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title: "A Critique of the Declaration of Independence"
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date: 2016-08-23T18:24:56Z
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tags: ["enlightenment","jefferson","declaration of independence","equality","liberty"]
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topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
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image: /img/jefferson_drafting_table.jpg
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description: ""
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draft: true
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---
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{{< note >}}
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EDITORS NOTE: A much improved analysis of the Declaration is now available in a four-part series I did between {{< newtab title="July 1 and July 4 of 2020." url="/post/the-declaration-of-independence-part-1-a-decent-respect/" >}} This is being maintained for archival and reference purposes only ~ Greg. 1 Dec. 2021
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{{< /note >}}
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----
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> When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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>
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> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
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What are these “*powers of the earth*”, and how was this “*separate and equal station*” discovered among and between men, and how do we know this entitlement was derived from “*the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God*”? According to Jefferson and his collaborators, these questions need not be answered. They are axiomatic. They “*hold these truths to be self-evident*”. Specifically, in Jefferson’s view, for anyone who takes a moment consider the truth, it should be **obvious** to their common sense, that “*all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.*”
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Despite it’s fame, and although it is masterful prose, the Declaration of Independence is not a particularly groundbreaking piece of writing. In practice, it was simply a polemical indictment of George III, and an open declaration of war against Britain. What the Declaration is **not**, is a philosophical treatise. Jefferson takes his “self-evident truths” as an *ex post facto* rationale, but he does nothing within the confines of the document to justify his reliance upon them for the rest of his argument, even though he was fully aware of their origins (Jefferson was a practicing lawyer, and well read in English jurisprudence and political philosophy).
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The Declaration is a political statement, and it is the last link in an intellectual chain stretching back at least two centuries before it. As we’ve seen from the readings of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, ideas of “Natural Law”, “Right”, and “Equality” (at least, as it exists in a “state of nature”) feature heavily in the book. But Hobbes was not unique. These ideas have been around since the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in vague forms, are a common thread in English Common Law jurisprudence stretching back to the 13th century.
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So, why are we reading this (along with Hobbes), and not reading Locke’s Second Treatise, or Rousseau’s Social Contract? Both of these works directly address the question of justifying the social goods of Liberty, Security, and Happiness much more thoroughly than the Declaration itself, and it seems to me, that’s what we’re trying to do here, yes?
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In any case, what if we were to distill the Declaration down into its actual arguments? Would it still be as convincing? I’m not so sure. But let’s give it a try, and see what we can come up with:
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To begin with, I’m going to discard the first paragraph, as it’s really nothing more than introduction. Charity demands that we set this aside. This leaves us with the first sentence of the second paragraph to start with, as our first proposition:
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> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
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This is not so much a first proposition, as it is a list of starting assumptions. As I said before, he takes these assertions as axiomatically true. So, our starting assumptions are:
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1. There is a creator
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2. This creator has created nature, and imbued it with a set of universal “natural laws”
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3. This creator has created all members of the set ‘mankind’, as a part of nature.
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4. This creator has inculcated certain properties to those members, in equal portion
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5. Those properties are fundamental to (inseparable from) the nature of each member of the set ‘mankind’
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6. Those properties are called “rights”, and are enumerated as follows:
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- life
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- liberty
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- “pursuit of happiness” (aka property ownership)
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- consent
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- revolution
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It’s a bit difficult to tell whether Jefferson intended the remainder to be considered also a part of the “self-evident truth” (that governments are instituted, that they derive their just power from the consent of the governed, etc). If I were to take the entire block of text preceding the “list of facts” as “self-evident truths”, it would require believing that Jefferson thought his entire statement was something that was as completely unassailable as the fact that the grass is green, and water is wet. This is uncharitable. So, we’ll take everything after the enumeration of basic rights to be his “arguments”.
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What does that look like, exactly? Well, perhaps something like this:
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1. A justly constituted government is one in which its power is derived from “*the consent of the governed*”
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2. The British government under “*the present King of Great Britain*” does not derive its power from the consent of the governed
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C1: Therefore, the British government is not justly constituted
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And:
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1. (sp) All men desire to defend themselves against alienation from their inalienable rights. (from our assumptions)
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2. (sp) If government is not justly constituted, it is not an effective weapon of defense of the rights of all men.
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3. [C1] The British government is not justly constituted
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C2: Therefore, the British government is not an effective weapon of defense of the rights of all men.
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And:
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1. It is the right (and/or duty) of all men to “*to alter or to abolish*” unjustly constituted governments.
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2. [C1] The British government is not justly constituted.
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C3: Therefore, the American colonists must “*throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security*”
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Jefferson and his collaborators were not comfortable resting on these arguments alone, however. So, they included an enormous list of particular grievances as “*facts*” meant to “*prove*” George’s “*abuses and usurpations*”. But if your arguments are so strong, why would you need to do this?
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Well, in fact, Jefferson (and most of his collaborators) knew the arguments actually weren’t that strong. One author (Bernard Bailyn) argue that the colonists were laboring under the belief that there was a massive conspiracy at play, working to undermine the ***British\*** constitution (as it was understood in 1770), and that the colonists believed they were pawns in this conspiracy. He may be right. But I take a far less extravagant view, myself.
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Right from the start, George and his court lawyers would have taken issue with Premise 1 of the first argument. What’s more, they probably would have used both Locke and Hobbes themselves, in order to defend George’s right to rule. By the 1700’s, the court really didn’t need to make reference to Divine Right, in order to claim legitimacy. This much had already been settled in the dispute with Cromwell (if you actually read all of Leviathan, Hobbes is aggressively defending the right of an absolute monarch, of precisely the kind that George III imagined himself to be).
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Then, there’s premise 2, of argument 1. Ah, rights. Those ineffable properties of mankind, endowed to us by our creator that are at once both inalienable, and yet alienable. It’s amazing to me, how almost three hundred years later, the concept of “rights” is almost as muddy and unjustifiable now, as it was in 1776. In some ways, the founders of America had it easier, though. They, at least, could appeal to a Supreme Creator, whose magical powers could make them a part of our “nature”. Today, secular analytical philosophy doesn’t have that luxury. It has to pretzel itself into all kinds of intellectual knots to make them seem real, let alone justifiable.
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But let’s take them for granted, as Jefferson asks us to do in this polemic, and let’s assume also (as he seems to here), that they are properties that can be, by force or fraud, alienated from individuals. Let’s also take the implicit assumption from Hobbes (which Jefferson silently assumes here) that mankind is incorrigibly self-motivated. By this reasoning, no sane man would consider a government as the surest weapon of defense against the usurpation of his rights.
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Why? Well, precisely because the state *is a weapon*. It is *the* weapon. A weapon of both physical force, and *moral authority*, that a self-interested man could use with great efficiency to his own advantage. The very thing that Jefferson and his colleagues are charging George III with, in this document. Jefferson and the signers were well read, and well aware of the perils of the institution of government. If you read the Federalist Papers, it is clear that they knew full well that you cannot create a huge weapon, enshrine it in moral armor, put it into the hands of men, and then expect them to *not use it* to their own advantage. Instead, they dissembled, vacillated, and rationalized into existence a Rube-Goldberg machine they believed would turn the *weapon* into a *tool* — and then further insured that *they* were the ones who got to use that tool. How convenient.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
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138
content/post/artur-schopenhauer-on-freedom.md
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content/post/artur-schopenhauer-on-freedom.md
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---
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title: "Artur Schopenhauer on Freedom"
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date: 2017-04-02T17:16:22Z
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tags: ["determinism","free will","freedom"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/schopenhauer.jpg
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draft: false
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---
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{{< anchorfm exitingthecave "What-Is-Freedom--Artur-Schopenhauer-and-The-Freedom-Of-The-Will-e3fv1p/a-absk8c" >}}
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The following is a dialogue between myself and Artur Schopenhauer, in which I basically try to interrogate the text as if I were talking directly to Schopenhauer, in an interview or discussion. All of Dr. Schopenhauer’s responses below come from the text of his essay, either as direct quotes or as slight rephrasing, in order to fit them into the flow of a conversation. It should be noted that I have not read World As Will And Representation (written before this essay), and that I have only a cursory knowledge of Schopenhauer’s biography. So, it is likely that additional context might have made this more insightful. In any case, this is meant only to offer an engaging way to consider the basic ideas contained within this essay, not as a serious critique of Schopenhauer, as such. I hope you enjoy it…
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**Me** : Herr Doctor Schopenhauer, thank you for joining me, today.
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**Artur**: You’re welcome. These days, I don’t have much else to do, and my hermitage in heaven is getting a bit stale. So, I need the outing.
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**Me:** : As you know, we’re here to discuss your famous Prize Essay On The Freedom of the Will. To begin with, I want to take a page out of the philosopher’s playbook, and focus on your definitions. What do you think is meant by ‘freedom’?
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**Artur**: When carefully examined, the concept of ‘freedom’ turns out to be negative… it signifies merely the absence of any hindrance or restraint… animals and men are called ‘free’ when their actions are not hindered by any physical or material obstacles — such as fetters, or prison, or paralysis. They proceed in accordance with their will… the concept in this meaning is not subject to doubt or controversy, and its reality can always be authenticated empirically.
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**Me** : So, you take the common sense view of freedom to be the most compelling?
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**Artur**: No, just the most obvious. In fact, it is perhaps the least interesting of the three different subspecies of freedom.
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**Me** : Three ‘subspecies’? What do you mean?
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**Artur**: Yes, as I was describing, freedom is a negative concept. The absence of restraint. But this means *restraint is a positive concept*, in the form of the power it manifests. The nature of this power can be seen in three different subspecies of freedom correspondent to it: physical, intellectual, and moral. I have only just begun to outline the physical subspecies.
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**Me** : Are these three subspecies, in combination, what we mean when we use terms like “free will”?
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**Artur**: Well, you’re jumping ahead a bit, but you are on the right track. With physical freedom, I do not take into account whatever may influence the will itself. For in it’s original, immediate, and therefore popular meaning, the concept of freedom refers only to the ability to act… However, as soon as we… consider the two remaining kinds, we are dealing with the philosophical sense of the concept, which leads to many difficulties.
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**Me** : Let’s take the other two in order then, yes? What do you mean by ‘intellectual freedom’?
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**Artur**: You are quite right to single out intellectual freedom first, because it is very closely related to physical freedom, but I cannot explain it properly unless we deal with moral freedom first.
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**Me** : Well, in that case, what do you mean by moral freedom?
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**Artur**: The key question here, is what is the true nature of the restraint to moral freedom. With physical freedom, I noted that material obstacles are the restraint upon physical freedom. It is present, when they are absent. In the case of moral freedom, however, it has been observed that a man, without being hindered by material obstacles, can be restrained by mere motives — such as threats, promises, dangers, and the like — from acting in a way in which, if these motives were absent, would have certainly expressed his will.
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**Me**: Yes, I can think of several examples of this…
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**Artur**: Of course, but the point is whether such a man is still free —
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**Me**: I would say no, because the motive, provided it is sufficiently compelling, is more or less the same as a physical obstacle. To use one of the examples I thought of, I would certainly not act out my will, if I knew my will were to lead to direct harm to someone I loved.
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**Artur**: You’re missing the point. If you refrain from acting, because you know it will harm a loved-one, you are acting in accordance with your will, not against it.
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**Me:**: But isn’t that because my will has been restrained by the motive, in the same way that my physical action has been restrained by shackles?
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**Artur**: A sound mind would say that a motive can never act in the same way as a physical obstacle! Undoubtedly, the physical restraint easily transcends human bodily powers unconditionally, but a motive can never be irresistible in itself, and has no absolute power. It can always be offset by a stronger counter-motive, provided that such a counter-motive is present and that you can be determined by it.
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**Me**: That’s quite a lot to take in. I guess I don’t understand what you mean by a ‘motive’. And, what do you mean by ‘whether I can be determined by’ a motive?
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**Artur**: I am not ready to explain this completely, just yet, but here is one example for you, to help you see what I mean: the motive to preserve one’s life. Does that make sense?
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**Me**: So, a sort of fundamental desire or instinct?
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**Artur**: Close, but not quite. But we’re getting side-tracked here. Can we simply accept this example for now?
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**Me**: Ok.
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**Artur**: Great. Now, the motive to preserve one’s own life is perhaps the strongest of all motives —
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**Me**: — But how did we determine that?
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**Artur**: Grrr… Ok, can you think of a motive stronger than the self-preservation motive? The will to live?
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**Me**: Hrm. No, not at the moment.
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**Artur**: Right. So, it is the strongest of all motives, and yet it can be outweighed by other motives, for example, in suicide or in sacrificing one’s life for others —
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**Me**: But wait! Doesn’t that make *those* motives the strongest motives, in the moment they are expressed? The strongest motive, by definition, is the motive that results in it’s own expression, yes?
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**Artur**: My boy, you’re making my point for me. Though motives bring with them no purely objective and absolute compulsion, still one could ascribe to them a subjective and relative compulsion namely, to the person involved. And, now I can finally begin to answer your original question…
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**Me**: Ok, I’m confused, what do you mean?
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**Artur**: You’ll notice that all this talk of motives and restraints, which as been imposed upon one’s *ability*, relates to *willing*. So, the question remains: is the will itself free? So far, we have defined freedom according to the popular conception as acting “*in accordance with one’s own will.*” So, to ask whether the will itself is free, is to ask whether the will is in accordance with itself. This, of course, is self-evident, but also says nothing at all.
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**Me**: Wait. So, you mean to ask not “am I free”, but “is my will free”? In other words, you think there is a difference between “me”, and my will?
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**Artur**: Let me see if I can make it clearer for you. The empirical concept of freedom signifies: “I am free when I can do what I will.” Here in the phrase “what I will” the freedom is already affirmed. But when we now inquire about the freedom of willing itself, the question would then take this form: “can you also will your volitions?”, as if a volition depended on another volition which lay behind it. Suppose that this question is answered in the affirmative. What then? Another question would arise: “can you also will that which you *will to will*?” Thus we would be pushed back indefinitely…
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**Me**: It’s an infinite regress!
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**Artur**: Yes, that’s quite right. You can see then that it is impossible to establish a direct connection between the concept of freedom — in its original, empirical meaning derived from action — and the concept of willing.
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**Me**: But I thought we already covered this. You said before that the physical understanding wasn’t enough, and that I needed to understand moral freedom as well. What am I missing?
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**Artur**: What you’re missing is the point. You want to understand what freedom is, yes?
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**Me**: Yes, that’s what I was hoping you could tell me.
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**Artur**: Please, do try to follow me, then. In order to be in a position to apply the concept of freedom to the will, one must modify it by making the concept of freedom signify in general only the absence of any *necessity*. Thus interpreted, the concept retains its negative character, which I attributed to it from the very beginning. Accordingly, one must first investigate the concept of necessity. For *this* is the positive concept which gives meaning to the negative one — and which gives form to the power I described at first.
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**Me** : Ok, so then is ‘necessity’ the same as the restraint you were talking about, at first?
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**Artur**: Yes, but this needs to be explained better. Something is necessary which follows from a given sufficient ground… Only insofar as we comprehend something as the consequent of a given ground do we recognize it to be necessary. Conversely, as soon as we recognize something to be a consequent of a sufficient ground, we see that it is necessary. This is because all grounds are compelling.
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**Me** : I don’t quite understand what you mean by ‘ground’ or ‘compelling’.
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**Artur**: The necessity of a logical cause will be the conclusion from valid premises. The necessity of a mathematical cause will be the equality of the terms on either side of the operator, and the necessity of physical cause will be its immediate effect. In all these cases, with equal strictness, the necessity is attached to the consequent when the ground is given. The ground is my conception of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, something I don’t have time to explain here, but you can read my doctoral thesis for a full treatment. Suffice to say, everything that is grounded has a proper cause.
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**Me** : Ah, ok. Well, then you must be saying that all causes necessitate their effects, is that right?
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**Artur**: In a word, yes. The absence of necessity would be identical with the absence of a determining sufficient cause. Still, we think of the accidental as the opposite of necessary.
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**Me** : Wait, what? Why? Isn’t an accidental cause still a cause? If so, how could it not be sufficient?
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**Artur**: There is no conflict between these views, each accidental occurrence is only relatively so. For in a world where only accidents can be encountered, every event is necessary in relation to its cause, while in relation to all other events which are contemporaneously and spatially contiguous with it, the event is accidental.
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**Me** : Ok, this is confusing. You seem to be agreeing with me. But what does all this have to do with freedom?
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**Artur**: I must concede, this is the most problematic notion of my idea of freedom. Since the mark of freedom is absence of necessity, that which is free would have to be absolutely independent of any cause and would therefore have to be defined as absolutely accidental.
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**Me** : Absolutely accidental? This is getting even more confusing. Are you saying that freedom, to be ‘real’, would have to be somehow disconnected, or even violate, causal necessity?
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**Artur**: That is precisely what I am saying. It coincides in a singular fashion with the concept of freedom, but I don’t guarantee that it is conceivable. At any rate, that which is free remains that which is in no respect necessary, that is, *not dependent on any ground*. If we apply this concept to the will of man, it would mean that an individual will in its manifestations (volitions) would not be determined by causes or by sufficient grounds at all.
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**Me** : This is astounding. Are you actually saying that there is no freedom?
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**Artur**: Well, yes, I suppose so. But more must be done to prove it, before we can be certain. At the moment, I am simply setting the criteria by which we might identify a will that is free. A free will then, would be the will which is not determined by grounds — and since everything that determines another must be a ground, in real things a real ground, that is, a cause — a few will would not be determined by anything at all. The particular manifestations of this will (volitions) would then proceed absolutely and quite originally from the will itself, without being brought about necessarily by antecedent conditions, and hence also with being determined by anything according to a rule.
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**Me** : But why should identifiable antecedent causes necessitate a lack of freedom? Just because I can look into my past and point to a chain of causal events — even necessary ones — that led me to the present interview, surely that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a choice, nor that I did not have the power to act on that choice, does it? To suggest that a causal explanation is evidence of some sort of *necessity*, one must be able to demonstrate that these causes stripped me of my capacity to choose.
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**Artur**: When we try to deal with this concept, clear thinking abandons us because, while the positing of a ground, in all of its meanings, is the essential form of our entire cognitive faculty, we are here asked to refrain from positing a ground. But every consequent of a ground is *necessary*, and every necessity is the consequent of a ground. Still, there is no lack of a technical term for this concept: *liberum arbitrium indifferentiae*… such a free will of indifference includes the peculiar feature that for a human individual equipped with such a feature, under given external conditions which are thoroughly determined in every particular, two diametrically opposed actions are equally possible.
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**Me** : But there must be some way out of this paradox! Clearly, I *feel* like I am willing my choices freely. How can I feel free, and yet be completely compelled by causal necessity?
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**Artur**: One cannot get away from the negative conception of freedom, without involving oneself in vacillating, hazy explanations, behind which hides hesitant indecision, as when one talks about grounds which do not necessarily bring about their consequents.
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**Me** : Well, I may not be able to get away from it, but I don’t have to like it! In any case, we’ve run out of time for this episode, I’m afraid. Next time, we’ll be moving on to your conception of consciousness, if you’re available.
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**Artur**: Yes, I think I still might be able to talk some sense into you. An explication of my view of consciousness that may help to clear a few things up for you.
