a bunch more articles

content/post/aristotle-vs-kant-virtue-and-the-moral-law.md

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+---
+title: "Aristotle vs Kant Virtue and the Moral Law"
+date: 2017-10-30T23:27:27Z
+tags: ["aristotle","kant","virtue","categorical imperative"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/heads.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Kant’s critique of Aristotle is fascinating to me. He uses Aristotle’s own standard against him: to say that virtue consists in achieving excellence in the unique purpose of a human life, and that this unique purpose can be identified by isolating the unique features of the organism as opposed to other organisms, you then have the problem of explaining how it is that the unique feature of reason could be better suited to helping humans achieve excellence at attaining ‘material ends’ (aka ‘happiness’), than the much more efficient and much less costly instinct, which all other animals have as well.
+
+This is enough for Kant to argue that reason must then have some other purpose — which for him, is accessing ‘universal absolutes’ and functioning as the standard of ‘value’ he ascribes to the “good” will. But in making this move, Kant is also implicitly conceding Aristotle’s notion of a teleological end for which man has been “formed”. He’s simply arguing that Aristotle was muddled about the particulars, and that he has managed to sort it all out for us.
+
+But, in order to make his criticism of Aristotle, Kant needs to reduce the greek notion of eudaemonia to (apparently) nothing more than the continuous satisfaction of contingent desires. Since these desires are ‘merely subjective’, dependent on circumstance, and are governed exclusively by the ‘laws of nature’, the satisfaction of them can have no ‘moral worth’ because moral worth consists in the ‘good will’ acting on the recognition of necessary duties found in the ‘moral law’ by way of pure reason, which is independent of contingent circumstances. Thus, hypothetical imperatives cannot “be moral”.
+
+What’s ironic about all of this, is that Kant seems to be arguing with Aristotle, from the point of view of Plato. Kant wants there to be an absolute truth about moral rules, in a mathematical sense (he even makes an analogy to geometry at one point). He is frequently making reference to the difference between the sensible and the intelligible world and with it he makes a distinction between absolute value and relative value. All of these notions are constantly present in Plato’s dialogues. Even the distinction between ‘material’ ends, and ‘ultimate’ ends is something of a dispute between Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) and Plato (The Timeaus, The Republic).
+
+It seems to me, that the debate around free will and morality seems to always resolve itself to the same dichotomies: objective-subjective, ‘intelligible’-‘sensible’, necessary-contingent, absolute-relative, and of course descriptive-normative. Has Kant added anything new to this dispute beyond Plato and Aristotle? I’m not so sure about that. The appeal to absolutes is a seductive one. Intuitively, it seems like a moral ‘rule’ could not be valid, if it were not absolute. Because, anything less than “true for everyone, everywhere, at all times”, is simply a preference by definition. However, Kant’s hypothetical examples of the Categorical Imperative in the Groundwork are notoriously confused and in at least one case (false promises), seem to argue against the categorical itself. If Kant himself could not imagine at least one unequivocal practical example of his imperative, it’s hardly fair to expect anyone else to be able to. Kant, I suppose, would have argued that in spite of the fact that ‘normal’ folk aren’t philosophers, they still “get it, deep down”. Maybe that’s what I was doing when I mentioned the intuitive appeal of absolutes. Still, it seems a bit like “cheating”, for Kant to make appeals to common-sense, when all throughout this book, he’s arguing that a properly philosophical understanding of morality must be grounded in rigorous logical universals. I’ll have more to say about this, later…

content/post/autism-and-trollies-against-utilitarianism.md

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+---
+title: "Autism and Trollies - Against Utilitarianism"
+date: 2018-02-15T22:57:44Z
+tags: ["ethics","hedonism","utilitarianism","jeremy bentham"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/jeremys-head.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+In recent years, it has been speculated that Jeremy Bentham was an autist. This speculation arises out of Bentham’s extreme attempts at systematizing human interactions in his formulation of Utilitarianism. Though I realize modern Utilitarianism is much more sophisticated now (in various forms of sociology and econometrics), I think they all still suffer from the fundamental assumptions laid down by Bentham. In this essay, I will show how one of those basic tenets leads to absurd conclusions, and hides imported value assumptions from other forms of ethics. What better way to do this, than with Philippa Foot’s trolley problem, a common modern tool of the Utilitarian.
+
+## Initial assumptions
+
+1. I’m working with traditional Utilitarianism, not any of the more modern econometric notions of Utility. The more sophisticated versions of Utilitarianism would pretend to have an answer to this problem, but I don’t have the space to deal with that here.
+2. I’m assuming “aggregate” pleasure is what we’re after, and not individual pleasure, since neither Bentham nor Mill were willing to concede to pure individualistic hedonism.
+3. I’m assuming all the passive participants in the trolley scenario are “blank slates”, and are of equal absolutely “value” in some objective sense,  in order to force the dilemma (i.e., it wouldn’t be much of a dilemma if the 5 were orphans, and the 1 was Hitler).
+	 
+
+## The Groundwork
+
+Now, Bentham had this idea that we might be able to parse pleasure and pain into quanta of measurable units. In keeping with the mindset of the time, and in an attempt to take Bentham’s idea to its logical limits (something he often did impulsively), let’s call these quanta, “hedons” and “dolors”. Where, Hedons are the finite quanta of pleasure (from ‘hedonism’), and Dolors (from the latin for “pain”) are the finite quanta of pain. For each individual, then, imagine a one-dimensional graph in which the zero-line runs through the horizontal center. Zero is equivalent to “indifferent”, anything above zero is equivalent to “pleasurable”, and anything below is equivalent to “pain” (like a barometer that can go into the negative). For example:
+
+{{< figure src="/img/hedonic_scale.jpg" title="Hedonic Scale" >}}
+
+Where +10 would be something like an orgasm whilst simultaneously eating a custard eclair in a warm Jacuzzi bath, and -10 would be something like having your Johnson burned off with an acetylene torch, whilst rabid dogs gnaw your fingers off, in an ice storm.
+
+Since we’re assuming “blank slate” participants, everyone starts out at zero (absolute indifference), and everyone has an equal capacity for either +10 or -10. Also, since we’re dealing with aggregates, rather than individuals, we need to take an accumulation of this for all six passive participants. That would be a maximum potential of +60 or -60 for the group. (6 people X 10). Lastly, since you can feel neither pleasure nor pain when you’re dead, you cease to count toward the aggregate once you are dead.
+
+In the trolley case, we are assuming that the trolley is going to *kill* whichever passive participants it strikes, not just seriously maim them. That means whomever it hits is effectively removed from the aggregate of total hedons and dolors available to make our “greatest good” calculation. Next, I think it’s safe to assume a reasonably sympathetic disposition in most people. So, witnessing a horrible tragedy is going to cause some serious distress. Therefore, we have to decide how many dolors that amounts to. I am willing to concede, also, the possibility that the relief at realizing it’s not *me* that got hit by the train will result in the addition of some hedons. Let’s say, witnessing the tragedy is equivalent to 2 dolors, and the self-interested relief is equivalent to 1 hedon.
+
+## The Experiment
+
+The trolley scenario I face today, is as follows:
+
+- (a) If I pull the lever to the left, I drive the train over the five passive participants.
+- (b) If I pull the lever to the right, I drive over one passive participant.
+
+In situation (a), 5 individuals are removed from the aggregate total of hedons and dolors. So, we are left with only one person on the opposite track. He experiences 2 dolors witnessing the tragedy, and 1 hedon of relief, for a total aggregate score of -1 on the “greatest good” scale.
+
+In situation (b), 1 individual is removed from the aggregate total of hedons and dolors. This leaves us with a total aggregate potential of +50/-50 (the five people on the other track). Each experiences 2 dolors at the witnessing of the tragedy on the other track. That is a total aggregate of 10 dolors. Each experiences 1 hedon at being relieved they weren’t the victim. That’s a total of 5 hedons. So, basic number line calculation would be: -10 + 5 = -5. In other words, we’re left with an aggregate “greatest good” scale calculation of -5.
+
+So you see, since one dolor of pain is better than five dolors of pain, on an aggregate scale, it is therefore better to run over 5 people, than it is to run over one (all other things being equal).
+
+## Interpreting The Results
+
+Now, outside of the framework of Utilitarianism as I have described it here, do I subscribe to this as a reasonable moral theory? Would I actually be willing to run over 5 people instead of 1? In real life, this is a choice I’m not likely to ever face. But if I were, my response to it is going to be driven by psychological and emotional causes, not Utilitarian calculations, which are far too speculative and complex to aid anyone in a moment of extreme stress. Of course, Mill would tell you that constant practice and study would leave you with something like a “second nature” that would respond to such situations. But this begs the question. In any case, I am inclined to refuse to answer the question of trolly scenarios.
+
+Firstly, the natural impulse to run over one instead of five has more to do with the contrived nature of the trolley experiment, than it does with proving Utilitarianism. Why should we assume “blank slates” are standing on the tracks? What if the five are a euthanasia club awaiting their prize? If you pulled the lever, you would thus cause great distress because they would not have their wishes fulfilled. On the other hand, what if the one man on the other track is a Nobel winning agricultural scientist who is on the verge of solving the world hunger problem? Seems to me, killing five to save him is well worth the cost.
+
+Secondly, these trolley scenarios, and Utilitarianism more generally, masquerade individual prejudices for *objective values*. Who am I to decide which people must die, and which must live? Why is my calculation of what’s more *pleasurable*, in any sense synonymous with the objective discovery of what’s *good*? Aristotle, for one, would have scoffed at such an equivocation.
+
+Thirdly, the whole scenario is implicitly adopting *life itself* as a value above and beyond Utilitarian considerations of pain and pleasure. In other words, It would be better to be alive and suffering from the loss of a limb due to a trolley accident, than to be dead and suffer no pain at all. This value cannot be coherently established in Utilitarianism, and there are some philosophers who have actually committed themselves to therefore denying that value. David Benatar comes to mind, who argues more or less from the same Utilitarian presuppositions as I have established in this essay: the whole of the human race should be rendered impotent, so as to prevent any more human beings from coming into existence, because the accumulated dolors vs hedons (my terms) of existence outweigh the net null of not existing at all.
+
+## The Conclusion
+
+Clearly, any framework for ethical calculus that can lead us to the conclusion that death is preferable to life, is fundamentally flawed. Even David Benatar himself asserts that the presently living have some sort of “interest” in remaining alive (confusingly, despite still insisting that their suffering far outweighs any interest that might promote being alive). Worse yet, any ethical system that implicitly requires the elevation of some individual or small group of individual judgments, as arbiters of an imaginary objective “greater good”, is demonstrably a bad thing. The late 19th, and all of the 20th century is a wasteland of Utilitarian utopianism – giant state bureaucracies filled with officious autistics, and political systems overrun by narcissistic do-gooders, all hell-bend on “making society compassionate”, at all costs.
+
+The trolley scenario I have laid out here, is a metaphorical demonstration of just this problem. Utilitarianism, as an ethical system, is at best a decision-making tool to be used in very specific, very short-term situations, after we’ve already established a set of moral presuppositions from which to frame the calculations. The Utilitarianism of this trolley scenario relies on the presupposition of life as a value; specifically, *human life*. But Utilitarianism as a doctrine need not also presuppose such a value. This is why many philosophers criticize Utilitarianism for failing to properly protect rights – they’re intuitively recognizing the fact that Utilitarianism is anti-life. When human lives themselves becomes an expendable means to some other greater abstract goal, the ethical system that led us to that is highly suspect at best. There are all sorts of other problems with Utilitarianism, but this this problem is enough by itself to suggest that we ought not adopt it with any degree of confidence.

