R.I.P. Dick

Dick, my adviser at Cornell, has died.

An obituary.

Cornell’s memorial notice, with reminiscences.

Brian Leiter’s notice, with a few more reminiscences in the comments.

Dick wrote on a wide range of topics. I’ll just mention some of the political ones.

He became known, early on, for his work on Marx.

His final views on economic justice can be glimpsed in:

this online profile …

this Washington Post opinion piece (he was always listening for wisdom from libertarians, utilitarians, and other sirens, but wasn’t seduced by those philosophies) …

and the 2019 article “Social Democracy and Free Enterprise” (listed with other writings here).

When I was at Cornell, Dick was writing Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power and conducting seminars on war, foreign aid and trade, global warming, and the rise of China.

His research into the last topic is another good example of how he would listen to lots of people as he formulated his views. He studied the Chinese language and got to know Chinese scholars and non-scholars. He even directed this documentary film about a provincial migrant to Beijing.

He also learned to cook delicious Chinese meals, which Karin & I enjoyed during our stay in his house. That was four years ago. I intended, later, to travel to Ithaca for a conference planned in his honor. The pandemic struck; the conference was put on hold. As far as I know, it was never rescheduled.

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I arrived at Cornell in 2005 expecting to focus on metaphysics or something comparably Laputan. Alas, I had a miserable first semester. In Dick’s political philosophy class, too, I was making a fool of myself; but at least I was learning. (Note: It’s not always good when your remarks cause the other graduate students to snigger into their sleeves.) Nevertheless, Dick treated my ideas with greater seriousness than anyone else ever had. I started to treat them more seriously, too.

The next semester, I was surprised when, at a departmental function, Dick impishly asked under whom I wished to write my dissertation. It took me another year to choose him. I wonder if he’d have been so nice about it if he’d known that the project would take more than a decade to complete. He retired the day after I defended the thing.

I used to bump into him at the Cornell Cinema, where he’d make some wry comment. Once, we both happened to come out of Scorsese’s The Departed. Boom, boom, boom, was all he said. His light reading was Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot. He hated lewdness. And greed. But he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they decided that nice clothes and gourmet cooking really would significantly improve their lives. He was committed to stamping out poverty and injustice, but he was no ascetic. He wanted people to be empowered to discover their own meaningful projects and direct their own lives.

He was a good man. I’m still absorbing the lessons he taught me. Above all, I’m grateful for his kindness.

He was an atheist. He used to tell how his wife, who had lost her religious belief, would visit the nuns who had schooled her. They’d ask how her prayer life was going. He liked that about the nuns. I hope non-Catholics won’t mind if I pray for his soul. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

A modest proposal

Another soccer final has been ruined by a referee’s decision to award a penalty kick.

In the first minute of the UEFA Champions League final, the ball ricocheted off the chest and then the upper arm of the Potato Tots’ Moussa Sissoko. (He’d extended his arm to gesture to a teammate.) The referee blew the whistle for the penalty kick.

A deliberate handball? Not a chance.

A penalty? Alas, by today’s refereeing standards, yes. The operators of the Video Assistant Refereeing system deemed the call not controversial enough to review.

(Here are some TV pundits disagreeing about the rule. As usual, Alejandro Moreno makes a jackass of himself.)

After converting the penalty, Liverpool – usually one of the most proactive teams in the sport – sat back and “parked the bus” of defenders in front of the attacking Potato Tots.

A game-long slog ensued. Finally, with just a few minutes to play, Liverpool scored again.

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In soccer, a single goal is momentous. It releases enormous tension. It affects all subsequent developments. But VAR has multiplied the number of penalty kicks awarded, and hence the number of goals scored, cheapening their value. And now the rules have been changed so that every handball, intentional or not, that occurs inside the handler’s box is to be punished with a penalty kick.

With this policy, and with VAR to enforce it, we should expect games to have penalty kicks awarded in them more often than not. That is, we should expect games to have more goals – and of the cheapest kind.

We should expect shooters to aim at defenders’ arms rather than at the goal. (Certainly, the Liverpool forward wasn’t aiming toward the goal when he kicked the ball at Sissoko.)

We should expect goals to be scored quickly – before either team has fully implemented its attacking strategy.

We should expect a scoring team to adopt tedious “bus-parking” tactics earlier in the game.

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Therefore, I offer a modest proposal for handballs committed by non-goalkeepers:

(1) Let every handball that occurs outside the handler’s box be governed under the old rules.

(2) Let every clearly intentional handball, inside or outside the box, be punished by carding, according to the old rules.

(3) Let every handball that occurs inside the handler’s box, whether intentional or not, be punished, as the new policy requires. But let the punishment be an indirect free kick inside the box, not a direct penalty kick.

Exception to (3): Let a direct penalty kick be the punishment for an unintentional or intentional defensive handball that results straightforwardly from an indirect free kick taken by an attacker inside the box. (Here, we’ll have to make a somewhat arbitrary stipulation, e.g., that a defensive handball results “straightforwardly” from an indirect free kick taken inside the box just in case, after the initial kick but prior to the ball’s touching the hand, the ball doesn’t leave the box – or something along those lines.)

This is the best rule combination I can think of. But I wouldn’t mind if FIFA simply went back to the old rules that focused on intent.

I also would accept this option:

Let FIFA’s new rules remain in effect, with the additional stipulation that all direct penalty kicks for handballs be taken by Martín Palermo.

Update: Perhaps the exception to (3) should include all free kicks, not just indirect free kicks taken inside the box, to discourage defenders from using their hands to block free kicks taken outside the box.

With this in mind:

Let a direct penalty kick be the punishment for an unintentional or intentional defensive handball that results, inside the box, straightforwardly from a free kick taken by an attacker, where a handball is understood to have resulted, inside the box, straightforwardly from a free kick just in case, after the initial kick but prior to the ball’s touching the hand, the ball touches no player outside the box.