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```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
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59
content/post/ayn-rand-is-still-the-boogeyman.md
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---
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title: "Ayn Rand Is Still the Boogeyman"
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date: 2016-08-10T19:16:33Z
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tags: ["ayn rand","objectivism","egoism","selfishness","thrasymachus","plato"]
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topics: ["philosophy"]
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image: /img/ayn-rand-voodoo-doll.jpg
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draft: false
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---
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The following quote is from a discussion of Plato’s dialogue “The Republic”, from [this course](https://www.coursera.org/learn/plato/home/info) on Coursera. The professor, a Dr. Meyer, is explaining the interactions early in the book between Glaucon, Adeimantus, Socrates, and Thrasymachus, wherein the group is debating the subject of whether it is more advantageous to be a just or an unjust man. Dr. Meyer, in this quote, is attempting to compare the vulgar egoism of Thrasymachus to Ayn Rand’s Virtue Of Selfishness, in a throw-away line clearly intended to virtue-signal, and intimidate younger students:
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> “…They want some sort of justification for their belief that it is better to lead a life of justice than one of injustice. We might say, in the vocabulary of the Meno, that they have a most true belief that justice is good. But without an explanation of the reason, the sort that ties down a true belief they don’t know that this is the case. And under the pressure of questioning from skeptics like Thrasymachus, they’re vulnerable to having their true beliefs wander away. We might compare this to the situation of many young people today, who have been raised by their parents and their communities to value generosity and altruism. But then they pick up the writings of Ayn Rand, which extol the virtues of selfishness. And then they’re tempted to abandon the ethical values in which they’ve been raised. Glaucon and Adeimantus are unimpressed with the usual sorts of reasons that their parents or their communities give them to recommend justice.”
|
||||
|
||||
If I were being entirely cheeky, I might ask if Dr. Meyer was accusing Ayn Rand of corrupting the youth.
|
||||
|
||||
As someone who has actually read The Virtue Of Selfishness, Philosophy: Who Needs It, The Objectivist Ethics, and Peikoff’s Objectivism, I always find these sanctimonious little jabs simultaneously hilarious, and tiresome.
|
||||
|
||||
Hilarious, because it’s clear from comments like these (and I’ve seen hundreds), that Dr. Meyer has only read the title, and wishes to dance a straw-man around in front of us. Tiresome, because I’m constantly finding myself in a situation of defending a philosopher with whom I don’t even share much agreement. Even Hannah Arendt doesn’t get this kind of petty hatred anymore.
|
||||
|
||||
It’s a little disappointing, too. This particular class is all about making a careful, close reading of Plato, in order to understand exactly what it is he’s trying to say. Whether or not we agree with his conception of ideas, or with his conclusions about the ideal state or the ideal man, we’re supposed to be able to address them as Plato intended (or as close as we can get to a reasonable interpretation). As Dr. Meyer points out, this is the “principle of charity”.
|
||||
|
||||
Why is it that this principle never applies to Ayn Rand? Is it because she’s not a “real” philosopher? Well, then why even bring her up? Just leave her lie, along with the Robert Pirsigs of the world. Is it because her arguments really are as horrible as Dr. Meyer says? Well, then, since Dr. Meyer is raising the comparison to Thrasymacus, it should be an easy matter to actually include a few fair quotes, to show how this is true. Is doing that a distraction from the class? Then again, why even bring her up at all?
|
||||
|
||||
To anyone reading this, I would highly recommend you actually go read The Virtue Of Selfishness. Don’t do it because I tell you it’s all true, or great, or wonderful (there’s plenty there to criticize). Do it, precisely because it’s a well argued position you’re not going to find in academia. Put yourself in Socrates’ shoes, and explain to Rand exactly why she’s wrong. It will, at the very least, strengthen your capacity to reason critically, and will give you the ammunition you need to properly argue with criticisms of concepts like egoism, altruism, sacrifice, and the value of self.
|
||||
|
||||
As it turns out, The Virtue Of Selfishness can easily be found online, [right here](http://marsexxx.com/ycnex/Ayn_Rand-The_Virtue_of_Selfishness.pdf). If you do take the time to read it, you’ll find that nowhere in it, does Rand defend Thrasymachus’ cynical opportunism, and moral confusion. In fact, she likely would have counted Thrasymachus among the very people she is condemning in this essay.
|
||||
|
||||
Now, you could take her to task for her conception of “rational self-interest”, and how exactly it is to be maintained. Or, you could demand she fully justify her position that “The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life…”. Or, you could speculate what she would say about Frans de Waal’s research (the principle of reciprocal altruism). And there is much to say, on the topic of contemporary egoism, as a philosophy.
|
||||
|
||||
But to do this, would be to engage her directly on her moral theory. And that would take some effort, to actually read her, and to apply the same principle of charity to her, that we do to Plato.
|
||||
|
||||
What’s truly unfortunate about the ignorant dismissals, is the loss of an incredibly valuable opportunity to really see Plato in stark contrast.
|
||||
|
||||
Rand was no fan of Plato (she labeled him a mystic). However, if you compare The Republic to Atlas Shrugged, there are innumerable similarities. Just a couple examples: The ideal man, with a soul that is well tempered by a harmonious balance of virtues constituting true justice, in the form of John Galt; The “city of the virtuous” that Socrates constructed with Glaucon and Adeimantus, in the form of Galt’s Gulch.
|
||||
|
||||
Looking more closely at the early books of The Republic, what you can immediately see, is that Rand is looking for a third way between Thrasymachus and Socrates.
|
||||
|
||||
Thrasymachus says: justice is (that is to say, the standard of justice is) that which benefits oneself.
|
||||
|
||||
Socrates replies: No, justice is what benefits another, when that benefit is education.
|
||||
|
||||
Rand is arguing with both of them, in The Virtue Of Selfishness, saying instead: The standard of justice is not *who is the beneficiary*, but rather, *something else entirely*. It is the intrinsic worth of mans life ‘qua man’, by virtue of his unique capacity for reason. That an action must benefit the actor, is necessary for justice, she says, but it is not sufficient. The action itself must be guided by a principle of reason, since reason as it manifests itself in man, is the standard (in her view).
|
||||
|
||||
This, to me, is absolutely fascinating. Because Socrates himself agrees that man is in some way exceptional to animal, by virtue of his capacity to reason (as In Republic). It is this faculty that provides him with access to the true form of the good, and with the capacity to recall it (as in Meno), and in doing so, perfecting it in preparation for its next iteration (as in Apology, and Phaedo).
|
||||
|
||||
So, Rand’s view is actually incredibly similar to Plato’s. But her task, as she saw it, was to bring the discussion back to earth, back to reality, and out of the realm of imaginary things like “true forms”. And her solution, such as it is, was an attempt to establish the value of the individual, as such, in the fact of rational consciousness.
|
||||
|
||||
Now, any follower of Hume might want to ask Rand, “How is it, exactly, that you get from an arbitrary fact about human consciousness, to his moral worth?” This is something Rand never quite answers in a satisfying way (at least, not for me). And it’s been stuck in my craw since I first read The Objectivist Ethics. One could argue that Plato had the easier job, since all he had to do was to refer to his theology, but Rand had to find some anchor in physical reality. But, this is all a subject for another post.
|
||||
|
||||
The point I’m trying to make here, is that reading this book will actually enrich your view of the dialogues, not diminish it. It will give you a modern voice that argues with Plato constantly (and quite forcefully), and will give you an opportunity to clarify your own thinking about the dialogues.
|
||||
|
||||
And this is why I get so angry, when I hear instructors – authority figures – attempting to ward students away from that opportunity.
|
||||
|
||||
Because what is the cost, in doing this? We reinforce the incurious, the prejudiced, and the cynical impulses in students, rather than inspiring the opposite. That is the cost. And it is an enormous cost.
|
||||
|
||||
In other words, we create precisely the world that Plato was railing against, in the dialogues.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
114
content/post/bernard-williams-and-moral-dilemmas.md
Normal file
114
content/post/bernard-williams-and-moral-dilemmas.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,114 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Bernard Williams and Moral Dilemmas"
|
||||
date: 2017-04-17T17:07:44Z
|
||||
tags: ["trolly problem","moral dilemma","thought experiments"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/mexican_standoff.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The following moral dilemmas come from a Bernard Williams’ essay “A Critique of Utilitarianism” in a book entitled “Utilitarianism: For and Against”. They are presented as part of Bernard Williams’ specific objections to Utilitarianism. However, I want to use them here to talk more generally about hypothetical moral dilemmas as a tool of thought (an ‘intuition pump’, to use the Dan Dennett euphemism) in philosophy. Here are the dilemmas, as stated in Williams’ essay
|
||||
|
||||
> Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town. Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a random group of the inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible protestors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim is an honored visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, then as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim, with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of that kind is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and the other villagers, understand the situation, and are obviously begging him to accept. What should he do?[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
And:
|
||||
|
||||
> George, who has just taken his Ph.D. in chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. He is not very robust in health, which cuts down the number of jobs he might be able to do satisfactorily. His wife has to go out to work to keep them, which itself causes a great deal of strain, since they have small children and there are severe problems about looking after them. The results of all this, especially on the children, are damaging. An older chemist, who knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemical and biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any such scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George would. Indeed, it is not merely concern for George and his family, but (to speak frankly and in confidence) some alarm about this other man’s excess of zeal, which has led the older man to offer to use his influence to get George the job… George’s wife, to whom he is deeply attached, has views (the details of which need not concern us) from which it follows that at least there is nothing particularly wrong with research into CBW. What should he do?[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### Initial thoughts
|
||||
|
||||
1. These kind of dilemmas (often pejoratively labeled “life-boat”, “trolly”, or “flag pole” scenarios, because of some very old and very well-worn traditional hypotheticals) make a subtle but very powerful appeal to intense feelings, like existential fear, or horror, or outrage. That, in my view, transforms this problem into a psychological one, not a philosophical one. We’re asking the person considering the situation to empathize with George and Jim, and then to consider whether we might be able to over-rule our own emotions, in favor of some sort of technical or moral calculus that renders the decision more ‘justifiable’. But what is it, exactly, that makes a choice grounded in emotion less appropriate than a choice grounded in some form of moral calculus? In other words, we’re smuggling in at least one moral judgement already, in the formulation of these hypothetical scenarios. How do we decide which hypotheticals are the ones that will get us to the “true” moral answers? This seems to me, to be the doorway to an infinite regress.
|
||||
2. There is something very odd about these new sorts of hypotheticals, that the traditional ones don’t seem to share: they absolve the non-player characters of any moral responsibility themselves, or even try to lever that responsibility entirely onto the player character by implication. In the George case, for example, the scenario doesn’t simply suggest that George may have the added incentive of the happy coincidence of impeding the progress of chemical weapons manufacturing (an oddly morally suspect thing to do, in its own right, but that’s a separate question), the story seems to suggest that George would himself bear responsibility for the actions of that energetic young weapons chemist also aiming for the job. But why? If we’re already stipulating to the notion of some “real” moral responsibility, then by what system of morals does this anonymous chemists responsibilities suddenly become George’s? I suppose, if you’re Christian, you could try to justify it by some sort of appeal to substitutional atonement (if it was good enough for Jesus, then its good enough for me). But that seems rather weak.
|
||||
3. These scenarios attempt to put you into a situation in which morality couldn’t possibly apply anyway. Take the Jim scenario. The guns are already out. Someone is already going to get killed. By the time we get to bullets flying, morality is sort of moot. Morality only matters where there are real choices to be made. But in the Jim scenario, all the serious choices have already been made. The only thing left to do, is to find a way to escape the situation yourself, with as little scarring as possible. And then seek psychological help. Action movies often depict this particular dilemma, as one man holding a gun to your head, and telling you he won’t kill you, if you kill another man (for an excellent and horrifying example, rent the movie “Lord of War” with Nicolas Cage… surprisingly, a rare piece of good acting on Cage’s part).
|
||||
4. An important point implied by my Nick Cage reference, is the fact that these scenarios exist “in a vacuum”. In the Jim scenario, Jim “finds himself” in a square. Like, he just happened to wake up there, or wandered through the jungle in a haze and suddenly realizes where he’s at. But this isn’t how people end up in incredibly violent situations. They are, necessarily, a long string of minor but very bad choices, that typically end in these kinds of impossible-situation horror stories. In the George case, George’s options are forcibly and very artificially limited. If George is so physically frail, how did he manage to make it through university in the first place? If working in as a construction worker is too much for him, why not as a water or soil purity tester, or a dispatcher, or an administrator, or something like that? Those sorts of jobs have very similar salaries (and sometimes much larger) to entry level research assistant jobs.
|
||||
|
||||
In spite of these objections, I’m going to task myself with evaluating the two scenarios according to Utilitarianism, taking into account the criticisms from Williams in “Utilitarianism: For and Against”, and from E. J. Lemmon, in his essay “Moral Dilemmas”.
|
||||
|
||||
First, my [Kobayashi Maru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru) ground rules:
|
||||
|
||||
1. *No Deus Ex Machina.* I’m not going to import anything into the scenario that isn’t already present. (such as, say, George gets a call from an old friend offering him a better job, or Captain Pedro has a congenital heart condition that will flare up just as he hands Jim the gun, or rebel forces come out of the woods and overrun the captain and his men).
|
||||
2. *Courtroom Discipline.* Where Bernard has taken license to speculate on future outcomes, I will take only those same liberties (the basic courtroom standard).
|
||||
3. *No Free Will.* I will grant the non-player characters no more moral agency than Williams has granted them (for example, perhaps Captain Pedro has a change of heart, or George’s wife promises never to leave George). The are basically preprogrammed obstacles, for the purposes of this analysis.
|
||||
|
||||
The point of these rules, is to constrict myself to the first-person player character, his moral agency, and the choice he faces. If I took liberties violating these rules, I wouldn’t actually be engaging with the moral dilemma.
|
||||
|
||||
### Analysing Jim
|
||||
|
||||
The easiest way to begin, for me, would be to simply brainstorm on all of Jim’s possible choices. What could he do? As Williams points out in the essay (echoing Kant), ought implies can. But what can Jim do? If we withhold consideration of the obligations, duties, rights, and outcomes for a moment, and just examine the imaginable choices, I think we can narrow the list down to this:
|
||||
Jim could:
|
||||
|
||||
- do as he’s commanded by Pedro.
|
||||
- stay and refuse Pedro’s command.
|
||||
- try to run away/escape.
|
||||
- accept the gun from Pedro, but commit suicide.
|
||||
|
||||
Anything else beyond these four choices would really just roll up into one of them, as a particular instance of these categories.
|
||||
|
||||
I wonder if Williams would reject the last two options outright, as examples of what he described in the essay as “self-deception”. If Jim were to run off into the woods from whence he came, it would be tempting I think, to convince himself that he was suffering from jungle delusions or that maybe Pedro didn’t actually say what he thought he said. In the suicide scenario, the decision might be accompanied by a belief that he had no other choice, or that he might incur some responsibility that actually he wouldn’t (in a less Utilitarian mindset).
|
||||
|
||||
But what if Jim wasn’t actually engaging in self-deception? What then? Being on a botanical expedition, surely Jim is traveling with fellow researchers, and has access to a radio back at his vehicle, with which he can summon international authorities to swoop in and overwhelm the locals? By a Utilitarian calculation, perhaps letting all the prisoners perish in order to capture Pedro and his gang is the better choice. Since Williams included this detail, I don’t see why I can’t.
|
||||
|
||||
However, let’s suppose as any good impossible situation would demand, that Jim is literally lost, and must act in the moment, in some violent way. Then, why would it be beyond the pale to imagine a man like that to be so panicked and distraught by the situation, that he might on an impulse simply shoot himself to avoid the moral hazard, and the subsequent mental torture of the outcome that he imagines in that moment? The point here, is not to avoid analysis of the actual choice, but to highlight a serious problem with Utilitarianism. Mill sarcastically dismisses critics who make the complaint that there simply isn’t time to make the calculations Utilitarianism demands, or that human nature might be too frail to be as disinterested as Mill wants it to be. This scenario is sufficiently sudden and violent enough, that any sane person would have to agree that there’s simply no telling what the outcome might be. Faced with such a situation myself, I could imagine at least contemplating exactly this option. Who would want to spend the rest of his life carrying around the psychological burden of having been forced into committing murder? Or worse, having been forced to passively watch the murder of others? Unless you’re some superhuman Elie Wiesel or Aleksander Solzhenitsyn type, you’re probably at a minimum not going to be able to continue your career in South American botany. Though, I suppose if Jim were a highly-trained covert ops soldier, acting under the cover story of a research botanist, then the choice might be significantly more utilitarian in nature. But this is outside the scope of Williams’ scenario, so I can’t grant that to our player-character.
|
||||
|
||||
Taking this point a bit further, Williams spends a good deal of time in the essay debating about whether Utilitarianism is a system for evaluating the imputed costs and benefits of a choice about to be made, or a system for evaluating the moral utility of the outcomes of choices already made. The Jim situation seems to imply the former, but when we think about scenarios like this, we’re always considering them as if the choice had already been made, and assuming (as John rightly pointed out) that we have certainty about both the outcomes and the utility of those outcomes. Let’s assume that taking Pedro’s offer is the proper choice, simply because, in the moment, its one life instead of 20. This obviously boils utility down to a mere numbers game. The loss of one life is better than the loss of 20. Fine, Jim must take the offer. But here’s a question for you: which one does he pick? The oldest man in the group? One of the women? The child soldier? The most aggressive rebel? The one who seems to be already injured? The one that seems to speak english? Which of these victims is the least likely to provide benefit to the village in the future? Less intuitively, which is more likely to be helpful to their rebel cause? What does utility tell us about this? How could Jim possibly have enough information, in the time allotted, to make anything like a reasonable cost/benefit evaluation? He would literally be faced with “draw straws” choice.
|
||||
|
||||
Getting back to my original list of objections (before I read the articles), I don’t see this situation as a moral dilemma at all. Jim has no moral responsibility for what is taking place. He came into it unawares, and Pedro and his men are in control. They are the ones with all the moral choices available to them. What Jim is doing, is making a practical choice: how do I get out of this situation: (1) alive, and (2) having done as little harm as possible. Note, he is not asking “why is one choice moral and another not”. He is asking a how question. Everything after that, is a personal estimation of: how much psychological pain he can bare; whether he can trust that Pedro, as violent and sadistic as he is, won’t just kill the rest of the captives anyway as some sort of cruel joke; Pedro won’t kill him anyway, after he’s killed a captive. The locus of moral responsibility here is with Pedro, not Jim. The evil rests with Pedro, not Jim. Jim is a victim, just as much as those villagers.
|
||||
|
||||
Now, if Pedro had instead said, “I will let them go, if you volunteer to go to prison”, then we might actually have ourselves a genuine moral dilemma. How much of Jim’s own life is he willing to sacrifice for others? Particularly, others who don’t really know him and who he doesn’t know. I think Mill would be more likely to take that sort of scenario as an exemplar of his concept of utilitarian choice:
|
||||
|
||||
> “… there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is which, when once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civilization. The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body; and this association is riveted more and more, as mankind are further removed from the state of savage independence. Any condition, therefore, which is essential to a state of society, becomes more and more an inseparable part of every person’s conception of the state of things which he is born into, and which is the destiny of a human being. Now, society between human beings, except in the relation of master and slave, is manifestly impossible on any other footing than that the interests of all are to be consulted. Society between equals can only exist on the understanding that the interests of all are to be regarded equally… In this way people grow up unable to conceive as possible to them a state of total disregard of other people’s interests… They are under a necessity of conceiving themselves as at least abstaining from all the grosser injuries, and (if only for their own protection) living in a state of constant protest against them…”[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Even though the choice is a forced choice (if Pedro had not put him in the situation, he’d not have had to make it) such a choice would still be Jim’s to make, and not Pedro’s. This is because Pedro is putting the decision to murder or not murder in Jim’s hands. Even if he did not make the choice on Utilitarian grounds, it would still be a moral choice, because the locus of moral responsibility is with Jim. Williams’ original scenario puts us – as the gods-eye viewers – in the position of having to assign a quantitative value to human life, and then judge Jim based on how much value we estimate is lost. The new scenario, on the other hand, puts Jim back in the moral driver’s seat.
|
||||
|
||||
However, since Pedro is a non-player character, I can’t change his actions. I am only free to manipulate Jim. As such, I can’t help but to come down on the side of my previous ruling. This is not a moral dilemma, but a practical one. Jim is not a proper moral agent in the original situation, only an extension of the inevitability that Pedro already set into motion. As such, I see Jim as a casualty, not a participant in the horror.
|
||||
|
||||
### Analysing George
|
||||
|
||||
As with the last case, taking the time up front to define what George could do may help to focus the problem. Williams’ retelling of the dilemma may leave us with the impression that it’s a straight-forward choice, but in this case, at least at the moment, it’s not so clear for reasons of historical accuracy. The book containing Williams’ essay, “Utilitarianism: For and Against”, was published by Cambridge in 1973. So, I am going to take the world of 1973 as the set of assumptions that Williams is unconsciously importing into this scenario, and I’m going to take the United States and the UK as the “world” into which Williams has put this man.