content/post/book-review-the-art-of-the-argument.md

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+---
+title: "Book Review: The Art of the Argument"
+date: 2018-05-29T22:19:42Z
+tags: ["reviews","pop philosophy","rhetoric","sophistry"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/art-of-the-argument.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+This weekend I had a little extra time on my hands, because of the bank holiday. It’s been quite a while since I’ve looked at any work by the growing cadre of freelance internet philosophers. So, I decided to have a look at the latest offering by Stefan Molyneux. Not a man to shy away from dramatic overstatement, the book is titled, [The Art of The Argument: Civilization’s Last Stand](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Argument-Western-Civilizations-Stand-ebook/dp/B0756QYZ26).
+
+The basic thesis of the book is that “sophists” – described as those who manipulate language and appeal to emotion to gain power for themselves – are undermining the basic capacity for good people to negotiate terms amongst themselves in good faith, and that without this capacity to engage in rational debate, civilization itself will descend into a chaos of brute force misery and destruction. He has taken it to be his task, then, to recruit and educate the new generation of soldiers in the war of the rational against the “relativist” and the “sophist”, and to train them up in the art of ***The Argument\***.
+
+Some have confused the purpose of this book, because of it’s title. Several reviewers on Amazon took it to be an attempt at a layman-accessible textbook or tutorial, and have [heavily critiqued the book](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R29YVREE2ZBQ1H/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0756QYZ26) in ways that, though largely correct, are far too stringent for a polemical tract of this kind, and fall directly into the trap Stefan sets for them, in his preface (hilariously titled “Trigger Warning”):
+
+> ’The Art of the Argument’ is an outright battle manual, not a prissy abstract academic paper… As we approach Western Civilization’s last stand for survival, loftily lecturing people on arcane terms is a mere confession of pitiful impotence…
+
+That ought to give some context as to what to actually expect from this book. Stefan thinks he’s distributing a basic survival manual in a state of impending cultural apocalypse (cue the picture of Patton standing in front of the flag). What of those who actually care to be precise, methodical, and try to practice a little epistemic humility? Well, Stefan just thinks they’re “whining”, and “*turning logic into wingdings*”.
+
+### I Am Absolutely Certain
+
+Still, precision and clarity is precisely what one would *want* if one were arming people for an ‘intellectual battle’, and it is true that his explanations of deduction and induction are rushed straw-men that, at times, are incoherent or just plain wrong. He is telling readers that he is equipping them with broad-swords, but handing them broom handles instead. We’ll get to examples of all this shortly, but first, a note about Stefan’s main object of un-ironic attention in the first part of the book: *absolute certainty*. Unlike most of us, who’ve come to understand that such a thing probably doesn’t exist, and that believing one has obtained such a thing is dangerous to the point of precipitating wars and genocides, Stefan on the other hand, has come to see absolute certainty as a special place one can go, to escape the “relativists”:
+
+> if you surrender to the peace of absolutism – if the premises are correct, and the reasoning is correct, the conclusion is absolute and inescapable – you will quickly find it a beautiful place to be, and that relativists are trying to deny you the peace, Zen, and beauty of the paradise called certainty.
+
+Rather than understanding, or self-knowledge (something he used to talk a lot about), or curiosity, or mindfulness, it is the *absolute certainty* of deductive rigor that will get his readers to the truth, and it is *absolute certainty* that will make his readers the *winners* of ***The Argument\***.
+
+It is this fixation that sets the tone for the opening explication of deductive and inductive reasoning. He rightly describes inductive reasoning as the method of reasoning to probabilities, and deductive reasoning as the method of reasoning to certainties. But because certainty is king, inductive reasoning plays only a secondary submissive role in Stefan’s jungle story known as the ***The Argument\***, and he equates probabilistic thinking simply with ‘rank relativism’:
+
+> A predator must be absolute in its reasoning. The lion must correctly identify and stalk the zebra, must calculate speed and interception without error, must attack and bite accurately, and must persist until the prey is down. All this must serve the conclusion: the meal. However, prey has a different set of calculations because a predator can see the prey, but the prey usually cannot see the predator – at least until it is too late… Dominant life forms revel in absolutes and fight hard against any encroaching fumes of **rank relativism**. A tiger cannot hunt if it doubts the evidence of its senses. The life of a zebra is a life of doubt, of fear. [emphasis added]
+
+This zeal for *absolute certainty* traps him in something of a bind later. When describing the scientific method, he has to characterize it as *fundamentally* deductive:
+
+> The Scientific Method is absolute – deductive – but individual hypotheses are usually conditional… inductive reasoning must be subject to the absolutes of deductive reasoning…
+
+While it’s true that deductive reasoning plays a significant role in evaluating hypotheses and the research products of scientific disciplines, it is wrong to assert that deduction is a primary in all cases. Deduction and induction play complementary roles in the methods of science, and which has primacy depends on the method and the context (though, for Stefan, The Scientific Method is just one thing).
+
+Stefan says, “*All valid hypotheses must conform with – and predict – empirical observations*“. Embedded implicitly in this assertion, is an idea never explicitly referenced, but clearly implied by his rhetoric about the scientific method. He wants to use Popperian falsificationism as a proxy for deductive certainty. While its true that Popper sought a way to give scientific conclusions a certainty akin to those of deductive arguments, he would never have pretended that falsification was *equivalent* to deductive certainty. The point was not to inject the absolutism of Augustinian faith declarations into scientific conclusions. Rather, it was to reduce the potential for catastrophic error – a brick wall into which Molyneux seems determined to drive himself. All of this effort comes on the heals of labeling deductive reasoning “alpha”, and inductive reasoning “beta”. He needed a way to rescue sissy science from the beta-cuck basement; and the way he does it, is by making it the twee Robin beside the manly Batman of deduction.
+
+But why is *absolute certainty* so important to Stefan? Because, for him, no rational action is possible without it:
+
+> The lion stalking the zebra is engaged in proactive behavior, and thus, by initiating the encounter, is in far greater control of the variables… Initiating action requires the certainty of deductive reasoning, and control over variables increases that certainty… The pursuit of the lion is the initiating action, the flight of the zebra is the reaction.
+
+Deductive lions are proactive, and inductive zebras are reactive. Neither act at all, without having achieved the *absolute certainty* of empirical verification. But is this actually how we act? I would argue that it is not. There are many things we do, day to day, without the absolute certainty of a deductive conclusion. In fact, most things we do are this way. He offers the example of deciding to bring an umbrella. But one could easily imagine deciding which arguments to deploy in a debate as well. The fascination with certainty also seems to run counter to Stefan’s commitment to free will, as well. The kind of certainty he describes could easily be imagined as the kind of certainty that results in perfect prediction (something akin to what he says above about hypotheses). Does this not imply some sort of threshold determinism? Given this, why, if I were an adherent of some common-sense conception of the free will, would I want to believe this was the only way I could act? Buried in this fixation, is the need to be *morally justified*, in order to act. For Stefan, acting without certainty is acting without the necessary moral authority. To act instead, as most of us do, on varying degrees of confidence in beliefs, is moral corruption. He needs to be certain, because he needs to *be good*. If I am *absolutely certain*, then your condemnations of me are like arrows bouncing off a tank.
+
+### What’s ***The Argument\***?
+
+In addition to the poor analogy to lions and zebras, and the failure to provide a stable definition of truth (or ‘virtue’, or ‘happiness’, or a half-dozen other things) Stefan never takes the time to explain what propositions are, or what makes them a proper part of an argument. This, to me, seems like it would not be too big a leap of effort, even for his readers. Clearly, he knows what they are, because he provides lots of them in this book. But he is terribly inconsistent about it. At one point, late in the book, he even seems to confuse validity and truth, and incorrectly marks out a single proposition as an argument:
+
+> ‘Ice cream contains dairy’ is an argument, since it claims to describe a property objectively measurable and testable…
+
+Being “objectively measurable and testable” does not meet the definition of an argument by even the most rudimentary general definition, as a ‘collection of reasons supporting a conclusion’. What’s worse, it doesn’t even meet Stefan’s own initial definition, as being:
+
+> an attempt to convince another person of the truth or value of your position using only reason and evidence.
+
+All we have here, is an asserted conclusion in the form of a subject-predicate proposition. There are no reasons supporting it, and no evidence offered to ‘verify’ it’s ‘objective reality’. Even if we take the colloquial presumptions, and accept that the subject ‘ice cream’ does refer to something in reality, and that the predicate ‘contains dairy’ accurately modifies this subject with – as he puts it – “*a property objectively measurable and testable*”, it still remains that a measurement must be made, and the result of that added to this proposition, *in order to make it an argument*. So, perhaps something like:
+
+1. Ice cream is made with milk
+2. Milk is a dairy product
+3. Therefore, ice cream contains dairy
+
+Note that this is a standard example of the [transitive property](https://www.britannica.com/topic/transitive-law) applied to the propositions of a logical argument. If Stefan were trying to outfit his army with a sharp argumentative blade, then this was definitely a missed opportunity.
+
+A bit later, he wants to say that *’inequality is bad’* is not an argument, and he tries to sustain this claim by way of this newly minted definition of an argument (its needing to be “objectively measurable and testable”). But rather than argue that “bad” is not “objectively measurable”, which would be the obvious thing to do given the new definition, he says this is because “bad” is a false-substitute for a preference claim, e.g., “I don’t like inequality”. But this only makes his explanation inscrutable. Surely, I can objectively measure a man’s preferences. Even if we reject self-reporting as acceptable, one could still measure pleasure responses neurologically, to obtain the truth of his statement, and in doing so, show that “bad” is an acceptable substitute for “dislike”.
+
+But it turns out that’s not why Molyneux makes this turn in the story. Instead, he wants to lodge an entirely new complaint about how personal preference isn’t a reasonable standard for moral judgment. On this point, I might be in agreement (were I to see an argument), but the problem is that it’s not germane to the explanation of *what is and is not an argument*. He’s lost visibility of the *form* of his argument, because he’s utterly distracted by the *content*. Perhaps those “*wingdings*” would come in handy about now?
+
+### Getting An Ought From An Ought…
+
+Now, we move beyond the logic lessons, and on to some specific content problems with this book. There are dozens of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and hyperbolic misreadings to be found littered across the pages of this book. I am going to focus on just three instances. First on the list (the most challenging to untangle) is his ham-fisted attempt at a refutation of Hume’s Is-Ought dichotomy. He states Hume’s case this way:
+
+> David Hume, the famous Scottish philosopher… introduc[ed] the concept of Humean scepticism, or the idea that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is.” While it is true that cutting off a man’s head will kill him, there is nothing in the basic biology that tells us we ought not to do it: in other words, there is no morality in physics.
+
+This is a common simplification of the is-ought dichotomy, and it suffers from the common problem of misunderstanding Hume’s logic problem as a reification problem (that “moral” properties are “real”). His rebuttal to this formulation amounts to two objections. First, predictably, that the is-ought problem is a non-problem (“irrelevant”, in his words):
+
+> There is no such thing as logic in material physics either, but we do not think that logic is unnecessary or irrelevant or subjective.
+
+This argument fails, because it doesn’t actually prove the case of irrelevance. Rather, he beats down the straw-man of reification. There is no “logic in material physics” (by which, he means ‘physical reality’), because logic (loosely speaking) is a set of rules defining a means of *describing* certain features of physical matter (as in, Aristotle’s three laws). Likewise, there is no “morality in material physics”, because morality (loosely speaking) is a set of rules defining a means of *evaluating* certain features of human character and behavior. The problem is to be found not in where any properties lie, but in the two words I highlighted: “describing” and “evaluating”, and their usage in arguments. Molyneux is aware of this difference. It is a key component of his opening claims about arguments. We’ll recall, that there are two kinds, according to him:
+
+> Truth arguments aim to unite fragmented and subjective humanity under the challenging banner of actual reality… Value arguments aim at improvements in aesthetic or moral standards… A truth argument can tell us who killed someone. A value argument tells us that murder is wrong.
+
+So, it’s clear that we have two different categories of argumentation, and that they need to be accounted for independently (indeed, justified independently), and reconciled. Which gets us to Stefan’s second objection:
+
+> …considering Hume’s argument that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is,” we can easily see that the mirror of **The Argument** destroys **The Argument**. If we cannot get an “ought” from an “is,” then anyone who tries to argue that we can is wrong. In other words, we “ought not” get an “ought” from an “is.” Arguing that we cannot derive universally preferable behavior from mere matter and energy argues that it is universally preferable behavior to not derive an “ought” from an “is.” If we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” this means that we can derive an “ought” from an “is,” which is that we ought not try it: a self detonating argument.
+
+There are two major problems with this argument. First, contrary to popular misconception, Hume never actually asserted that one cannot not derive an ought from an is. Second, Molyneux is exemplifying in his prose, precisely the problem that Hume was actually describing in his Treatise. Let’s take a look at Hume’s actual words:
+
+> In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. **For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained;** and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (Treatise 3.1.1)
+
+This may seem too subtle for a general overview, but Hume is not saying you “cannot derive an ought from an is”. He’s saying exactly what I said above: there appears to be two categorically different kinds of reasoning, and authors are mixing them in their writings, without explaining how the relations work. The relation is simply assumed, without justification. That is a problem that is hardly irrelevant to philosophy. Here is a rudimentary example:
+
+1. Some humans go hungry in winter
+2. Those with food ought to feed the hungry in winter
+
+Just like Stefan’s example of murder above, we have one proposition that is in the ‘descriptive’ category, and one that is in the ‘evaluative’ category (or, in this case, injunctive which – loosely speaking – implies normative evaluation). By what laws of logic can the second proposition be transformed into a conclusion from the first? Or, at lease, how can we show logical linkage between proposition 1 and proposition 2? That is what Hume was asking his reader to consider. In order for Hume to sustain the broader positive assertion that “one cannot derive an ought from an is”, he would’ve had to construct a theory of deduction that categorically (and absolutely, ironically) excluded evaluation statements or injunctions as meaningful propositions (in the true/false sense of meaning). He didn’t do that.
+
+But what of Stefan’s clever turn? If we take the colloquial assertion as read (regardless of what Hume was saying), does Molyneux successfully refute it? I still don’t think so. First, note his usage of the word “wrong” in that passage:
+
+> If we cannot get an “ought” from an “is,” then anyone who tries to argue that we can is wrong.
+
+Does he mean “incorrect”, or does he mean “bad”? Fortunately, Molyneux provides a clarification:
+
+> In other words, we “ought not” get an “ought” from an “is.”
+
+Is saying that we cannot derive an ought from an is, the same as saying we *ought not* derive an ought from an is (i.e., that it would be ‘bad’ for us to do this)? On broad broad reading, Molyneux may have a point. The rules of logic are often described as normative as well as descriptive (see [Guttenplan](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Languages-Logic-Introduction-Formal/dp/155786988X), for example). In other words, the rules ‘guide good behavior’ in argumentation, in some sense, in addition to simply describing the methods of thinking. But that’s not what’s going on here. As I pointed out above, nobody is saying that it is *morally wrong* to derive an ought from an is, merely that it doesn’t seem possible, given the present theories of logic available to us. The task would be to build a logical system that incorporated normative evaluation and injunction into the system (in other words, to somehow provide a truth-bearing meaning for those sorts of statements). Not an easy task, but also not necessarily an impossibility.
+
+In any case, to make this objection stick, and condemn the dichotomy, Stefan has to appeal to his own moral theory (known as “Universally Preferred Behavior”):
+
+> Arguing that we cannot derive universally preferable behavior from mere matter and energy argues that it is universally preferable behavior to not derive an “ought” from an “is.” If we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” this means that we can derive an “ought” from an “is,” which is that we ought not try it: a self detonating argument.
+
+This should raise a red flag. Because, again, Hume isn’t making a moral condemnation of the traversal from descriptive to normative. He’s asking how it’s possible to do so in moral theories, given the normal rules of logic. What’s more, even if we granted the *normative* complaint, it’s still a stretch to say that all normative evaluations are *moral* evaluations, and therefore, must be held to the same definitional standard – and in doing so, ruling out moral complaints about evaluative language in logic. In other words, to make the objection from UPB work, Stefan has to commit exactly the same sleight of hand that Hume was complaining about: “ *instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not*”.
+
+### Democracy Is For Dummies
+
+The second example is a straw man the size of the Wicker Man. For a man with both a BA and an MA in history, I am continually in awe of Stefan’s utter disregard and contempt for it. Often, he actually seems proud of the contempt he sprinkles liberally throughout this book. One breathtaking example of these random turds can be found here:
+
+> Less intelligent people invented democracy (more intelligent people invented Republics), because, being less intelligent, they could not influence society through the brilliance of their writing and oratory. But naturally they wish to have such influence, and therefore invented the concept of “one adult, one vote.” This makes their political perspectives equally valuable to the greatest genius in the land. In other words, they get the effects of genius, without the genetics or hard work of becoming a genius. From an amoral, biological standpoint, who can blame them?
+
+Setting aside the comparative confusion (“less intelligent” than whom? “more intelligent” than what?), I have to wonder why this was even included in the book. It’s one of the most cartoonishly ignorant and cynical descriptions of the invention of democracy I’ve ever read (and I’ve read some bad ones). But, let’s entertain the possibility, for the moment. Is it reasonable to suppose that Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes were indeed low-IQ, genetically inferior parasites who, unable to “*influence society through the brilliance of their writing and oratory*”, still somehow managed to convince the population of Athens over a generation, to divide themselves into classes, and organize themselves around a complex system of representative bodies like the Ecclesia, the Boule, and the Areopagus? In a book touting the power of ***The Argument\***, dare I ask for ***An Argument\*** for this claim? What would such an argument look like? What sort of society would have replaced early Greek democracy, had these intellectual inferiors not succeeded to transform their society? Stefan doesn’t bother to elaborate. Rather, he wants this assertion to stand on its own, as a stepping-stone in a chain of shallow reasons he thinks cinches the case for the moral superiority of high intelligence.
+
+But it’s not even a good reason to think that. For a man who is constantly pounding his chest in honor of “empirical evidence”, he never seems to leave any room for that evidence when making claims such as this one. For anyone who has read any serious history on ancient greek society and politics, it should be obvious: there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the founders of Greek democracy were “less intelligent” than their social peers. What’s more, far from being incompetent writers and orators, the Athenians were some of the most accomplished writers and orators in the Hellenistic world. It’s precisely because of how accomplished they were, that *we can talk about them at all, now*. In other words, *the evidence* stands in direct opposition to this claim. And he doesn’t seem to notice.
+
+This is a problem throughout this book. There really is no good reason for the inclusion of the brief line of “reasoning” within which this claim is couched. It’s arbitrary and random. It neither sustains his primary claim – that reasoned debate is essential to stable civilizations – nor offers a challenge to it that he can respond to. In fact, it’s such an outlandish and distracting empty assertion, that it damages his main case. It’s ***not an argument\***. There are other places where similar interruptions are not nearly as damaging (such as the parenthetical mention of “abduction” at the end of his explication of induction and deduction). Which leads me to believe this book probably would have really benefited from a good editor.
+
+### Consequences And Principles
+
+The last example may seem too subtle for some. But I raise the objection here, because I think it’s important to point out that Stefan claims the mantle of a “public intellectual”, and has been, ostensibly, hard at work as an “internet philosopher” for at least 10 years. Why is this important? Because lay-people who read this book will take the misreadings as more-or-less correct, and find themselves with their pants down, when faced with someone who knows better. In particular, I’m referring to his mischaracterization of Consequentialism, as a ‘pragmatic’ (meaning ‘unprincipled’) doctrine:
+
+> Atheists also tend to prefer consequentialism, or outcome-based moral standards. That which produces direct and immediate benefits in society is considered the good: the greatest good for the greatest number, and so on. These are not principled arguments, but pragmatic arguments. The principled argument against the welfare state is that it violates property rights (thou shalt not steal). The consequentialist argument for the welfare state is that it immediately reduces the amount of poverty in society. If your goal is consequentialist, principled arguments often stand in your way.
+
+I am certainly no fan of consequentialist ethics, as readers of this blog will know. But to simply dismiss the theory out of hand as “unprincipled” or “pragmatic” is a weak approach at best. Mainly, because *consequentialism is not unprincipled*. Since Stefan has made indirect reference to Mill’s Greatest Happiness principle, I will then let Bentham and Mill speak for themselves:
+
+> Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason… By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. (Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation)
+
+And:
+
+> The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded— namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. (JS Mill, Utilitarianism)
+
+Now, it is certainly reasonable to question the correctness of this principle. For example, why is happiness directly equated with pleasure? Or, how do you address the objections in the Protagoras? Or any number of other complaints I, and other more skilled philosophers have raised in this blog and elsewhere. The Utility Principle is notorious for its myriad problems. But, *not being a principle* is not one of them. Perhaps Stefan should have taken the time to give us a definition of “principle” before proceeding with a condemnation of consequentialism as “unprincipled”.
+
+Later on, he tries to extend the meaning of consequentialism itself, in order to heap more scorn on it:
+
+> As the influence of women in society has grown, so has pragmatism, which can also be called consequentialism, which is the idea that an argument can be judged by its effects. If the effects are negative, The Argument is “problematic” or “inappropriate” or “offensive.”
+
+Here, he is attempting to equate the fallacy of *[appeal to consequences](https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/26/Appeal-to-Consequences)* with the moral theory of consequentialism. This is a profound category error. He lays blame for the fallacy of the appeal to consequences almost entirely at the feet of women (which also includes the only research paper he quotes – but doesn’t cite – in the entire book). But, setting that silliness aside (yet another distraction), he fails to provide an explanation for how consequentialism as a moral theory says incorrectly that propositions can be judged true or false as a result of the desirability of their effects. In this small, but incredibly disingenuous two-sentence passage, he’s managed to throw pragmatism, consequentialism, women, and ***The Argument\*** under the bus.
+
+### Summary Conclusion (My Amazon Review)
+
+I yearned for this to be a better book than it was. I sympathize with the sentiment that reason is beleaguered in modern society, and crave a good book on the topic. Alas, this is not the book. For all his railing against sophistry, confirmation bias, and appeals to emotion, Stefan relies heavily on an audience so steeped in its own prejudices, that it won’t notice the factual errors, logical incongruities, or interpretational biases littered throughout its pages. What’s worse, is that Molyneux attacks the disingenuous debater so strenuously in this book, that he often ends up recriminating himself for his own sloppiness.
+
+Molyneux’s book reads like a personal journal that was transcribed directly into print. It is haphazard, overwrought, and at times, stream-of-consciousness. If you’re not already familiar with the lingo of internet Libertarianism, you’ll be completely confused by numerous passages. If you’re not already rehearsed in, and in agreement with, the arguments and positions of right-leaning anarchism (“anarcho-capitalism”), you’ll find the presumption of foregone conclusions scattered throughout the book to be irritating at best.
+
+At bottom, the main problem with this book, is that it doesn’t appear to have an audience. The dismissive and sneering tone taken toward the political left will put them off. The appeals to the political right will (and has) earned him podcast interviews, but they certainly aren’t interested in philosophical inquiry beyond their own prejudices. The academic community has already shunned him as a lightweight at best, crackpot at worst. The book is too polemical and doctrinaire to appeal to the mainstream (many of whom fear him as some sort of cult leader already). So, who is this book for?
+
+He will say, of course, that it is for the ‘true philosophers’. But any true philosopher will find this book terribly disappointing at best, perniciously self-defeating at worst. His explication of logic is amateur and incomplete, and at times just plain wrong. He takes Popperian falsificationism as a given, as if it were just a fact. He makes a sophomoric straw man of consequentialism, misreads Hume, offers only common-sense intuition explanations for complex topics like virtue and happiness, and deftly shifts from normative to descriptive usages of “right” and “wrong”, where it suits him.
+
+In the end, as near as I can tell, the audience for this book was himself, and the handful who share whatever psychology it is that produced this work. The only person who will be most convinced by this work, is his own faltering conscience. He is defending heavily against the anxiety of uncertainty; the vulnerability and insecurity of having more questions than answers – and nowhere to look for them.
+
+For centuries, the medievals also sought the same security in the reified power of deductive logic which Stefan is groping so desperately for in this book. On that count, I surely sympathize with him. The seduction of certainty – its comforting, self-soothing lullaby of finality and the archimedean lever it offers against those who would use doubt and curiosity to hurt, to plunder, and to oppress, is something I have been drawn to at times in my own life.
+
+But for those of us afflicted by the daemon of Socrates, these islands of comfortable absolutism will never make a permanent home. Eventually, the urge to set sail again on the sea of uncertainty – on the path to discovery – will overtake the fear of being unmoored, and away we will voyage, come what may.
+
+Stefan’s book is one such island of comfortable certitude, for some. The philosophers may visit, but they won’t stay long. What concerns me, though, are those who end up shipwrecked on one of these islands, before they’ve even had an opportunity to understand the voyage they set themselves on.
+
+I will close this review with a few quotes from Stefan, that I would like to offer as chastening advice to Stefan himself:
+
+> There are only two ways to achieve certainty: dogma and philosophy. Dogma is by far the easiest choice, of course, and while it may give you the illusion of certainty, it does not give you the reality of knowledge. Dogma arises, like most dysfunctions, from a greed for the unearned…
+>
+> If **The Argument** begins with the conclusion, it is neither an argument, nor a proof of any kind…
+
+Indeed.
+
+### Addendum: Making Stefan’s Case For Him
+
+In researching for this review, I stumbled across [this review](https://medium.com/@alexanderdouglas/the-art-of-the-ego-review-of-stefan-molyneuxs-stupid-book-4a195ab1a5bc) of the book, by Alexander Douglas, a philosophy lecturer at St. Andrews in Scotland. On reading this review, I couldn’t help but cringe. Dr. Douglas has volunteered to make himself into precisely the boogy-man that Stefan points to as an example of why he’s so right, and everyone else is so wrong. As he says: “*When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser*”.
+
+If you are a professional philosopher, and you think Stefan Molyneux is not worth wasting a single breath on, then why write a “review” like this? Why acknowledge him at all? He’s not a professional philosopher, and only on the periphery of the political debate online, which itself, is already a periphery. If you *do* think he’s [worth the effort to review honestly](https://medium.com/@cianchartier/a-review-of-stefan-molyneuxs-the-art-of-the-argument-2c1c83fa7802), then why this sort of silly screed, that only serves to entrench his fans, and (as they would put it) “virtue signal” to yours? Why fall into this trap at all?
+
+This is one of the reasons I decided to proceed with this review (I considered abandoning it several times). There needs to be somebody reviewing Stefan Molyneux in an honest way, with rigor and discipline, who doesn’t have an axe to grind. People hovering in the orbits around the personalities of the “internet right”, need to be able to find genuine criticism, in order to be able to make rational decisions themselves. It’s the only way out of the morass.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+

content/post/book-review-the-righteous-mind.md

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+---
+title: "Book Review: the Righteous Mind"
+date: 2017-11-30T23:14:18Z
+tags: ["reviews","jonathan haidt","moral psychology","ethics","utilitarianism"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/righteous_mind.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Is it better to be truly just, or merely to seem so? This is the question put to Socrates by Glaucon in The Republic. Jonathan Haidt, in his book, “The Righteous Mind”, counts Glaucon among the cynics for putting this challenge to Socrates. But Haidt is missing a subtle and very powerful nuance in Plato’s story. Socrates had just finished embarrassing Thrasymachus for his weak defense of cynical egoism. Glaucon and Adeimantus were certainly entertained, but they were not satisfied with Socrates. They sought much stronger reasons for accepting the conclusion that true justice is preferable to appearance, because they did not want to merely seem to agree with Socrates. They *really wanted to believe* that genuine justice was better, and giving Socrates the strongest possible objection that could be mustered is the only way an honest man (if he is honest with himself) can do this.
+
+Socrates’ initial response to Glaucon was not the description of the ideal state that the story has become famous for. Rather, it was a likening of the soul to the body. Repeated abuses and illnesses corrupt and degrade the health of the body over time, until at some point it is no longer possible to experience vigor and vitality. Likewise, says Socrates, repeated vices and injustices committed in pursuit of wealth or power or honor will eventually render the soul so degraded and corrupt that it will no longer be capable of achieving eudaemonia (aka ‘contentment’, ‘happiness’, or ‘flourishing’). This is the fate of the man who pursues a life of politics, without first tending to his soul.
+
+Haidt seems almost proud of his “Glauconian cynicism” – a socio-biological view in which he believes he can show that, regardless of which is better, *seeming* just is what we humans *actually seek*. Haidt claims explicitly and confidently not to be offering an argument for what *ought to be*, only what *is*. But the enthusiasm with which he reports this supposed scientific fact suggests that he also thinks that what *is*, just is what *ought to be*. But this is precisely the challenge posed to Socrates by Glaucon: it certainly is true that many people (perhaps even most) are cynical and self-serving. So, why oughtn’t they be? Haidt’s response to this recurring implicit question seems to be to just keep reasserting the fact, in ever more sophisticated and complex ways.
+
+Near the end of the book, in spite of already offering an explicit refusal to address the problem of normative ethics, Haidt tosses off a flippant endorsement of Utilitarianism as if this view has already settled the normative question, or simply to signal to the reader that the question just isn’t interesting enough to bother investigating. But this has profound implications for how seriously one can take some of the claims he makes in this book. The tension between what is and what ought to be plagues this book, and any reader eager for insight into the gap between descriptive and normative ethics will find it profoundly frustrating.
+
+### The Basic Theory, and It’s Problems
+
+Haidt’s basic theory of the “Righteous Mind” comes down to two hypotheses. First, that the human brain has evolved for both “tribal” and “hive” social structures. To put it in his terms, “we are 90% chimp, and 10% bee”, and a special “hive switch” in the brain is flipped, when conditions are ideal, that suppress our self-interested “groups” psychology, and make us more altruistically “hive-ish”. It’s not quite clear what sort of mechanism this “switch” is, what causes it to flip, and how it gets reset. But he offers a lot of anecdotes from his research that describe evidence suggesting its presence.
+
+The second, and much more complex portion of the theory, is his six-dimensional model of moral psychology. His system is powerfully reminiscent of David Hume’s own four-pole system of moral emotions (Pride-vs-Humility / Love-vs-Hate). But there is one extremely significant difference. Hume’s theory was one meant to describe morality as a system of “passions” (special kinds of emotions). These passions derive from a natural propensity for pleasure, and a natural aversion to pain (he presages the Utilitarians in this respect). What’s more, moral judgments are not reasoned, but *felt*. Morality, for Hume, just is emotions expressed. Haidt’s theory, on the other hand, describes six dimensions of *values*, not emotions: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty. Haidt says that all human beings have this six-dimensional system built-in as a consequence of thousands of years of socio-biological evolution. He argues that the “sensitivity level” at which each of these is not permanently fixed, but is set to “defaults” at birth, and adjusted over a lifespan by experience. How, precisely, this happens and by what mechanism, is a bit murky, but again, he offers loads of anecdotal examples (and data from his studies) to show how each of these dimensions is expressed by individuals.
+
+A few questions and objections arose for me, about these two hypotheses, as I read through the book, that never seemed to get a satisfactory answer. First, on the six aspects: are they like adjuster knobs on a sound board? Or, are they merely barometer needles reporting varying pressure levels set by environmental impacts on a biological system? If the former, then surely there are “optimal” positions for each of these knobs (even if only circumstantially optimal)? In that case, then there is indeed an opening for a normative ethical theory, describing these optimums. However, if the latter is true, then it is hard to understand how there could be any such thing as an “ought” at all, much less a system prescribing them. Haidt is constantly nudging up to the edge of this Humean is-ought cliff, and retreating from it just when things start to get interesting.
+
+Second, Haidt never quite explicitly acknowledges that he’s describing a *system of values*, rather than a moral psychology. One might object that a system of values could be said to be a variety of moral psychology, but I would reply that by the time we get to values, we’re already one layer above fundamental psychology. Why these six, and not others? Indeed, in the book, Haidt explicitly acknowledges that some early reviewers of the book objected to the lack of “equality” as a value on his list of “aspects”. If “liberty” counts as a foundational psychological value, then why not “equality”? It has just as long a history, after all. More importantly, to talk of values at all, you’re once again in flirting in the realm of the normative. I would have to look more closely at the research he used to back this section of the book, but how do we know he didn’t just happen to find the set of six values that he and his team were particularly focused on already? That is a normative selection process: “these values are more important than those”.
+
+Third, returning to the “hive switch”, Haidt emphasizes the “dangers” of too much hive-ishness or too much groupishness. But he never quite explains how there could be any such thing as a “right amount” of either, in the absence of a *normative* theory. Without any idea of what an ideal amount of either would look like, why would the horror of the Hobbesian anarchy or Stalinist oppression even count as “bad”? Lower primates seem perfectly satisfied with brutal inter-tribal conflict, and ants are obliviously willing to destroy themselves en masse for the sake of colony and queen. What’s worse, is that there’s no clear explanation for how the “hive switch” and the six-dimensional moral psychology fit together. Do certain knob settings produce hives instead of tribes? Do others produce tribes instead of hives? What are the right tension levels between the two modes? If the knob settings do influence this, how do we know what those should be? None of this is discussed in the book, except in passionate warnings to beware of extremes. A laudable sentiment, but so what?
+
+Lastly, while Frans de Waal is largely an asset to Haidt’s book, there is one key notion from de Waal that highlights the primary problem with Haidt’s “Glauconian moral matrix”; de Waal captured it in a rather pithy phrase: Veneer Theory. In his book, “Primates and Philosophers”, de Waal uses the phrase to criticize Huxley and Dawkins for uncritically accepting a view of human nature that is Hobbesian without providing an explanation for how a self-serving egoist gets to altruism all on his own. Haidt’s book suffers from a similar problem. Though he does a great job of bridging the gap between egoist and “group-altruist”, what he fails to do is explain how the “Glauconian cynic” becomes a genuinely caring being. Haidt has concocted his own variety of Veneer Theory by redefining it as a complex inter-subjective social delusion that we all agree to participate in. He takes this as an *answer* to the problem of a “veneer” layer. But it only makes his own set of theories seem like a Rube Goldberg machine. Haidt makes a strong case for the biological and psychological *reality* of moral experience as a genuine phenomenon. But this works directly against the idea that we merely wish to *appear* to care, or to be virtuous. Why layer a “moral matrix” on top of a perfectly reasonable explanation of genuine moral emotions? More to the point, why would evolution tolerate such an expensive and convoluted cognitive load, such as layers of delusion, on top of the already demanding task of navigating the social world in real time? Even more curiously, why would we count the primitive primate morality of chimps and bonobos as “actual” or “genuine”, while regarding our own as a mere matrix-like delusion?
+
+### Final Thoughts
+
+Anyone who has read the entirety of The Republic has to come to terms with a powerful dissonance in Plato’s tale. Either Socrates truly misunderstood human nature (perhaps he confused it with his own psychological projections), or he didn’t actually believe what he was saying. Some philosophers argue for the latter theory: that the ideal state was ideal *intentionally*. Socrates was never going to convince the Athenians to drive all the old folks out of the city in order to start afresh, or convince the educated classes to surrender their private property holdings to the commons, or convince them to put their women and children into a breeding commune to be tended by specially bred and trained guardians. He must have known that. What was really going on here? Remember that the tale was written by Plato, long after Socrates’ execution. Plato was engaging in his own bit of *cynical rhetoric*, grounded in bitterness. He wanted to demonstrate the utter impossibility of the larger task: convincing men to love virtue for its own sake; to *be* just, rather than simply to *appear* just. He had given up on the possibility, and the Republic was his way of showing this. It is hard to blame him, on one level. He’d watched these people destroy his master and teacher; a man for whom Plato had given up a promising life as a poet, in order to follow him in philosophy. Haidt, on the other hand, embraces his cynicism with zeal, because he believes the data tells him he must, and he refuses to even entertain the possibility that we might just be better than that. In effect, he takes Plato’s implicit condemnation of man and turns it into a simple matter-of-fact. But recasting the condemnation as mere description doesn’t change the moral reality; it just hides it behind a veil of cynicism.

