Last week, a panel of doctors at the Center for Disease Control announced that they have discovered that some people have a natural immunity to swine flu. These people are the elderly. Yes, my good friends, apparently many old-timers can’t get the H1N1. This is shocking and frankly a tad appalling to me. I like old people, but the idea that their bodies are better apt to handle a “deadly new virus” seems to run contrary to any common sense I thought I might have gained over the years.

OSCAR WAO, the main character in author Junot Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a comic-book/sci-fi/role-playing gamer nerd of the nth degree. Add to that adolescent dysfunction the misery of being grossly overweight, “blacker” than the rest of his Dominican family and neighbors, and raised in Paterson, New Jersey during the 70s and 80s, and you’ve got one poor pathetic little muchacho.

THIS summer, I’m doing some research on the doing/allowing problem—the philosophical debate over whether there’s a moral difference between directly causing harm to someone and allowing harm to come to that person—with one of my favorite philosophy professors. It’s been rewarding; I’m learning a lot about several deep issues in ethical theory, issues surrounding the rational authority of moral reasons, the relationship between reactive attitudes and the impersonal evaluative standpoint, and the commensurability of various sorts of practical reasons. Nonetheless, my work so far has put me in a position to make a rather uncomfortable observation: philosophers like to endanger fat men. Consider just a few examples from the ethical theory literature.