|
||||
|
||||
While it’s true that in the UK, Porton Down and Nancekuke were being “maintained” as late as 1975, it seems from credible reports that these facilities (the only facilities in the UK to produce chemical and biological weapons during WWII) were not being used to produce anything new. Nancekuke was essentially dormant, and Porton Down was being used only to study other governments’ uses of chemical weapons, and to develop defenses against biological threats like Ebola. Meanwhile, in the United States the dreaded President Nixon unilaterally halted all government work on chemical and biological weapons in 1969. The military then converted the Rocky Mountain Arsenal chemical weapons base, using it as a disposal facility until the early 1980’s. While it appears the US military and the CIA did engage in some highly secret testing programs as late as 1973, it is highly unlikely that George, even with the help of his older friend, could have obtained the security clearance needed to join the program – unless his older friend worked for the CIA. Also, it’s true that the Soviet Union, and a number of east African and Middle Eastern states were engaged in the manufacture and trade of chemical weapons as late as the early 1990’s.
|
||||
|
||||
However, unless we’re willing to speculate that George’s friend was a Yemeni, Iranian, or Russian double-agent, and we’re willing to distend the moral dilemma beyond all recognition, then I think it’s safe to assume this isn’t what Williams had in mind. So, unless sickly George is prepared to take on the dangerous life of a secret agent, living a double-identity and doing clandestine work for a lab that is somehow secretly operating in violation of numerous national and international laws, then I honestly don’t understand how he could have this choice to make at all. Maybe George is the model for the Breaking Bad character?
|
||||
|
||||
Still, if I violate my own rules, we could put this dilemma back on solid ground. Let’s suppose, instead of being a chemist, and instead of having difficulty finding work in chemistry (which itself is kind of weird, since chemical engineering in the 70’s and 80’s was one of the most sought-after high-skill degrees in private industry at the time), George is instead a PhD nuclear physicist, and his friend is offering him a job in a government lab researching nuclear weapons technology. This, at least, is something that was still an active and well-trafficked pursuit by “legitimate” states in the 1970’s. Thus, it’s a plausible substitution, doesn’t require us to change the dilemma in any fundamental way, and doesn’t require us to accept Williams’ implicit assumption violating obviously well-worn facts of history, or to turn George into a spy novel protagonist.
|
||||
|
||||
Given this situation, what could George now do? If I stay within the bounds of the dilemma, and my own rules, then it does seem George is left with two options: take the job, or refuse the job. At this point, it seems to me easier to understand George’s problem if we frame the dilemma in the form of Lemmon’s three main categories of Duty, Obligation, and Principle. What are George’s duties, obligations, and principles?
|
||||
|
||||
George’s central moral principle is stated explicitly in the dilemma: George is opposed to [nuclear] weapons, in principle. So, this would suggest at least initially, that George should not take the job. But we don’t know anything about the job itself. Supposing he is tasked with developing technologies that neutralize warheads, or inventing ways of defending against various forms of radiation, or building defensive technologies like detectors or sensors or long-range scanners or something? Surely, in spite of his principles — indeed, perhaps because of them — he could take the job, if it entailed these tasks? But this is importing too much into the dilemma. Clearly, Williams’ implication is that he’d be building offensive weapons. If so, that would lead us back to recommending refusal.
|
||||
|
||||
In terms of obligations, the only one that seems clear is to the welfare his family: his wife and two children. George’s wife is explicitly noncommittal on the question of weapons. So, there doesn’t seem to be any obligation present to honour her commitments. On impulse, one might think that the welfare obligation would suggest that George should take the job. But here, we’re left with a single-index, one-dimensional analysis of the situation. It’s true that the household income would increase with George’s taking the job. But – as we’ve mentioned elsewhere – at what additional cost to George’s health, both physical and mental? What if the strain of working a job that forces George to live in a state of constant mental anguish, causes him to become more ill, forcing him to quit? What if his attempt to adopt toxically obstructionist habits at work (in service to his principles) causes his superiors to evaluate him poorly, getting himself fired? What if the stress of all of this finally destroys the bond between George and his wife, ending in divorce? Given any of these equally possible outcomes, it seems clear that George’s obligation to his family’s welfare ought to lead him to refuse the job.
|
||||
|
||||
Lastly, what are George’s duties? On the face of it, proceeding from Lemmon’s conception, one might say none, as George has not yet taken on any particular role which has encumbered him with duties (such as a politician or a policeman). However, he likely does bear some duty, in Mill’s view. If George were a well-trained utilitarian, then his “conscientious feelings” might well instruct him as to his duty:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…The internal sanction of duty, whatever our standard of duty may be, is one and the same— a feeling in our own mind; a pain, more or less intense, attendant on violation of duty, which in properly cultivated moral natures rises, in the more serious cases, into shrinking from it as an impossibility. This feeling, when disinterested, and connecting itself with the pure idea of duty, and not with some particular form of it, or with any of the merely accessory circumstances, is the essence of Conscience…”[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
And this would stem, of course, from a proper disinterested evaluation of the amount of utility to be lost and gained in the choice at hand. Bentham and Mill quantified utility (happiness) in terms of denominated currency (dollars, pounds, what have you). But as we’ve seen when looking at the two previous categories, it’s not clear why we should accept this single-index view of utility. There are lots of other factors that weigh into a “calculation” of happiness. Interestingly enough, Mill, in defending the “private” or “local” conception of utility, seems to implicitly acknowledge this problem:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…to speak only of actions done from the motive of duty, and in direct obedience to principle: it is a misapprehension of the utilitarian mode of thought, to conceive it as implying that people should fix their minds upon so wide a generality as the world, or society at large. The great majority of good actions are intended, not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights — that is, the legitimate and authorised expectations — of any one else…”
|
||||
|
||||
Worse yet, this passage seems to oppose the notion of a “social” calculation, in which George might consider the wider effect on society in a utilitarian way. But even if he were to try, he’d be in the same boat as Jim: how could he possibly estimate the overall happiness of the world, as against that of himself and his own family, in an attempt to discover his duty? Where would this information come from, and in what framework of analysis could it possibly make any sense? I am inclined, therefore, to think that Utilitarianism cannot actually help George in this regard. Not simply because there is no duty to be found in the dilemma, but because utilitarian calculus could not find it, even if it were there to be found. If it is to be found, it must be discovered elsewhere. Perhaps, contra Mill, in a Kantian categorical principle, or some other system of morals?
|
||||
|
||||
### Final thoughts
|
||||
|
||||
So, in the dilemma of George, we have one vote against, one vote that could be interpreted as against, and one vote to abstain. Therefore, taking the democratic vote of Lemmon’s moral categories, George should refuse the job. Or, at least, get more information before he decides to take it. But the judgement against is hardly unequivocal. I am hard pressed to explain how any intellectual analysis of morality could be.
|
||||
|
||||
Williams identified what I think is a general problem with the analytical approach to moral dilemmas, in his critique of Utilitarianism specifically. In short: what framework of reasoning could we apply, which does not (at least) have the potential to bias our own evaluation of moral choices in favor of the outcomes amenable to that framework? Here’s the quote from Williams:
|
||||
|
||||
> ”…to exercise utilitarian methods on things which at least seem to respond to them is not merely to provide a benefit in some areas which one cannot provide in all. It is, at least very often, to provide those things with prestige, to give them an unjustifiably large role in the decision, and to dismiss to a greater distance those things which do not respond to the same methods. Just as in the natural sciences, scientific questions get asked in those areas where experimental techniques exist for answering them, so in the very different matter of political and social decision weight will be put on those considerations which respected intellectual techniques can seem, or at least promise, to handle. To regard this as a matter of half a loaf, is to presuppose both that the selective application of those techniques to some elements in the situation does not in itself bias the result, and also that to take in a wider set of considerations will necessarily, in the long run, be a matter of more of the same; and often both those presuppositions are false…”
|
||||
|
||||
If I am deontologically disposed, I am going to search for answers to the dilemmas that conform to hypothetical and categorical imperatives. If I am consequentially disposed, I am going to search for answers that maximize utility. Who’s “correct”? How can I be sure that the hypothetical situation itself isn’t a product of my predisposition? For that, we’d have to appeal to some higher court — yet another tumble into an infinite regress…
|
||||
|
||||
------
|
||||
|
||||
### Bibliography
|
||||
|
||||
- Smart, J. J. C.. Utilitarianism: For and Against. Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
|
||||
- Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays (Oxford World’s Classics) OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
|
||||
- Lemmon, E. J.. Moral Dilemmas, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr., 1962), pp. 139-158 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Smart, J. J. C.. Utilitarianism: For and Against (pp. 97-99). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
|
||||
[^2]: ibid. Pg. 98
|
||||
[^3]: Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays (Oxford World’s Classics) (Kindle Locations 3637-3639). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
|
||||
[^4]: ibid. loc. 3645
|
||||
95
content/post/doubt-and-descartes-existence.md
Normal file
95
content/post/doubt-and-descartes-existence.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Doubt and Descartes Existence"
|
||||
date: 2016-10-01T18:08:30Z
|
||||
tags: ["skepticism","rationalism","cartesian dualism","desartes"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/the_matrix.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The proposition ‘*I am, I exist*’ (*ego sum, ego existo* – hereafter, referred to as the ’*ego*’), is of special importance in the argument of Descartes’ Second Meditation for many reasons. More generally, it is important because of the implications it has for Descartes’ overall philosophical project. For example, it implicitly rejects religious authority in favor of a personal standard of knowledge in an era in which Galileo faced aggressive persecution; it also forms the nascent beginning of the still ongoing nature-nurture debate, and it ultimately makes Descartes something of an Augustinian. But these topics are far too broad to cover adequately in a brief essay. Since the language of the question at hand focuses exclusively on the the Second Meditation and specifically the argument within it, a much narrower interpretation seems more appropriate. Namely, why is the ‘*ego*’ necessary for Descartes to achieve his goal in the Second Meditation, and how does it facilitate that goal? On this point, I will argue that there is one fundamental reason. Namely, without the *ego*, Descartes has no means by which to recover from the corrosive power of his own method of doubt. I will outline and analyze this reason, focusing on whether the ‘*ego*’ satisfies the logical and epistemic demands put upon it by the method. Finally, I will argue that because Descartes is unclear in his justification for the *ego*, it remains unconvincing as a basis for epistemic certainty.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Doubt, Absolute Certainty, And The Whirlpool
|
||||
|
||||
A central feature of Descartes’ Method of Doubt is an absolute standard for what he will allow himself to identify as knowledge. He states in Meditation One: “*…we should withhold assent just as carefully from whatever is not completely certain and indubitable as from what is clearly false…*”. In other words, for the purposes of his method, he makes no distinction, nor accommodates any gradation, between the weakest of doubts and the worst of errors. All of these shades of gray are to be judged identically false. As a consequence, he admits he is, “…*forced to concede eventually that there is nothing… that cannot be doubted…*”, and by the beginning of Second Meditation, he recognizes the extreme position this puts him in, vowing to find a way to extricate himself:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*…I am so tossed about, as if I had fallen suddenly into a deep whirlpool, that I can neither put my foot on the bottom nor swim to the surface. However… I will follow [the method of doubt] until I discover something that is certain or, at least, until I discover that it is certain only that nothing is certain. Archimedes looked for only one firm and immovable point in order to move the whole earth; likewise, I could hope for great things if I found even the smallest thing that is certain and unmoved…*”
|
||||
|
||||
Finding this Archimedean point, then, is the challenge he faces in the Second Meditation. But what does this entail, exactly? To begin, we need to understand the standard of knowledge that has driven him to this point. In other words, what does Descartes mean by certainty? He defines it in The Meditations thus far only in silhouette, as a belief held “without doubt”. But to clearly understand his predicament it would help to understand what, for Descartes, constituted epistemic certainty. On this question, Descartes offers very little in the Meditations in the way of a complete explanation. However, he does provide some helpful details in an earlier work entitled, “*Rules For the Direction of The Mind*”. Rule three provides a direct and concise answer, in fact:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*…let us here enumerate all the acts of our intellect through which we can arrive at knowledge of things without any fear of error. We admit only two: **namely, intuition and deduction**.*”
|
||||
|
||||
#### The Acts Of The Intellect
|
||||
|
||||
Unfortunately, Descartes does not explain why these two particular acts of the intellect are the only two options. However, he does a fair amount of work to describe how they function separately as paths to knowledge. First, on intuition, he explains that it something quite different from the common-sense conception:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*…By intuition I understand neither the fleeting testimony of the senses nor the deceptive judgment of the imagination with its false constructions, but a conception of a pure and attentive mind, so easy and so distinct, that no doubt at all remains about what we understand. Or, what comes to the same thing, intuition is the indubitable conception of a pure and attentive mind arising from **the light of reason alone**; it is more certain even than deduction, because it is simpler, even though, as we noted above, people cannot err in deduction either. **Thus everyone can intuit with his mind that he exists, that he is thinking**, that a triangle is bounded by only three lines, a sphere by a single surface, and the like…*”
|
||||
|
||||
Descartes actually restates the “light of reason” notion in Meditation Three. So, we can be reasonably sure that the concept remained roughly the same for him in the gap between the writing of *Rules* and *Meditations*. He does not explain in the *Rules* how that “indubitable conception” is arrived at, except to assert that it arises from that “light of reason”. In The Meditations, he also adds that intuition is necessarily trustworthy, because none of the other “faculties” share the indubitable character of the faculty from which this notion arises.
|
||||
|
||||
> “…*whatever is shown to me by **the natural light of reason** – for example, that from the fact that I doubt it follows that I exist, and similar things – cannot in any way be doubtful, because there cannot be another faculty which I trust as much as that light and which could teach me that the conclusion is not true*…”
|
||||
|
||||
He gives us an argument in the third Meditation for how intuition achieves this absolute undoubtable character, by way of a fairly lengthy chain of reasoning meant also to provide his first proof of the existence of God. An analysis of that argument (and the so-called ‘Cartesian Circle’ created by it) is beyond the scope of this essay. So, I will only roughly summarize Descartes’ justification, here: The ideas in my mind are something that require a cause which, at least in some cases, cannot be myself. That cause is necessarily God, because the regress must end somewhere, and that end must be the necessary source, and the most perfect of ideas. Namely, God.
|
||||
|
||||
Moving on to the intellectual act of deduction, he argues first in rule two of *Rules*, that deduction is like mathematics and geometry because it’s objects are “pure and simple”, and this makes intelligible knowledge superior to sensible knowledge:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…*we must observe that we can arrive at knowledge of things by two paths, namely by experience or by deduction. We must observe, further, that while experiences of things are often deceptive, deduction or a pure inference of one thing from another, though it may be passed over if it is not noticed, can never be erroneously executed by an intellect even minimally rational…*”
|
||||
|
||||
And further, he assigns the same certainty to this sort of reasoning, as he does to his intuition, precisely because of it’s independence from the senses:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…*mathematics and geometry… alone are concerned with an object so pure and simple that they suppose absolutely nothing which experience has rendered uncertain, but they consist entirely in consequences rationally deduced… [Thus], one must conclude… that those who seek the right road of truth should not occupy themselves with any object concerning which they cannot possess a certainty equal to that of the demonstrations of arithmetic and geometry…*”
|
||||
|
||||
In the Meditations, again, he repeats this conception of (and commitment to) mathematical thought as a form of certainty, both in his opening letter to the Sorbonne, and in the First Meditation. The end result is that, for Descartes, nothing is worthy of the label “knowledge” or “certainty”, unless he can intuit it from the “*light of pure reason*” in a single spontaneous instant, or infer it directly in a single step from such an intuition. As he puts it in The Rules:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…*From all this we may conclude that those propositions which follow immediately from first principles are known according to the way we look at it, now by intuition, now by deduction, but that the first principles themselves are known only by intuition, and the remote conclusions, in contrast, only by deduction…*”
|
||||
|
||||
From the outset of his project, then, we can see that Descartes is anxious to find some kind of unassailable object of the mind that is beyond the reach of empirical rejection or denial by reasoned argument, upon which he can construct an epistemological edifice that will function as the basis for his science. But from what “first principle” can he begin this chain of very small, singular, and “certain” logical inferences? Well, to reiterate what he says in the *Rules*, “*everyone can intuit with his mind that he exists, that he is thinking*” In other words, *Cogito, Ergo Sum*. Or, even more simply as the necessary conclusion stated in Meditation Two.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Argument or Intuition?
|
||||
|
||||
Does the ‘*ego*’ succeed as this singular, certain, self-evident intuition? To begin with, it isn’t clear in the Second Meditation that Descartes has in fact established the proposition *as an intuition* by his own standard. For example, there are three obvious arguments presented near the start of the essay:
|
||||
|
||||
#### Argument 1:
|
||||
|
||||
1. If I am having thoughts, then I am something.
|
||||
2. I am having thoughts
|
||||
3. C1: I am something
|
||||
|
||||
#### Argument 2:
|
||||
|
||||
1. If I convinced myself of something, then I exist
|
||||
2. I convinced myself that there is no material world (From Meditation 1)
|
||||
3. C2: I exist
|
||||
|
||||
#### Argument 3:
|
||||
|
||||
1. If it is possible that a powerful demon is deceiving me, then I exist
|
||||
2. It is possible that a powerful demon is deceiving me (from Meditation 1)
|
||||
3. C3: I exist
|
||||
|
||||
All of these are stated in quick succession immediately prior the conclusion, “…*this proposition ‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily true whenever it is stated by me or conceived in my mind*…” If Descartes had not intended to express his existence as a conclusion following necessarily from premises (i.e., as an argument), or as a result of a series of arguments, then why even include these? If the intent was to demonstrate the “*clear and distinct*” idea of his own existence, wouldn’t it have been wiser to point out the absurdity in the inverse assertion (“*I am not, I do not exist*”)? Descartes actually hints at this in his explication of intuition in the *Rules*, even going so far as to assert the intuitive obviousness of our own self-existence. And, in response to Mersenne and Gassendi, in the *Objections And Replies*, Descartes explicitly denies that he is making an argument. He rejects their particular attempt to state the *cogito* in the traditional formulation of a strict syllogism, which contains a major general premise (in this case suppressed) and a minor particular premise:
|
||||
|
||||
1. SP: Whatever is thinking must exist
|
||||
2. I am a thinking
|
||||
3. C1: I exist
|
||||
|
||||
By my reading, this is close, but not quite what Descartes is doing in the Second Meditation. Yet also by my reading, it still seems clear that he is indeed making an argument (three of them, in fact, as I have demonstrated above). But so what? Let’s grant momentarily that this criticism is sufficient to render both the *ego* and the *cogito* either as arguments, or the conclusions to arguments. Still, Descartes’ own standard of knowledge included both intuition, *and* deduction. Do the Modus Ponens interpretations above conform to Descartes’ understanding of the kind of deduction that constituted epistemic certainty? And, if they don’t, where does this leave the *ego*?