content/post/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life.md

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+---
+title: "Book Review: Twelve Rules for Life"
+date: 2018-03-10T22:48:45Z
+tags: ["reviews","jordan peterson","maps of meaning","culture","society"]
+topics: ["philosophy","psychology","theology"]
+image: /img/peterson-12-rules.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” is an admixture of continental philosophy, eastern mysticism, Jungian psychology, Christian theology, clinical psychotherapy insights, personal biography, and folk wisdom. At 368 pages, it’s just large enough to keep a thoughtful layman engaged without the more intimidating academic burden of his first book, “Maps of Meaning”. Dr. Peterson is obviously well read and quite thoughtful. In addition to some of his own occasional profundities, the book is absolutely littered with references to Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and many others. If you’re a curious reader, following these up will take you weeks.
+
+A Jungian at heart, Peterson loves to cast his arguments into metaphorical and mytho-poetic form, which can be remarkably frustrating for a more hard-nosed analytical thinker like myself (he does this much less so, in Maps of Meaning). But Peterson is still very careful to cite modern sources for most of his empirical assertions throughout the book (with one significant exception, which I’ll get to later).
+
+It took reading nearly the entire book to figure out how each of the 12 rules were related to each other as a whole, and the effort was well worth it. Chapters 6 (“Set your house in perfect order…”), 7 (“Pursue what is meaningful…”), and 8 (“Tell the truth…”), constitute the heart of the book in my view, with chapters 10 (“Be precise in your speech…”), and 11 (“Do not bother skateboarders…”) serving to really drive home the overall message of the book. What is that message? First, that contra Descartes, the fundamental unshakeable truth of human existence is the experience of suffering – a pre-rational essential phenomena that is, as Descartes might have put it, the primary “clear and distinct” knowledge we have of ourselves and of our “Being” (Peterson’s term. It seems to mean something like the state of existing and experiencing existence). Moreover, that suffering is a result of our having awakened to the fact of our own Being, that this was in some sense a choice, and most importantly, that now leaves us facing the perpetual choice of either accepting or rejecting the burden of this knowledge. The implication of all this, for Peterson, is that this is the fundamental moral choice. Our burden of this conscious choice – and the selection itself – is the acting out of our fundamental value. The ultimate consequence is the wholehearted embrace or rejection of the whole of creation. Not simply, as Nietzsche or Camus might say, the choice of suicide, but the choice of becoming judge, jury, and executioner of all Being including your own. The moral man, then, chooses life, and makes that his ultimate value in the process.
+
+These chapters are, by far, the most philosophical of the book. They are essentially Peterson’s response to Nietzsche’s famous critique of value found in Zarathustra and the Genealogy of Morals. His formulation and answer to this problem is clearly influenced by Kirkegaard (whom he quotes twice), but the far stronger influence it seems to me is the Judeo-Christian Bible. Peterson casts the opening books of the bible into Jungian archetypes, and uses them to make his case. The Priestly Genesis is the origin of all Being: The Word is self-conscious Truth spoken as a means of deriving order from the chaos of the deep. Eve chooses to invite chaos into the walled garden of Eden and Adam follows her lead. In their offspring – Cain and Abel – we are confronted with the choice of life stated above, only in archetypal form: Cain condemns the world, its creator, and himself, out of resentment for the suffering he encounters; and not just for the suffering, but for the apparently unequal distribution of that suffering between himself and his brother Abel. Abel, on the other hand, chooses to properly honor himself and his creator with honest sacrifice. Peterson draws upon this metaphor again later, in a masterful parallel between this and the parable of Christ’s temptation in the desert.
+
+So, for those who do their philosophy metaphorically, this book is a feast. It is an homage to hope, and a powerful argument against the nihilistic despair that seems to permeate our present modern culture. Still, I think this book is only likely to find fertile ground with seekers still open to the intuitive and allegorical approach to philosophical investigation. More to the point, those jaundiced by academic cynicism or jaded by ideological or intellectual biases, will generally find nothing more than a twenty-first century Joseph Campbell.
+
+To be sure, there are some problems with the book. Rule 5, for example, lacks much of the intellectual rigor and careful citations of the rest of the book. Peterson makes numerous appeals to the work of B. F. Skinner in this chapter, which is only obliquely relevant anymore, since decades of work has been done on the developmental psychology of children since then (none of which he notes). Worse, he also makes appeal to several trite and easily refutable arguments in support of his position (for example, what I like to call the “hot stove defense”), and fails to acknowledge that much of what he put in this chapter is very often used as post hoc justification by many very poor parents. I think Peterson could have left this chapter out, and it would have been a better book.
+
+Also, it is possible to charitably dispute Peterson’s allegorical approach to the question of meaning. The Joseph Campbell complaint, while somewhat of a straw man, is not entirely without merit. Sam Harris makes an excellent illustration of this, in his book “The End of Faith”, in which he satirically describes the spiritual significance of a Hawaiian snapper recipe. Though it is hyperbole, it does raise the question of how one would anchor the claims drawn from allegory in something more empirical, in order to make them properly defeasible. Peterson has yet to address this objection fully, as far as I know.
+
+Despite these problems, I think the book is still well worth the effort to read, for any lay-philosopher looking for an interesting angle of approach to the problem of value and meaning, and its application in a very real-world way. The parallel psychoanalytic threads running through this book, also make it an excellent tool for meditation and self-reflection. It might be tempting to think that the work is mere “self-help”, because of this and because of the title. Don’t be fooled. Peterson explicitly rejects “giving advice”, in the book. What’s more, he’s secretly not even giving you “rules” to follow. What he’s offering, through the mnemonic device of easy-to-remember “rules”, is a glimpse into a unique psycho-philosophical framework for making sense of our phenomenal experience of the world. Or, to put it as Peterson might, a means of forging some order out of the chaos of your own suffering existence. The principles that make up the framework will sound surprisingly familiar to anyone who’s read any Greek philosophy:
+
+- It is better to choose life, than death
+- Aim for the ideal of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, but work on earth with what you have
+- The responsibility for these choices is yours, and yours alone.
+
+In a nutshell, he implores us all to be philosophical before (but not to the exclusion of) theological, and he thinks that if we would be, we would make the world better, even if only a little. Who can argue with that?

content/post/can-the-will-ever-be-regarded-as-free.md

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+---
+title: "Can the Will Ever Be Regarded as Free?"
+date: 2017-06-18T23:49:25Z
+tags: ["free will", "determinism"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/pinocchio.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+The question at hand, is whether or not the will can ever be regarded as free. Taken at face value, the obvious answer would be, “of course”. Most people, as a matter of fact, regard their will as “free”, most of the time. So, yes, it both can be, and is. Even neuroscientists like Benjamin Libet seem to think so.[^1] But the matter-of-fact interpretation of this question is entirely uninteresting, even as an observation. What we really want to know, is whether this nearly universal intuitive belief is *true* — or, at least, a reasonable belief. More precisely, under what conditions could we judge such a belief, and will those conditions ever be actualized? This is a much more difficult question to answer, and one any wise common person would balk at. As the saying goes, however, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. With that spirit in mind, this paper is an attempt to answer that question by first addressing two more fundamental questions. Firstly, what is this thing we call “the will”? Can it be located in the brain, or at least defined in some tangible way? Secondly, what does it mean to say that this “will” is “free”? Once there is at least some flesh attached to these two concepts, an answer to the broader question will be attempted. However, the ultimate conclusion of this paper will be that there is no conclusion. Try as we might, the question of the freedom of the will remains as unanswerable as ever, and it seems it will remain so for a very long time to come.
+
+### The Problem of The “Will”
+
+What is the “will”? Dan Dennett[^2] urges us to “trade in mystery for mechanisms”, but a close examination of the available science and philosophy on the question suggests that we’ve just traded one mystery for another. Our subjective experience of conscious deliberation and decision-making leads us to believe that the “will” is some sort of unity, within the unity of our larger conscious minds, that takes in external sense data, blends it with emotions and preferences, and outputs intentions to act. Traditional philosophy has long offered elaborate metaphors for this experience, with notions like the “rational faculty” or the capacity for “practical reasoning”[^3]. These metaphors don’t so much explain what the will is, as they simply provide convenient substitute labels for it. Where in the brain is the “rational faculty”, for instance? How, exactly, is it supposed to function? One might say that the answer to this is of course the frontal lobe. But this glib answer, even if it were correct, is far too general. It would be like saying ‘BMWs are made in Germany’. Further, it’s not simply more precision that’s needed. We’re not even sure what *kind* of thing it is we’re talking about. According to Peter Tse[^4], “*will, whether free or not, is not monolithic*”. He describes it as a “*durationally extended process*” – or, more precisely, a “*concatenation of subprocesses*”, made up of the “*operations of different neural circuits*” that activate rapidly in a synchronous “*cascade of steps from abstract plan to concrete action*”. In short, the word “will”, is itself a metaphor. This metaphor is a stand-in for a distinction alluded to initially here, and implicit in Tse’s description of willing. Namely, the distinction between the physical mechanisms of willing, and the subjective experience of a “self” that “wills”. In other words, where in this “durationally extended concatenation of subprocesses”, is the “I” that is doing the desiring, the intending, the planning, and the acting? Is this “I” just an epiphenomenal product of these synchronized cascades of activated neural circuits (a “froth on the waves”, as it were)? If so, how could it have any purchase on the underlying mechanisms that gave rise to it? Jaegwon Kim[^5] clarifies the problem, and gives it some urgency, by pointing out that if we were to claim that such an “I” did have purchase, we’d have to explain how it would not violate the physical principles of closure and overdetermination (in other words, we’d have to explain how we solve the problem of supervenience). In other words, if we want to deny epiphenomenalism, then we have to explain both how the “agent” gets into the machine, and how it is causally antecedent to the neural activity that we can detect. Still, none of these criticisms show conclusively that we are without a will, or that the will is absolutely determined (at least, not entirely). At best, what Kim and others show, is that we are a very long way from a good understanding of what’s really going on in the brain. That being the case, it is difficult to fault thinkers for their metaphors. When the best that neuroscience and philosophy has to offer only affords a metaphorical understanding, then that’s more or less what we must settle upon, in order to have a discussion. On this basis, I take a mixture of Tse and Kane for my understanding of the notion of “will”: a collection of neural sub-processes necessary for the phenomenal experience of deliberative or practical reasoning, *in addition to* the phenomenon itself. What does this mean? How can the “phenomenal experience” be a material part of the willing? One might suspect an attempt to smuggle in an equivocation here. Rather, the intent is to acknowledge looming specter of dualism, and to make an admission to no clear answer to that problem. What’s more, there ought be no expectation that one humble writer is going to solve the riddle of the ages in a short paper. Instead, the point is to cue up one of the conditions for answering the question posed in the title of this essay.
+
+### The Problem of “Freedom”
+
+If the will is merely a “durationally extended concatenation of cascading neural sub-process events”, it is difficult to see why one would need to ask a question like “is it free?” Such a question seems comically nonsensical in this context. It would be like, after hearing a long technical explanation of the functioning of a transistor circuit, one responded with, “yes, but is it orange?” Still, the subjective experience of free choice must be referring to something physical, at least if we want to claim that freedom is a real thing without also committing ourselves to either dualism or mysticism, or both. But as noted earlier, this would further require a conception of self as more than a mere supervenient phenomenon riding on top the wave of electro-chemical activity in the brain.
+
+Tse seems to think that ‘criterial causation’ provides the fix. He argues that neuronal activity is not a simple ‘ballistic’ process, like billiard balls transferring energy between themselves as a matter of causal necessity. Rather, he describes a process of “information transmission”, rather than energy transference. He describes clusters of “epiconnected” neurons acting as “coincidence detectors”, firing not on some quantitative threshold, but on qualitative criteria like coincidences of certain patterns. He argues that these criteria can be altered in the present moment of activity in such a way that future behavior becomes probabilistic. In other words, the resetting of criterial determinates, from moment to moment, renders each subsequent moment unpredictable in an absolute sense (Tse even uses phrases like “will fire or not fire”, to illustrate this). Tse’s theory is difficult for a layman to understand, but even so, it seems to miss the mark as a defense of free will. Firstly, while the idea is fascinating, it is not at all clear how these coincidence detection circuits are “transmitting information”, rather than transferring energy. The distinction is interesting, and Tse is technically correct when he points out that the process is not strictly ballistic. But, even if we take the theory as read, it doesn’t seem to obviate the problem of causal necessity. In fact, it just seems to make the game of billiards fantastically more complicated. Secondly, Tse asserts in several places that his theory provides an explanation for “downward causation” (his term for an agent’s causal efficacy), but his explanation for this was even more opaque than the explanation for coincidence detection. Is he saying that these subprocesses interpose upon and overlap each other somehow? Is he suggesting some kind of feedback loop or call-and-response interaction among the various “epiconnected” groups of neurons? He doesn’t actually say. Whatever this complicated ballet of neuronal behaviors happens to be, it isn’t at all clear why some of them should be regarded as “upward”, while others are regarded as “downward”. What Tse is trying to do with this theory, fundamentally, is to solve the mind-body problem. This is interesting because it suggests that he fears the physicalists may be correct that if there is no “agent”, then there can be no free will. But, his attempt at a theory that makes room for a supervenient agent seems like an attempt to construct the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine in the brain.
+
+In a more global context, what are we really saying when we refer to ourselves as free? Schopenhauer[^6] famously describes “negative” freedom as the absence of fetters or impediments to action. He then makes an analogy from this “physical” freedom to “moral” freedom, arguing that in the same way we are only physically free when we are not shackled by physical restraints, we are only “morally” free when our minds are not shackled by a similar restraint on our capacity to will. For Schopenhauer, that restraint is causal necessity. In other words, for the will to be “free”, it would need to be capable of violating the fundamental laws of physics. It would be easy to caricature Schopenhauer’s notion, by objecting that nobody in his right mind wishes that he could will to turn himself into a dragon, or to both do and not do something simultaneously. But a more serious criticism would be to say that he never specifies anything like what might be considered a ‘null hypothesis’ test, for his claim. When every observable act is invariably traceable backward to a willing event that could only be questioned on the basis of a hypothetical or counterfactual, one is trapped into accepting a conclusion that Schopenhauer, in particular, would have been hoping for: despair.
+
+### The Problem of Finding An Answer
+
+What if, like the notion of the “will”, the notion of “freedom” is also a mere metaphor acting as a verbal tag for a subjective phenomenon that is more complicated and varied than we care to think? What are we really looking for when we go looking for “freedom” in the neuronal neighborhoods of the brain, or in the observable actions of an “agent”? How will we know when we’ve found it? Let’s suppose there is a machine that can map the firings of every neuron, for every decision or action a subject could engage in. Now, suppose this subject were simply speaking his name repeatedly. What if the machine told us that different neurons were firing on every speaking event? Would that mean he was free? What if the machine told us that the exact same neurons were firing every time he spoke. Would that mean he was “not free”? How would this data help us make this determination? What would justify it? Now, more generally, suppose this fellow walks to work every day. Suppose he takes the same route unfailingly. Suppose we keep a record, and note that he as made this same commute for many years. What does this tell us about his metaphysical status? Is he acting freely? How would this information answer that question? Suppose instead, that 10% of the time, he changes his route or takes a taxi. How would this make him any different in a fundamental sense, than his perfectly predictable alternate ego? What these thought experiments suggest, is that the question we’re trying to address is fundamentally unanswerable, because it is unfalsifiable. In short, if looking at the neurons, one cannot tell which are the “effect” of the “agent” and which are the “cause” of the “agent” (or even, which are the “agent”, and which aren’t), then it doesn’t much matter what they’re up to. Likewise, if a ‘free’ agent’s actions are indistinguishable from a ‘determined’ agent’s actions, then once more, one is left without a means for deciding which is which. There doesn’t seem to be a way out of this problem.
+
+### An Attempt At Criteria
+
+It is a truism to say that man is not a machine. In view of the previously stated concern, what could we point to, that would justify an answer in support of this truism? There are three potential criteria that may help us:
+
+1. **The problem of the self**: A means by which we can distinguish agent consciousness from underlying conscious and unconscious mechanisms mingled in the same brain. (i.e., which bits are the ‘self’ or the ‘will’, and which aren’t?)
+2. **The problem of supervenience**: A means by which we can distinguish the neural events that are causally antecedent to the agent, from the neural events that are causally descendent from the agent (i.e. which events does the agent ‘control’ and which does he not?)
+3. **The problem of necessity**: A means by which we can differentiate causally necessitated actions from ‘free’ actions, assuming that these are oppositional (i.e. which actions *must* happen, versus which actions might have been otherwise?)
+
+It is not at all clear how we would go about testing for these things. And, as mentioned previously, they seem to flirt with dubious notions like dualism and necessity. Though, the third criteria might be easier to tackle than it might seem at first. If we come at it from the direction of the problem of induction, there may be a defense. Still, it seems a mistake to define freedom as something opposed to causality. Why should one’s capacity to make deliberative choices require the distortion or denial of the fundamental laws of nature? Perhaps a better way to phrase the third criteria would be:
+
+- A means by which we can distinguish free actions from unfree actions, given the constraints of nature.
+
+This phrasing seems to allow for theories such as Peter Tse’s criterial causation. But it also raises the specter of unfalsifiability, if we cannot construct a definition of ‘unfree’ that makes any sense. As for the first two criteria, there may eventually be some breakthrough in neuroscience that provides us with a method for differentiating types of neurons and neuronal events to the degree that such things as self-identity and conscious will are “locatable”. But for now, they seem utterly out of reach.
+
+### Conclusion
+
+Given the present state of philosophical thought and neuroscience, it seems clear that there is no clear answer, at the moment, to the question of whether the will can be regarded as free or not. The neuroscience claims of determinism are dubious, and the philosophical claims of freedom are either unfalsifiable, or merely metaphorical. Will the question ever be answerable? This seems doubtful. Some might suggest that if it is answerable, then the answer could only come from neuroscience. But this presupposes the ‘ballistic’ model of neuronal behavior, and a view of causality that presupposes necessity. Both of these presuppositions are questionable. It is highly tempting to believe that the question is answerable, and must be answerable in the affirmative, because freedom underpins so much of our understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and indeed our civilization. In support of this hope, Benjamin Libet gets the last word:
+
+> The phenomenal fact is that most of us feel that we do have free will, at least for some of our actions and within certain limits that may be imposed by our brain’s status and by our environment. The intuitive feelings about the phenomenon of free will form a fundamental basis for views of our human nature, and great care should be taken not to believe allegedly scientific conclusions about them which actually depend upon hidden ad hoc assumptions. A theory that simply interprets the phenomenon of free will as illusory and denies the validity of this phenomenal fact is less attractive than a theory that accepts or accommodates the phenomenal fact.[^7]
+
+[^1]: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Lynn Nadel. Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet (Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy) (p. 8). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
+[^2]: D. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, London, Penguine Books, 2003
+[^3]: Robert Kane. The Significance of Free Will (Kindle Locations 314-316). Kindle Edition.
+[^4]: Tse, Peter Ulric. The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation (MIT Press) (Kindle Location 525). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition. 
+[^5]: Kim, Jaegwon. Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) (Page 3). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
+[^6]: Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essay on the Freedom of the Will (Dover Philosophical Classics) (p. 11). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition. 
+[^7]: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Lynn Nadel. Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet (Oxford Series in Neuroscience, Law, and Philosophy) (p. 8). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

