Category Archives: value

life, liberty, and bodily integrity: thoughts on routine infant circumcision

A while back, I shared this blog post on Twit­ter: the only nec­es­sary argu­ment against rou­tine infant cir­cum­ci­sion Although I’ve lost track of the @replies, I recall that there was sig­nif­i­cant push­back from a cou­ple of my fol­low­ers, and so I wanted to say more about the issue. Basi­cally the argu­ment offered at L’Hôte is this: “In a …

July 4, 2011 – 6:03 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in applied ethics, biomedical ethics, ethics, health care, value | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

have your college and eat it too: consuming education

Today, I want to make what, to my economics-ish friends, are prob­a­bly some painfully obvi­ous points. How­ever, I had never explic­itly con­sid­ered this angle on college/education before tak­ing eco­nom­ics of edu­ca­tion last semes­ter, and I sus­pect that it’s some­thing many oth­ers of even my rather intel­li­gent friends and col­leagues have also failed to con­sider in depth. …

March 24, 2011 – 9:27 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in current reading, economics-ish, education, education policy, grad school, higher education, saw it in the news, value | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (10)

on the non-normativity of value-added analysis

As you are likely to have heard by now, the Los Ange­les Times recently con­ducted and pub­lished a value-added analy­sis of some of the city’s ele­men­tary school teach­ers, using data that had been col­lected by the school dis­trict but never pre­vi­ously ana­lyzed in this way. There was a nice sum­mary of the value-added analy­sis and …

September 4, 2010 – 12:44 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in applied ethics, economics-ish, education, education policy, ethics, philosophy of education, teaching, value | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

so be good for goodness sake

I’m tak­ing a break from seri­ous con­tent to bring you friv­o­lous xmas post, 2009. You know that song “Santa Clause is Com­ing to Town?” It con­tains the lyric: “so be good for good­ness sake.” But this is clearly incon­sis­tent with the con­tent of the song, and it dri­ves me crazy. Being good for good­ness’ sake means that …

December 24, 2009 – 4:13 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in ethics, makes me stabby, value | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

teaching philosophy: possibility vs. plausibility

Here’s some­thing with which I’ve noticed intro to phi­los­o­phy stu­dents tend to strug­gle: the dif­fer­ence between it being pos­si­ble that a the­ory is true, and the theory’s being plau­si­ble. Exam­ple: In the course I’m TAing this semes­ter, one of the top­ics we dis­cussed is the nature of value. In virtue of what does any­thing have …

November 19, 2009 – 3:22 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in education, teaching, value | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

on the value of blogging

What value is there in blog­ging? Well, I sup­pose that depends on who you are. Some peo­ple blog to make money on adver­tis­ing, some peo­ple net­work with busi­ness con­tacts or pub­li­cize them­selves, some peo­ple are look­ing to share phở­tog­ra­phy, etc. I am a grad­u­ate stu­dent in phi­los­o­phy and edu­ca­tion who hopes to make a career, not …

June 27, 2009 – 12:30 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in applied ethics, ethics, value | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)