|
||||
|
||||
Judging by his statements about deduction in the *Rules*, it’s not so clear. On the one hand, he suggests a sort of apparent obviousness that requires no formal reasoning at all, such as the contemplation of geometric shapes. On the other, he describes a process by which we are moving from an axiom to an inference based on the axiom. There doesn’t seem to be any clear guidance on which of the two conceptions is preferable. In fact, Descartes himself seemed to recognize this muddled distinction, and tried to clarify it in the *Rules*:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*there may now be some doubt as to why we should have added here another mode of knowledge besides intuition, that is, one proceeding by deduction, by which we understand all that is necessarily inferred from other things that are certainly known. But this procedure was necessary, since many things are known with certainty which nevertheless are not themselves evident, simply because they are deduced from true and known principles by the continuous and uninterrupted movement of a mind which clearly intuits each step… Therefore we distinguish here intuition from certain deduction by the fact that some movement or succession is conceived in the latter but not in the former…*”
|
||||
|
||||
In this context, it seems to me the Modus Ponens interpretations may be a more charitable understanding of Descartes than the form prescribed by Mersenne or Gassendi, since you could read the first two premises as a sort of simultaneous set of propositions, phrased for example, like: “*the ‘I’ exists, **and** is convinced*”. Yet, it seems to me that all that this really amounts to, is an attempt to make the argument *look like* an intuition — the only thing, really, that Descartes is willing to countenance as a “first principle” in his epistemology. Which puts us right back where we started: at a loss to discover “*one firm and immovable point*”, from which to lever the rest of our thinking.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Conclusion
|
||||
|
||||
The standard of knowledge that Descartes defines for himself in the beginning of *Meditations* is absolute certainty. He insists that only those things that we can assert with unflinching conviction should be granted the status of truth or knowledge. He tells us that this sort of “clear and distinct” certainty is only possible in the “light of reason”. While Descartes may assert, “*…as a general rule… everything that I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true.*”, I find I have to agree with another author, that “*The notion of a clear and distinct idea is, unfortunately, one of Descartes’ least clear and distinct notions.*” And, as I have shown, there is even less ground for confidence in his idea as a deduction, since even Descartes himself insists that it is not, and the more charitable forms are simply begging the intuition. Applying Descartes’ own standard, then, there is no good reason to believe he exists, and I think Descartes would agree:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*…we should be warned never at any time to admit any conjectures what- soever as an admixture to our judgments on the truth of things. This counsel is of no small importance. For the chief reason why nothing is found in the vulgar philosophy so evident and certain as to be incapable of controversial treatment is this: scholars, not content with knowing what is clear and certain, first hazarded further affirmations about obscure and unknown matters which they arrived at only by probable conjectures;…*”
|
||||
|
||||
While it’s true that Descartes’ method of doubt is useful occasionally, as a tool for highlighting hidden assumptions and implicit errors in thinking, Descartes’ use of it in the *Meditations* has a very different purpose. He says in passing, in the First Meditation, that he wants to make an advancement to “the sciences”. But that term had a very different meaning for him, than it does for us some 400 years later. Many writers and commentators excuse Descartes’ religiosity in his writings as a necessary self-defense in an era in which Galileo faced extreme danger for his confrontations with the church. But this does not correspond with the biography of Descartes the man, as I understand him. For all his skepticism, Descartes was fundamentally committed to his belief in God. And this was an explicit goal of the Meditations: “*God’s existence and the distinction between the human soul and the body are demonstrated*”. Nothing I’ve read so far, gives me any cause to believe this goal was disingenuously bolted on to the work, to appease ecclesiastical tyrants.
|
||||
|
||||
The *Meditations* is replete with black-and-white dichotomies, and impossible situations. The insistence on absolute certainty itself is a perfect example of that. This sort of thinking raises my own skeptical alarm bells. It typically arises out of two situations: (1) there is a problem with the language used in the argument, or some terms are not well understood, or (2) the author is determined to arrive at a preconceived conclusion, at all costs. As I have shown, Descartes clearly suffers from both Maladies. He needs knowledge to begin with something fundamentally separate from common experience, and yet fundamentally personal, in order to get to his God. To do this, he needs a standard of knowledge that divorces him from reality, and from authority. This is what motivated Descartes to put the *ego* (and the *cogito*) at center stage. Because without it, his argument is empty, and — at least for him — there is no reality.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
52
content/post/getting-a-handle-on-the-truth.md
Normal file
52
content/post/getting-a-handle-on-the-truth.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Getting a Handle on the Truth"
|
||||
date: 2016-08-13T19:03:02Z
|
||||
tags: ["truth","logic","realism","syntax","semantics"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/truthometer.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
> “[What is truth?](http://biblehub.com/john/18-38.htm)” ~ Pontius Pilate
|
||||
|
||||
This is an interesting and surprisingly difficult question. If you look in the [OED](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/truth), what you’ll find there are entirely circular and self-referential explanations: “*the quality or state of being true*“, ” *that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality*“, and “*a fact or belief that is accepted as true*“.
|
||||
|
||||
So, the poor souls that rely on the dictionary are left with, essentially, “truth is what’s true”, and “what’s true is what we agree are the facts of reality.” But what if we’re wrong and we still agree? Or worse, what if we disagree, but one of us is right? This can’t be the last word on this topic. What can we say with any confidence about truth, as such? To put it in the words of Bertrand Russell:
|
||||
|
||||
> “We may believe what is false as well as what is true. We know that on very many subjects different people hold different and incompatible opinions: hence some beliefs must be erroneous. Since erroneous beliefs are often held just as strongly as true beliefs, it becomes a difficult question how they are to be distinguished from true beliefs. How are we to know, in a given case, that our belief is not erroneous? This is a question of the very greatest difficulty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is possible. There is, however, a preliminary question which is rather less difficult, and that is: **What do we mean by truth and falsehood?**” — [The Problems of Philosophy](http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_10174.pdf) (p. 77)
|
||||
|
||||
Thinking on the question a bit, I realized I’m not quite sure *what* I mean. So, I decided to take a brief look at what what philosophy has had to say on the subject over the centuries, to see if I might find something I’m willing to accede to, at least in the short term.
|
||||
|
||||
As Russell is careful to point out in the book I just referenced, any real understanding of truth must start first with understanding what knowledge is. But even this is tricky. I wanted to simply stipulate to the classical definition, in order to shorten this post. But what we find in the traditional definition of knowledge, is yet another circular reference: knowledge is [Justified True Belief](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#TruCon). In other words, that which is *known* is that which satisfies all of the following three conditions:
|
||||
|
||||
1. It is believed
|
||||
2. That belief is justified
|
||||
3. That belief **is true**
|
||||
|
||||
For the sake of brevity, I’ll let the [Stanford encyclopedia](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnoJusTruBel) explain these three conditions in detail, and I’ll set aside [common objections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) to this formulation of knowledge for a later post. Nevertheless, in spite of Stanford’s assertion that “*the truth condition is largely uncontroversial*“, I think the fact that *truth* is present in the definition of knowledge is a serious problem for philosophy because it makes the two terms fundamentally dependent upon each other: *truth is that which is known is that which is the truth*.
|
||||
|
||||
As such, I find it hard to blame the dictionary for its circularity when it relies for its definitions on an academic discipline that can’t seem to provide a clear answer to this question. What’s more, I think it’s a little disingenuous for “serious” philosophers to scoff at Ayn Rand for her insistence on unjustified “axioms” like “[Existence Exists](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/primacy_of_existence_vs_primacy_of_consciousness.html)“, or to laugh at Christians who, facing no real alternative, rely on Jesus’ pronouncement that actually it is *he personally* who is “…*the way, the truth, and the life*…” ([John 14:6](http://biblehub.com/john/14-6.htm)).
|
||||
|
||||
To be completely clear, my aim here is not to argue that *there is no such thing as truth*, or that *we cannot know things* or *cannot justifiably claim to know the truth* — or worse, that we should just throw our hands up and simply declare it to be *whatever we want it to be*. To do so, I’d have to employ the very tools of thought that I’d be condemning. All I am suggesting is that maybe we’re not as sure as we think we are, and that maybe we need to rethink some of these fundamental questions.
|
||||
|
||||
### What Everyone Else Thinks
|
||||
|
||||
As one might expect, given what I have stated above, there are actually [numerous philosophical theories of truth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth). The most popular among them, the “[correspondence theory](http://www.iep.utm.edu/truth/#H3)“, offers the greatest appeal to common sense. This theory is probably where the OED gets it’s turn of phrase “in accordance with fact or reality”. The theory states that “*a proposition is true provided there exists a fact corresponding to it.*” But what does “correspondence” mean? And what, exactly, are facts? Russell makes a lot of hay on this second question, in his [own conception of correspondence](http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-joachim-on-truth1.html#top). In short, this definition “works”, but it’s not entirely satisfying (as Russell notes in the above quote).
|
||||
|
||||
Some argue for something called “[coherence](http://www.iep.utm.edu/truth/#H5)“, in which each new statement is compared to a complete set of beliefs, and rejected if it does not “fit” within that collection. This theory seems to fail on two grounds: first, that it is not *necessary* for the collection of beliefs to have any relation to reality, and secondly, as [Russell again points out](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-coherence/#Cri), because of the first problem, there can be many equally “coherent” belief systems existing side by side. How do we know which one to choose? The problems point to a third problem, that I think also plagues the pragmatist, constructivist, and consensus theories of truth. Namely, that they all elevate mere *belief* to the ontological status of a fact, by virtue of some *ex post facto* rationale. What’s more, this equivocation seems to go unnoticed (or worse, dishonestly ignored) by the theories’ adherents.
|
||||
|
||||
### What I think
|
||||
|
||||
I find [Kant’s idea](http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2015/01/29/What-is-Truth.aspx) of the conjunction between the noumenal and phenomenal world somewhat compelling. Although, probably not for reasons Kant would approve. Science shows us that there is a reality that is outside the reach of the senses. Perhaps truth, then, is the extent to which we can apprehend these non-phenomenal parts of reality, and reconcile them with the phenomenal parts. Already, science has provided us with all sorts of tools for doing this (telescopes, microscopes, sensors, meters, etc.). If this is true (somewhat ironically), then the way to the truth is through scientific inquiry. This is certainly a different route to truth via science than the pragmatists propose, but I think the destination may be the same.
|
||||
|
||||
On the other hand, although I don’t quite understand his theory, [Alfred Tarsky](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/#TarTheTru)‘s emphasis on semantics got me to wondering.
|
||||
|
||||
I have heard truth described by some as a relationship between physical reality and conscious awareness. This is not quite the same thing as correspondence, because the focus here is not on the objects in the relation, but *the relation itself*. It’s an interesting idea, but I think this isn’t quite complete. Because, if conscious awareness of reality is all that is necessary for a “truth” relation, then beavers and ants and birds would be capable of apprehending the truth. Clearly, then, it must something more.
|
||||
|
||||
That difference is language. Truth is as much a *semantic* concept, as it is a *metaphysical* one. Like knowledge, the definition of truth is concerned with the objects of mind and reality, and primarily with the nature of the relationship between them. But what is it about the nature of this relation, that makes it *truth*? I think it is the *meaning we assign* to that relationship, and the *value discovered* in the contents of that relationship.
|
||||
|
||||
In short, truth is a kind of semantic value judgment of the perception of reality as it is apprehended, by a mind capable of apprehending and valuing. But what does this mean, in practice? Is this just another way of formulating correspondence? Not quite. Is it the same as claiming that the truth is whatever we want it to be? Not quite. Is it pragmatism in another suit of clothes? I don’t think so.
|
||||
|
||||
But I’m struggling to find the words necessary to develop the idea any further. And perhaps that’s a clue to the problem with all of these theories. Maybe the problem lies precisely with the fact that our language is woefully lacking, when it comes to the task of describing these sorts of relationships. This is why I am beginning to wonder if we don’t need a new language, or a new way of thinking, or of describing our thoughts, before we can properly answer this question.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported From exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Isp Launch Event Three Talks on Three Philosophers"
|
||||
date: 2017-01-08T17:29:56Z
|
||||
tags: ["events","ISP","conway hall"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/conway_hall.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
This weekend I attended the launch event for the [International School of Philosophy](http://www.internationalschoolofphilosophy.org/) here in London. [Three Talks on Three Philosophers](http://www.internationalschoolofphilosophy.org/public-event-3-talks-on-3-philosophers.html) was intended to showcase the kind of thought one could expect from the new school, as well as provide an opportunity for philosophical learning to the local community (greater Islington, mainly). Sam Freemantle, the founder of the new independent school, provided the first of the three lectures, in the form of an overview of his Phd thesis, “[Reconstructing Rawls](http://londonschoolofphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Reconstructing-Rawls.pdf)”. Following Sam, [Adrian Brockless](http://www.adrianbrockless.com/) offered a passionate argument for a more thoughtful kind of education grounded in Socratic questioning. Lastly, [Professor Ken Gemes](http://www.bbk.ac.uk/philosophy/our-staff/academics/gemes) of the University of London treated us with an extended version of his talk on [Nietzsche’s Death of God](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgHymFb5DQ0).
|
||||
|
||||
Serendipitously, I also listened this weekend to a new reading of the introduction to [Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtNN9eCoeuw) (a book I read years ago). I say “serendipitously”, because it turns out to be a powerful lens through which to interpret the messages coming out of Saturday’s lectures. In particular, the lectures of Professor Gemes and Mr. Brockless, which were laden with themes that could easily have been attributed to Bloom. The erosion of truth and goodness as absolute values (both in society and in the academy), the corruption of the academy to purposes other than the pursuit of the good life, the need for a renewal of these core values, the seemingly intractable challenge of re-establishing them in an educational environment so democratized and demoralized that even the hint of such an effort will raise accusations of elitism. All of these were core concerns of Allan Bloom, and his voice was clearly resonating in the words of both Professor Gemes and Mr. Brockless. Though, I suspect neither of them would agree.
|
||||
|
||||
For Professor Gemes the worry is societal, and spans generations. He began his talk with the story of the madman from Nietzsche’s [The Gay Science](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Modernized-Translation-Introduction-Biography-ebook/dp/B003IHW00U/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=), which illustrates the central problem for Nietzsche, as Gemes sees it: absent the catalyzing mythology of christianity, why would we continue to cling to it’s core values of truth and goodness? Given that the values of honor and glory held by civilization before Christianity seem more seductive, why wouldn’t we return to these, and abandon truth and goodness, in the absence of a dogma that focused us on them? According to Professor Gemes, Nietzsche believed we were clinging to truth as a value, by way of some sort of “hangover” from Christianity, and he wanted to know why. I think Nietzsche may have been disadvantaged by his proximity to the downfall of Christianity in the west. Over a century on now, in the “post-truth” era, it appears we have indeed begun to abandon truth and goodness as ultimate values, and have indeed begun replacing them with honor and glory once again.
|
||||
|
||||
Nowhere is this shift more clearly and startlingly present, than in the academy. Mr. Brockless highlighted this inadvertently, I believe, in his lecture. Using the Socrates of Gorgias and The Republic as a mentor, Brockless crisply argued for a conception of higher education that differentiates itself from the contemporary academy, by focusing on the pursuit of truth through “authentic” learning that exposes students to “meaning and understanding of the human condition”, rather than on the career advancement goals and academic advantages of its students. This plea explicitly demands that truth be reseated in our minds as an absolute value, pursued for its own sake. Although Mr. Brockless’ lecture came before Professor Gemes, his is a direct response to Nietzsche, in the form of a resounding and explicit affirmation of truth and goodness, above honor and glory, at least as far as the academy is concerned. To that end, Brockless counseled a return to the ancient classics, and glowed with a reverence for the Socratic dialogues themselves, even recommending them as a starting point for students.
|
||||
|
||||
Interestingly, a popular new voice has also converged on this question. I’ve recently seen [a lecture by Jonathan Haidt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqUtgFBWezE) of New York University, in which he suggests that a “new schism” ought to take place in the modern university, involving the realignment of ultimate values. In his view, these divergent ultimate values are “truth” versus “justice” (actually, “social justice”, which he contends is unjust at times). But rather than pressing for the conquest of truth *over* social justice, Haidt advocates for an amicable divorce. Haidt centers his lecture on a vision of education very similar to Brockless, in which universities that adopt truth as a core value dedicate themselves firmly to free expression, and open dialogue and debate in which no idea is off the table. In other words, the Socratic tradition. The same tradition Brockless described during the question and answer period of his lecture.
|
||||
|
||||
Allan Bloom’s book was a vanguard in this discussion, I think. Some might suggest that perhaps there really is no problem, and this is all just varying degrees of predictable conservatism occasionally surfacing above the white noise. After all, these sorts of complaints have been around for almost 50 years, and yet the generations leaving university then and now don’t seem to be too much different from each other. But are they really so much the same? Bloom (and proteges like E. D. Hirsch) would point to the degradation of “dead white males” in the academy, and their gradual replacement with relativist and anti-absolutist dogmas (in addition to the impulse toward radical activism) — and the pervasive cultural ignorance and growing hostility to truth of new students — as certain indicators. I’m not sure that Haidt, Brockless, or even Gemes would necessarily agree with that. But one thing that all of these voices seem to agree on, regardless of the reasons grounding it, is the loss of truth and goodness as guiding star values in our overall culture, and most profoundly, in the academy.
|
||||
|
||||
The question is what, if anything, should we do about it? Brockless and Haidt have slightly divergent opinions on this. One suggests lobbying to reestablish the traditional mission of all higher education, the other recommends a more “free market” answer (if I can call it that), by bifurcating the institution into two competing organizations, one focused on truth, the other on justice. Neither of these speakers’ solutions are entirely satisfying to me. I think this problem is bigger than all of us, and may be inevitable. I wonder if Nietzsche thought so, too.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
22
content/post/kant-vs-mill-preference-and-universality.md
Normal file
22
content/post/kant-vs-mill-preference-and-universality.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Kant vs Mill - Preference and Universality"
|
||||
date: 2017-04-18T17:02:35Z
|
||||
tags: ["kant","mill","utilitarianism","idealism","pleasure","universality"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/kant-vs-mill.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
If you look closely at Mill’s arguments in Utilitarianism, he seems to be making a very strong response to Kant (perhaps against the Groundwork?). Mill accepts the notion of moral duty, just as Kant does. But he insists it derives not from any form of analytic (i.e., Kant’s notion of *synthetic a priori*) truth. Rather, Mill insists it derives from the apparently universal desire of mankind (individually, in aggregate) to seek its own pleasure. Aware of some of the contextual implications of this principle, Mill attacks head-on the charge of Epicureanism. But what strikes me as interesting, is the fact that, though he makes frequent reference to Kant, he never directly refutes Kant’s position, and never fully explains how the pleasure principle isn’t obviously and soundly refuted already by Kant’s explication of deontology (in the Groundwork). Mill just seems to ignore the problem of subjectivity in the hypothetical imperative, as described by Kant. Perhaps Mill is assuming that the apparently universal preference for pleasure somehow renders the hypothetical imperative a moot point? (i.e., since *everyone* prefers pleasure, it’s pointless to bother thinking in terms like, ‘if you seek pleasure, then you should do x’).
|
||||
|
||||
This idea of a universal preference is an intriguing one. Mill makes frequent appeals to preference – both implicit and explicit. What if we could actually identify a preference that is indeed universal to all human beings? I’m struggling, frankly, to think of one. Even something as intuitively obvious as “life” isn’t so obvious, when you consider the willingness of soldiers to throw themselves over the trenches, or the high rate of suicide among men in the west, today. Clearly, those folk do not have a preference for living. If something like life itself can’t be ascribed as a preference to all human beings, why should pleasure?
|
||||
|
||||
On the other hand, biology is notoriously fuzzy at the edges. Sometimes a horse is born with 5 legs. Is it no longer a horse? Sometimes humans are born with 3 x chromosomes, instead of an xy pair. Does that mean there’s no such thing as mammalian sexes? If we can accept these sorts of vaguenesses in distinction, then perhaps a “universal preference” could also be accepted as something slightly less than universal?
|
||||
|
||||
Perhaps, but when we start ascribing moral significance to such a thing as a preference, the game changes a bit. Because what are we really saying, when we say we can judge a behaviour as “right” or “wrong”? When I say something is or isn’t a preference of mine, nothing follows. I just go about my business, and you, yours. But when I take a preference of mine as a standard to judge you ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, I am implying a great deal more. It implies that, at the very least, I am licensed to condemn you for not sharing the preference — and at the most extreme end, that I am licensed to kill you.
|
||||
|
||||
But what if the standard isn’t some particular material preference (such as ice cream favors, or even living), but rather, for behavioral reciprocity? Now, if I have a preference for vanilla, and you have a preference for chocolate, but we both share (for example) a preference for not attacking people with differing preferences, then we might be able to negotiate a peaceful existence together. What’s more, we’d then be justified in self-defense against someone who didn’t share that meta-preference.
|
||||
|
||||
Perhaps this is what Mill was thinking when he suggested we all ought to regard each other equally, in the decisions we make? More thought must be done on this one…
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
21
content/post/knowledge-certainty-and-logic.md
Normal file
21
content/post/knowledge-certainty-and-logic.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Knowledge Certainty and Logic"
|
||||
date: 2016-08-05T19:20:24Z
|
||||
tags: ["knowledge","certainty","logic"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/thinking-ape.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[The Epistemic Regress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument) (specifically, the Skeptical variety) is a little out of my depth at the moment, but what is plainly obvious by various presentations of the problem, is that at it’s core lies the [Problem of Knowledge](http://www.informationphilosopher.com/knowledge/problem/). The key question that arises in the examination of major premises in any deductive argument, is “how do you know?” This suggests that something essential about the nature of the premises needs to be discovered, before we are going to solve the riddle.