content/post/hume-plato-and-the-impotence-of-reason.md

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+---
+title: "Hume, Plato, and the Impotence of Reason"
+date: 2018-02-25T22:53:32Z
+tags: ["hume","plato","reason","passion","the soul"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/elephant_chariot.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Hume infers from his insight that it is not reason but moral opinion that moves us to act, that reason is not the source of moral opinion. From this, he then further argues that moral opinion is a product of the passions – special emotions that arise out of the relations of ideas and impressions. In this essay, I will argue that Hume’s initial inference is correct, but that his subsequent inference is not. Passions may indeed arise from relations of ideas and impressions, but there is no good reason to presume passions, though necessary, are sufficient to produce a moral opinion.
+
+So, what exactly is a “moral opinion”? Plato believed that opinion (doxa) was something that lay in the gray area between true and false belief. He argued that opinion did not deserve the respect of a truth because it lacked the justification of an eternal, unchanging quality necessary to rise to the level of êpistêmê (true belief). If we apply this standard to moral opinion, then, it would be a doxastic belief about the rightness or wrongness of an action, or the goodness or badness of a character. Moral knowledge, on the other hand, would be a belief of a much stronger type. To say, for example, that I believe stealing to be unpleasant, or that I wouldn’t do it, or that it seems wrong, would be to say something contingently true, relative to myself, and subject to correction. To say, “stealing is wrong”, on the other hand, is to make a truth claim asserting the real existence of a property in a certain class of actions. To make such an assertion, I would need to be able to identify the property, point it out, and name it. That would require some sort of perception, and perception requires a sense organ or a faculty of the mind, or both. Plato would rule out a sense organ as the source of our moral knowledge, because sensible phenomena are mere imperfect reflections of the ultimate reality of the form of the good.
+
+The faculty of the mind that perceives such things as rightness or wrongness, according to Plato, is therefore a certain kind of judging faculty that need not rely on the senses. The traditional interpretation is to say that this is reason, and to make analogies to mathematics to bolster the claim because this is what Plato seems to do, but I disagree. In The Republic, Plato provides an ornate metaphor for his tripartite soul: that of a charioteer and two great horses. Plato puts reason in the charioteer’s seat, and assigns the role of appetite (passions) and judgment (moral judgment) to each of the two horses. This arrangement is important, because it speaks to Hume’s own assertion that “reason is and only ever ought to be the slave of the passions”. The charioteer is the apprehending ego, the “reasoning” member of the triad. He does not *motivate* the chariot. He only steers it. This is consonant with Hume’s view, that reason can only guide the passions, but where Hume fails is (to borrow Plato’s analogy), in thinking there is *only one horse*. Hume is presuming there is no judging faculty. With only one horse to pull the chariot, the best the driver can do is provide a bit of helpful guidance as the appetitive horse causes the chariot to careen in whatever direction its whim pulls it.
+
+Jonathan Haidt, in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, provides a more vivid metaphor: that of a thin, scantily clad tribesman mounted atop an unruly African elephant. In this metaphor, the elephant is almost entirely in control, and all the rider can do is suggest minor alterations in direction with a swat of reeds or a tug on a rope. His metaphor, like Hume, includes no faculty of judgment, no capacity to discern the difference between mathematical or empirical facts, and the normative consequences of actions taken in light of them. No capacity for selecting among possible goals. For Haidt, the elephant dictates the terms of engagement to the rider, and his only choice is over how enthusiastically he accepts them. Haidt is dutiful in his acceptance of Hume’s model of moral psychology. But Hume, as I have said, is wrong. Hume is indeed correct that the rider does not form his opinions on his own, but he is wrong to say that they necessarily derive from the elephant. Hume is ignoring the judging horse. Kant, reacting to his own observation of this problem, attempts to right the ship by overcorrecting in the opposite direction: he denies the importance of the appetitive horse, and gives control of the chariot exclusively to the driver. On Kant’s model, neither appetite nor judgment are empowered to lead us anywhere, and the charioteer is forced to get out and push the chariot, out of “respect for the moral law”. This will not do.
+
+To properly form a “moral opinion”, as anything more than just opinion, requires judgment. Judgment is the reconciliation of “is” with “ought”, by means of a value determination. That determination requires a negotiation of experienced desires and reasoned principles. In this way, the rider and his two chariot horses have an *equal say* in the speed, direction, and ultimate destination of the chariot. For all it’s metaphorical mysticism, Plato’s model of the tripartite soul is a profound insight into human character that is lacking in almost all of his successors, save perhaps, Aristotle. The rational portion of the soul is the master of what *is*, the appetitive portion is the master of what I *want* to be, and the judging portion of the soul is the master of what *ought* to be. Our task, as thinking, self-conscious human beings, is to train ourselves so that these masters learn to live in harmony with one another. When we do, the result is eudaemonia.

content/post/is-the-categorical-imperative-convincing.md

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+---
+title: "Is the Categorical Imperative Convincing?"
+date: 2017-11-09T23:20:49Z
+tags: ["kant","categorical imperative","moral logic"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/immanuel-kant.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+The following essay answers the question:
+
+> Are you convinced by Kant’s argument that there are categorical as well as hypothetical imperatives?
+
+This question is not asking us to evaluate whether the consequences of a system of bifurcated imperatives is preferable or not, or to judge whether such a system could “work”. Rather, it is asking whether Kant, in his Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, supplied a convincing argument that two sorts of imperatives *exist*. In other words, this is a logical and an ontological question, not a normative one.
+
+What does it mean for an imperative to “exist”? And what is an “imperative”, in an ontological sense? Kant seems to equivocate subtly on this point. In a few places, he wants to say it is a “command” or “rule” (i.e., that which we are obliged to obey). At others places, he wants it to mean “determinator” or “cause” (i.e., that which necessitates its effect). What’s worse, is that this variation in meaning doesn’t always correspond to his “laws of nature” and “laws of reason”, either.
+
+To be fair, Kant needn’t have worked quite so hard to prove the existence of hypothetical imperatives. That there are causal determinants of our “inclinations” and behaviors (even if only probabilistic in nature), and that we have the cognitive capacity to recognize and manipulate them in pursuit of objects of desire, seems to me to be a simple matter of brute observable fact. Getting from that to a conception of a hypothetical imperative is a single movement of thought, as far as I can tell. E.g., “If I want to get to Oxford, then I will need to book a ticket on the train from Waterloo”. And, there are all manner of social and legal “rules” that we choose to follow on similar grounds, every day: “If you don’t want a ticket, you oughtn’t park in the red zones”. Thus, I think a convincing argument for hypothetical imperatives is not only unnecessary, it’s nearly a self-evident truth.
+
+#### The Meat of the Matter
+
+What Kant does need to prove, is that there are two categories of imperatives, and that the latter exist regardless of (in fact, in spite of) empirical experience. So, what does Kant mean, when he says that the Categorical Imperative exists? He lays out a rather explicit syllogistic argument for this in the middle of essay two. I’ll try to give it a fair summary, so that we can evaluated it together, here:
+
+1 – Everything in nature works according to laws.
+2 – Only rational beings can act according to the conception of laws (aka can have a will).
+2a – the deduction of actions from principles requires reason.
+2b – therefore, the will (the seat of action) is itself practical reason.
+3 – If reason perfectly determines the will, then actions that are objectively necessary, are also subjectively necessary (i.e. necessarily good).
+4 – Reason does not perfectly determine the will.
+5 – If other determinants are subjective and conditional, then the will cannot accord necessarily with reason.
+6 – If the will does not perfectly accord with reason, then actions which are objectively necessary, are subjectively contingent.
+7 – If (6), then the determination of the will according to objective laws is obligation, not necessity.
+8 – The will does not perfectly accord with reason.
+9 – Therefore, the will is determined by a principles of reason, but not necessarily.
+
+Kant then summarizes the whole argument, as such:
+
+> …the conception of an objective principle that is obligatory is called a command of reason and its formula is an imperative. All imperatives are expressed by the word “ought” [or “shall”] and thereby indicate the relation of an objective law of reason to a will, which from its subjective constitution is not necessarily determined by it [because it is merely an obligation]…[^1]
+
+Kant was well aware of Hume and his “is-ought” problem (see Kant’s remarks about being “awakened” by Hume, from his “dogmatic slumber”, in the Prolegomena). So, I think this passage in the middle of essay two was Kant’s attempt to answer Hume directly, on how to bridge the categorical gap between “is” and “ought”. The answer seems to be, that objects of reason, under certain conditions (logical necessity, and universalizability), become determinants of the will. But, because this process is not one of absolute necessity, there must be something by which it can take place contingently. Kant tries to outline this process in steps 5, 6, and 7 of the argument. However, implicit in these steps is the fact that Kant has already asserted one set of laws for nature, and another set of laws for reason (classic Platonic idealism, by the way). In other words, Kant is presupposing what he is trying to prove — that there are laws of reason which we are obliged to obey.
+
+But even if I were to set aside this issue, there are yet several other problems I see with this argument, mainly at steps 2 and 2a. In attempting to explain what the will is, he asserts, “the deduction of actions from principles requires reason”. But, what does it mean to “deduce” an action? This seems to me, to be precisely the sleight-of-hand that Hume was talking about in the Treatise. Deduction is a formal means of deriving a truth from a series of propositions, one of which we might call the “conclusion”. An action, though, is neither true nor false. The propositional description can be, but it’s simply a non-sequitur, in the context of a proper deductive argument[^2] (e.g., “I drive the car”, or “He ran to the store”). Thus, neither can an imperative stand in its stead. Let’s take Kant’s false-promise example, to highlight my point:
+
+1 – If I tell a lie, I will escape an immediate harm.
+2 – If I tell the truth, I will suffer an immediate harm.
+C – I tell the truth.
+
+In this formulation, premise one and two are both weak. Firstly, both are hypothetical and would require empirical testing in order to assign a truth value to them (which makes them contingently true, by definition). Secondly, they’re completely independent of each other (in other words, there is nothing necessarily “leading” from premise one to premise two). I could leave either of them out of the argument, and it wouldn’t matter. Third, I could drop both premises, and (as pointed out above), the value of the so-called ‘conclusion’ would not be effected at all. It remains a description of some behavior, regardless of the premises. In other words, the conclusion is not actually a conclusion, but a free-floating descriptive proposition. At best, it’s a chronological terminus to a series of thoughts. But where’s the necessity in that?
+
+Now, I will add an additional premise, in an attempt to bolster Kant’s case:
+
+1 – If I tell a lie, I will escape an immediate harm.
+2 – If I tell the truth, I will suffer an immediate harm.
+3 – If everyone lied, making promises would become impossible.
+C – I tell the truth.
+
+Kant seems to think that this shows the truth of the Categorical Imperative (act only such that… etc), because lying cannot be universalized. But does it? Premise three, if true, would result in profoundly absurd consequences in practice, but that’s not the same thing as a logical contradiction. Even worse, it implies that consequences actually do matter. Yet, Kant has admitted earlier on that an argument from consequences cannot be obligatory (much less have any moral worth) because they are contingent, not necessary.
+
+In other words, the test of universalizability itself is not clear to me. On the one hand, he seems to be saying (I can’t recall exactly where), that anything that is logically contradictory is not universalizable (this would be something akin to Socrates’ search for definitions, I suppose — which comes with a whole host of its own problems). On the other hand, as with the lying example, he seems to be suggesting that it’s the speculative consequences that make the test fail (also, it seems to me that whether the bad outcome takes place in one instance or all instances doesn’t matter because once it fails for one person, the fail light turns red by definition). In short: If the standard is a purely logical one, then the fact that the duty would oblige us to lie all the time isn’t enough to fail the test. If the standard is preference for certain outcomes (i.e., “lying all the time isn’t practicable/sensible”), then he’s making an appeal to consequences in the material sense, and has violated his own system.
+
+In addition to all of the problems of the first syllogism applying just the same to this one, there is a much more damaging problem. What if we were to state the conclusion as an imperative? “I ought to tell the truth”. Immediately, we see David Hume poking his head out, and chiding us. Even if we had valid premises that were coherently connected, there is nothing that could get us from those descriptive statements of fact, to a conclusion constructed as an imperative to act. Kant seems to think that simply by hiding the normative language, we can escape having to justify the implicit presence of it. But the problem remains, all the same. Try as he might, Kant has not been able to wriggle his leg out of Hume’s bear trap.
+
+Finally, the Categorical Imperative could itself be expressed as a hypothetical imperative.
+
+“If you wish to do good, then you are never to act otherwise than so that you could also will that your maxim should become a universal law.”
+
+Nothing in Kant’s essay suggests to me why this would be necessarily incorrect. In fact, I am suspicious that all Kant did was to drop the hypothetical language in order to hide the fact that the categorical imperative was not actually categorical at all (just as he did during the explication of deriving actions deductively from premises. Thus, I do not think that Kant has made a convincing argument to prove the existence of a Categorical Imperative, even if we grant him his hypothetical imperatives.
+
+#### Final Thought…
+
+I think there is something very deeply seductive about the notion of universal absolutes. In addition to the logical certitude they offer, there is also the promise of independence from the authority or will of others. If I can appeal to a feature of reality over which none of us has power or authority, as a rationale for my behaviour, I am counter-intuitively empowered to independent action, in spite of any approval or disapproval of others.
+
+The problem is that universal absolutes are also, necessarily, so abstract they can never fully justify any particular “duty” to an action within the circumstances in which they arise (just see any of Kant’s practical examples of the Categorical Imperative or [read this essay](http://www.mesacc.edu/~davpy35701/text/kant-sup-right-to-lie.pdf) in which he is responding to someone who called him out on the problem of false promises, to see what I mean).
+
+I think those of use who grew up in intensely authoritarian or strongly religious households may be especially susceptible to this sort of thinking. The black-and-white of logical absolutes, combined with the lever of escape from the power of overbearing parents, makes for a potent psychological seed-bed in which a love for Kantianism is likely to take root.
+
+[^1]: Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: With Linked Table of Contents. Dancing Unicorn Books. Kindle Edition. 
+[^2]: To be fair, you could say that a description of action might be properly the conclusion of an inductive argument (e.g., “His keys are gone; his car is gone; therefore, he went to work”). But Kant is explicit that he is working from deduction here. 

content/post/judgment-and-virtue.md

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+---
+title: "Judgment and Virtue"
+date: 2018-01-25T23:07:19Z
+tags: ["virtue ethics","decision procedure","choice","moral calculus"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/cloudy-aristotle.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+It has been put by some that Virtue ethics lacks a decision-procedure to help us make moral decisions, and is therefore, not a good moral theory. In this essay, I will argue that the decision-procedure is not a satisfactory standard for judging ethical systems because they do not take the full experience of human morality into account, and because the theories instrumenting them often achieve exactly the opposite of their stated goal. I then offer an approach to virtue ethics that I think might salvage the theory as a whole, and I conclude that, despite my moral skepticism, such a theory would be preferable to decision-procedure based approaches.
+
+To begin with, why should a decision-procedure be the standard by which we judge a moral theory? It might be argued that decision-procedures are commonplace tools for making choices in many situations. So, why not under moral circumstances as well? While it is true that there are many contexts in which flowcharting and process modeling are useful, these are practical problems, not necessarily ethical ones. There is already a concrete goal in mind, risks have already been calculated, and processes are followed according to plan, in the hope of achieving the material goal. Decisions-procedures are explicitly useful in software development because, in fact, there is no other way to direct the behavior of the computer. It’s programs are its decision-procedures. It is designed to do nothing but execute those procedures against given inputs. Anyone familiar with the industry, knows that dozens of different languages for building decision-procedures proliferate, often for no other reason than that they are fun to invent. But the human mind is radically different from a computer. Not just in degree, but in kind. It is certainly true, as I just described, that the human mind can process decision-procedures. That’s what made computers possible in the first place. We’re very good at crafting tools to relieve ourselves of tedious burdens. Executing decision-procedures, though, is just one kind of operation in which the human mind engages. It is an organ (perhaps one of the most important organs) resting inside the head of a complex, dynamic, constantly changing biological organism with a sophisticated psychology that is capable of not just calculating sums or following instructions. It is an organ that is capable, in combination with the entire body of the organism, of emotional responses to its environment and, perhaps most important of all, making *qualitative evaluations* of the relationship between the sensed and calculated reality, and the subjective emotional response to that reality. This is where the realm of moral judgment lies: in the qualitative gap between subject and object. Decision-procedures, therefore, are the wrong “tool for the job”, because they fail (in all the prevailing theories) to account for the full moral experience of the human being.
+
+What’s more, the prevailing theories all boil morality down to a single principle such as the “categorical imperative”, or a single linear dimension of value such as the “pleasure principle”, and then their proponents build unidimensional decision-procedure instruction sets that inevitably lead to distressing absurdities or outright horrors. Utilitarian calculi (pick whichever one you want, really) tend to lead to devastations like the agricultural famine in the Ukraine in the name of equalizing opportunities for the cessation of hunger, or radical insanities like anti-natalism which argues that the goal of reducing overall suffering requires that we mandate barrenness on all of humanity. Kantians, on the other hand, would have us giving alms to the poor in the name of our ontological duty, but simultaneously commanding us to *not enjoy doing so*, on pain of moral condemnation.
+
+Lastly, Julia Annas[^1] points out that the decision-procedure (whatever it might be) looks suspiciously like a subtle substitution for mature judgment. Indeed, if we were mere robots or computers, with a slot in the side of the head into which one could insert an SD card with the appropriate set of procedural instructions, it would be hard to imagine why any such thing as philosophy, let alone ethics as a discipline, would even exist.
+
+Virtue ethics, insofar as it recognizes the developmental nature[^2] and experiential complexity of moral maturity, ‘gets it right’. But Aristotle didn’t have the tools or the intellectual framework to conceive of a model sophisticated enough to make much sense outside of Athens in the third century BC. What’s more, later iterations have consistently failed for much the same reason to craft a system of values that can be claimed of all humans (let alone, a method of evaluating the mastery of those values). One recent valiant attempt at this, comes from Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind”[^3] (though he would probably disagree that he was contributing to a system of Virtue Ethics). Haidt assembles a list of six “foundational” values that he attributes to everyone (in the west, at least) and argues that we differ with each other as human beings, only with respect to our psychological “sensitivity” to each of these six values (“care”, “fairness”, “loyalty”, “authority”, “sanctity”, and “liberty”). All six of these propensities are present and set to ‘default sensitivities’ at birth, but they fluctuate as we grow and are influenced by environmental pressures. It isn’t clear from his book whether these fluctuations are like studio sound-board knobs, that we consciously adjust (at least to some extent), or are merely barometer needles reporting the determined outcomes of causal factors. If the former is the case, then his psychological theory might provide the basis for an Aristotelian normative theory in which the position of each of these sensitivity ‘knobs’ is ‘tuned’ throughout life, for their optimal position. The point here isn’t to prove the case, but simply to show that the merger of psychology and normative ethics is at least plausible, and that such an approach would provide us with a developmental ethic that is simultaneously *measurable*.
+
+This, it seems to me, is the basis for the opposition to virtue ethics. Not the lack of a ‘decision-procedure’ *per se*, but the lack of a *measurable standard* by which I can justifiably judge someone. With a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of human psychology, the “journeyman / apprentice” developmental approach to virtue ethics provides an ethical mentorship system with measurable outcomes. However, I can imagine two potential problems with this concept. First, who decides what the list of values are, how many there are, and what the optimal sensitivity settings are? This problem implies the need for some sort of ur-ethic that can be used to evaluate the evaluation system – and suddenly, we’re plummeting into an infinite regress. Secondly, such a system could ultimately end up stratifying the society into the ‘enlightened’ graduates, and the ‘benighted savages’ who haven’t had the privilege of studying yet. To the first objection, I must admit I have no reply. It seems a bit like the problem of set-theory, and like set-theory, it calls the whole system into suspicion. But, if we’re willing to continue using sets – merely coping with the edge-case problems of set-theory – then why not this moral theory as well? Perhaps because set-theory won’t get you killed by the state, if you run afoul of its paradoxes while using it. To the second objection, I would say that this doesn’t seem to me like a serious concern. If it were fully adopted in an already liberal democratic culture, the transition would be almost invisible. Much of the system is simply describing habits of human psychology that we already observe. The rest would be a matter of crafting environments that steer developing minds in the right direction, while modeling appropriate behaviors. The latter is already a natural parental impulse, and the former could be done by modifications to existing social organizations or minor changes to legislation.
+
+Given these arguments, it seems to me that *if* virtue ethics deserves condemnation for its lack of a decision procedure, then the prevailing ethical systems that do implement a decision procedure deserve far greater condemnation for producing effects with those procedures that directly oppose their stated goals. Furthermore, given advances in psychology, and the flexibility of virtue ethics, it seems to me that give no other than these three options, a virtue theory coupled with a mature understanding of human psychology would be far superior, regardless of its lack of a formal decision procedure.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+
+[^1]: Ethical Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies) (p. 681). Wiley. Kindle Edition. 
+[^2]: ibid, p. 681
+[^3]: Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 146). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

