify on the basis of gut feelings alone. Restoring sanity to public discourse means restoring a place for reason.

How do we restore reason? Heath thinks we need to begin with a better grasp of what it is. The reigning enlightenment idea locates reason entirely in the heads of autonomous individuals, and the public discussion of reason today, “dominated by psychologists and economists,” reflects this view. On their account, Heath says, “if you want people to behave more rationally, they just have to try harder and maybe be educated better.” However, in Heath’s view, if we want to reboot the enlightenment project, we need a better notion of rationality, one that recognizes its linguistic, social and cultural dimension. No matter how well educated we become, we are stuck with a set of easily exploited limits and biases built into our cognition. For example, our beliefs tend to serve our base interests rather than reflect reality. The lesson is that we need to “pay much more attention to whether the social environments we create are going to enhance rationality.”

To level reason’s playing field is to create a kluge, one of the more memorable concepts from the book. For Heath, a simple box of vegetables delivered to your door can be a kluge, a trick to ensure that he acts rationally. Knowing he should eat well doesn’t yield good choices at the grocery store, so Heath exploits other tendencies.

“I have the kind of ethic where, goddamn it, if I bought it I’m going to eat it. So I order a vegetable box entirely as a pre-commitment strategy.”

Even his office is a kluge, as Heath notes: a quiet, distraction-free space designed to enable concentration and clear thinking.

Heath is ultimately pessimistic about the conservative and anti-rationalist climate gripping our politics, but he does believe that we can realize small, gradual changes to improve our lives. The key is to design our institutions and the human environment to empower our rational abilities rather than exploit our inherent weaknesses.

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Assisted death: how the work of this philosopher informed the recent Supreme Court decision

sgupta — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 13:14:02 +0000

Assisted death: how the work of this philosopher informed the recent Supreme Court decision sgupta Fri, 02/20/2015 - 08:14

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I have always held the view that philosophers should try to make a difference in matters of public policy," says Wayne Sumner (photo by Diana Tyszko, Faculty of Arts & Science)

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University Professor Emeritus Wayne Sumner

In 2011, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) filed a lawsuit claiming that physician-assisted dying should be legal. That case ended up before the Supreme Court of Canada last fall and on February 6, 2015, the BCCLA won their case.

The landmark decision overturned the Supreme Court’s 1993 ruling that physician-assisted suicide is illegal. The court has suspended its decision for 12 months to give lawmakers a chance to write new laws that reflect the ruling.

Wayne Sumner, University Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy, offered to help the BCCLA with their case in 2011 and became directly involved in their efforts. He used arguments he developed in his book, Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law (2011), to provide expert testimony that played a significant role in the Supreme Court’s decision. Sumner spoke to the Faculty of Arts & Science News about the decision and his contribution to it.

This has been called a landmark ruling. What is the significance of the Supreme Court’s decision?
It is historic. It changes the landscape in Canada in pretty profound ways. Up to this point there have been a variety of things that can be done for patients experiencing significant suffering in the last stages of their lives, including a number of things that would actually hasten their deaths, such as honouring a patient’s refusal of further life-sustaining treatment, terminal sedation, and the use of painkillers to the extent that it might compromise life. All of these were legal and widely regarded as ethical, but the law had drawn a firm line between them and any form of physician-assisted death, whether it’s physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. What this judgment does is to cross that line. Competent adults who are able to make a clear request and who experience intolerable suffering from an irremediable disease will now have a right to physician-assisted suicide and physician-administered euthanasia. The judgment makes options available to these patients that they didn’t have before.

It is rare for an academic philosopher to contribute to a case before the Supreme Court. How did you come to be involved?
I’ve been teaching and writing in bioethics for a long time. In the 1990s, I started teaching courses specifically on end-of-life issues and developed my own views on physician-assisted dying. When I retired from teaching in 2008, I decided to put together the views that I wanted to defend on these questions, so I wrote Assisted Death trying to systematically provide a case that physician-assisted death is ethical and should be legal. Those were the two aims of the book. At just about the time the book appeared, in 2011, I learned that the BCCLA was mounting a challenge to the constitutionality of the Canadian laws covering assisted death. I wrote an email to tell them that I had just published a book on this very question and that I would be delighted to help out in any way I could.

Joseph Arvay, the lead council for the BCCLA, asked me to serve as an expert witness in ethics in the case before the B.C. Supreme Court. Expert witnesses are usually expert on facts – it’s usually scientists of various kinds who are recognized by the court. Joe didn’t know of any case in which anyone had ever been recognized by a Canadian court as an expert witness on an ethical issue, so this might have been a first.

Part of my contribution was to write an ethical opinion that condensed material from my book. I argued that there are no significant ethical differences between assisted death and various other end-of-life treatment options that can have the effect of hastening death. The argument established that the legal distinction between physician-assisted death and other end-of-life treatments is not grounded in the ethics of these practices. This is what they used at the B.C. Supreme Court trial. Madam Justice Lynn Smith ended up agreeing with us, concluding that there was no ethical difference here.

So that was my role. I was an expert witness for the plaintiffs on ethics. My testimony, my evidence was incorporated into the B.C. trial judge’s decision and all of her findings, including my arguments, went forward to the Supreme Court of Canada.

What is it like to make a significant contribution to a Supreme Court ruling as an academic philosopher?
I think it’s just super-cool. I have always held the view that philosophers should try to make a difference in matters of public policy, that we have skills that we can bring to the table and that it’s a shame if we don’t do that on whatever issue happens to animate us. I’ve advocated that for a long time, but I never dreamed that I could be part of anything as momentous as this decision. This is a high-watermark of my career as a public intellectual.

What do you make of the public discourse responding to the decision?
I think in one respect the actual reporting of the case has been misleading, by emphasizing physician-assisted suicide. The 1993 Supreme Court case challenged only the prohibition of assisted suicide. This time the challenge was also to the provision in the Criminal Code that prohibits someone from consenting to their own death, so laws that were struck down had to do with both physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

The upshot for legal and medical practices seems huge. Where do we go from here?
Obviously this decision is not one that the Harper government is keen to act on. I hope that they take the conditions that the court laid down seriously and write them into the law. But even if they do, there are still going to be many questions about how provincial ministries of health should operationalize these practices. Do you require a second opinion as a matter of law? How do you ensure that the patient is competent and able to make his or her own healthcare decisions? All of these questions are up in the air. There is the initial euphoria that the old laws have been struck down and then you wake up the next day and wonder how we’re going to get it right.

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