|
||||
|
||||
Perhaps the root of the question actually lies in an unconscious [equivocation of analytic and synthetic statements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic–synthetic_distinction), when we ask it? The latter being knowledge derived from sense perception, the former from “pure reason” (as Kant might have put it). To that end, some suggest that we probably need to revisit the classic problem of Cartesian skepticism yet again. [This paper](http://www.uah.edu/cling/EpRegProb.pdf) from someone at the University of Alabama discusses a theory called “[Foundationalism](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/)“, which despite the numerous objections to it, seems somewhat appealing.
|
||||
|
||||
However, I think the problem lies precisely in the form of logic itself. It is a tool designed around a positive conception of knowledge; one that presumes that certainty is reasonable and achievable as a standard of knowledge, and requires assertions that are absolute. There’s even a term for it: “[Justified True Belief](http://documents.routledge-interactive.s3.amazonaws.com/9781138793934/A2/Epistemologyandmetaphysics/JustifiedTrueBelief.pdf)“, in which absolute certainty is the gold standard defining what “knowledge” really is. A view that drove Descartes to his maxim, *Cogito Ergo Sum*.
|
||||
|
||||
But I take my view more from [Karl Popper](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#GroHumKno), than from René Descartes: the regress exists, because the tool we’re using and the thing we’re trying to achieve with it *are incompatible*. We need a new form of critical reasoning, and a new conception of knowledge, that is capable of *coping with degrees of uncertainty, and degrees of probability*.
|
||||
|
||||
Traditional deductive logic (and even some forms of induction) rely too much on a conception of knowledge that demands of its users something that seems, upon very close inspection, to not exist and to not even be possible. We need to get out of the classical playpen of Aristotle and Plato, and grow up a little. What that will look like, is a bit beyond me right now. But maybe someone, somewhere has already beat me to the punch. I hope so. Maybe tentative uncertainty is the most anyone can hope for.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
37
content/post/naturalism-vs-teleology.md
Normal file
37
content/post/naturalism-vs-teleology.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Naturalism vs Teleology"
|
||||
date: 2016-09-05T18:20:02Z
|
||||
tags: ["aristotle","teleology","naturalism","causes"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/dogs-teeth.jpeg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle’s argument in Physics II 8 can be summarized as follows:
|
||||
|
||||
1. Dogs typically develop teeth good for biting and chewing.
|
||||
2. A typical result is not a coincidence.
|
||||
3. So it’s not a coincidence that dogs develop teeth good for biting and chewing.
|
||||
4. If the development is not coincidental, it must be “for something”.
|
||||
5. So the dog’s development is “for something”. (that is, it is goal-directed)
|
||||
|
||||
The problem with this argument lies in premise 4. Aristotle’s use of “for something”, implies some conscious agent that has intended the thing to be the case. You make this implication clear yourself, by calling the development “goal directed”.
|
||||
|
||||
Aristotle understood that an acorn is not an oak tree, and so would have understood that an embryo is not a dog. The embryo has no need of teeth. So, Aristotle is arguing that the unformed dog is somehow capable of intending its own form. But the dog doesn’t exist yet. So how can this be?
|
||||
|
||||
Today, we understand that embryology and fetal development is a product of evolution, and that a dog’s teeth is the mere expression of it’s genetic instructions. Which has no “purpose”, as such. It’s not “for” anything. It’s simply the brute fact of being a feature that makes survival and reproduction more likely. But, I suspect that Aristotle or his interlocutors would probably have invented a “prime intender” from this problem, had they realized it. Or, as the modern superstitious would put it, a “designer”.
|
||||
|
||||
> I always struggle with this point, and perhaps since you brought it in, you may help me out. You say that the results of development are a “mere expression of genetic instructions”, which have no purpose as such. In your words, it’s just “a feature that makes survival and reproduction more likely.” My question is: How is it that survival and reproduction are not seen here as the goals of evolution? (There’s no need to postulate an agent together with the goal, a “designer”, since as far as I can understand Aristotle doesn’t do it.)
|
||||
|
||||
We impose the goal on the facts. Molecules do what they do. The fact that the processes by which molecules operate has resulted in different arrangments of those molecules, is no more evidence of a “goal directed” process, than a rock falling down a hill is evidence that the rock has the “goal” of getting to the bottom of the hill.
|
||||
|
||||
Think of this in the same way that Hume criticized “causation”, only one layer of abstraction up from there.
|
||||
|
||||
One can legitimately argue with Hume, when he suggests that when we see two billiard balls bang together and roll off in different directions, we’re not really “seeing” cause-and-effect, we’re only seeing a matter-of-fact series of impressions that we ascribe some mythical cause-and-effect concept to.
|
||||
|
||||
However, even if we accept cause-and-effect as a real phenomenon, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to demonstrate how the two billiard balls had the “goal” of vectoring in different directions, when they struck each other.
|
||||
|
||||
If you suppose that there are two different “kinds” of physical things at the level of atoms and molecules (the level at which genetics really operates), some of which can “have goals”, and some of which cannot, then the burden is on you to demonstrate what they are, how the difference produces these “goals”, and why they exist.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2016]```
|
||||
|
||||
37
content/post/on-david-hume-and-susan-feagin.md
Normal file
37
content/post/on-david-hume-and-susan-feagin.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "On David Hume and Susan Feagin"
|
||||
date: 2016-12-18T17:51:54Z
|
||||
tags: ["aesthetics","art","emotions","experience","pleasure"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","psychology"]
|
||||
image: /img/theater-goers.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
> In what way, if any, is Feagin’s solution to the Paradox of Tragedy an improvement on Hume’s solution?
|
||||
|
||||
#### Introduction
|
||||
|
||||
Susan Feagin’s solution to the Paradox of Tragedy is not only not an improvement to Hume’s solution, it is not a solution at all. I will argue that Feagin fails to improve upon Hume’s solution for two key reasons. First, because her solution suffers from the same inscrutability as Hume’s solution. Second, because the extra complexity, despite being somewhat more self-aware than Hume, adds nothing to the solution due to its lack of scientific support.
|
||||
|
||||
#### II. More Mysterious Than Thou
|
||||
|
||||
Feagin warns us not to “substitute one puzzle for another” found in Hume’s vague notion of “movement” between passion and eloquence resulting in “delight”. She then immediately asks us to accept a substitute that is equally as mysterious and complex. First, she claims that we experience *dual* responses to art: The “direct” response is the emotion triggered by direct exposure to the content. The “meta” response is an emotion triggered by the conscious observation of the “direct” response. She goes on to explain that the responses and meta-responses can take virtually any form in response to any stimulus. This diverges from Hume’s theory, since his is limited us to one “direct” response to tragedy or “eloquence”, and one response to that response (pleasure resulting from the admixture of passion and eloquence). However, Feagin agrees with Hume’s criticism of Fontanelle, arguing that these responses and meta-responses are possible both when beholding tragedy in a fiction, and when beholding it in reality. What’s more, she argues that these responses are present not only in the beholding but also in the experiencing. Hume only describes his experience of Cicero’s *retelling* of a factual event, but Feagin implicitly argues that her theory of responses and meta-responses could be applied not just to the readers of Cicero, but to the judges hearing the case, Verres himself, and perhaps even Cicero.
|
||||
|
||||
Feagin’s approach suffers from the same vagueness as Hume’s, firstly because she asserts her response-metaresponse phenomenon without offering any real evidence in support of it. While she supplies a few plausible examples of when such a phenomenon might occur, she seems to expect the reader to take the truth of those examples from their sheer intuitive obviousness. However, it’s not so obvious to me that people are actually experiencing these meta-responses in the order she supposes. For example, in the example of the strip joint hustlers, it is trivial to imagine an experience of pleasure in *the thought* of overcoming my inhibitions, long before I ever even get to the red-light district. Likewise, it is just as possible to feel a sense of cultural pride in myself in knowing that I will be amused by Papageno or knowing that I will be horrified by Peter Quint, long before I ever get to the theater — and then, have my expectations confirmed or denied by the performance.
|
||||
|
||||
Secondly, like Hume, Feagin offers no insight into *the source* of either the response or the meta-response. She does an excellent job of providing a description of the phenomenon that is more amenable to the modern mind, and one naturally begins to search for experiences that might confirm Feagin’s description, but this evades, rather than answers, the core question. Namely, *why* do we have these experiences? This is a question that is begging to be answered by psychology, or neuroscience, or some cross-over research between aesthetic philosophy and psychology. If Feagin really wanted to answer it, this is where she should have turned.
|
||||
|
||||
#### III. Circles Within Circles
|
||||
|
||||
Hume’s original essay tries to account for an apparent phenomenon in the simplest terms possible in an attempt to arrive at a general theory. It suffers from its simplicity. But Hume lacked the insight of a more advanced psychological science to provide a more plausible explanation of the phenomenon. Feagin’s response to Hume is a sort of astrological adjustment of Hume’s Ptolemaic understanding of the human mind. Rather than resolving or replacing Hume’s vague and muddled explanation, Feagin has simply added a layer of Baroque complexity to it.
|
||||
|
||||
To start, Feagin decouples her theory from tragedy-as-an-art-form, expanding it to include all possible experiences. Additionally, she decouples the *kinds* of responses necessitated by specific *kinds* of events. In her theory, it is entirely possible for any combination of responses and meta-responses in the wake of any experience. While there is nothing necessarily wrong with suggesting such a possibility, it doesn’t actually answer the challenge of the paradox. In fact, it makes the problem much more difficult. If it’s possible to have any sort of response to any sort of event, then why do humans generally seem to share the same responses to all the same circumstances? If I can have any meta-response to any response to any event, then why have I not collapsed into a heap of neurotic confusion as a result of the infinite regress of reactions I’m having to those events and the reactions to those events? With as much focus as there is on self-regard and self-observation, how does this not impel me to narcissism, rather than empathy for my fellow man? How, exactly are pleasurable meta-responses “foreclosed” by a “continuing call” for direct responses?
|
||||
|
||||
Finally, it’s not all that clear how we are to get from this state of continuous self-observation to a state of pleasure. Feagin simply “suggests” that self-observation of the correct responses to specific circumstances yields this pleasure. But this doesn’t answer the question of why they are the “correct” responses, how we know they are the “correct” ones, and how that knowledge got there in the first place. In other words, Feagin is simply substituting Hume’s 18th century vagueness for her own 20th century ignorance of the relevant psychological literature.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Conclusion
|
||||
|
||||
Hume’s essay, though flawed and unsatisfying, is a quality piece of work because it is narrow-focused and thorough. Hume is humble enough to realize that he may not be able to answer his own question, let alone attempt to resolve all of the biggest conundrums of art in one sitting. He asks a very simple, though very difficult, question: Why do we experience pleasure in the depiction of painful tragedy? Feagin not only claims that she has discovered the answer to this question but confidently proclaims a resolution to the dispute between comedy and tragedy and announces a “new perspective” on the relationship between art and morality. Had Feagin spent a bit more time researching the science of emotions and their relation to aesthetics and art, and a little less time telling us all how “inappropriate” we were for laughing at tragedy, or worse, feeling self-satisfied for *not* laughing at tragedy, we still might not have gotten a complete answer to the paradox, but we may very likely have gotten an explanation that moved us a little closer to an actual answer.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
27
content/post/on-schopenhauers-freedom-of-the-will.md
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27
content/post/on-schopenhauers-freedom-of-the-will.md
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@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "On Schopenhauers Freedom of the Will"
|
||||
date: 2016-12-29T17:44:20Z
|
||||
tags: ["determinism","free will","schopenhauer"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/free-will-sign.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
> Expound and assess Schopenhauer’s argument that free will is an illusion. Does he succeed in showing what he calls “relative” freedom is not really enough to constitute free will?
|
||||
|
||||
Schopenhauer does succeed in logically arguing that what he calls “will” is not “free”, as he conceives the terms “will” and “free”. However, he does not succeed in showing that what we commonly understand to be freedom, is in any way undermined by his conception of the will. At best, he shows is that our common conception is incomplete. I will show that Schopenhauer sets up a false dichotomy between causality and the will via a misapplication of the notion of “negative” freedom, and that he asserts a scientifically inaccurate view of human consciousness that conflates causality with fatalism through his use of the concept of the “character” of the will. Finally, I will forgive Schopenhauer his mistakes, and show how his conception of the will, as crude as it was, pointed (perhaps inadvertently) to a more sophisticated approach to understanding human freedom.
|
||||
|
||||
Schopenhauer distinguishes man from animal in his essay by describing our capacity for rational deliberation and showing how this capacity provides us with a means to project decisions far into the future, thus freeing us from the constraints of instinctive behavior determined by immediate environmental concerns. Schopenhauer believes this sense of control over our own actions is what gives us the feeling that “I can do as I will”. This, he says, is the “negative” conception of freedom, meaning that my actions are not necessitated by external obstacles or coercions. But, he argues, being “free to do as I will” is in some sense still constrained, because acts originate from the will, and the will itself is constrained by causality. So, for Schopenhauer, a “free” will would be one that could function independently — i.e., in violation of — the laws of physical causality; and, since no one can show this to be the case except by special pleading, the will must be causally determined, and as such, not “free”.
|
||||
|
||||
While the notion of being “free from obstacles” is a good starting point in searching for a definition of freedom, it is a mistake to equate the laws of physical causality with a metaphysical “obstacle”. It suggests that existence is some sort of hurdle that needs to be overcome. This is akin to Descartes’ demand for absolute certainty as a standard of “knowledge”. Both yearn for an ideal realm of absolutes in which the mind is effectively godlike, possessing a sort of unmediated awareness of everything, and capable of a spontaneity akin to [Douglas Adams’ Infinite Improbability Engine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjbtZ4NgtdA), producing “decisions” in isolation (or even opposition) to the universe around it. In other words, like Descartes’ conception of knowledge, Schopenhauer’s conception of freedom is designed to render it impossible, leaving us no choice but to accept the negative conclusion that there is no such thing. But is there really no other way to look at this problem, than as an impossible metaphysical trolly dilemma between an utter enslavement to fate, or a miraculous denial of physical causality? For Schopenhauer, the answer is no, and this comes down to his view of the will.
|
||||
|
||||
Schopenhauer’s conception of the will is one shrouded in mystery. He describes it only in silhouette, as a feature of what he calls the “self-consciousness”: that part of the mind that is “turned inward” exclusively, and that makes us aware of our inner emotional states. He claims that the will cannot be known “in itself”, but only through the observation of our emotional states and our actions. He describes a decision, or choice, as an event in which an external “motive” is presented to the “outward-looking” consciousness, which then passes that awareness to the will. The combination of motive and the “character” of the will then produces an impulse to act in a certain way, which we can observe via the self-consciousness. He goes on to assert that the “character” of the will is something we are born with, and that remains fixed and immutable throughout our lives. So, for Schopenhauer, the “will” is a sort of Chinese Room, into which motives are inserted, and decisions are ejected, and if we had enough accumulated knowledge of every man’s decisions, we could conceivably define their character precisely, and predict all of their actions into the future, given a complete set of input “motives”.
|
||||
|
||||
This is a highly mechanistic view of human psychology of which even B. F. Skinner might have been skeptical. Modern neuroscience and psychology tell us that the brain is a highly “plastic” well into adulthood, that there does not seem to be any “center” of conscious control (aka “will”), and that there are many clinical therapy methods that have been very successful at altering not only behavior, but desires, impulses to action, and emotional responses to external stimuli. If we were to maintain even a metaphorical conception of the “character of the will”, modern science would compel us to a view of it that is anything but immutable. What’s more, it doesn’t make sense why an immutable will is required for Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as “causally determined”. Why is it not possible for external motives to have lasting causal effects on the “character” of the will, such that it’s later outputs did not match early results? Schopenhauer seems, implicitly, to think that this immutability is required in order to maintain his positive claim of causal determinism, but he does not explain why. Perhaps this was his attempt to avoid the “could have done otherwise” question?
|
||||
|
||||
For all of the vague and inexplicable features of his theory of will, Schopenhauer did manage to do us a favor. By formulating an idea that was fundamentally empirical, he offered us an opportunity for new knowledge through scientific testing of his theory. By making the distinction between matter-of-fact “negative” freedom, and the more fundamental metaphysical freedom, Schopenhauer helped to clarify the proper boundaries of our concept of freedom. By attempting to delineate the features of the conscious mind in order to isolate the will, he actually helped to begin the process of freeing us from the muddle of Cartesian dogmatisms, even while relying on them in some sense. Seen through the hind-sight lens of modern science, Schopenhauer was quite right to suspect an unexplored universe of activity in the mind occurring below the level of consciousness. The mistake he made, and that we continue to make today, is in assuming that this activity renders us incapable of acting “freely”. Schopenhauer does this because he conflates freedom with a miraculous power to untether oneself from the laws of physics. But it seems perfectly feasible that a complex process of activity – entirely governed by the laws of physics – could be going on at the neuronal level, that produced a behavioral phenomenon in living organisms that could be described as acting “freely”. The problem is, how would we know this? How could we correctly judge which of an organism’s behaviors was “free” and which was not? If I ran a rat through a maze 1,000 times, and it took the same path every time, could I say that the rat’s behavior was “determined”? Whether or not it was actually making “a free choice” is effectively an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I drive the same route to work every day for a year, and then suddenly decide to change my route because I’m bored, is that evidence of “freedom”, or evidence of some causal factor that if I’d been aware of it a year earlier, could predict accurately, my change in habit? And even if I could predict this accurately, could it really be said that I did not have a “free choice” to take a different route when the year came due? It’s really not clear either way. This suggests that the whole question might be a red herring.
|
||||
|
||||
Schopenhauer wisely recognized that our concept of free will was superficial, and somewhat tenuous. Although his effort to achieve clarity overreached was could reasonably asserted in his day, he offered a dim light on the path to understanding the role of the subconscious in our decision-making processes. As such, he helped to make it possible for us to satisfy ourselves with “relative” freedom, even if he was correct that such a thing is an “illusion”. Though, as I have explained already, he hasn’t quite demonstrated that either.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
31
content/post/on-the-qualia-of-dreams.md
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31
content/post/on-the-qualia-of-dreams.md
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@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "On the Qualia of Dreams"
|
||||
date: 2016-12-26T17:48:05Z
|
||||
tags: ["mind","dreams","perception","subjectivity","epistemology"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/dreamscape.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
The [IEP defines Qualia](http://www.iep.utm.edu/qualia/) as:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…the subjective or qualitative properties of experiences. What it feels like, experientially, to see a red rose is different from what it feels like to see a yellow rose. Likewise for hearing a musical note played by a piano and hearing the same musical note played by a tuba… As [C. I.] Lewis [the originator of the term] used the term, qualia were properties of sense-data themselves. In contemporary usage, the term has been broadened to refer more generally to properties of experience… Qualia are often referred to as the phenomenal properties of experience…”
|
||||
|
||||
As I understand this, qualia is what the brain makes, out of the raw data coming across the wires connecting our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and fingers, to the brain. In other words, the meaningful content constructed out of that data. The article also goes on to include emotional responses among the “phenomena of experience”.
|
||||
|
||||
If this definition is correct, then what would we call the meaningful content constructed during dreaming? I often dream of driving off the edge of a cliff or a high bridge that’s unfinished. I can feel the free-fall as the car leaves the pavement. I can feel the inertia as I plummet (usually toward a body of water), and I can hear the wind in my ears. I can see the green-gray water of the lake below me. I can feel the water envelop me, as I strike its surface, and I can feel the pressure against my chest. I can taste the water, in my mouth, as I gasp for air after surfacing. And yet, I’m actually lying in bed, sound asleep.
|
||||
|
||||
This, of course, is a classic Cartesian complaint about “knowing”. But my main question, is how these feelings are occurring at all, if they are a product of sense data?
|
||||
|
||||
The same is true for memories. When I recall a choir concert I’ve been too, I can hear the music in my head (though, this is a bit more obviously distinct from actually hearing). When I recall the time I spent in Vermont, I can smell the mower clippings in our neighbor’s hay field. When I close my eyes, I can see the Alpacas he kept, nosing up to the fence in anticipation of some corn or sugar cubes.