content/post/morality-in-a-determined-world.md

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+---
+title: "Morality in a Determined World"
+date: 2017-10-15T23:35:29Z
+tags: ["free will","determinism","moral choice","ethics"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/morality-heads.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+This essay will attempt an answer to the following question: If determinism is true, is morality an illusion? In other words, if we take the basic fact of causal necessity – the brute physical explanation that every effect has a cause – as a given, can we justify a belief in moral value and normative judgment in the narrow sense of “good” and “bad”? I will argue that there are good reasons to believe in the reality of both moral judgment and moral value in spite of causal necessity. Firstly, I will show that causal necessity does not entail what determinists insist of it. Secondly, I will argue that causal necessity leaves us no choice but to accept the responsibility of making moral choices, as members of the human community. Lastly, I will argue that the status of morality as a real phenomenon need not rest on naïve notions of ontological independence from the human mind.
+
+The determinist insists on a universe in which all effects are perfectly determined from prior causes all the way back to the so-called “Big Bang”. He argues that we could, in principle, explain all effects in terms of their prior causes, if we only had the means to acquire enough knowledge to do so. We know from quantum physics that this is not actually true. Quantum indeterminacy shows that predictions at the sub-atomic level are a probabilistic affair, at best. Though this is not enough to claim free will (because brute randomness is just as much a causal driver as a perfectly predictable mechanical universe), it does show that the traditional view of determinism is in need of some updating. What’s more, as Peter Tse[^1] has argued, neural activity – one level up from the sub-atomic – is not a purely ballistic process (i.e., like billiard balls bouncing around). Rather, according to Tse, neurons behave more like a “store and forward” messaging system, in which groups of “epi-connected” neurons assemble into temporary networks, that collect and release electrochemical energy by way of criterial threshold triggers that may be pattern-specific. These criterial triggers can effect future neural states, and the arrangement of subsequent “epi-connected” networks, which makes their behavior indeterminate, but of a non-random nature. These two phenomenon (random quantum indeterminacy, and non-random neural indeterminacy) together, function as a necessary first condition for genuine choice-making activity in the brain. But none of this need be true, necessarily, to refute the main complaint of the determinist. Namely, that moral “responsibility” could not rest with the individual making the apparent choice, because the individual is not the “ultimate” cause of his behavior and because he’s not really making a choice. To begin with, there is no reason I know of, why responsibility can only rest on a causal terminus. So what if I’m not the ultimate cause of my choice? In fact, I can’t really think of any choice I’ve ever made, in which I was the originating source of the choice. By this reasoning, the Big Bang itself would become the ultimate scape goat. So, that objection seems spurious to me. On the question of whether I’m actually making a choice or not, this objection seems to beg the question it is trying to prove. Perhaps I am making an actual choice. The traditional determinist has yet to prove otherwise, and as I have shown, there is good evidence to suggest that he may be operating on obsolete information.
+
+But Dr. Tse’s work is, at the moment, only an untested theory. So, prudence and charity suggests that taking the determinist’s position as a given might be the safer bet. If the human mind is indeed determined in a ballistic sense, just as the rest of physical matter in the universe, and the barrier to making all human activity predictable is not one of principle, but of mere technological prowess, would this mean our impulse to moral judgment is illusory, or that maintaining moral position is indulging in a fiction? When I consider what it means to be a human being, I think not. While we are animals that have evolved just like all others have, we are yet primates of a very peculiar variety. We are creatures driven by a psychology that was chiseled out of environmental pressures that determined a set of genetic traits that were necessary for the reproductive success of primates in that early environment. That process has, as Frans de Waal[^2] has outlined, equipped us with a highly sophisticated cognitive and emotional apparatus (whether as primary or secondary traits is somewhat irrelevant at the moment), that enabled such things as gratification deferment, long-term planning, cost/benefit calculation, and comparative judgment. These traits have enabled highly sophisticated social interactions and complex social structures in which genetic relatedness, reciprocal altruism, sympathetic resentment, emotional contagion, empathy, and a robust theory of mind, have all culminated in a “moral sense” that is both self- and other-directed. This collection of “moral sentiments” is necessarily normative, because each of us, as a specimen of the human primate species, requires a means by which we can determine our “fit” in the social order so as to budget our resource acquisition and mating opportunities. The ways in which this evaluative process expresses itself and the individual, and subsequently the group, is going to vary broadly with climatic conditions and population (and is a topic for another time), but in general, when attitudes arising from these evaluations are systematized into moral “codes”, or political philosophies, this we want to call “morality”. What this means, is that morality is not illusory, but it is also not what we typically think it is. It is a psycho-biological phenomenon that consists in a process of continuous negotiation, competition, and collaboration, that regulate the behavior of the species over time, and in response to environmental pressures. There is a further consequence: as a member of this species, I have no choice but to participate in this process. My brain is constructed to perform these evaluative judgments, and to seek commerce with (and protection within) my in- groups. The common question, “why should I be moral?”, is thus answerable by saying that you already are, necessarily. The only thing that remains is, what are you going to do about it?
+
+It might be objected at this point, that these evaluations are purely mythical because no such qualities as “good” and “bad” can be identified in the actions of an individual in the way that angular momentum or velocity can be. Or, it may be contested that because such things as moral “value” are negotiated, they are a mere “social construct”, and therefore ought not be taken seriously. Both objections, it seems to me, come down to an unreasonably reductive insistence on a narrow conception of “existence” as nothing more than physical matter and energy. Even the most materialist of Marxist economists would be willing to acknowledge the “real” store of value present in a ten pound note. As noted above, such things as the capacity for long-term planning, gratification deferment, and cost-benefit calculation (as well as language, and a sense of reciprocity and expectation), enable the creation of real symbols of evaluative judgment – simple commodities upon which we psychologically project a certain qualitative or quantitative meaning. While it is true that different groups of people have used different commodities and have imbued those tokens with different degrees of importance and different kinds of meaning, they have all nonetheless engaged in the creation and representation of real value. If we are willing to accept this as an example of value in real form, why would we not accept the same for morality? Why would we take the collective store of moral value to be less “real”, than the collective store of economic value? Seems to me, without a principle for making such a choice, I’d only be engaging in an act of caprice, and denying my own nature in the process.
+
+The arguments above cannot help us explain what kinds of things we need to evaluate, what means of evaluation we ought to engage in, how much importance the evaluations deserve, or even which evaluations are appropriate in any given situation. Rather, all I have tried to show, is that accepting a deterministic view of reality hardly excuses us from the fact of morality, as a human phenomenon. Far from excusing us from moral choice because mere illusion, a deterministic understanding, when coupled with the science of evolution and psychology, makes morality an inescapable inevitability for us (or, at least, a biological fact of life – even if accidental). What’s more, in trying to characterize morality as an “illusion” because of causal necessity or biological determination, we’re doing nothing less than trying to deny the responsibility with which nature itself has tasked us. For those of us who choose to take up this burden, the challenge is precisely this: to explain what it really is, and to show how we can best make use of it.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+
+[^1]: Peter Tse, The Neural Basis of Free Will, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2013 
+[^2]: Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006 

content/post/musings-on-the-problem-of-the-state.md

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+---
+title: "Musings on the Problem of the State"
+date: 2018-07-05T22:14:25Z
+tags: ["the republic","democracy","legitimacy"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/plato-and-aristotle.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Socrates, in *The Republic*, argues that a society must be ordered, and that the just and ordered polity requires a just and well ordered soul. But, not all souls will achieve the rational ideal, says the anarchist. He has a point. However, this leaves both the advocate of a state and the political anarchist with a problem. An anarchy of disordered souls is pure chaos. A state of disordered souls is a tyranny. Plato solved this dilemma simply by putting the most just and ordered souls “in charge” of the polity. But, of course, this is no solution at all for the voluntarist. He thinks there can be no such thing as a just society, over which a state rules, because rule is unjust by definition. Plato, of course, had much more to say about this. We’ll return to him shortly. In the meantime, a history lesson is necessary.
+
+Ancient Greek society (between 1100-700 BC) was primarily composed of wealthy families that had formed a loosely connected society of clans. Their primary mode of justice was inter- and intra-familial retribution. After this Greek “dark age”, came the Archaic and Classical period, and along with it, the transition to the city-state. That transition included surrendering the natural right of personal retribution to a central and “neutral” authority that would adjudicate those disputes. Euripides’ play *Oresteia* is an allegory describing this transition and highlighting the necessity of the institution of the city-state as a part of that transition. At the end of the play, Athena comes down from Olympus and imposes Olympian justice upon Orestes, driving the Erinyes underground. The Erinyes are symbols of primal justice; Athena is a symbol of the sublimation of those dark passions, and the *delegation* of our primal powers of retribution to a rational manager, for the betterment of all.
+
+Nietzsche recognized this sublimation, and railed against it in works like *The Genealogy of Morals*. This view of our ancient past, exemplified also by Hebrew history, constitutes the basis for his master-slave morality theory, and the will to power. His goal was to end the alienation of ourselves from our capacity to enact primal justice. His “over-man”, would supposedly be such a person. Unfettered by “soft” Christian morality, he would experience no inner “laceration” when acting out what is his right, by natural endowment of power. This is a very decidedly non-rational approach to the end of the state, and arguably (if you take the words of someone like Jonathan Haidt[1](https://exitingthecave.com/musings-on-the-problem-of-the-state/#fn-528-1) to be correct), more true to the actual nature of man. However, even if Nietzsche’s idea could somehow come true, it is ultimately doomed because the law of nature (as a doctrine of raw power) affords no opportunity for such things as industry, art, and science, which require a society that is stabilized by common doctrines and predictable rules of behavior.[2](https://exitingthecave.com/musings-on-the-problem-of-the-state/#fn-528-2)
+
+Plato recognized this problem not only in *The Republic*, but also in works like *The Gorgias*. The doctrine of the character of Callicles is so strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s own vainglorious rantings about “men of true courage and honor” and “blonde beasts”, that it is difficult to suppress the thought that when Nietzsche wrote *Beyond Good and Evil*, he must have had Plato’s Callicles in mind:
+
+> …by the rule of nature, to suffer injustice is the greater disgrace because the greater evil; but conventionally, to do evil is the more disgraceful. For the suffering of injustice is not the part of a man, but of a slave, who indeed had better die than live; since when he is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares. The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice (compare Republic), whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior… according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,—charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth. [3](https://exitingthecave.com/musings-on-the-problem-of-the-state/#fn-528-3)
+
+Yet, seen for what it is, the voluntarist doctrine is demanding something even more preposterous and tragic than Nietzsche’s plan. They also want to end the alienation of the Erinyes, but they think they can somehow maintain the edifice of Athena in the process. This would require cutting Athena up into 7.5 billion individual pieces, and distributing her evenly across the demos. This, of course, would mean the death of Athena. Something else Nietzsche recognized, with some horror. But Nietzsche still thought that returning to some sort of primordial self would somehow rescue humanity from the ignominy of the slave. This gets the causality exactly backward. It is the return to the primordial that kills God, not the other way ’round.[4](https://exitingthecave.com/musings-on-the-problem-of-the-state/#fn-528-4)
+
+What anarchists have to prove, then, is how we return to the primordial and yet somehow simultaneously maintain the edifice of Athenian justice we all still highly value. I do not think they can. But there is one approach to this problem, that might work.
+
+It is true that men have the capacity for good in them. But what optimistic folks like the voluntarists want to avoid, is precisely what Jung pointed out explicitly (and Plato recognised implicitly): the degree to which we are capable of good, is the degree to which we are capable of bad. Jordan Peterson argues that the good is the successful navigation of the narrow pathway between order and chaos. If the voluntarist can show that the state, as presently constituted in its best-case-scenario in the present (Say, the United States, or Australia, or the UK) is not a good exemplar of the justice of Athena, that a reconstitution would also fail this idea, and that an open system of privately negotiated contract law can represent the ideal better, without devolving into a system of mutually reciprocal vengeance — ie, that voluntarism does a better job of negotiating the gap between order and chaos than a well-ordered and just state, then I might be convinced.
+
+Some advocates for voluntarism object to this line of reasoning, on the grounds that it is self-refuting. If men do indeed suffer from corruptibility, then why advocate for a social system that would put an enormous amount of power in their hands? Indeed, read from an angle, it could be argued that this is also something about which Callicles is warning us. To this objection, I would argue that this corruptibility is what would also cause something like a society constructed entirely of privately negotiated contracts to devolve into reciprocal vengeance. What’s more, the ancients realized this themselves, and instituted the state in an effort to mitigate against it — and *this* is what Callicles and Nietzsche are bemoaning.
+
+There is, finally, one more point to be made about this problem. It turns out that Jonathan Haidt (and Callicles) are wrong. As I said before, men have the capacity for both good and evil, rationality and irrationality. The social scientists make the mistake of thinking that what they measure right now and on average, is what all men are, have always been, and always will be. But this need not be the case. Aristotle, for example, shows in the Nicomachean ethics, that we are driven by more than just passions (As Hume would call it). We are also virtue driven creatures, as much as we are appetite driven. The truth is, in a society of predominantly appetite driven men, *both* political systems would fall into corruption. The political philosophers of the English Enlightenment recognized this as well. No society can survive, when virtue stops being the dominant motivation of its citizens. As I said at the beginning, this is why Plato just put the ordered souls “in charge”. But someone like Madison or Jefferson might argue for a more optimistic view, in which we endeavor as a society, to create an entire polity of well-ordered souls. At the beginning of the American experiment, it certainly seemed like it might work, in spite of its rocky beginnings. It’s clear from history, that this optimism was at best over-enthusiastic. But this is no argument for abandoning the state as an institution. Rather, it is an argument for extreme humility and caution, in imagining what the state is capable of accomplishing. In the beginning, it’s purpose was merely to generalize the responsibility for justice, and to establish uniformity in its meting out. History shows that even this goal is difficult, if not impossible at times, to accomplish — even in a highly virtuous society.
+
+Somewhere between the totalitarian nightmare of Plato’s *Republic*, and the uncertain primitive world of clan warfare, lies a golden mean. The closer to virtue we can get, as citizens, the closer we can get to this golden mean as a society. Once again, Jordan Peterson’s admonition to walk the line between “order” and “chaos” makes itself clear. What’s interesting about Aristotle’s view of virtue, is that this ideal mean was not absolute center, but could lean left or right, relative to the particular virtue or circumstance. This, it seems to me, is a perfect description of the political landscape. These days, it is drifting ever more out of kilter, mostly because we have abandoned the collective project of the *individual* pursuit of virtue, in favor of a lust for power. This is why, I think, voices like Jordan Peterson’s are so maligned, and so important. If we were all some variety of man like him, anarchy would not seem so attractive. Indeed, it would not even be necessary.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+
+[^1]: The metaphor of the “Elephant and the Rider” is a more than obvious allusion to his belief in the fundamental irrationality of the soul. See “The Righteous Mind” 
+[^2]: I am well aware of the common voluntarist objection that there is an apparent paradox inherent in the idea of needing a state for a civilized market economy, and technological progress. I will deal with that in another post. This topic is far too large for the moment. 
+[^3]: Gorgias, beginning at 483a: https://bit.ly/2u0wRL7 
+[^4]: This is another thesis that will require a separate post. Suffice to say here, that the sophisticated notion of God that we have inherited in the west, is one that incorporates both neo-Platonic and Aristotelian notion of the Ultimate Good for man, and a social order organized around it, necessary for a stable social order that has Truth as a goal. 

content/post/philippa-foot-and-I-exchange-words.md

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+---
+title: "Philippa Foot and I Exchange Words"
+date: 2018-04-08T22:33:36Z
+tags: ["virtue","vice","justice","ethics"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/justice_with_virtue_and_vice.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+The following pseudo-dialogue is based on my reading of part three of Philippa Foot’s famous essay, “Virtues and Vices”, which can be [found here](http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/Readings/VirtureViceChap1.pdf). All of her “dialogue” constitutes direct quotes from the essay. In this essay, she seems to me to be anxious about identifying vice for what it is and has crafted a sophisticated means of diluting the boundaries between virtue and vice, in order to relieve that anxiety. I could be wrong, of course. But Here is my engagement with those portions of the text that seem to me to be pointing in that direction.
+
+------
+
+**FOOT:** Is there not more difficulty than might first appear in the idea of an act of injustice which is nevertheless an act of courage? Suppose, for instance, that a sordid murder were in question, say a murder done for gain or to get an inconvenient person out of the way, but that this murder had to be done in alarming circumstances or in the face of real danger; should we be happy to say that such an action was an act of courage?
+
+**ME:** No, I think not. Courage, the virtue, is not the mere capacity to act regardless of any fear we might feel. It is not simply overcoming fear to whatever acts we desire a license to commit. Rather, courage is the capacity to *do what is right* regardless of the fear. It is overcoming fear of personal risk when an act of duty, or benevolence, or justice is required of us. Courage is not licentiousness, it is a kind of discipline of the soul.
+
+**FOOT:** [but] there is no doubt that the murderer who *murdered for gain* was not a coward: he did not have this second moral defect which another villain might have had. There is no difficulty about this because it is clear that one defect may neutralize another. As Aquinas remarked, it is better for a blind horse if it is slow…
+
+**ME:** No, this is wrong. What this hypothetical murderer lacks is not cowardice, but courage. But let me back up a second. Our murderer can be one of two types of people. It could be he has no conscience, or lacks the capacity to “hear” his conscience when it pricks him. If this is the case, then he is no better than an animal or a madman, and it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of virtues and vices in such a creature, because they cannot make choices. Or, it could be that our murderer has a conscience, and can hear it, but is not heeding it because he has chosen to obey his avarice rather than his conscience. I say this is an act of cowardice. Acts of cowardice always have the goal of alleviating some momentary or short-term want or desire or discomfort. Murder, rape, assault, robbery, fraud: all of these things get us something *right now*, at the expense of the future and the health of our own souls. In the case of this murder, as you say, a pile of booty or the elimination of an inconvenient person. In other cases, it might be the discharge of rage, or the capture of a prize. It takes enormous courage to recognize in ourselves that we each are capable of acting in these ways, *and then choosing not to*. There is no guarantee that having the courage to obey the conscience will result in material good in the future, of course. That is partly what makes it an act of courage to refrain from the murder. On this account, the fact that the act of murder itself might include “alarming circumstances”, is irrelevant.
+
+**FOOT:** [But] his courage *will* often result in good; it may enable him to do many innocent or positively good things for himself or for his family and friends. On the strength of an individual bad action we can hardly say that in him courage is not a virtue.
+
+**ME:** Philippa, what is wrong with you? First, you equate courage with a willingness to commit murder, and now you equate the Good purely with the material gains acquired as a result of that willingness to murder? This is one of the reasons I am not a consequentialist. My prior response to you is sufficient to answer this. The murderer is not exhibiting courage, but cowardice. Further, there is no good reason to think that material gain is always *necessarily* a positive good. It could be, that if the murderer had refrained from killing said victim, an opportunity to gain something even more valuable might have arisen. There’s no way to know for sure, but even if it is guaranteed that he is destined to no material gain whatsoever in refraining from the murder, one would have to be a very peculiarly narrow consequentialist indeed to rule his restraint a morally wrong action.
+
+**FOOT:** One way out of this difficulty might be to say that the man who is ready to pursue bad ends does indeed have courage, and shows courage in his action, but that in him courage is not a virtue… courage is not operating as a virtue when the murderer turns his courage, which is a virtue, to bad ends.
+
+**ME:** Firstly, the murder is not an “end”, as such. It is a means to an end, which you said was material gain or the elimination of an inconvenient person. That aside, however, why are you so insistent on diluting the meaning of virtues like courage? I cannot help but wonder if you actually understand Aristotle at all, or if there might be something psychological going on. I have already explained how this murderer is not showing courage at all, but cowardice. But even if we consider any other habit or disposition of character described by Aristotle’s ethics, what we find is that the definition of a virtue is a capacity to follow a narrow path of right behavior that cuts through the center between two wide expanses of *vice* at either extreme. What’s more, he explicitly identifies the vices of cowardice and foolhardiness as the extremes on either side of the virtue courage. But, let’s take your example of industriousness in this article, to illustrate the point even more: the extreme to the left of the virtue would be the *vice of sloth*, and the extreme to the right of the virtue would be the *vice of slavishness*. There is no circumstance in which the virtue of industriousness is “operating” as either of those vices, because then it would be one of the two vices, and not the virtue. And, there is no circumstance in which the virtue of industriousness could be “operating” as a virtue, and come to vicious ends. That’s not how virtues work.
+
+**FOOT:** [But while it’s true that] wisdom always operates as a virtue, its close relation prudence does not… for in some, it is rather an over-anxious concern for safety and propriety, and a determination to keep away from people or situations which are apt to bring trouble with them; and by such defensiveness, much good is lost.
+
+**ME:** Now you’re just making my point for me. Your own language, “over-anxious concern” is nearly good enough to act as a label for the actual vice we’re dealing with here. What you’re describing is not prudence, but either the *vice of timidness* or the *vice of cowardice* (ironically enough). Why are you so afraid of naming the vices, in an article that includes the word right in the title?
+
+**FOOT:** Of course what is best is to live boldly yet without imprudence or intemperance, but the fact is that rather few can manage that!
+
+**ME:** But that’s exactly the point! Virtue is something that is possible for all of us, but also very difficult for all of us. It wouldn’t be a virtue if you needn’t have worked very hard at it. As you said yourself, *”virtues are about what is difficult for men.”* I don’t understand why that’s suddenly a problem for you, here in part III of the essay.
+
+Anyway, it’s no wonder modern society is so corrupt, when its philosophers keep trying to turn the vicious man into the virtuous man, and deploying obfuscating language like “inoperative virtues” to hide the real nature of *vices*. No matter how anxious we might get about having to properly judge character from a meritocratic understanding of the noble soul, shrinking from this duty into the comfortable “everybody gets a trophy” mentality is only going to make things worse. We make a mockery of morality when we do this, and show our children that we don’t actually care for the health of either their souls, or our own. We need to screw up the courage to call things by their right names, and name the vices.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+