|
||||
|
||||
The brain must be storing the original data somewhere up there, and re-purposing it, for memories and dreams. But how?
|
||||
|
||||
I think Descartes argument in the Meditations would have been much stronger, if he’d stuck with the dream comparison. Launching off into the demon analogy lost me.
|
||||
|
||||
When I was a teen, it was not difficult for me to realize I was in a dream, or to impose conscious intent into my dream landscapes. Realizing my state, it was thrilling to be able to give myself powers of flight or lazer eyes, or extra limbs. But sometimes, I would get stuck in a sort of “third person” mode, as well (Cartesian theater?), where I could watch myself from an oblique overhead perspective. Those dreams were a great deal more frightening (due to the lack of control). However, as I’ve gotten older, it’s become more and more difficult to differentiate between the conscious ego and the dream actor — and much more difficult to realize I am in a dream (when I’m dreaming, of course).
|
||||
|
||||
This suggests to me, that dreams either function as, or are a byproduct of, some sort of process of “integration” taking place in the brain. In other words, that our sensual experience, our emotional responses to those experiences, and our rational interpretations of the two, somehow need to be distilled into one thing, before they can “settle” into the personality. What that might look like at the neurological level — if my idea is even coherent — is beyond me.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
57
content/post/philosopher-kings-and-smartphones.md
Normal file
57
content/post/philosopher-kings-and-smartphones.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Philosopher Kings and Smartphones"
|
||||
date: 2016-03-06T19:28:53Z
|
||||
tags: []
|
||||
topics: []
|
||||
image: /img/technocracy.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
> ”*When a man’s knowledge is not in order, the more of it
|
||||
> he has, the greater will be his confusion*” Herbert
|
||||
> Spencer
|
||||
|
||||
Today, I attended [a lecture by Derek Bates hosted by the Conway Hall Ethical Society](https://conwayhall.org.uk/event/democracy-for-the-21st-century/), in London. I call it a lecture perhaps too generously. You’ll see why in a moment. The event was billed as one man’s attempt to provide a reasoned defense for the efficacy of a more direct democracy, and to propose a technological solution to the logistical problems inherent within it:
|
||||
|
||||
> Derek Bates will argue that we should be able to properly engage with our elected representatives using modern communication and internet technology, have a “live” influence on our futures and express our opinions – effectively crowd-sourcing innovative policy and direction… A million brains could just be a whole lot better than one!
|
||||
|
||||
Given the nature of this topic, I am always immediately somewhat skeptical. Futurists have been falling all over themselves since the 1980’s, to explain how computers and networks would ultimately dissolve all of the logistical barriers of having large, diverse, geographically dispersed populations weigh in on a steady diet of public policy matters from the small (like when to repave the street in front of my house), to the large (such as whether or not to allow Iran’s government to engage in nuclear research). But a very rare few of them have been willing to address the founding principles behind such changes, even at a basic level like the problem of two wolves and a sheep.
|
||||
|
||||
So, eager to engage, I packed up my intellectual suitcase with every scrap of skepticism and critical thought on the subject I’ve ever collected, and I headed off to the hall expecting to be schooled by someone far older and far wiser than myself. I could not possibly have been more misinformed, or more disabused of my mismatched expectations, than by Derek himself.
|
||||
|
||||
## It’s Not About What It’s About
|
||||
|
||||
Originally, I wanted this post to be about the problems of direct democracy, and about our continuing love affair with it, as a concept. I wanted to engage the content of Derek’s arguments as an example of this phenomenon. But I can’t do that, now, in good conscience.
|
||||
|
||||
You see, Derek didn’t actually have any arguments. What he did have, was a long list of banal, pedestrian complaints, and demands for more “training” of elected officials (whatever that means). His entire presentation had quite literally all intellectual depth and sophistication of a bad pub rant. And sadly, due to Derek’s unfortunate lack of podium presence, it was devoid any of the redeeming entertainment value usually found in such rants. The whole of the argument over the first hour literally boiled down to: “Politicians are ignorant and corrupt; someone needs to train them.” I honestly felt embarrassed for the man, alongside my own disgust and anger at having wasted two hours on a gorgeously sunny Sunday morning.
|
||||
|
||||
Derek did inspire me, however. I realized something, watching this train wreck of a slide deck: Derek is the problem. Allow me to explain.
|
||||
|
||||
## The Hubris Of Politics
|
||||
|
||||
In his professional life, Derek has the scientific method on his side. He’s clearly used that to good effect, as a welding engineer and a materials scientist, in the petrochemicals industry and elsewhere. It’s highly likely that he’s actually solved quite a few very complex and very difficult problems with this training. I certainly wouldn’t dare attempt to challenge him in that realm.
|
||||
|
||||
Somewhere along the line, Derek has decided that his mastery of materials engineering, and the good it has brought the world, somehow now qualifies him as an expert in any number of other disciplines, including Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Ecology, and Agriculture. Derek has become so enamored by the voluptuous beauty of his own intellect that he’s enthusiastically unshackled it from the ugly, sweaty rigors of any actual research, reading, or formal argumentation. Worse, he’s replaced those uncomfortable constraints with nothing but fantasy and a will to power.
|
||||
|
||||
In short, Derek is becoming a politician. But lacking the professional discipline and manipulative cunning of a career politician (or technological bureaucrat, or public policy “expert”) he’s relegated to making his one-man pitch to local ethical societies on Sunday mornings.
|
||||
|
||||
## The War Of All Against All
|
||||
|
||||
But this isn’t just about Derek. It’s about all of us, and about the nature of democracy itself. Derek just happens to be a really good example of how dysfunctional we all are. Every time we step into a voting booth, or answer a political survey taker, or listen to a political speech, we’re thinking about ourselves: what gets me what I want; who do I like; how do I want to live; what makes me happy; what can someone else do for me.
|
||||
|
||||
This is the true nature of the pub rant. It is an expression of a broken psychology; one crying out in despair at the lack of something essential to itself, and bemoaning the inability to achieve enough mastery over the physical world to attain that desire. It rarely has anything at all to do with the external target of the verbal diarrhea, except that the target may fit some emotional template for the ranter. In a nutshell: I am owed something, and justice demands that someone be obligated to give it to me.
|
||||
|
||||
This is an angry child crying out for a parent. And, really, the state itself is nothing more than a collective expression of this dysfunction. Only, as adults, we have real power to do real harm in the process. Democracies of all forms and styles – in fact, monolithic institutions of power of all kinds – are fundamentally two things: Firstly, a weapon. But more importantly: the implicit social approval to use that weapon to threaten or harm others to get what you want. Political philosophers of all stripes have recognized this fact for eons, actually.
|
||||
|
||||
They’ve also identified another fundamental problem with the State as a form of social organization: How do you decide who gets what they want? Developmental psychologists will also point out that this is a common subterranean struggle within families, as well. Children are constantly vying for their parents’ attentions. And it’s not uncommon for siblings to attempt to manipulate parents to gain advantage over each other. Thus, it is with the State as well.
|
||||
|
||||
## Knowing When To Quit
|
||||
|
||||
I don’t have an answer to this problem. How could I be expected to? I’m a 25 year veteran of the I.T. and software industries, not a political philosopher. But, then again, I don’t go around offering lectures claiming that I do have that answer.
|
||||
|
||||
And this is where I come back to Derek. It’s not impossible for a scientist to have something useful to say about political philosophy, just as it’s not impossible for a political philosopher to have something useful to say about science. After all, Herbert Spencer (for example) was able to bring both to heel fairly effectively, during his own lifetime.
|
||||
|
||||
But if you’re going to make this kind of professional leap, you really need to do it from a position of humility and curiosity — that is, if you’re not simply trying to get what you want at others’ expense. And, really, when was the last time you exhibited a politician behaving with the humility and curiosity of a scientist? Yet, this is precisely what Derek is expecting, in his demands for “better training” of politicians. Which, it seems to me, marks Derek as a pretty typical politician, himself: naive, untrained, and driven by egotistical fantasies about philosopher kings and smartphone apps.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "Philosophy - an Obituary"
|
||||
date: 2015-11-14T21:47:53Z
|
||||
tags: ["stephen hawking"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy", "psychology", "culture"]
|
||||
image: /img/philosophy-obituary.jpg
|
||||
image: /img/death-of-socrates.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
211
content/post/rousseaus-social-contract-book-one.md
Normal file
211
content/post/rousseaus-social-contract-book-one.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,211 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Rousseau's Social Contract - Book One"
|
||||
date: 2016-11-17T17:57:06Z
|
||||
tags: ["enlightenment","rousseau","social contract theory"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy"]
|
||||
image: /img/chains.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
{{< note >}}
|
||||
EDITORS NOTE: I wrote this at a time when I was not yet equipped to do such a thing as analyze Rousseau. This now reads more to me like a YouTube reaction video, than a proper analysis. A much improved analysis will be forthcoming in 2022. ~ Greg. 1 Dec. 2021
|
||||
{{< /note >}}
|
||||
|
||||
----
|
||||
|
||||
> “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
|
||||
|
||||
This famous opening line of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s equally famous essay, appears, to our modern minds, to point clearly toward an obvious question: ‘Why?’ But this is not the question Rousseau has in mind. Instead, what he asks is, ‘Why not?’
|
||||
|
||||
What I intend to show during this read-through, is that far from providing mankind with a blueprint for his own freedom, what Rousseau managed to forge with this document was nothing less than a new-fangled set of chains with which to shackle a mind slowly awakening from centuries of ancient bondage. But what makes this document especially brilliant, is the fact that Rousseau realized that the modern mind was no longer capable of being commanded to wear its chains; it needed to be flattered into them, instead. The Social Contract, then, is one of history’s most magnificent seductions.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Today’s Post – Book 1:
|
||||
|
||||
In the introduction to Book 1, Rousseau is very kind enough to give us a clear and concise statement of his goal:
|
||||
|
||||
> “I mean to inquire if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be. In this inquiry I shall endeavor always to unite what right sanctions with what is prescribed by interest, in order that justice and utility may in no case be divided.”
|
||||
|
||||
Considering the aforementioned chains of his opening line to Chapter 1, he asks, “*What can make it legitimate?*”, and he asserts confidently that he has the answer.
|
||||
|
||||
Jumping a little ahead for a moment, in Chapter 6, he restates his problem very specifically in this way:
|
||||
|
||||
> ”The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”
|
||||
|
||||
And finally he proudly announces:
|
||||
|
||||
> “This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.”
|
||||
|
||||
But has Rousseau defined a real problem? What is that problem, exactly? And if so, is his confidence in his own solution to that problem really as justifiable as he makes it seem? Let’s continue, to see how he lays out the actual problem in more detail.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Chapter 2: Early Societies and the Social Order
|
||||
|
||||
> “ the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and so must therefore be founded on conventions [covenants]…“
|
||||
|
||||
What does Rousseau mean by ‘social order’ and ‘sacred right’? There are hints in his stated goals. For Rousseau, civil order is a form of perfection of the human being. To be part of an organized social body raises man above the state of ‘state of nature’. But for him, it is not enough for this order to be a tool of progress. He assumes it to be an obligation, since it does appear to him better than his state of nature. What’s more, the only way to maintain this social order, is by imposing it, and the only way to justify the imposition, as he puts it, is by justifying the ‘conventions’ or ‘covenants’ that constitute it.
|
||||
|
||||
But he begins the argument, first, by explaining what he believes is the origin of social order, and freedom.
|
||||
|
||||
> “…The most ancient of all social orders, and the only one that is natural is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention… This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master…”
|
||||
|
||||
So, in a natural state, children are ‘obligated’ to their parents by necessity of dependence. The voluntary association of adulthood admittedly entails no natural obligation; therefore, the obligation is a mere ‘convention’. What he’s implying thus far, is that absent that moral obligation, the association would have no stability. That children would turn on their fathers, if they thought it expedient, and chaos would reign.
|
||||
|
||||
In essence, then, social order is a ‘sacred right’, because stability and order is better than chaos and arbitrary violence. He’s constructed an incredibly dangerous straw man, and then argued for a moral obligation on the basis of frightening consequences where none exists. The straw man doesn’t really even have anything to do with the actual anthropology. It’s one he could have falsified for himself, if he’d taken the time to look around. Capriciousness is not a commonly observed trait in humans. Even in the 18th century.
|
||||
|
||||
But let’s assume his premise is true, for the moment: Men are arbitrary, self-centered, capricious, and incapable of moral calculations involving mutual benefit, beyond the short term. Well, then, even IF social order were a ’sacred right’, how could it ever even be possible? Beings capable of it apparently don’t exist in such a world.
|
||||
|
||||
Rousseau goes on to draw a direct parallel between the family and the state. I’m not clear on why he did this. At first, it looked to me like an argument from analogy. But this is really the only place he does this, and later, as we’ll see, he says things that apparently contradict it.
|
||||
|
||||
Also, As we saw at first, he declares that all men are born free. But in this chapter, he argues that we are born into a natural obligation, and only earn our freedom by means of natural independence from our parents. Later, we’ll see that he recasts this as no freedom at all, but a kind of slavery to appetite. This chapter, then, is the first of a long series of contradictions and equivocations on the nature of freedom, and on what obligations individuals owe to each other.
|
||||
|
||||
The last thing I want to point out, is that a century of work on the actual anthropology of early societies renders his atomistic and chaotic view of early humanity mostly naive and irrelevant. This by itself is not enough to invalidate the theory, but as we’ve seen, even granting him this, his statement of the problem is at best unclear, and at worst, a straw man erected for the sake of a rationalization.
|
||||
|
||||
#### Chapter 3 & 4: Dealing with Contemporary Competitors
|
||||
|
||||
Moving on, Rousseau then tries to tackle a couple common counter-arguments to the notion of rights. Both are essentially non-issues in the modern age, but what is interesting about them in context, is that Rousseau appears inconsistent about them.
|
||||
|
||||
The first is that might makes right. He rightly rejects this, and provides an excellent refutation, arguing that the subjugated obey out of necessity rather than obligation, and to call that necessity an obligation is to simply misapply the term.
|
||||
|
||||
What is fascinating about the inclusion of this rejoinder, however, is that later on, Rousseau will himself attempt to make the converse argument for might from right, and argues that subjugation under such a regime is perfectly moral, and even relabels it as ‘freedom’. But more on this later, in Chapter 6.
|
||||
|
||||
The second counter claim he takes on is the right of the conquerer to enslave the conquered. Clearly, we take this to be an antique notion. But I want to address a number of things he says in this chapter, that are both highly illustrative of the confusion in his own mind about his own theory, and fascinatingly supportive of the notion of pure voluntarism.
|
||||
|
||||
The first thing he has to say in this chapter, is this:
|
||||
|
||||
> “Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions [i.e. ‘covenants’] form the basis of all legitimate authority among men.”
|
||||
|
||||
Recall that “natural” for Rousseau means some form of dependency imposed by the nature of the individual (as in a child to his parent). Given this passage then, the book is basically done, yes? All human relations must be formed by voluntary agreements. End of story. But that’s not enough for him. If he were to stop here, he’d essentially invalidate all violent authority, and that’s exactly the opposite of his own stated goal.
|
||||
|
||||
Next, Rousseau introduces the idea of ‘alienation’, succinctly defining it as ‘to give or to sell’, and attempts to invalidate the notion of slavery on the grounds that a slave does not give himself, but sells himself, and the agreement involved in that sale makes no sense to him. This, to me, seems an unnecessarily complicated argument for what was already a perfectly simple moral objection: might does not make right, and the conquered are laboring under the yolk of might.
|
||||
|
||||
But Rousseau needs this simple (perhaps naive) bifurcated definition of ‘alienation’ in order to make a palatable claim in the next chapter, as we shall see. But the very next passage is perhaps the most breathtaking of the chapter:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…Even if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they come to years of discretion, the father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their preservation and well-being, but he cannot give them, irrevocably and without conditions: such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the rights of paternity. It would therefore be necessary, in order to legitimize an arbitrary government, that in every generation the people should be in a position to accept or reject it;…”
|
||||
|
||||
What Rousseau is clearly stating here, without equivocation, is that under no circumstances, is a government legitimate upon which subsequent generations cannot pass their judgment. As we’ll see later, this seems to run counter to his own theory. But it also has other deeper implications. For example, if the framers of the Constitution (e.g. Madison and Hamilton) took this passage from Rousseau seriously, they would not have been making all those proclamations about posterity in the preamble. Yet, at the same time, Jefferson must have been aware of these concepts when he wrote in the Declaration those passages about the right of the people to dissolve the state (though this may also have been derived from Locke’s theory, which we’ll get to in a later series).
|
||||
|
||||
#### Chapter VI: The Social Compact
|
||||
|
||||
This is the climax chapter, in which Rousseau finally feels confident enough to lay out the central thesis for us. Once again, he conveniently and succinctly formulates his problem for us:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.
|
||||
>
|
||||
> But, as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert…”
|
||||
|
||||
As I’ve pointed out earlier, his view of early societies is purely speculative (as he admits himself, in an earlier essay called ‘Discourses On Inequality’), and grounded in any number of naive misconceptions about primitive peoples, and the way they lived. But even if this were not the case, even if there were some truly independent state in which individual humans had absolutely no need of each other, and even if only that need were sufficient justification for obligations, it still doesn’t follow that the human race would perish in the absence of a central authority that “maintained” it in some ideal order. In addition to a straw man, then, Rousseau has also constructed an obvious false dichotomy: surrender to a central authority, or perish alone in a hostile wilderness. This kind of caricature thinking should be fairly familiar to anyone who’s debated anarchy before.
|
||||
|
||||
So there are really no grounds on which to accept his claim that there is a problem that needs solving. But let’s grant him this, and see where he goes with it. Let’s grant that all he means is that humans are social animals, and that for their survival they require a social order. What does Rousseau offer as the correct form for this social order, and why? Famously, he asserts the following:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” This is the fundamental problem of which the *Social Contract* provides the solution…”
|
||||
|
||||
There are three basic complaints I have with this: First, why must this association be something other than a purely voluntary association? In the chapter on slavery he strongly suggests that such a form of association is entirely possible. Second, why would such an association need to be monolithic (i.e. why couldn’t a collection of voluntary associations confederate for their own mutual benefit?), and thirdly, Why does Rousseau seem to think he has the perfect knowledge to answer this question for all time, and in all places?
|
||||
|
||||
On the first question, Rousseau himself seems to be aware of the problem. Which is why he frames this as a conundrum. He seems to be confounded by the notion that an individual might be making a free choice, and yet choosing to subordinate some preferences to others, in order to remain in a group. Here we begin to see that Rousseau may have a straw man view of freedom, in which all desires and preferences necessarily have the same weight and priority.
|
||||
|
||||
On the second question, Rousseau never full explains this necessity, but does touch on a few potential problems, such as associations with competing interests. However, he does this in the context of defending his monolith, not in defending disparate associations. So it doesn’t really answer the objection.
|
||||
|
||||
On the third question, I don’t think any of the enlightenment thinkers can provide a sufficient explanation. Each has simply assumed his speculations about human nature to be a fact, and driven forward from there. With the single exception of morality itself, this problem is a spike in the heart of all social contractarians. And, we’ll see in a moment, that Rousseau is clearly consciously anxious about it.
|
||||
|
||||
Nevertheless, he proudly describes the “contract”, as such:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…The clauses of this contract… although they have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized…, [and] properly understood, may be reduced to one–the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.
|
||||
>
|
||||
> Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.
|
||||
>
|
||||
> Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has….”
|
||||
|
||||
How do we get from the basic problem of a group of individuals desiring common defense of their group, to a situation in which an individual is required to alienate himself but to not alienate himself? In which he loses his freedom but doesn’t lose his freedom? Rousseau offers no explanation. It just is. What’s more, these are bald face contradictions. We’ve entered the realm of the imaginary, now. Where words suddenly mean the exact opposite of what they actually mean. In my view, this is a crude form of verbal gymnastics.
|
||||
|
||||
At this point, I would normally stop reading, and no longer treat a theory seriously. Clever philosophers will call the words in these passages an entertaining “paradox”. I am not clever. I can only see contradictions, and any theory grounded at its root on a contradiction, cannot, by force of the laws of logic, be true.
|
||||
|
||||
But let us be charitable, and proceed as if Rousseau were simply being clever and paradoxical. His burden, then, is to unwind these paradoxes, and show me how his conception of social organization is not wholly Orwellian. As we move forward, though, you’ll see things only get worse.
|
||||
|
||||
Before we do move forward, though, there are a few additional objections I want to unpack at this point: The notion of ‘total alienation’ is the claim that a person can give himself, as if he were an item of value, in exchange for an equal value. But this notion is patently absurd. Let’s just assume the validity of self-ownership, for the moment. Even in such a situation, one cannot surrender ownership of oneself, even if one wanted to. This would be the equivalent of surrendering control of your eyeballs to someone else’s consciousness. Clearly, this initial act isn’t even a material possibility. So how it could be the basis for a voluntary contract, I am entirely unclear.
|
||||
|
||||
Second, the claim about competing rights. Again, let us simply assume the validity of ‘rights’ for the sake of his argument. This claim is very important to keep in mind for later, when we get to his discussion of property and other rights (in the subsequent books). He is unequivocal here. No individual can retain any rights whatsoever, because no superior could exist within this contract that could provide an objective adjudication of which rights should remain with the individual, and which with the group. This is also interesting to think about in the context of the modern era. Many totalitarian states have taken their inspiration from philosophers who took their inspiration from Rousseau.
|
||||
|
||||
Moving on: at last, from the dirt of this collective act of ‘total alienation’, Rousseau conjures up the homunculus he names “General Will”:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms– ‘Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.’
|
||||
>
|
||||
> At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons…”
|
||||
|
||||
In this final flourish of fantastical imagination, Rousseau gives birth to a “moral body” and a “public person”, composed of the individuals who ‘alienated’ themselves, and are now bound to remain as ‘indivisible parts’ in perpetuity, or until this imaginary person decides to incise the part.
|
||||
|
||||
He never shows by example or argument that this emergent will actually exists. He simply asserts it. He doesn’t explain why it’s moral, except to insist that it must be, since the individual members of it are moral – a sort of compositional fallacy – and as we shall see later, has trouble actually explaining the difference between it, and mere mob rule.
|
||||
|
||||
This macabre beast, concocted out of one part excusable ignorance, one part inexcusable sloppy thinking, one part fantastical imagination, and one part classical European hubris, is far from being a proof of any kind. What this is, is a fictional invention. One who’s characteristics Rousseau devotes enormous energy describing in the next chapter. Where he has observed these characteristics in reality, I do not know.
|
||||
|
||||
#### CHAPTER VII: THE SOVEREIGN, OR: HOW FAST CAN THE URUKAI RUN?
|
||||
|
||||
In chapter VII, Rousseau relabels his ‘general will’, or ‘body politic’, as ‘The Sovereign’. In essence, giving a name to his imaginary “moral person”. And he asserts of this person, “*The Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, it is always what it should be… drawing its being wholly from the sanctity of the contract, can never bind itself, even to an outsider, to do anything derogatory to the original act, for instance, to alienate any part of itself, or to submit to another Sovereign. Violation of the act by which it exists would be self-annihilation; and that which is itself nothing can create nothing…*”
|
||||
|
||||
In other words, no matter how the whole group acts, or what rules are to be imposed upon the members of the group, or what the group expresses, it will always express it, act it, or obey it, as a whole, and cannot do otherwise. What is he talking about? No groups in all of human history have ever behaved this way. This is pure utopianism. He’s simply ascribing characteristics to his invention. Like, how fast can the Urukai run?
|
||||
|
||||
Rousseau recognizes this obvious inconsistency, and so, decides to simply acknowledge it openly. How nice of him:
|
||||
|
||||
> “In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others than the payment of it is burdensome to himself; and, regarding the moral person which constitutes the State as a *persona ficta,* because not a man, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfill the duties of a subject. The continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic.”
|
||||
|
||||
So, any particular will that is in conflict with the general will is by definition not part of the general will and by its very existence, a threat to the general will. Well, that’s accommodating. How does he deal with this conflict? Let’s see:
|
||||
|
||||
> “In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. **This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free;** for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.”
|
||||
|
||||
I think at this point, Rousseau must have just said “fuck it, if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll accept anything!” He’s clearly engaged in a moment of unreserved projection. He asserts that any individual who refuses to submit to the group will be forced to obey, and brazenly relabels this ‘freedom’. Then, he just flatly asserts that to do the opposite would be ’tyrannical’.
|
||||
|
||||
I think my head is going to explode. As much as I trumpet the Principle of Charity, this is the point at which I can no longer withhold my incredulity. There are only so many times a philosopher can insist that black is white, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength, before I get suspicious.
|
||||
|
||||
But wait, my friends. It gets worse. Yes, my friends. Much worse.
|
||||
|
||||
#### CHAPTER VIII – THE CIVIL STATE : OR, ONCE MORE WITH FEELING!
|
||||
|
||||
In this chapter, Rousseau decides to revisit both of his straw men one last time, and to add more vivid and contrasting colors to them. Now, in addition to the creation of the imaginary friend the “Sovereign”, the Social Contract also magically produces a moral and personal transformation in each human being, which is in contrast to the dismal and wretched beasts we were, before we freely, and joyously gave of ourselves to this new body:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does *man*, who so far had considered only himself, finds that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man…”
|
||||
|
||||
Well, hot dog! Where do I sign! Utopia is the place for me! The degree to which these hyperbolic fugues have escalated since the beginning of the essay should be a clear sign to the reader that poor Jean-Jacques was the least convinced of his own scheme.
|
||||
|
||||
Lastly, as an aside, in his final depiction of the core theory, Rousseau decides to further clarify his definition of ‘natural’ liberty, ‘civil’ liberty, and again insists that the state of nature is worse than the latter. This time, however, he uses the occasion to introduce us to yet another dichotomy. That of the difference between “possession” and “proprietorship”. The idea of property, that is:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title.”
|
||||
|
||||
This then, is his lead-in to the final chapter of this book, and the next major fissure in the idea, as we shall see.
|
||||
|
||||
Finally, he briefly glosses over what, in my mind, is the missing lynch-pin in all of the various theories of “civil society”: the origin of moral authority.
|
||||
|
||||
> “…We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty. But I have already said too much on this head, and the philosophical meaning of the word liberty does not now concern us.”
|
||||
|
||||
Really? The philosophical meaning of liberty doesn’t concern us? You’ve been on about it since the beginning of the essay. Couldn’t you at least take a little time to explain why you get to use it in so many clearly contorted ways, here (‘moral’ liberty, ‘civil’ liberty, ‘natural’ liberty)? Sure, I’ve read Discourses on Equality. But nothing in this essay suggests that he still holds to the concepts and definitions he used there. In fact, much of it suggests that he’s moved on to much different views, in many ways. So… how about a little help here, Rousseau? I guess not.
|
||||
|
||||
#### CHAPTER IX – REAL PROPERTY : OR, FORGET EVERYTHING I SAID BEFORE
|
||||
|
||||
This chapter is one of the worst of the entire set of 4 books. Thankfully, it is the last chapter we have to deal with, in this video. In this chapter, Rousseau contradicts his assertion that no individual rights are possible in the Social Contract, contradicts his assertion in the previous chapter that first occupancy is not enough to establish ownership, and further entrenches the problem of the hereditary state.
|
||||
|
||||
> “…Each member of the community gives himself to it, at the moment of its foundation, just as he is, with all the resources at his command, including the goods he possesses…”
|
||||
|
||||
This is fine for those who enter into the compact voluntarily at the outset, for example, the signers of the Magna Carta, or the Mayflower Compact, or the Declaration of Independence. But what about those who don’t wish to join your little club, and what about successive generations? What choice do they have? Since they have not made the choice to give of themselves voluntarily, will they still be “forced to be free”? No answers to these questions are forthcoming.
|
||||
|
||||
Following on that, he then attempts to restate what he said in chapter VIII, only with exceptions:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…This act does not make possession, in changing hands, change its nature, to become property in the hands of the Sovereign; but, as the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public possession is also, in fact, stronger and more irrevocable, without being any more legitimate…”
|
||||
|
||||
So, he concedes that it is mere possession, and then insists that because the state is really, really powerful, it might as well just be considered property. In fact, he goes one step further, and simply asserts that all property is now the property of the state, and that it is the only “person” that can own property. Somehow, now, the Sovereign now has properties that the members do not have.
|
||||
|
||||
> “…For the State, in relation to its members, is master of all their goods by the social contract, which, within the State, is the basis of all rights; but, in relation to other powers, it is so only by the right of the first occupier, which it holds from its members…”
|
||||
|
||||
And then, not more than one paragraph later, he reverses himself, and asserts, well, yes, individuals do have the right of first occupier, but only if they do certain things. It’s like some kind of magic ritual of “labor and cultivation”, in which the right is transferred from the state to the individual:
|
||||
|
||||
> “…In general, to establish the right of the first occupier over a plot of ground, the following conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence; and, in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of proprietorship that should be respected by others, in default of a legal title….”
|
||||
|
||||
#### CONCLUSION TO BOOK 1:
|
||||
|
||||
So, after rising to orgasmic heights in chapters 6, 7 and 8, we’re left with a pack of smokes and a bag full of contradictions in chapter 9.
|
||||
|
||||
In reading this particular book, I just couldn’t help but see the parallels to George Orwell’s 1984. Perhaps this is just a prejudice of my individualistic upbringing. But I don’t think so. Time and again, Rousseau obfuscates definitions, reverses them, and even consciously contradicts them. And yet, the reader is expected to hold his tongue, bind it in the Principle Of Charity, and treat Rousseau as something more than the grifting con-man that he was.
|
||||
|
||||
At the outset of this book, Rousseau set forth one challenge for himself: to justify the presence of a centrally coercive authority within society. So far, all he’s given us is an imaginary boogie-man of which we are supposed to be terrified, and as a solution, he’s offered the grandiose vision of exalted souls bound into one mystical body, gladly giving of themselves for ‘the greater good’.
|
||||
|
||||
I’m certain we’ve all heard this particular story before. We are, all of us, sinners before god, and the only salvation is to give of ourselves to mother church, who will deliver us, through Jesus Christ, to heaven, and away from our nasty, brutish, fate in hell.
|
||||
|
||||
Books two and three will be next. I will be skimming these for the most part, since they are primarily concerned with the structural details of his ideal state, as compared to existing forms. I have no interest in nit-picking the biology of the Urukai. However, we will be diving deep again, in Book 4, where Rousseau vacillates on the basic definition of the ‘general will’, and contradicts himself about it’s destructibility.
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
@ -10,8 +10,13 @@ draft: false
|
||||
Today, I'm just testing out a few new Hugo shortcodes I added to the site. I've culled these from around the internet, and hacked together some of my own. You might find them useful, if you're doing static blogging yourself. You can find all the code on the repo for this site, **{{< newtab title="found here." url="https://gitea.gmgauthier.com/gmgauthier/personal-blog" >}}** As I do more and more blogging from the static site generator, this sort of thing will be more and more useful to me, at least.
|
||||
|
||||
{{% ah %}} Linking {{% /ah %}}
|
||||
Above this line, you can see that the text header now has a linked anchor. That's done with:
|
||||
|
||||
{{</* newtab title="whatever" url="https:\/\/whatever.com" */>}}
|
||||
```{{%/* ah */%}} Header Text {{%/* /ah */%}} ```
|
||||
|
||||
Opening links in a new browser tab:
|
||||
|
||||
```{{</* newtab title="whatever" url="https://whatever.com" */>}}```
|
||||
|
||||
Here is a link to my legacy philosophy blog, that will open in a new tab. Out of the box, neither markdown, nor Hugo will do this: **{{< newtab title="Exiting The Cave" url="https://exitingthecave.com/" >}}**
|
||||
|
||||
@ -28,6 +33,12 @@ Here is a quote block, in which I can change text color arbitrarily using a cust
|
||||
fourth @ {{< span style="color:blue;border:1px solid blue;" text="some blue text" >}}
|
||||
last @ {{< span style="color:black;font-weight:bold;" text="bold black text" >}}
|
||||
|
||||
Now, I can add inset editor's notes to my posts, for notations I want to add to old posts:
|
||||
|
||||
{{</* note */>}} This text appears in a blue box {{</* /note */>}}
|
||||
|
||||
{{< note >}}This text appears in a blue box{{< /note >}}
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
{{% ah %}} Text Markup {{% /ah %}}
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
49
content/post/the-ought-in-the-machine.md
Normal file
49
content/post/the-ought-in-the-machine.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "The Ought in the Machine"
|
||||
date: 2017-01-02T17:35:43Z
|
||||
tags: ["moral psychology","truth","realism","veneer theory"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","psychology"]
|
||||
image: /img/choice-sign.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
> *“If I must choose between peace and righteousness, I choose righteousness”* ~Theodore Roosevelt
|
||||
|
||||
I have long held the belief that moral self-justification is both the engine and the doom of the world. Nobody does what they do thinking to themselves “this is the wrong thing, so I should do it”, or desiring to do wrong for its own sake. Even people as evil as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot all had reasons for why they did what they did. Reasons that they believed made them right to do what they did. Some even wrote whole books justifying themselves.
|
||||
|
||||
Today, we have strong scientific evidence to explain and describe various specific phenomena like [Noble Cause Corruption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_cause_corruption), [Cognitive Blindness](http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Inattentional_blindness), and [Motivated Reasoning](https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/motivated-reasoning). But what we don’t yet have (as far as I am aware), is a biological explanation for the existence of the impulse that leads to these things – in other words, the *impulse to morally self-justify*. What could possibly be the evolutionary / reproductive advantage of self-justification? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [puts it this way](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-biology/):
|
||||
|
||||
> *When it comes to morality, the most basic issue concerns our capacity for normative guidance: our ability to be motivated by norms of behavior and feeling through judgments about how people ought to act and respond in various circumstances (Joyce 2006, Kitcher 2006a,b, 2011, and Machery and Mallon 2010). Is this human capacity a biological adaptation, having perhaps conferred a selective advantage on our homini[d] ancestors by enhancing social cohesion and cooperation? …If so, then it would be part of evolved human nature to employ moral judgment in governing human behavior, rather than a mere “cultural veneer” artificially imposed on an amoral human nature (de Waal 2006).*
|
||||
|
||||
The fact that this question remains fundamentally unanswered can be intuited by the fact that numerous quasi-scientific specializations have popped up in the past two decades inspired by it. Evolutionary Psychology, and Moral Psychology, the two most prominent. As hinted at in the SEP in the citation from Frans de Waal, there are some who think morality as a whole, including phenomena like self-justification, is nothing but a culturally constructed illusion (incidentally, it is an interesting and disturbing repeating theme in philosophy and science these days, to condemn common experiences as “illusions”. Why is that?). Others argue that the biological facts are themselves enough to deflate the importance of morality to nothing more than an incidentally adaptive feature, like gills or lungs:
|
||||
|
||||
> *Darwin’s sometimes diffuse speculations about the “social instincts” have given way to theories firmly grounded in logic and fact, the theories of reciprocal altruism and kin selection. And they don’t leave our moral sentiments feeling as celestial as they used to. Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse, even the very sense of justice, the sense that doers of good deserve reward and doers of bad deserve punishment— all these can now be viewed as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet. (Wright 2010)*
|
||||
|
||||
And yet, there it is, all the same. It is this impulse, illusory or not, that drove Homer to write his epics, that drove Plato to toss all of his tragedies into a fire and embark instead down the path of the dialectic as Socrates’ life-long student, that drove Diogenes to the brink of madness, wandering the streets of Athens with a lamp (if the apocryphal stories are to be believed). Over the centuries, this impulse has given fuel not only to philosophers, but to kings and generals, despots and tyrants, radicals and revolutionaries, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. It ended the life of Julius Caesar, converted the Roman empire to Christianity, divorced Europe and England from the medieval church of Rome, separated the North American colonies from the British empire, ended the slave trade, turned Europe and the Middle East into a killing field for nearly all of the 20th century, and now sends fanatics hurtling into buildings and crowds loaded with explosives and guns, continues to fuel a never-ending western campaign in the middle east, and is slowly turning university campuses back into self-denying and self-deluding monasteries. And, so far, the future looks to be just as replete with examples like this.
|
||||
|
||||
For all the talk of it’s illusory, or teleologically meaningless biological nature, moral self-justification is perhaps the single most defining feature of the human species. And yet, we know so little about it. For all the theories explaining various features of morality that Wright and de Waal expound upon on their books, the body of knowledge is really very thin, compared with even basic physiology or even psychology. And there doesn’t actually seem to be much urgency about it. As Wright himself admits:
|
||||
|
||||
> *The religious sense has indeed waned, especially among the intelligentsia… among ethical philosophers, there is nothing approaching agreement on where we might turn for basic moral values— except, perhaps, nowhere. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the prevailing moral philosophy within many philosophy departments is nihilism.*
|
||||
|
||||
I have deeply mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, the authors of these books all seem to paint a picture in which armies of intellectually curious Dr. Mengeles, unmoored from empathy or compassion, roam the planet torturing each other out of nothing more than a desire to experiment. It’s a compelling story: what sort of monsters would we be, without these moral “guard rails” to keep us on the straight-and-narrow?
|
||||
|
||||
But Josef Mengele *had* a moral compass. One aligned with his master, Adolf Hitler. What sort of life would Mengele have chosen for himself instead, if his moral fervor had been dampened severely by a capacity to reason disinterestedly about what was taking place around him in the 1930’s? But, that’s the rub. Human beings **can’t** reason purely disinterestedly about their circumstances. They are *emotional* creatures — *moral* animals, as Wright calls them. Mengele did what he did, not because he was *amoral*, but because he was *immoral*. But we’ve lost the will to admit this anymore.
|
||||
|
||||
This is why philosophy is so, so important today — and what frustrates me enormously about most of what I see coming out of philosophic production centers today. For all the sophistication and depth that we’ve gained from our scientific understanding of morality and its origins, science cannot tell us what to do with this impulse to “be good”, in a world where fundamental survival and subsistence is no longer a central concern. Reciprocal altruism and kin selection, in their crudest forms, work for the apes. Frans de Waal has done amazing work showing this, and showing how they constitute the fundamental building blocks of our own moral feelings. But human civilization is far more complex, and several orders of sophistication removed from the tribal warfare of chimpanzee troupes in the jungle. I want to know how I should manage my desire for reciprocity in my relationships. What sort of importance ought I put on my kin and community? What is the appropriate amount of sympathy, remorse, gratitude, or compassion for a given situation I may be in? What meaning can I give to terms like “justice” and “fairness”? What are the implications built-in to the answers to all these questions?
|
||||
|
||||
But, as Wright seems to have correctly pointed out, academic philosophy has all but abandoned any desire to systematize any understanding of these questions. Instead, the topic has more or less fractured into secondary vocational concerns, such as “human rights”, or “medical ethics” or “business ethics”, which are really just jurisprudence specializations borne out of the direct needs of government and industry. In the vacuum, we can see all around us what has been slowly taking it’s place. Moral crusaders are everywhere in academia – from the [physical sciences](http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/14-priest-physicist-would-marry-science-religion), to [psychology](http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/17/canadian-professor-ignites-protests-refusing-use-transgender-pronouns/), to [social studies](http://theothermccain.com/2016/11/23/womens-studies-professor-accuses-trump-supporters-of-terrorism/), and [law](http://uk.businessinsider.com/alan-dershowitz-hits-back-at-student-protesters-2015-11?r=US&IR=T). These crusaders are followed closely behind by academicians in other fields — [some](http://righteousmind.com/) [more credible](http://physics.wm.edu/~remler/PPP.html) [than](http://www.michaelshermer.com/the-moral-arc/) [others](https://www.samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape) — essentially doing the work of philosophy for the philosophers.
|
||||
|
||||
Why is this happening? Why has academic philosophy taken this route? Where are the philosophers? In an era when academic philosophy is most needed, and an era when accusations of [irrelevance](http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/05/when-philosophy-is-irrelevant/), [uselessness](http://www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/footnotes-to-plato/61-on-the-uselessness-of-much-academic-philosophy), [corruption](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/27/beyond-hoax-alan-sokal), (and even “[death](https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy)”) are coming from almost every quarter, and an era where religion is no longer seen as the answer to morality that it once was by large segments of the population, it boggles my mind why modern academic philosophy has not taken up this charge with full force — a charge it is both best suited, and arguably duty-bound, to assume.