content/post/plato-and-nietzsche-the-end-and-the-beginning.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: "Plato and Nietzsche - The End and the Beginning"
+date: 2018-04-14T22:27:59Z
+tags: ["plato", "nietzsche", "faith", "reason"]
+topics: ["philosophy","theology"]
+image: /img/apotheosis.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+> I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’ ~Isaiah 46:10
+
+In [The Republic](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Republic-Plato-ebook/dp/B06XX974WC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1523736862&sr=8-2&keywords=plato+republic), Socrates repeatedly insists that truth will be the highest value of his utopian society. To accomplish this, he argues that the myths of Homer and Hesiod should be hewn down to only those stories that are in accordance with what we know to be true, by proper philosophic study and dialectic argumentation. He further describes how the golden souls — those destined to be the philosopher king rulers of this utopia — having been weened and nurtured on these stories of truth, and having eventually come to know the truth for themselves in adulthood, will happily choose to submit themselves to the proper order of a truly just society.
+
+And yet, he goes on to deny these “guardians” their own property, wives, or children, on the grounds that they will be overcome by their natural impulse to self-interest and find themselves in conflict with the good of the society as a whole. To mitigate the contradiction, in other words, Plato decides to institute a form of primitive communism. In order to institute the communization of guardian life, Plato has Socrates declare the necessity for the founders of this society to instill a falsehood in the first generation of guardians. This is to be a new myth, in which their childhoods were but a mere dream implanted in their memories by their ‘true’ mother, the soil of Hellas which birthed them whole, and to which they now owe their undying allegiance.
+
+Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, expresses an explicitly self-conscious pang of guilt to Glaucon at the utterance of this “noble lie”, as well he should. This is because this step in Socrates’ argument (if it is Socrates’ argument) is the complete undoing of his entire utopian vision. To put the point bluntly, one cannot base an entire society on the absolute value of truth (and beauty) as ultimate ends, while simultaneously infecting it with an obvious and egregious lie at its core — even if that lie is encapsulated in a rapturous myth. Eventually, the love of truth will expose the myth for the lie that it is, and the entire civilization will dissolve into nihilism and hedonism.
+
+This should be ringing some bells for wary modern ears. Another great philosopher once identified exactly the same flaw in our own society. If you’ve ever read Nietzsche’s [Genealogy of Morals](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genealogy-Morals-Dover-Thrift-Editions-ebook/dp/B00A62Y18E/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1523737119&sr=1-1&keywords=genealogy+of+morals&dpID=41Mdw5VWLcL&preST=_SY445_QL70_&dpSrc=srch), or [Thus Spake Zarathustra](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thus-Spake-Zarathustra-book-none-ebook/dp/B0082USJ9Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1523737199&sr=1-1&keywords=thus+spake+zarathustra), you know what I’m alluding to. In these works, Nietzsche describes a western society that is dedicated to truth as an ultimate value, but simultaneously committed to a mythology that elevates self-sacrifice as a means of redemption from sin against the creator god himself. Because this mythology has an ultimate value in competition with truth — namely, self-justification through redemption versus self-justification through the pursuit of truth – and because truth is a natural acid to mythology, the mythology is ultimately doomed to fail, and the value hierarchy along with it. In other words, the death of God will spell the death of our civilization. Nietzsche thought this was because truth alone could not stand as sufficiently meaningful to stave off the onset of nihilism, but I think the dissolution of *this* myth has rendered us incapable of imbibing truth through myth anymore; and even more deadly, has left us certain that redemption is no longer necessary, let alone possible.
+
+In any case, Nietzsche tried in vain to rescue us from our fate, but his work on the revaluation of all values is as horrifying as it is tragic. In it, you can hear the strong echoes of voices like [Callicles from the Gorgias](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gorgias-Plato-ebook/dp/B0082S22O4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1523737535&sr=1-1&keywords=gorgias), whispers of [Protagoras](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Protagoras-Plato-ebook/dp/B0082T10JQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1523737570&sr=1-1&keywords=protagoras), and of course, whole refrains of Thrasymachus from The Republic. Socrates does a masterful job of dispatching Callicles and Protagoras, but there are niggling missteps in the argument of The Republic around the problem of self-interest and the common good that he is never quite able to put to bed. That should give one pause, and I do find these realizations immensely disturbing. It means that recent critics of the Enlightenment are very likely on to something, even if they may be wrong in the particulars. It means that, after all these centuries, not only have we not solved the problem of value, we still don’t have a clear answer to the much more primitive problem of the relationship of the individual to his society. This last realization came itself on the heels of another recent realization: Plato’s model of moral psychology is far more sophisticated than our own, and men like Hume and Mill have done an enormous amount of damage to the study of the nature of the human soul (as Plato would have put it), by trying to reduce it to mere sensual satisfactions (i.e., pleasure-seeking). In the process, they’ve made it more difficult than ever before, to solve the two problems I’ve enumerated here.
+
+Modern-day acolytes of Hume (see [my review of Jonathan Haidt’s book](http://philosophy.gmgauthier.com/haidt-the-righteous-mind/)), recognizing the primitive nature of Hume’s work, have attempted to layer on modern explanations for his rudimentary theories of moral psychology, but this is doomed to failure, because it reflexively dismisses Plato as archaic, merely because he came before Hume (Haidt even tragically references The Republic in his unfortunate book). This is a mistake I’ll have much more to say about in future, but for now, suffice to say that we are living in dangerously perilous times. A world which both Plato and Aristotle would have found horrifying. A world in which we are being encouraged from birth to indulge our appetitive nature, and to believe there is no such thing as a spirited conscience, or a free will with which to act upon it. In spite of the shiny *appearance* of “progress” our science and technology has glossed the world in, it seems to me that this modern evacuation of such concepts as conscience and will can only lead to disaster. In our zest for truth, we’ve abandoned the false myths of religion, but have tossed out the true myths of moral psychology along with it, and now we can’t seem to find our way back.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+

content/post/plato-freud-orwell-and-the-danger-of-the-modern-mind.md

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+---
+title: "Plato, Freud, Orwell, and the Danger of the Modern Mind"
+date: 2017-07-18T23:42:27Z
+tags: ["the soul","moral psychology","virtue"]
+topics: ["philosophy","psychology","culture"]
+image: /img/platos-soul.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+In The Phaedrus, Plato offers up two rapturously beautiful visions of the soul of man. The first, is the Manichaean winged being of pure beauty, trapped against its will in a prison of corporeal form, and able to find relief only in the apprehension and achievement of true love. The second is a famous metaphor who’s hold on the modern mind is as ubiquitous as it is distorted and tragic.
+
+Plato divides the soul up into three parts by likening it to a charioteer driving a chariot with two very head-strong steeds. It may be tempting to think of the charioteer as predominating in the relationship from the start, since he is the driver. But Plato describes a relation in which the charioteer is as much dependent upon his steeds, as they are subject to his admonitions. Nonetheless, he does also describe a process of perfection, whereby the charioteer brings the horses to heel, in pursuit of heavenly bliss. So it is likely that Plato imagined a process of maturation; one in which, though initially equal, the charioteer ought to end up the dominant member of the trio, reliant upon his horses only insofar as they are able to work in concert with him to reach the vault of heaven.
+
+This is especially interesting, when we examine the nature of the steeds. According to Plato, one is ‘noble’, the other ‘ignoble’. The ‘noble’ steed, whose coat is pure white, is a representative of moral courage and a natural guide to heaven. The ‘ignoble’ steed, on the other hand, has a black coat and is disfigured and ill-tempered. It represents animal nature, carnal desires, and rage, and leads the chariot naturally to earth. The white steed will obey the charioteer’s instructions without the whip, only insofar as the charioteer is driving toward the good; the black horse rebels against all commands, regardless of direction — until it is beaten into submission.
+
+Clearly, Plato is describing a struggle between the moral conscience and the biological urges in every normal human being. But, to borrow a concept from Freud, Plato seems to want to equate the ego with the moral conscience (or, at least, equate their separate intentions, more so than with the black horse). This equation will figure heavily on the remainder of this exploration.
+
+Speaking of Freud, it cannot be an accident that his own theory of consciousness is tripartite, and of roughly the same character in its various parts. Freud hypothesizes an ‘id’, and a ‘super-ego’, as the analogues of the black and white horses. As I have already mentioned, he also hypothesizes an ‘ego’, that must negotiate between them. But, unlike Plato, Freud’s ego is not a charioteer. It doesn’t seem to be an equal partner at all, and often is depicted as far less vigorous than either of the two horses. At best, the ego is described as a rider on horseback, but who’s horse is ready to throw him at the first sign of disagreement. In fact, late in his book ‘The Ego and The Id’, the ego is depicted quite literally as an impotent “go-between”, tortured on one side by the dark terrors lurking in the black depths of the id, and on the other by the constant overbearing threat of recrimination and punishment from the all-seeing eye of the super-ego. To be fair, Freud was describing what he considered to be the pathological cases, in order to highlight the roles of each of the three aspects of consciousness, but it is not at all clear from his writing where the boundary between normalcy and pathology can be drawn. What’s more, he never takes the time in any of his other writings (as far as I am aware) to describe the “healthy” case, even in outline, and this has led most lay-people to take his hypothesis of pathology as representative of all psychology.
+
+In any case, Freud’s model places the id in the dominant position in the partnership trio, acting as an inscrutable black box brimming with primitive passions, desires, and needs, about which the ego is almost helpless to do anything. As each of these things comes bubbling out of the cauldron of the id, the ego is tasked with either satisfying them as best it can, or repressing them, depending on what it learns from the super-ego. The super-ego, then (a representative of fatherly reproach) is far from a noble horse. It acts more-or-less as a negative reinforcement mechanism, punishing the ego for satisfying when it should have repressed, or repressing when it should have satisfied.
+
+Freud’s general model is still quite fashionable today, because of its implicit determinism, and the superficial escape from responsibility this seems to offer us. The language of his theories permeates the culture: ego, id, libido, sex-drive, and so on. Very much the same way that Plato’s conceptual model of the soul permeates Freud’s theory. It is quite remarkable to me, just how inescapably pervasive are the ideas of some philosophers, informing our interpretation of the world, and even shaping the way in which we experience that world, from thousands of years in the past.
+
+One modern author who’s work seems touched by just such an unconscious awareness, is the unlikely prophet, George Orwell. At first glance, his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four looks like a typical dystopian future science fiction. But a closer inspection reveals a very Freudian psychological drama unfolding with horrifying and tragic consequences. Orwell, whether he realized it or not, was warning that we unseat the charioteer at our own peril.
+
+The novel opens by giving us a glimpse of a world completely dominated and oppressed by a super-ego so over-active and so ubiquitous, that there is nowhere and nothing that it cannot reach — and cannot punish. Yet, in spite of this, a weak but still yearning ego somehow manages to escape view (or so it believes) in one tiny dark corner of its only private space. This ego, interestingly enough, is tasked with the professional work of the destruction of its own history, and the continuous reinvention of a moving present in which the super-ego is the supreme ruler and judge of all. A present the ego desperately (and secretly) wishes to escape.
+
+For Plato, the white horse represents the moral conscience, just like the super-ego. But the white horse was also a representative of the aspiration to ultimate truth and beauty – the route to the vault of heaven. Plato’s depiction of this horse is one of stoic stoutness, not tyrannical obstinacy. In fact, it is the black horse that is depicted as the obstinate one. So, how is it that Orwell’s white steed is distorted into such a monster (in the form of Big Brother)? By way of Freud. In The Ego and the Id, Freud describes a process whereby the id and the super-ego work together as a kind of tag-team, taking turns tempting and then punishing the frail ego, particularly in cases of deep melancholia or obsessional neurosis. This can become so severe in melancholia cases, that the ‘death instinct’ and the ‘life [sex] instinct’ become virtually fused in the psyche, resulting in the literal death of the ego, and the actual death of the patient.
+
+These observations should be ringing a few bells, if you’ve read your Orwell. Lacking any proper guide in the form of his own white horse, the hapless ego – Winston – stumbles about in the gray universe of The Party, hoping to somehow find the kind of true love Plato orates for us in the Phaedrus. But, instead, he tragically mistakes the ecstasy of satisfying long deprived carnal pleasures for the attainment of just that true love, in the consummation of his relationship with Julia. Julia – the representative of Winston’s id – turns out to be precisely the kind of vicious collaborator Freud depicted in the obsessional neurotic. The white horse and the black horse are merged into an unnatural chimera of self-annihilation, and Winston his handed over to Big Brother. The despair proves to be too much, and he is doomed finally to the death of his true self – his soul, as Plato no doubt would have put it.
+
+The genius of Plato was both in recognizing the reality of these competing features of the human psyche, and in realizing that ultimately it is the rational portion that must stand apart from the horses and act as the ‘guardian’ of the entire self, rather than the hopelessly inadequate servant to the fractious elements, competing for its efforts. The genius of Orwell, whether he quite knew it or not, was in recognizing that modern man had surrendered responsibility for the charioteer by embracing men like Skinner and Freud, and that nothing good would ever come of it.

content/post/plato-parmenides-and-the-theory-of-forms-part-1.md

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+title: "Plato, Parmenides, and the Theory of Forms - Part 1"
+date: 2018-07-23T22:03:31Z
+tags: ["plato","parmenides","eidos","forms","idealism"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/form-blocks.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+It has become a commonplace habit in contemporary quasi-philosophical circles, to roll one’s eyes and snicker, or to sneer and sniff, whenever the mention of Plato’s Forms happens to sour the air. It seems to be taken for granted these days, that the Forms “just aren’t done” anymore, that somehow they’ve been shown to be disreputable or false, and that no one need any longer to take the idea seriously (least of all, professional philosophers). Yet, at the same time, one habit I have acquired during the last four years of intensive study of philosophy as a genuine student, is the reflex of taking people’s ideas seriously — and, for all the dismissals, nobody has ever bothered to explain to me *why* the Forms are no longer taken seriously, or *how* they’ve been shown to be disreputable.
+
+Over the next three posts, I will be outlining the theory of Forms, beginning today with why Plato might have concocted the theory in the first place, moving next to what exactly the theory is and how it works, and finishing up with an analysis of the criticisms of the Forms offered by Parmenides (primarily), and a few others since. The point of these posts is to answer for myself the why and how questions nobody else is either willing or able to give me. That process has to begin with the reflex I just mentioned. In order to be confident of why I ought to either accept or reject this theory, I need to understand the theory, and to understand it, I need to portray it to myself, as closely as possible as Plato would have portrayed it to himself. Along the way, I hope others find these posts useful as well. On to today’s topic:
+
+### Why Forms?
+
+> We may give [the presocratics] credit for having built on the solid fact that all physics, if not all science, has a mathematical basis… ~G.M.A. Grube, Plato’s Thought
+>
+> When Forms are what they are in relation to one another, their essence is determined by the relation among themselves, and has nothing to do with resemblances… ~Plato, Parmenides
+
+Socrates seemed to have been engaged in a project very similar to that of the presocratics. His theory of Forms[^1] (if we can rightly attribute it to him, and not just Plato) seems to be an attempt to do in the qualitative sense, what the Pythagoreans had done in the quantitative sense. By positing a theory of Forms for qualities such as “Likeness”, or “Beauty”, or “Greatness”, or “Justice”, Socrates seemingly hoped he could show the ultimate intelligibility of every facet of experiential reality, to be just as absolute and true as the sum of a series of numbers, or the square of the hypotenuse. “Ideas are what they are in relation to one another”, Parmenides echoes back to Socrates in his eponymous dialogue, in the same way that numbers are what they are in relation to one another. If that is so, and we can use numbers to say certainly true and useful things about the contents of the material world, then surely the same is possible for the Forms in relation to the experiential world. Aristotle appears to be partially confirming this hunch, in his Metaphysics:
+
+> …Socrates, disregarding the physical universe and confining his study to moral questions, sought in this sphere for the universal… Plato followed him and assumed that the problem of definition is concerned not with any sensible thing but with entities of another kind; for the reason that there can be no general definition of sensible things which are always changing. These entities he called “Forms,” and held that all sensible things are named after them sensible and in virtue of their relation to them; whereas the Pythagoreans say that things exist by imitation of numbers, Plato says that they exist by participation… As to what this “participation” or “imitation” may be, they left this an open question… Further, he states that besides sensible things and the Forms there exists an intermediate class, the objects of mathematics, which differ from sensible things in being eternal and immutable, and from the Forms in that there are many similar objects of mathematics, whereas each Form is itself unique.[^2]
+
+If Aristotle is correct, then the Forms and the objects of mathematics are not simply categorical siblings. Instead, there is a hierarchical order of inheritance in which the Forms are primary because they are templates of unity, and the objects of mathematics are templates of plurality, but mathematical objects include the properties of eternality and immutability of the Forms, because they are similarly independent of material reality.
+
+This will be interesting to return to, later, when looking at Parmenides’ critique of the Forms. But, returning to Socrates’ (and Plato’s) motivations, the fundamental conundrum facing Socrates was this: His *method of definition* was forcing him into a dilemma. If definition is knowledge, and definition is not possible in an ever mutable Heraclitean reality, then knowledge of the world was not possible and the skeptical sophists turn out to be tragically correct. We cannot know anything. If, however, there is an intelligible reality of absolute truths about sensible reality, from which we can derive analytical definitions for qualitative experiences — in the same way we can derive analytical definitions for quantitative phenomena through the “imitation of numbers” exhibited by objects — then knowledge is possible, the sophists are thankfully wrong, and there are things we can say with certainty that we do indeed know. This should sound eerily familiar to anyone who’s read any Descartes. Seventeen hundred years later, he was still struggling with the same problem, but that’s a topic for another day.
+
+According to Grube, one third century commentator is purported to have credited Aristotle with five distinct arguments supporting the necessity of the Forms. The first argument seems to implicitly acknowledge Parmenides’ final objection to Socrates (to which we’ll return, later), and — if I’m not being too optimistic — seems to also implicitly partially affirm my intuition above:
+
+> The argument[s] from the sciences:… (i) if every science fulfils its function by having some one thing as its object, there must be such a single thing which is the object of that science, it must be unchanging and eternal, an eternal model beyond the particular sensible things, for these cannot be the objects of knowledge in the proper sense. The particular things or incidents in the physical world happen according to this model. This model is the Form. (ii) The objects of science exist. But science is concerned with something beyond the particulars which are infinite in number and indeterminate, while science is determined. There are therefore certain things beyond the particulars, and these are the Forms. (iii) Medicine is not the study of my health or yours, but of health as such. So the objects of geometry are not this or that equal or commensurate object, but equality and commensurability as such. These must exist, and are the Forms. These three ways of stating the case all come to this: knowledge and science exist; they cannot be the particular things we know since these are in a perpetual state of change whereas the objects of science must be constant; there must therefore be eternal and immutable realities, which we call the Forms. The best illustration is that of the mathematical sciences…[^3]
+
+So, there does seem to be an association between the analytical truths of mathematics and the theorized analytical truths of experience, that the Forms could provide. There is a debate within the field of ancient philosophy over whether Plato was trying to reconcile two categories of knowledge (analytical and synthetic), or instead trying to establish the supremacy of a mind-dependent reality over all the sciences[^4]. The resolution of this debate one way or the other is less important to me, than that it exists at all. Because it shows that the scholars themselves are also aware of the fundamental problem Plato was grappling with, as I’ve outlined it here, and are simply quibbling over the precise shape of that problem. For my part, at the moment, I’m tending toward J. N. Findlay’s view from his book, “Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines”. This is partly because of the quote from the Metaphysics above, and partly because I see Plato representing the “Transcendence” half of the larger “Transcendence vs Immanence” debate that took place between him and Aristotle. But that, too, is a much larger discussion for another day.
+
+**Next Up: What are Forms, again?**
+
+[^1]: I am using “Forms” (capitalized) uniformly throughout, to signify both “ἰδέα”, and “εἶδος”. I realize there’s a subtle distinction between these two terms, but that’s an issue of scholarship that is beyond the scope of this post. What’s more, neither term precisely means “idea” in the sense that we now use that word, to mean a nonce entity housed entirely in the mind, often synonymously called a “concept” or a “picture”. The Parmenides would make little sense in several passages, if that was the meaning we took for “Form”. 
+[^2]: Metaphysics I, 987a-b (https://bit.ly/2LdTI05)
+[^3]: Grube, G. M. A., Plato’s Thought, pg. 5 (1980, Hackett) – Grube is paraphrasing an author by the name of “Robin”, but he provides no bibliographical record for the citation. So, I am unable to track down this author to confirm this paraphrasing. Since this book was published originally in 1935, I am guessing “Robin” is someone who was a common reference of the period, but has since fallen out of fashion.
+[^4]: See J.N. Findlay’s “Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines”, for example. 

content/post/plato-parmenides-and-the-theory-of-forms-part-2.md

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+---
+title: "Plato, Parmenides, and the Theory of Forms - Part 2"
+date: 2018-09-08T21:58:21Z
+tags: ["platonism","dualism","eidos","forms","idealism","realism"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/panpsychic.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+In this installment of the series on Plato’s Forms, we’ll have a brief look at the major conceptions of the theory, some of the key differences, and dig deep into the one formulation Plato seems to have favored the most. For those of you looking for a thorough discussion of Parmenides’ refutations, you’ll have to wait until the last installment. In keeping with the principle of the first post, the idea here is to just try to understand the theory itself, and the problem it was trying to solve, before we make any move to object to it.
+
+In any case, the theory of Forms comes in three basic varieties, and these varieties are themselves the expression of a tension between two different characterizations of the forms – immanence versus transcendence (which was touched on briefly in the first post). This tension expresses itself further, in a conflict over how we relate to the forms. To put it in simple terms, how “separate” are we, from the Forms? Each of the variations of the theory attempts to reconcile these two conflicts in very different ways. I will present the three varieties here, in the order of strenuousness with which Plato argued for them, weakest to strongest.
+
+### Forms as literal ideas
+
+> …maybe each of the forms is a thought, and properly occurs only in the mind. In this way each of them might be one and no longer face the difficulty [ of infinite regress and multitude ]… each thought is one, is a thought of something that is ‘one thing’, which the thought thinks is over all the instances, being some one [common] character…” Parmenides, 132b-c
+
+This is the weakest of the formulations, and the least strenuously argued for. What’s fascinating, is that it is the most intuitive of the definitions, is what most people imagine at first, when the discussion of Plato’s forms begins, and from a modern perspective, offers the closest conception to modern mathematical concepts like ‘number’ and ‘formula’.
+
+As we’ll see later, this formulation is not entirely incongruous with the others. Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection requires that the recollection reside somewhere, and in the mind is where that is. But what makes this theory different from the others, is that it attempts to claim that the form is *only* in the mind, and nowhere else (recollected or otherwise).
+
+Given Socrates’ emphasis on the method of definition in his early dialogues, it may be tempting to think of the Forms merely as “definitions of things” (as the attempt to capture in language, the one or two properties of a thing, that makes it *that thing*), and in this sense, the theory of Forms as Ideas has some plausibility. But, as G.M.A. Grube points out:
+
+> “for a definition to be universally valid, [Plato] felt it must be the definition of a constant reality, independent of any particular specimen of the thing defined. A definition of Man [for example] is not of any particular man, but of *Man*, which is a reality quite independent of the particular *you* or *me*… This reality is the ‘Eidos’, the Platonic Form of Man.” (pg. 4)
+
+In the next post, we’ll discuss Parmenides’ objections, showing how Forms as merely ideas could not be the case, but the point here, is to say that because Plato is quietly already committed to a different formulation (the noumenal one discussed below), he is quick to abandon this one, on Parmenides’ first refutation of it.
+
+### Forms as the patterns of the artificer
+
+> “What appears most likely to me is this: these forms are like patterns set in nature, and other things resemble them and are likenesses; and this partaking of the Forms is, for the other things, simply being modeled on them…” Parmenides, 132d
+
+Here, Plato envisions the Forms as either a sculptor’s miniature, or as a blacksmith’s mold. This formulation of the Forms is one Aristotle would likely have found appealing. It suggests a shapeless, indefinite substance which is “pressed” or “sculpted” into a definite object, according to a plan or model, like a statue, or a coin, or a sword.
+
+This notion of the Forms is appealing as an ontological explanation of the existence of things (clearly, similar concepts were appealing to Aristotle in the same way). But Plato’s task with the Forms was not accounting for the existence of things. It was to account for the *knowledge* of the things that exist. More to the point, accounting for our subjective experience of those things. Why do we have the idea of ‘things’ at all? Again, Parmenides will make short work of this conception of the Forms, as well, and Plato will move on.
+
+### Forms as noumenal entities
+
+I am borrowing the term from Kant, here, because I think it best (and most concisely) expresses the notion of Forms, as Plato seems to have finally settled on them: ideal objects belonging to a transcendental reality, apprehended only by the mind itself.
+
+There are many places where Plato makes this argument. The most famous is perhaps the depiction of The Good in The Republic, but the best technical explanations can be found right in the Parmenides, along with several passages in the Phaedo, and the Meno.
+
+This passage from the Phaedo best encapsulates the problem that Plato is trying to solve, and begins to introduce us to the kind of thing a Form might be:
+
+> “…mathematical reasoning is most successful when the mind is not troubled by hearing, sight, pleasure, pain, or any of those things; when it is alone as far as possible and **without concern for the body**; when it has the least possible contact or association with the body it reaches out **toward reality**… whoever of us prepares himself best and most exactly to perceive each **thing in itself** will come nearest to **knowing** each thing…” Phaedo, 65b (emphases added by me)
+
+It is not so hard to see why Whitehead famously declared that all of the European philosophical tradition could be safely characterized as “footnotes to Plato”. This passage hints strongly not only at Kantian noumenal “things in themselves”, but also at Cartesian “clear and distinct ideas”. In its emphasis on mathematics, and the absolute necessity of intelligibility for “true” knowledge, Plato has presaged (or, more probably, provided the intellectual fodder for) the Rationalist move, and mind-body dualism, by almost two thousand years.
+
+In any case, the point is that Plato wants to understand how the world we live in – the world of constant “flux” (as Heraclitus would put it) – can be *intelligible at all*. Why aren’t humans just like the other animals, who are capable of nothing more than generation, sensible excitation, and destruction? How is it that we can also *understand* our plight as mortal creatures? For that, as he says in the Phaedo passage above, we must contemplate the underlying reality of things, and when we do, what we will find, is a reality composed fundamentally of intelligible things that give the superficial sensible reality, its definite presence:
+
+> “…there are certain Forms from which [particular things], by getting a share of them, derive their names — as, for instance, they come to be *like* by getting a share of Likeness, *large* by getting a share of Largeness, and *just* and *beautiful* by getting a share of Justice and Beauty…” Parmenides, 131a
+
+and:
+
+> “…if, in the case of sticks and stones and such things, someone tries to show that the same thing is many and one, we say that he is demonstrating **something** to be many and one, not **the one** to be many, or **the many** one…” Parmenides, 129a
+
+and:
+
+> “[The Form would not be] at the same time, as a whole, in things that are many and separate; and thus… separate from itself… [because, like the day], the Form is in many places at the same time and is nonetheless not separate from itself…” Parmenides, 131b
+
+and:
+
+> “…there is an absolute beauty and goodness and largeness and the like… if there be anything beautiful other than absolute beauty (should there be such), that it can be beautiful only insofar as it partakes of absolute Beauty – and I should say the same of everything…” Phaedo, 100b
+
+and:
+
+> “….nothing makes a thing beautiful but the presence and participation in Beauty in whatever way or manner obtained; for as to the manner I am uncertain, but I am certain – I stoutly contend – that by Beauty all beautiful things become beautiful…” Phaedo, 102b
+
+and:
+
+> “Socrates: …what do you call the quality by which [the bees] do not differ, but are alike? You could find me an answer, I presume?
+>
+> Meno: I could
+>
+> Socrates: And likewise, with the virtues, however many and varied they may be, they all have **one common character** whereby they are virtues, and on which one could of course be wise and keep an eye when one is **giving a definitive answer** to what virtue **really is**…” Meno, 72b-c (emphases are mine)
+
+The idea of a “Form”, then, seems to be serving a number of useful purposes. It is an attempt to give definitive account for difficult to define objects, such as “man” and “animal”; it is an attempt to “quantify” the qualitative aspects of reality, such as “the beautiful”, and “the virtuous” (even including subjective experiences such as “largeness” and “sameness”); and it is an attempt to explain how these things are not mere *doxa* (opinion), but *noesis* (knowledge). That’s quite a tall order. As we’ll see in the upcoming conclusion, Plato wasn’t as successful at accomplishing these goals, as he might have assumed he was. But there is a a very good reason for this, I think.
+
+### The plausibility of Forms
+
+Why was Plato so enamored with the notion of the Form? We will see in the subsequent conclusion, that from his Parmenides, he must have been entirely aware of the weaknesses of this theory. Grube says,
+
+> “Plato insisted upon the possibility of knowledge, and upon the existence of absolute values. To do this, he had to establish the existence of an objective, universally valid reality, and this he found in his Forms…” Grube, Pg. 3
+
+But why was he insisting on “absolutes” at all? This goes back to an earlier question I posed: why is it that we are able to look upon the world as sensible beings, and yet apprehend it as intelligible beings? How is it that the world has an intelligible order, and how is it that we are able to apprehend it? Two key influences on Plato (according to some scholars) were Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras. The former impressed upon Plato, the fact that there were indeed *knowable realities* that stood independent of our senses. Mathematics *works*, and it works everywhere and always, regardless of how the physical world may be changing continuously. This is why the Forms must be universal and unchanging, for Plato. Our *qualitative experience* of the world must be explainable in just the same way as our *quantitative understanding* of it.
+
+More importantly, however, is what Plato took from Anaxagoras. As Grube rightly points out:
+
+> “…[Anaxagoras] insisted on the permanence of qualities, and posited **Nous** [mind] as the origin of motion and the **guiding principle** of the universe… the essential reality of things was to be found not in the material components but in their **Logos** …we can give them credit for having build on the solid fact that all physics, if not all science, has a mathematical basis…,” Grube, pg. 2
+
+Logos, then, is the discernibility or intelligibility of the universe; intelligibility is only possible where Nous is present; Nous is the guiding principle and motivating force of all things, according to Anaxagoras. To understand the universe, then, is to understand the mind that gives rise to it. What is this mind? What is its nature? How different is it from the mind of man? Is it Plato’s Demiurge? Does it have conscious intention as we do? Is the universe itself a kind of medium within which mind is made manifest (like writing on paper, or a bacterial culture in agar)?
+
+This is why the Forms are important, and why Plato saw them as essential. He imagined them to be not only the way we made contact with the mind of God, but also the way in which the human mind exercised its “god resembling powers”. This is the reason why Aristotle argued for the contemplative life as the highest form of virtuous living, and imagined the Demiurge as a being that lived a perpetual life of self-contemplation. The reality that mattered, was the *transcendent* reality, where the mind that instantiated the order we were capable of discerning existed, and it should be our goal as humans to return to that reality and give an account of our mortality.
+
+This is also why the idea of the Form as an “immanent” character is a non-starter, ultimately, for Plato: because it doesn’t actually answer the question he’s asking. Insisting on “immanent” character, is just to push back the goal posts. Why is it we are capable of recognizing “immanent” order? By apprehending the transcendent order that gives rise to it in the first place.
+
+As we’ll see in the final installment of this series, the insistence on transcendence is going to be a major problem for Plato. This is the problem of “separation”, I mentioned earlier. Parmenides makes the problem of our relation to the Forms a centerpiece of his criticism, and it is a criticism from which Plato did not seem to recover.
+
+Stay tuned for part three….
+
+```[imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+

content/post/plato-parmenides-and-the-theory-of-forms-part-3.md

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+---
+title: "Plato, Parmenides, and the Theory of Forms - Part 3"
+date: 2018-09-29T21:53:42Z
+tags: ["eidos","forms","idealism","realism","mind","transcendence"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/firmament-as-form.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+To recap and summarize, there are three different kinds of forms presented to us in the Parmenides, by Socrates:
+
+1. *Relational:* the subjective experience of qualities of things, relative to each other. For example, Bigness, Sameness, or Heaviness (and their oppositions: Smallness, Difference, or Lightness).
+2. *Ontological:* the model or exemplar of actual things. For example, Man, Animal, Fire, and Water (but, inexplicably, not things like sticks and stones and mud and sealing wax).
+3. *Ethical:* Truthfulness, Goodness, Beautifulness, and Justness. This conception is the one that has the most traction, at least with later neoplatonic followers (e.g. Plotinus and Olympiodorus).
+
+And, as we saw with the last post, there were three basic theories for the existence of these forms:
+
+1. *Literal ideas:* concepts in the mind, that have no ontological status beyond the mind, out of which all things are materialized.
+2. *Patterns in nature:* something similar to a blacksmith’s mould, or an artists miniature, from which all things are copied.
+3. *Noumenal entities:* Universal transcendental beings, in which all particulars participate.
+
+As we’ll see here, Parmenides is careful to move fluidly between these three kinds, and these three theories, in order to make his case against the young Socrates, and his Forms. Depending on the author, and the level of complexity of the analysis, some parse Parmenides’ case into four objections, some five, and some six. For the sake of limiting the difficulty of this post, I’ll be taking the four objection approach, clustering the minor ones in where they make sense. I’ll go through each of Parmenides’ objections as they occur in the course of the dialogue, and considering whether he’s sufficiently refuted Socrates.
+
+**Objection 1: Reconciling Unity with Plurality**
+The first of the objections Parmenides raises, is to challenge Socrates to account for how the Forms – as unities – can manifest themselves severally in concrete particulars. He is essentially asking Socrates to reconcile unity with plurality. If the whole Form is present in a single particular, then it cannot be present in any other particular. Yet, if only a portion of the Form is present in all particulars manifesting it, then we have a divisible object which cannot be a Form, because said entities must be perfect, and perfection requires indivisible unity.
+
+Socrates rebuttal to this, is to say that the Forms are like the day, which is at once everywhere and experienced severally by everyone, and yet the same whole day. This seems plausible at first glance, but Parmenides has a rejoinder to offer. He changes the metaphor to a sail, and insists that no one covered by it is covered by the whole, and therefore, the sail must have parts. Taking Bigness as his example from this metaphor, Parmenides then argues that breaking bigness into necessarily smaller parts to be distributed among the particular people who manifest bigness, would render the Form of Bigness an absurdity.
+
+While Parmenides’ initial objection is a good point (how can we reconcile unity and plurality), the exchange in the dialogue on this point is frustrating and disappointing. Firstly, Parmenides changes the metaphor from the day to a sail with no justification or explanation. This completely muddles Socrates’ original point. To restate his case in modern terms: I experience Tuesday in Chicago, and you experience Tuesday in New York, but it would be laughingly absurd to suggest that we are experiencing *different days*. Equally, it would be just as absurd to say that because I am in Chicago and you in New York, we are experiencing *different parts of the same day*. It is the same day everywhere that day is taking place. Parmenides moves to the sail metaphor, because he realizes it is less obviously absurd to talk about different parts of a large piece of sail cloth. This is because a *day* and a *sail* are fundamentally different in kind, and it is this shift is that makes Parmenides’ next step in the objection plausible. If we accept that it is only parts of the sail that are covering each particular individual, then we must accept that it is only parts of Bigness that are in each big person, thus ostensibly demonstrating the incommensurability of “participation” in the unified Form of Bigness. On the original metaphor, however, accepting that there are “parts” is not necessary to accepting participation in a given day. While the term “participation” may be somewhat inadequate to the task of describing a big person’s relationship to the Form of Bigness, it certainly doesn’t require the divisibility of Bigness any more than our separate participation in Tuesday requires the divisibility of Tuesday.
+
+So, Parmenides’ first major complaint turns out to be a confusion on his part. Whether this was intentional or not is a matter of debate. Some speculate that Plato was putting the confusions of the Aristotelian splitters in the Academy into the mouth of Parmenides. Perhaps this is true. Regardless, it’s clear there is a way to understand the Forms as a harmonization of unity and plurality, in the sense conceived of by Socrates original metaphor. As such, this objection is not enough to dismiss the theory of Forms.
+
+**Objection 2: The Relational Regress on Bigness**
+Next, Parmenides attempts to show that the Forms (of the relational kind), lead to a regress. He argues that a Form of Bigness, in which big things necessarily participate (and are called “big” by their participation) must itself belong to a class of objects in which the Form of Bigness and big particulars are all members. This is because, on Parmenides’ view, there must be something against which we can compare the Form of Bigness with big things, to see that they are similar. This, then, would require yet another class of objects that contains the compared Form of Bigness and big things, and another comparator Form of classes containing the Form of Bigness and big things, ad infinitum.
+
+Again, at first glance, this seems devastating to the theory. Socrates attempts to escape this by reformulating Forms as pure thoughts. This is something talked about in part two of this series, and I’ll come back to this in a moment, but first, let’s have a closer look at the regress. There are two problems that I see with Parmenides’ complaint, here. First, Parmenides is confusing universals and particulars. There is nothing to suggest that, because Forms have an ontological status outside the mind, they must share the same constraints and features as the particulars they characterize. Forms, if they exist, do not exist in the material, ever-changing, finite world of sensible experience. So, why must a Form have a Form? Particulars, of course, derive their reality from Forms. But the reality of the Forms themselves is necessarily independent, because they are perfect. What’s more, being perfect unities, they must be uniques. There can only be one Form of Bigness, necessarily, and it stands necessarily as the originator (the arché?) of all particular sensible objects that we call “big”. It makes no sense to call the Form of Bigness “big”, itself, because that would require it to participate in itself. Participation entails being a particular, and only sensible things can be particulars (and being particular, necessarily would require it to be imperfect, because copy). So, Parmenides’ regress turns out to be implausible.
+
+Getting back to Socrates’ notion of the Forms as ideas in the mind only, there is only final speculation I’d like to offer. Presently, there is no good explanation for how it is that all of experience – indeed, all of the order of reality – isn’t just a “blooming, buzzing confusion” (to borrow James’ famous phrase). Human minds are somehow capable of discerning patterns and definitions and organizing experiences into discrete, ordered objects. How is this possible? Is it part of the fabric of reality itself, these discrete patterns and this intelligible order? If that is true, and it’s also true that only a conscious mind is capable of apprehending these things, then is it really that much of a stretch to speculate a “mind” or “consciousness” as a property of the universe itself, out of which the Forms arise (or whatever ordering pattern suits your fancy)? Perhaps this is some form of Genetic Fallacy or Composition Fallacy, but without an explanation for how this is so, the speculation seems plausible to me. On this view, Socrates’ suggestion that the Forms may be “only in the mind” might work, if we extend the notion of “mind” to some kind of property of the universe itself. But I’m willing to concede this as just a speculation.
+
+**Objection 3: Relational Regress Redux (Likeness)**
+This objection is often explained as a reiteration of the Largeness regress. If particulars with the same property are like each other because they participate in a Form of Likeness, then the particulars and the Form of Likeness must be like each other, and that would itself require another Form of Likeness of Forms of Likeness and Particulars, and so on. In addition to the points I raised in the first iteration of this problem, this objection also suffers from not actually addressing Socrates’ next reconceptualization of the theory. Socrates is not suggesting a participation or presence of any immanent character with the notion of forms as “patterns in nature”. Rather, he is likening the Forms to the moulds in an artisan’s workshop, or the miniatures in an artists studio. This would make the similarities seen in particulars in nature a product of their similarity with the mould out of which they were “pressed”. This is a very different concept, than the noumenal entities deconstructed in the first and second objections. In the context of Socrates’ time, this metaphor has some plausibility. Why is it that the planets have a spherical shape, or move in near-circular paths? Why do living creatures exhibit symmetry of physical form? Why is there water or earth or fire at all? Something must have “pressed” these objects into existence, and provided the copying mechanism for nature to continue to do the work on its own. These days, we have loads of scientific explanations for how this actually happens, but at the time, Parmenides would have had a hard time objecting to this line of theorizing — which is why he chose to argue against Likeness, as if he were arguing against the conception of Bigness before it.
+
+**Objection 4: Separated At Birth**
+The separation objection is perhaps the most important, and arguably the second most famous of all Parmenides’ objections to the Forms. This objection, as Gill rightly points out, rests on Socrates’ failure to adequately explain “participation” in any of the previous objections. The objection comes down to this: the Forms can only relate to each other, and particulars can only relate to each other, but particulars cannot relate to the Forms, and the Forms cannot relate to particulars. Therefore, even if they did exist, the Forms would have no relevance to the existence of particulars. I find the objection, from an ontological perspective, unconvincing for two reasons. First, as I’ve explained above, Parmenides appears to be engaging in a great deal of sleight of hand in his objections. He is using the relational kind when it suits him, the noumenal conception when it suits him, and the ontological kind, when it suits him. I suppose you could respond that the variety in Socrates’ theory is itself enough to discount the theory as unworkable; after all, what exactly are we talking about, here? Which combination of these things are we to take as canonical? I’m inclined to agree. What’s more, I think the Separation argument does have some teeth, as an epistemological problem. Even if the Forms exist, and even if we could defend the notion of “participation”, there remains the problem of how we can know any of this is actually the case. As put by Gill,
+
+> “…if things in our realm can be known and explained without reference to Forms, and if we are fully empowered within our realm, how much have we lost if we give up Forms…? …they seem irrelevant…”
+
+Indeed. In Socrates’ metaphysics, the Forms are absolutely essential. The Forms are causally necessary for things being as they appear to us. As Gill puts it, “immanent character accounts for appearances”, and the Forms account for immanent character. But if, because the realm of Forms is indeed inaccessible to us (either intelligibly or sensibly), because timeless and perfect entities cannot be known by finite, changing beings, then we cannot know the ultimate reality of the immanent characters we apprehend with our senses, and it indeed seems we are trapped in a cartesian hell of varying degrees of uncertainty and vagueness. Quoting Gill again, “remove the causal link, as Parmenides does, in the Separation argument, and we no longer have access to what things *really are*.”
+
+**Conclusion**
+The Forms, it turns out, are only pointers to a much deeper problem that we are often willing to admit. Plato was attempting to bridge the gap between subjective experience, and objective reality; between appearance, and substance; between moral sentiment, and mathematical certainty; between what is, and what ought to be; and he was hoping to do it in one motion with the invention of The Forms. All of the basic questions: what is happening when I identify something as “beautiful”? How do I know that someone is “good”? Why am I able to have the concept of a “person”? The Forms were supposed to give us insight into all these things. But, if we can’t even know what the Forms themselves are, we can’t possibly answer any of the other questions with any certainty or honesty. In the end, it is this last objection that kills the theory for me, as nothing more than an interesting speculation. It’s one of the reasons why I find Kant’s work so unconvincing. He runs head-first into the noumenal for much of his work on ethics, and as we’ve seen here, it is far from clear what that is.
+
+```[imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+

content/post/plato-versus-mill-on-the-pleasure-principle.md

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+---
+title: "Plato Versus Mill on the Pleasure Principle"
+date: 2018-03-18T22:39:13Z
+tags: ["ethics","utilitarianism","idealism","transcendence","hedonism","pleasure"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/les_romains_dans_la_decadence.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+> …after more than two thousand years the same discussions continue, philosophers are still ranged under the same contending banners, and neither thinkers nor mankind at large seem nearer to being unanimous on the subject, than when the youth Socrates listened to the old Protagoras, and asserted… the theory of utilitarianism against the popular morality of the so-called sophist… ~John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
+
+I wonder, sometimes, if Mill had ever *actually read* the Protagoras. The reason is, because having read that dialogue and the Gorgias many times, it makes no sense to me that Mill would be claiming that it was Socrates that was advocating for the pleasure principle, as *against Protagoras*. If Mill had read the dialogue, then perhaps the problem is that he was missing a layer of ironic sarcasm in his interpretation. I wouldn’t put it past Mill (or Bentham, for that matter) to be somewhat lacking in the capacity for contextual subtlety, given the enthusiasm with which they embraced a view of human nature utterly devoid of anything like it. To let Mill speak for himself:
+
+> The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended **pleasure, and the absence of pain**; by unhappiness, pain and the deprivation of pleasure…
+
+Curiously, Mill admits just a few pages earlier that he has *no justification* for his equation of pleasure with The Good:
+
+> The medical art is proved to be good, by its conducing to health; but how is it possible to prove that health is good?… The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but **what proof is possible to give, that pleasure is good**?
+
+Given this admission, it’s profoundly difficult to believe that Mill was unable to see the obvious problems with this doctrine. Problems that Socrates had laid bare so handily *in the Protagoras*. How could he not have noticed? Admittedly, the first and most obvious objection is put rather sharply by Socrates in the Gorgias rather than the Protagoras:
+
+> will you tell me whether you include itching and scratching, provided you have enough of them and pass your life in scratching, in your notion of happiness?… What if the scratching were not confined to the head? I would have you consider… whether the life of a catamite is not terrible, foul, or miserable? Or would you venture to say, that they too are happy, if they only get enough of what they want? Consider whether pleasure, from whatever source derived, is the Good; for if this be true, then the disagreeable consequences which have been darkly intimated must follow… ~Gorgias
+
+To which, Mill makes essentially the same mistake as Socrates’ imagined unwashed masses in the Protagoras (and Callicles in the Gorgias), by asserting a difference between “good” and “bad” pleasures:
+
+> It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some **kinds** of pleasures are more desirable and more **valuable** than others. It would be absurd that, while in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone… of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experienced both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure [thus, higher quality]… ~Utilitarianism
+
+So, for Mill, the moral pleasures are possibly either those preferred by majority vote, or those preferred by a privileged class of experienced persons of discernment who make authoritative pronouncements on which pleasures are the moral pleasures. Mill even goes on to admit that some pleasures, no matter how desirable (even by the privileged class), would be unacceptable to any *”person of feeling and conscience”*. No one should ever accept the base pleasures of *”the fool, the dunce, or the rascal”*, even if we are entirely persuaded that they are better satisfied with their lot in life, than we are with our own. But why? Again, I find it startlingly implausible that Mill could not have understood Socrate’s critique of this new assertion. I’ll let Socrates speak for himself:
+
+> …you think that pain is an evil and pleasure is a good: and even pleasure you deem an evil, when it robs you of greater pleasures than it gives, or causes pains greater than the pleasure. If, however, you call pleasure an evil in relation to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. But you have none to show… And have you not a similar way of speaking about pain? You call pain a good when it takes away greater pains than those which it has, or gives pleasures greater than the pains: then if you have some standard other than pleasure and pain to which you refer when you call actual pain a good, you can show what that is. But you cannot… ~Protagoras
+
+No matter how many experts have experienced whatever two pleasures Mill is talking about, and no matter how unanimous their preference is, that preference has to be grounded in something more than pleasure itself. And here, we see a familiar trilemma expose itself: 1. He can simply assert pleasure as the good (the axiom fork); 2. He can appeal to some ideal that is the same as pleasure (the circular fork); 3. He can appeal to the preferences of experts, which reduces to the quantitative weighing of pleasures (the infinite regress fork). Mill’s answer, it seems, is simply to pick the axiom fork, and run with it.
+
+But it gets worse. After leaving Socrates’ demand for an explication of the true standard of The Good utterly unanswered, Mill careens haplessly into yet another glaring mistake dispatched by Socrates in the Protagoras:
+
+> Men, often from infirmity of character, make their election for the nearer good, though they **know it to be less valuable**; and this is no less when the choice is between two bodily pleasures, than when it is between bodily and mental. They pursue sensual indulgences to the injury of health, though **perfectly aware that health is the greater good**
+
+To begin with, as Socrates points out in Protagoras, if the Utilitarian sort of naive Hedonism is true, then it is a ridiculous absurdity to say that “a man pursues what is bad for him, because he is overcome by pleasure”. This is because Hedonism asserts that pleasure just is the good, and pain just is the bad (as Mill succinctly put, above). Being overcome by pleasure, on this account, simply equates with being overcome by the good, and pursuing evil equates to pursuing pain. So, one would be pursuing pain because one is overcome by pleasure, or worse, one would be pursuing evil because one is overcome by the good.
+
+Worse yet, Socrates describes how basic virtues are rendered ridiculous by Hedonism. If we take courage to mean overcoming the fear of personal risk in order to act on a requirement of duty, or honesty, or benevolence, or justice (or whatever else), then courage becomes a *vice*, because what the courageous man would be risking is the infliction of pain upon himself – in other words, he would be inviting an evil to himself, without any guarantee of a good beyond it (there is no good reason to think that an act of honesty or even benevolence will *necessarily* result in pleasure for the actor). This objection is a strong one, because Mill is admitting at a minimum, the necessity of *knowledge* to virtue, something that Socrates would have grabbed hold of like a rabid dog, if the two had been in dialogue.
+
+Returning to the search for the ultimate standard (the one that judges which pleasures are moral), Mill refines what he means by a competent judge, and further admits that Utilitarianism *could not work* without the standard by which this judge is judged:
+
+> Utilitarianism… could only gain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character…
+
+And, what is the “end” of Utilitarianism, mentioned in this quote?
+
+> an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who, in their opportunities of experiences, to which must be added their **habits of self-consciousness and self-observation**, are best furnished with a means of comparison…
+
+So, we are to choose certain pleasures over others, which are qualitatively not only different, but *better*. We are to make these choices either from a “nobleness of character” or are to defer to those who, having experienced both pleasures and judged them against their own “nobleness of character”, can tell us which is better. But what are the “noble” and “base” characters? How do we identify them? Why would a “noble” character always choose the better of the pleasures? Clearly, in the use of terms such as “noble”, and in the insistence of habits and practices of cultivation, Mill is making a subterranean appeal to some sort of Aristotelian virtue ethic. But he never makes it explicit. It lies just under the surface, assumed as a part of his own Victorian upbringing. To repeat Socrates’ words:
+
+> …If you call pleasure an evil in relation to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. But you have none to show…
+
+Mill is absolutely anxious to prove that Utilitarianism isn’t mere naive Hedonism as the readers of his day would have seen it. But in his single-minded quest to do so, he is constantly tripping over the secondary standard problem. Here he is proudly declaring the “nobility” of self-sacrifice, in spite of the pleasure principle:
+
+> It is noble to be capable of resigning entirely one’s own portion of happiness [pleasure], or chances of it… All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyments of life, when by such renunciation they contribute **worthily** to increase the amount of happiness [pleasure] in the world;…
+
+This passage is a bizarre knot of self-contradiction. How can the opposite of the good, when acted out, result in a good? How can the renunciation of the highest good [pleasure] be a good in itself? Practically speaking, how is it possible that a specific reduction in pleasure can be equal to a specific increase in pleasure? Socrates’ description of the courageous man certainly comes to mind here. And, again, there is the hidden secondary standard at play: how do we know when the renunciation of pleasure is the “noble” thing to do? The quote suggests that mob rule may be the standard – when all others around us tell us they will derive great pleasure from the deprivation of ourselves. But to be fair to Mill, surely, this cannot be what he means. Which leads us again to seek for a notion of Aristotelian virtue hinted at in the constant uses of terms like “noble” and “nobility”. At one point, in the sacrificial citizen discussion, Mill nearly admits this hidden standard:
+
+> I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a **sacrifice is the highest virtue** which can be found in man… the conscious ability to do without happiness [pleasure] gives the best prospect of realizing such happiness [pleasure] as is attainable…
+
+It is tempting to see in that phrase, either a Christian or a Stoic ethic, by which he wants to judge the character of men. But his use of the terms “noble” and “nobility” clearly mean something more than this, and have a distinct flavor of Greek elitism to them. Which ever one it is, it’s certainly not Hedonism. He says he knows this passage is “paradoxical”, but I insist it is simply a contradiction built into his original theory based on the fact that its true standard is hidden to him. He cannot, on the one hand, insist that the *summum bonum* – the ultimate end to which all human action should be directed – is *”an existence as rich as possible in enjoyments”*, and then on the other hand declare the man who renounces this highest good, to be a man of the “*highest virtue*”. It’s confused at best; madness at worst. And if Mill had actually understood the Protagoras, he’d know that.
+
+So, how does Mill propose to fix this problem? He provides the first stone on that path in the following quote:
+
+> A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the **sum total** of happiness, [Utilitarianism] considers as wasted…
+
+Mill does not bother to explain how a decrease in pleasure in a single member of a population can result in a *sum total increase* in pleasure in the population to which the individual belongs. But this is not the worst of the oddities of this passage. What sort of sadistic society would it have to be, if it derived pleasure from the occasional sacrifice of its individual members (I am reminded of Shirley Jackson’s story, “The Lottery”)? All that aside, this passage shows the “scope creep” of Mill’s project, resulting from his recognition of the philosophical problems inherent in naive Hedonism. In order to escape them, he tries to collectivize the concept:
+
+> the happiness [pleasure] which forms the Utilitarian standard of what is right conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness, and that of others, Utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator…
+
+So, Mill sets up a false dichotomy between the individual and the society, in order to disguise the contradictions we’ve been discussing thus far. In a bizarre and sudden reversal, Utilitarianism is no longer an ethic of naive Hedonism; it is now an ethic of individual self-sacrifice to group preference. Much like Rousseau, Mill reifies the group into a “corporate body”, ascribes to it the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, and tasks every individual with the impossible task of “impartially” judging his own desires against the desires of this chimera. If it were even possible to be an “impartial spectator” of one’s own desires – and it isn’t – how could anyone possibly satisfy this standard, given that one cannot possibly also know what *everyone else’s* desires are? Socrates would have fainted in amazement at this kind of bravado.
+
+The twentieth century is littered with the death and destruction of numerous societies attempting to implement this kind of collective pleasure principle. It’s also left the twenty-first century with an endemic moral confusion (dare I say, corruption), that threatens to drive us to repeat the same mistakes over again. It seems to me, that the blame for much of this rests at the feet of philosophers who’ve claimed the authority of Plato and Aristotle, without actually having taken the time to earn it. John Stuart Mill is clearly one of those philosophers.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 30 November 2021]```
+

content/post/reason-vs-the-passions-initial-thoughts-on-humes-treatise.md

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+---
+title: "Reason vs the Passions - Initial Thoughts on Hume's Treatise"
+date: 2017-10-25T23:31:56Z
+tags: ["hume","emotivism","sentimentalism","dualism"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/reason-vs-emotion.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+> …When in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the designed end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects. Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. It is as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. A trivial good may, from certain circumstances, produce a desire superior to what arises from the greatest and most valuable enjoyment; nor is there any thing more extraordinary in this, than in mechanics to see one pound weight raise up a hundred by the advantage of its situation.In short, a passion must be accompanyed with some false judgment in order to its being unreasonable; and even then it is not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.
+>
+> The consequences are evident. Since a passion can never, in any sense, be called unreasonable, [except] when founded on a false supposition or when it chuses means insufficient for the designed end, it is impossible, that reason and passion can ever oppose each other, or dispute for the government of the will and actions. The moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means our passions yield to our reason without any opposition. I may desire any fruit as of an excellent relish; but whenever you convince me of my mistake, my longing ceases. I may will the performance of certain actions as means of obtaining any desired good; but as my willing of these actions is only secondary, and founded on the supposition, that they are causes of the proposed effect; as soon as I discover the falsehood of that supposition, they must become indifferent to me…. [Book II, Part ii, Section iii]
+>
+> Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature: Bestsellers and famous Books (pp. 388-389). anboco. Kindle Edition.
+
+According to Hume, reason is but a slave to the passions. We are moved to act by a process of primary impressions (e.g., pleasure and pain, or grief and joy, or attraction and aversion), giving rise to relations of ideas (memories and reflections), which then give rise to secondary impressions (pride and shame, or love and hate, etc).
+
+Hume was probably hyperbolizing for the sake of highlighting the point (later on in life Hume apparently lamented stating it so forcefully). But the point was not simply that passions are neither ‘reasonable’ nor ‘unreasonable’, it was primarily that reason is inert; That no calculation of circumstances or train of logic is capable of moving a man, all on its own. He reasoned that there must be some process by which ‘relations of impressions and ideas’ are converted into passions (the things that actually provide us with the impulse to act). Hume often depicts reason as lying somewhere between initial impressions, and final passions, acting merely as a conduit or proximal cause (though I suppose he would have balked at the word ’cause’ here).
+
+His explication of that process and how it works is woefully naive and speculative (in addition to being incorrect in most respects). However, I think he was on the right track, and simply lacked a sophisticated enough science of human biology and psychology to render his theory into something that made better sense to a modern mind. For the most part, in the 18th century, the only tool available to him was introspection and a smattering of knowledge of human and animal anatomy. So, frankly, not only should he be excused, he ought to be lauded as a genius for (nearly) single-handedly inventing the science of psychology and the philosophical notion of moral psychology.
+
+Still, I find myself disagreeing with Hume for the following reasons:
+
+First, “reason” and “passion” are not separate ‘faculties’ of the mind, placed into a hierarchy with each other. Even Hume seemed to understand this (at least in part). They are functional capacities that express themselves in varying degrees in concert, under various circumstances. Reason is no more the slave of the passions, than the strings and woodwinds are the ‘slaves’ of the french horns and trumpets in an orchestra.
+
+Second, Later on in the Treatise, he’ll introduce yet a third relation: that of moral judgment. At which point, all he’s really doing is describing Plato’s tripartite soul, in a much more complex way (Plato, of course, placed reason in the charioteer’s seat). Why philosophers traditionally have insisted on conceptions of consciousness as simple hierarchies is something I don’t quite understand, but in truth, the mind is more like an evolving ecosystem, not a top-down political structure.
+
+Third, Hume reifies the phenomena in his model. He says that passions are derived from relations of impressions and ideas. He also says that the “self” is itself nothing more than an idea that arises from a relation of other impressions and ideas. But, he then says that pride and shame are passions, and that pride and shame have as “their object”, the self. And, for this to happen, there must be a “we” (i.e. the “self”) that receives an impression of something beautiful that “we” own. But this is to assign intentionality to mere phenomena. Hume never explains how this is possible. You can’t on the one hand, say that all the phenomena of the brain are merely the effects of causal inter-relations between impressions and ideas, and then on the other, somehow make the impressions and ideas capable of choosing objects at which to direct themselves.
+
+The consequence of this, is that the most Hume could have reasonably said, was that he didn’t really know whether passions ‘ruled’ or reason ‘ruled’. At most, our cognitive and emotional capacities are cohabitants, and if you look at the modern scientific literature (admittedly, I am but a layman), there is little in the brain itself to distinguish them apart. Some would say the difference between the limbic system and the frontal lobes is enough to show this, but despite being separate physical structures, the actual neural activity isn’t so distinct. The limbic system, for example, in addition to being responsible for most of our emotions, is also responsible for several functions related to memory(something Hume would have counted as part of his ‘relations of ideas’ rather than as a sensation). The point is, rather than being master and slave to each other, they’re more like ‘dance partners’.
+
+In fact, it seems to me, the core question here is exactly what role do each of the cognitive and emotive capacities of the brain play, in decision-making? Unfortunately, I’m no psychologist, and only have a layman’s familiarity with a smattering of the scientific literature on the question (which might help answer the question). But, I suppose one criticism you could levy at Hume, is that his overall theory (as its proposed here) is unfalsifiable: no matter what you decide, it’s always evidence of the passions at work. But then, it’s not like Hume had access to a rigorous methodology.

content/post/the-platonism-of-the-categorical-imperative.md

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+---
+title: "The Platonism of the Categorical Imperative"
+date: 2018-03-16T22:44:22Z
+tags: ["plato","kant","categorical imperative","forms","eidos","transcendence"]
+topics: ["philosophy"]
+image: /img/shapes.gif
+draft: false
+---
+
+Moral maxims are rules governing actions, or commands to act in certain ways considered morally correct. Some of the most well known maxims are those that come to us by way of religious tradition. “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness” are paradigm examples. Kant insists that his Categorical Imperative is the best means by which to test the maxims, for whether they correctly guide us to right action and away from wrong action. In this essay, I will argue that while the Categorical Imperative might seem plausible as a test of moral maxims because of it’s rigid logical form, it actually fails the plausibility test for one of the same reasons Parmenides rejected Socrates’ conception of the Forms.
+
+In brief, the Categorical Imperative test is a thought experiment in which one attempts to universalize the maxim in question in order to discover a logical impossibility, or at least, an absurdity embedded in the consequences. Here’s how he states it:
+
+> “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
+
+But there is a second, very closely related formulation, that looks like this:
+
+> “Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.”
+
+The difference between these two might seem insignificant on the surface, but they represent a fundamental Platonic tension in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, which I’ll explain more fully, after outlining the distinction between these two a bit better. In the first conception, Kant is describing a feature of his *moral law*. In the second, he is making explicit reference to the *natural law*, in the Newtonian sense. He wants to link them because of their fundamental universality, but this linkage is only an analogy; the two universalities are fundamentally different in kind. In the case of *natural law*, scientists subsequent to Newton were attempting to *infer* the presence of a structure of rational intelligibility from the regularities and consistencies they observed, and in some cases could predict, in the behavior of objects in the mechanical universe given to us by Newton.
+
+Kant rightly recognized the lack of ultimate *necessity* in these laws, and goes on about it at length in the Groundwork. He does this, because he needs his *moral law* to be something that is ultimately good, and that *could not have been otherwise*. In order to arrive at this, Kant has to borrow the notion of a telos for man from Aristotle. As with Aristotle, Kant chooses *reason* as the basis for that telos. But unlike Aristotle, Kant insists that the reason he has in mind is not the reason Aristotle wants us to accept. Aristotle’s reason would have us pursuing material ends that satisfy the conditions of living. For Kant, this is unacceptable. He makes a distinction between the rational mind of contingency, and the faculty of pure reason capable of discerning the absolutes of *moral law*, in the same way that Socrates would have us contemplating the Forms, in *Republic* or *Phaedrus*. The former is the basis for what Kant regards as “hypothetical imperatives”. These sorts of imperatives, he argues, can be of only relative or instrumental value, because they arise out of the contingency of circumstances and the temporal calculations of cost and benefit. For Kant, such imperatives could not constitute *moral* imperatives because they lack the constancy and objectivity of a mathematical equation or a geometric expression; in other words, the kind of truth that is true everywhere, at all times, and applicable to all rational beings – a_universal_ truth, of the kind envisioned in Plato’s description of the Form of The Good.
+
+Intuitively, the ascendence into Platonic idealism may seem like a good idea. After all, why would we call a rule that only applied circumstantially a “moral rule”? Wouldn’t that simply be a convention, or a preference? Indeed, for Kant, the universal law of the Categorical Imperative is not derived from natural law, in the way that Newton’s laws of thermodynamics, for instance, are derived by inferring them from the behavior of matter. Rather, the Categorical Imperative is derived from the *moral law* which is accessible only by means of the faculty of “pure reason”, as an entirely contemplative exercise. Kant goes so far with this concept as to suggest that there may be no acceptable method for justifying the Categorical Imperative itself by any exemplary application of the self-same principle:
+
+> “…how could laws of the determination of the will be regarded as laws of the determination of the will of rational beings generally… if they were merely empirical and did not take their origin wholly **a priori** from pure but practical reason? Nor could anything be more fatal to morality than that we should wish to derive it from examples. For every example of it that is set before me must be first itself tested by principles of morality, whether it is worthy to serve as an **original** example… but by no means can it authoritatively furnish the conception of morality… imitation finds no place at all in morality, and examples serve only for encouragement… they can never authorize us to set aside the true original which lies only in reason…”
+
+Kant is invoking the ghost of Socrates here by complaining that examples are not enough, and that what he seeks is a universal definition for right action that can be contemplated in the realm of the intelligible, like the Form of the Good or the Form of Beauty. But Kant is also invoking the ghost of Parmenides here, by reminding us that the *ideal* good will, and the *actual* good will, do not seem to have any relation or connection to each other. As put by G. M. A. Grube:
+
+> If the [Forms] are not of our world, they are totally separate and there can be no connexion between the two. The [Forms] cannot then be objects of knowledge… If anyone has knowledge of them, a god has, but this knowledge of the Forms is beyond us human beings. We cannot know the god and the god cannot know us.
+
+Kant even attempts to remedy this in his own metaphysics by positing a nearly identical Nuemenal Realm for his *moral law* as Socrates posits for Parmenides for his Forms (from Parmenides):
+
+> Could not, Parmenides, each of these Forms be a noema which cannot properly exist elsewhere than in souls? For then each of them would be one and what you said just now would not apply to it…
+
+This could be the reason why Kant gives us these two different formulations of the Categorical Imperative — a difference that should appear much more stark now than at the beginning of this essay. Kant is trying to provide towers on either side of the chasm he’s attempting to bridge, with his “good will”. What’s more, Plato’s Forms are attempting to conceptualize an ideal for static objects of subjective experience, such as beauty or justice, or the shape of a triangle. But Kant is demanding the same standard of perfection for human action, as it manifests itself in the material world. There can be no perfect form of right action, because all of human action is bounded by contingency in the facts of reality. The Categorical Imperative is, therefore, a profoundly confused misapplication of Platonic Idealism.
+
+It is telling, then, that Kant struggles so mightily in attempting to demonstrate the utility of the Categorical Imperative in the various examples he offers (and that earlier he complained could provide no true representation of it, much like Socrates would have complained of the Form of man). The case of the false promise, for example, does not expose a logical contradiction any more than Hume’s teapot refusing to boil does. Instead, all Kant is able to show, is how a world of nothing but false promises would seem a whimsically ridiculous place to us. The recognition of the absurdity in consequence is not the same thing as contemplating the injustice of the violation of a universal moral law. Even worse, the recognition of that absurdity exposes the fact that we’re implicitly dealing with a *hypothetical* imperative here: If you want to be able to rely on promises, then you need to honor them and expect others will do the same. Imagining this as some species of a Categorical Imperative residing in an intelligible realm of *moral law* renders you no less vulnerable to the unscrupulous man. But, more to the point, it leaves you with no clear reason to condemn him as having *acted immorally*. At best, you could complain about the inconvenience or the harm, at which point, you’d be applying a consequentialist standard, and our unscrupulous man could simply retort that its up to you to indemnify yourself against such a contingency in the real world.
+
+For anyone who already prizes the beauty or the utility of the universal applicability of mathematics, or who is already wedded to the universal divinity of the human soul, Kant’s Categorical imperative is going to be powerfully seductive, as a moral system. If we all lived in a rational paradise in fact, then maybe we’d all be like that and Kant would just be another in a long pantheon of Philosopher Kings, ruling us rationally from the pulpit of the Form of Right Action, or the Form of The Good. For the rest of us in the real world, however, where life is lived in pursuit of contingent and temporal goals, the Categorical Imperative is at best a useful heuristic, and at worst, an oppressive ideal that renders us all moral failures at the outset.