|
||||
|
||||
Perhaps the reason is that philosophers fear a recurrence of what happened in the wake of the rise of German philosophy in the late 1890’s? Perhaps the prospect of a failure that large happening again is too much to face? Or perhaps, that failure had already destroyed philosophy as a systematic discipline, and we’re only just now — after 60 years of recovery from the globe-spanning wars it enabled — coming to that realization? I’d like to believe that’s not the case. At a time when we’re on the brink of yet another round of globe-spanning terrors, I would like to think that the philosophers are hard at work trying to fix the problems and find the answers that they couldn’t seem to find, in 1939.
|
||||
|
||||
At the center of that struggle, in my view, lies morality. Our moral consciousness is at the epicenter of our sense of free will, the core of our emotional experiences, the bedrock of our individual identities, the binding chords of our relationships and social structures, and the frameworks of our political systems. Moral *psychology* is not enough. *Evolutionary* morality is not enough. What we need is *moral philosophy*, now more than ever.
|
||||
|
||||
------
|
||||
|
||||
*Waal, Frans de; Stephen Macedo; Josiah Ober (2009). Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Kindle Location 94) Princeton Science Library. Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.*
|
||||
|
||||
*Wright, Robert (2010). The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (Kindle Locations 5672-5682). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.*
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ Since my birth year, there have been revolutions, assassinations, bombings, hija
|
||||
|
||||
What used to be the grand dream of instant effortless communication with our fellow human beings in new and different ways, has gradually twisted itself into a perverse facsimile, in which marketing professionals and mobile software engineers turn us all into Narcissus. Except that Narcissus got a better deal. He was at least enraptured by his own beauty. We, on the other hand, are happy to be hypnotized by our own ugliness.
|
||||
|
||||
{{< fluid_imgs "narcissus-myth|/img/narcissus-myth.jpg|The Myth of Narcissus" >}}
|
||||
{{< fluid_imgs "narcissus-myth|/img/narcissus.jpg|The Myth of Narcissus" >}}
|
||||
|
||||
#### Closing thought...
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
164
content/post/why-ubi-is-a-really-bad-idea.md
Normal file
164
content/post/why-ubi-is-a-really-bad-idea.md
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,164 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Why Ubi Is a Really Bad Idea"
|
||||
date: 2016-04-16T19:24:04Z
|
||||
tags: ["ubi","socialism","welfare","subsidies"]
|
||||
topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
|
||||
image: /img/free-money.jpg
|
||||
draft: false
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Free Money For Everyone
|
||||
|
||||
Over the last year or so, I’ve seen a number of [fresh videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okx60F3eHpo) [popping up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4) in places like [TED](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0), enthusiastically championing a resuscitated old leftist public policy idea called the [“Universal / Unconditional Basic Income”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income), or “UBI”. This summer, Switzerland is [scheduled to hold a referendum](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-will-be-the-first-country-in-the-world-to-vote-on-having-a-national-wage-of-1700-a-month-a6843666.html) on one such proposal. And, earlier this month, I attended a [lecture here in London](http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/), in which [Barb Jacobson](http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/) made a vigorous pitch for the idea. Since this has suddenly become a hobby horse for the left again, I think it’s time to have a good hard look at it. To start, I’m going to let the proponents of the concept define and describe it for us:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*A lump sum of income, that is distributed unconditionally — without any strings attached — to every person in a country, every month… What is the goal?… Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate to the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services [UDHR #25](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)…*” ~ [Federico Pistono](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4#t=8m40s)
|
||||
|
||||
So, according to Federico, it’s a payment equal to the amount of resources necessary to satisfy the standard set by the UN Declaration Of Human Rights. And while Rutger Bregman doesn’t mention the UNDHR explicitly, he seems to agree with this conception in principle:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*A monthly grant; enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. That’s it… in the first place, it’s universal. Everyone would get it. Whether you’re a billionaire, or a beggar… The basic income is a right. A right, as a citizen of your country.*” ~ [Rutger Bregman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0#t=2m56s)
|
||||
|
||||
But there are [those here in the UK](http://citizensincome.org/) who argue for a much more circumspect version of this idea. One that looks a lot more like traditional welfare. While it is “unconditional”, in the sense that the payments would be issued without rules for usage, they’re certainly not universal, and they’re most decidedly not intended to provide you with enough money for “your basic needs”:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*Essentially… giving every adult ~£3,700 per year unconditionally, with up to £4,300 per year for each child [in] 2012 prices. A family of three with a child under the age of 5, would receive in the range of £11,000 per year. Universal payment. Unconditional. This replaces all tax credits, child benefits, and tax allowances. [however, it would not replace the National Living Wage]*” ~ [Anthony Painter, RSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkO2CwLWRvg)
|
||||
|
||||
[This article in The Independent](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/replace-the-benefits-system-with-a-universal-basic-income-paid-to-all-citizens-think-tank-recommends-a6777101.html) also clarifies that the payment would be taxed back from you once you earned more than £75,000. Barb Jacobson described something similar in an interview, and referenced the RSA plan in her talk at Conway:
|
||||
|
||||
> “*A regular payment, made to everybody, unconditionally. And that’s it. ([Source: Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi-WtoTWjho))… Basic Income – that is to say, a payment to every individual regardless of worth or means… in this country, there are several models. Most of them have been done by Citizens Income Trust. They’re based on the income tax system… The RSA has just come out with a model which is about 80 pounds a week…*” ~ [Barb Jacobson](http://basicincome.org.uk/author/barbjacobson/)
|
||||
|
||||
## Monorail, Monorail, Monorail
|
||||
|
||||
While proponents of UBI struggle to produce consistent or detailed plans that realize [the core principles of a UBI](http://www.usbig.net/pdf/manyfacesofubi.pdf), they do not hesitate to make many enthusiastic claims of the amazing beneficial effects it will have on society, regardless of those details. It’s going [eliminate income inequality](https://medium.com/basic-income/inequality-and-the-basic-income-guarantee-c8f84d936640#.eppq18c1v). It’s going to [“create social cohesion”](http://citizensincome.org/citizens-income/how-does-it-work/). It’s going to [drastically reduce poverty](http://www.parncutt.org/BIFT1.html). It’s going to [eliminate waste, fraud, and corruption](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-arent-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/) in government. It’s going to [“strengthen democracy”](https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/). It’s going to [improve the health of the population](http://basicincome.org.uk/2013/08/health-forget-mincome-poverty/). It’s going to [encourage entrepreneurship and technological innovation](https://www.crunch.co.uk/blog/small-business-advice/2016/01/11/will-a-basic-income-turn-us-all-into-entrepreneurs/). It’s going to [stimulate the economy](https://thebigpoliticalparty.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/unconditional-basic-income-is-an-economic-stimulus-everybody-wins/). It’s going to [“liberate” everyone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi2tnbtpEvA). It’s going to [reduce unemployment](http://www.basicincome.org/bien/pdf/2004WattsMitchell.pdf). It’s going to [rescue us from environmental catastrophe](http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-save-earth-and-human-life-guaranteed-income). It’s going to [promote gender equality](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/payback-time-for-women.html?_r=0). It’s going to [improve education levels](http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/basic-income-9781472583116/), [protect us against the robots](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9758f1a-e9c0-11e5-888e-2eadd5fbc4a4.html#axzz45zJfS1vw) and on, and on.
|
||||
|
||||
Given how spectacularly effective this social medicine sounds, how could anyone in his right mind be opposed to it? Even if there are potential risks or unknown costs, surely they can’t be that bad when weighed against all these amazing benefits. So, of course, I’m on board with this, right?
|
||||
|
||||
Well, not quite. Having read all these articles and listened to the lectures, I’m struck by the fact that nobody is really offering any actual evidence in support of these amazing claims. And, at the risk of overusing a cliché, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Of *course* I would be in favor of something that simultaneously eliminated poverty, protected the environment, increased entrepreneurship, and brought justice and fairness to the entire world. But this is like saying I’m in favor of Superman. In case you weren’t sure: *Superman is imaginary*.
|
||||
|
||||
Numerous obvious (and somewhat naive) objections have been thrown at this idea. Most of them are actually hoisted up and shot down handily by the proponents themselves, in an attempt to lend some superficial credibility to it. Objections like, “[Wouldn’t this produce a generation of work-shy couch potatoes?](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/04/matt-zwolinski/pragmatic-libertarian-case-basic-income-guarantee)“, or “[Isn’t this just Communism?](http://gaurarader.com/2014/07/14/basic-income-is-a-viable-path-to-realizing-the-goals-of-communism-a-form-of-common-ownership-a-classless-society-and-an-end-to-the-dominance-relationships-and-alienation-produced-by-capitalism/)” These are not really objections, so much as they’re just conditioned reactions. The impulses people respond with, when confronted by ideas they find strange and threatening. But there are serious problems with the idea that remain almost entirely unanswered. I am going to focus on the three I find most significant: Morality, Cost, and Economics 101.
|
||||
|
||||
## We’re All Consequentialists Now…
|
||||
|
||||
The first of my objections is a moral one (there are actually several moral objections, but I am going to focus on the one I view as the most significant). This is typically waved away as “storytelling” or “ideology”. [Federico Pistono](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aBKnr3Ep4) does this, for example, and asserts that it doesn’t matter what your *a priori* moral objection is, if the idea actually accomplishes a goal that is particularly noble in his estimation (e.g., satisfying article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights). In other words, the only good is the good of a particular set of outcomes he and his supporters prefer.
|
||||
|
||||
What Federico may not realize consciously (I am trying to be charitable) is that he’s smuggled in his own moral argument in an attempt to refute another moral argument, by asserting that certain desirable outcomes are more important than mere morality. He chastises his cloud of unnamed acquaintences for their archaic devotion such silliness, but then proudly argues for a form of moral Consequentialism. For those who aren’t quite sure what that means: *The Ends Justify The Means*. For the more astute viewer, you may have picked up on the muddled blend of [Mohism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism), [Utilitarianism](http://www.iep.utm.edu/util-a-r/), and [Motive Consequentialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism#Motive_consequentialism) embedded in Federico’s impassioned plea. To Federico’s credit, he admitted that he was unsure whether the goal was actually achievable by means of the UBI. But this only makes his argument much worse. It utterly defangs his excuse for a deplorable and utterly unecessary double-standard.
|
||||
|
||||
But, let’s set aside the explicit problems with *his* moral position in particular for a moment, because what’s really at issue here is whether or not we can determine the moral implications of an idea like UBI, at all. In other words, what *is* immoral about a universal basic income, if (and that’s a big if) the outcome is something desirable?
|
||||
|
||||
To address that question, we need to go back to basics. Morality is a particular kind of *judgment of human actions* that categorizes them according to normative standards. In other words, it judges behaviors that are “good” or “bad”, or tells us what “should” or “shouldn’t” be acted out. Moral philosophy, or ethics, is the study and systematization of these judgments. One intellectual product of the discipline of ethics is the notion of political “rights”. A right is something akin to a “principle” encapsulating a rule governing how agents of the state ought to behave with respect to the citizens they rule over. Federico made an appeal to just such a rule, when he referenced article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (ironically, yet another attempt to smuggle morality into a discussion he claimed was not about morality).
|
||||
|
||||
Even if we stipulate to the validity of “rights” as a logical concept, and to the legal relevance (jurisdiction) of the UNDHR (Federico’s standard for ideal consequences), and to the validity of article 25 in particular (those of us who were schooled in the American legal tradition will probably not do this easily), there is still a major problem for Federico. You see, we have been granted other rights in that UN Declaration. Rights that stand in direct contradiction to any attempt at enacting the principle of article 25. Article three grants me the “right to *life, liberty, and security of person*“. Article four grants me the right not to be “held in *slavery or servitude*“. Article seven grants me “*equal protection* under the law”. And, finally, article 17 explicitly grants me “the *right to own property* alone as well as in association with others…” and further asserts that I shall not “be arbitrarily *deprived of [my] property*“.
|
||||
|
||||
One could argue that since these all come in the top 20, and they all come well before article 25, surely they hold a higher precedence than article 25. But even if we were to accept that every article is of absolutely equal weight and importance, all it leaves us with is an irreconcilable contradiction. The state must both confiscate my property, and not confiscate it. The state must enslave me to fulfil its duty, and must not enslave me to fulfil its duty. The state must violate my security of person, but must not violate it.
|
||||
|
||||
At the center of all of these swirling contradictions, of course, is the widely ignored fact that the state does not produce wealth. It appropriates wealth. And it does so by the active application of force and the threat of force. It has many excuses for doing so, among them “redistribution”, a euphemism for the forcible taking of property from one person, in order to give it to another. There are three ways in which the state can act out its power to take property: taxation, borrowing, or the printing of fiat currency. In all three cases, fundamentally, it is the forcible taking of property. The subject of borrowing and printing I’ll address in my next objection, but the true nature of taxation should be fairly obvious even to anyone new to the workforce.
|
||||
|
||||
This is the moral argument that folks like Federico are really trying to make. Not that, “it is morally good to give everyone some amount of property, whether they are justified in receiving it or not”, but rather, “it is morally good to *take* some amount of property from everyone, whether the state is morally justified in taking it or not”. For Federico, this is where the Utilitarianism comes in handy. Because once we get down to the bare facts of the relationship, idealists like Federico are left with nothing but a bald-faced *ex post facto* rationalization for their desire to take stuff that doesn’t belong to them: they think they can dispose of it better, more wisely, more justly, and more compassionately, than you can. And, if he can wrap that rationalization in fantastical tales of a utopian future, and obfuscating language like “*[the greatest good for the greatest number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham)*“, why, he can even make his theft sound like a profoundly noble act. He can become his generation’s social justice Superman.
|
||||
|
||||
But, ironically, he’s already openly admitted that he’s not even certain whether the consequences he desires are possible, let alone reasonably achievable (I concur with this assessment, as we’ll see in my subsequent objections). But what this means, in effect, is that he’s willing to wield the gun of the state to act out a theft that he’s *not even certain will result in a desirable outcome*. What utter madness. Federico chides us constantly to avoid moral storytelling, and to rely on empirical data, and yet cannot see the moral story he is telling himself. Federico’s boyish smile and youthful enthusiasm are little comfort when all he can offer is riches in the progressive afterlife for a present-day of almost certain Utilitarian suffering.
|
||||
|
||||
> “*God save us from people who mean well.*” ~ Vikram Seth
|
||||
|
||||
## Just A Few Easy Installments…
|
||||
|
||||
“Yes but,” you might say, “the moral argument is moot, because after all, we’re already taxing and borrowing for loads of other reasons. So, why not simply accept it, and resign yourself to trying to improve the efficiency of the system we have?” Libertarians seem to [like asking this question a lot](http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income) these days (I think they’ve given up).
|
||||
|
||||
How do we know this would actually “increase the efficiency” of the system (whatever that even means)? Sure, it would nominally eliminate agencies and jobs devoted to vetting and means testing, where certain benefits are eliminated — *if* they actually got eliminated. But if you actually look at the proposals in the pipeline now, none of them are unconditional or universal. All of them put limits on the funding that would require data collection for the purpose of filtering out those who do not qualify, and some would even include a back-handed means test that would put the burden of reclaiming distributions on tax collection agencies. So, it’s not at all clear to me that this would eliminate bureaucracy or improve “efficiency”.
|
||||
|
||||
But let’s think about what it would take to implement an *actual* UBI; one that satisfies all the criteria: universal, unconditional, uniform, individual, and sufficient for “basic needs”. That last criteria is an especially tough one to define. What are “basic needs”? The list can be as sparse as [nothing but emergency essentials](http://canatx.org/basicneeds/backup/documents/1999Assessment/basicneeds99whatarebasicneeds.html): temporary food, shelter, and clothing. Or, they can [include all of the social services provided by the state today](http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/basic-human-needs-what-are-they-really): education, healthcare, transportation, and many other goods and services. Again, there’s no clear picture of what the proponents of UBI are talking about. Which should be a huge warning signal.
|
||||
|
||||
Since the purpose of the payment is intentionally unspecified, and the disbursment is unconditional, I’m not sure why the proponents of this idea feel compelled to casually enumerate its “basic need” uses for us. Perhaps they think it makes us feel better to think of the money being used for those things, instead of on prostitutes, drugs, video games, amusement park tickets, or comic books? They often make a concerted effort in their lectures to argue that nobody would spend the money on those other things. But why? If I can spend the money in any way I wish, who cares if I spend it on a sack of staple rice, or a trip to Disneyland?
|
||||
|
||||
In any case, if we stick with the phrase “basic needs”, then we do have a universal rubrik we could use as a real-world mechanism for determining the size of this payment: The state’s official “poverty line”, below which it argues, “basic needs” are not achievable. In the UK, there is actually something heavily promoted (though, not yet officially adopted), called a “minimum income standard”. This number is supposed to represent the minimum income necessary for the satisfaction of “basic needs”.
|
||||
|
||||
So, let’s do some math. The [JRF](https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/minimum-income-standard-uk-2015) and [minimumincome.org](http://www.minimumincome.org.uk/results) both place this number at somewhere around £17,000 per year for an individual. Since the [median income across all of Britain](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours) is roughly £25,000, I’m willing to accept the MIS at face value. But we should be aware that this sort of generalization will make some folks appear extremely comfortable, and others appear nearly destitute by comparison, [depending on exactly where they live in the UK](http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/HTMLDocs/dvc126/). Still, for the sake of the general argument, let’s just go with the £17,000.
|
||||
|
||||
According to the [Office for National Statistics in the UK](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates), the total population in the UK is about 64.5 million. This includes adults, children, and legal foreign national residents. If we take the UBI at its word, and take it seriously, it should be simply a matter of multiplying this number by the minimum income standard, to get a figure for the whole country. That would come to just a shave over 1.095 trillion pounds. That should give Brits some pause. The current total [national budget for the entire UK](http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/government_expenditure.html) is ~£759 Billion. So, a proper UBI would balloon total government expenditures to nearly £2 trillion.
|
||||
|
||||
So, what would it take to collect 1.095 trillion in taxes from the working population of Britain? Well, let’s do some more math. Again, according to the [Office for National Statistics in the UK](http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/march2016) the number of employed adults in the UK is roughly 31.4 million. if we divide our earlier number by this one, we get a figure of £33,917 in taxes, per working adult.
|
||||
|
||||
That’s right. In order for the entire population of the UK to take home £327 per week (the unofficial minimum basic income), those of us who work for a living would need to be taxed at a rate of £657 per week. Welcome to Cloud-Cuckoo Land, my friends.
|
||||
|
||||
However, he RSA claims [its proposal](https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/) would only come to £30 billion. This is nowhere near the naive figures we’ve been working with above. How is this possible? Well, to begin with, despite what they strenuously claim, [the RSA proposal](https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2015/12/in-support-of-a-universal-basic-income--introducing-the-rsa-basic-income-model/) isn’t really universal or unconditional. It’s also not “basic”. For starters, it only comes to £71 per week (£3,692 per year). Which is nowhere near the commonly accepted definition of a “basic income”. Worse yet, even at this rather meager sum, the total cost still comes to roughly £238 billion. So, what else is going on here? Surprise, surprise, the “unconditional income” comes with LOADS of conditions:
|
||||
|
||||
- You must be between the age of 25 and 65. Apparently, they want to let the public pension system bureaucrats know that the RSA won’t be a threat. This also means 18-25 year olds are not considered legal adults by the RSA.
|
||||
- However, if you are 18-25, you could sign what is essentially an indentured servitude contract, whereby you would “contribute” to your “community” as a *condition* of your payment. Paradoxically, the RSA insists that the state would do no monitoring or enforcement of these contracts. So I’m not sure at all how they’d stop you from taking your payment if you simply lied about “contributing”.
|
||||
- You have to enroll in the electoral political system here (i.e., you have to be a registered voter), in order to qualify for a payment.
|
||||
- If you are an EU citizen, you would have to “pay in” to the system for a number of years, before you could begin collecting.
|
||||
- If you are a legal resident but a non-EU citizen (e.g., a US Citizen), you are ineligible for a payment.
|
||||
- If you earn more than £75,000, your benefit would be refused or taxed back away from you, in graduated steps.
|
||||
|
||||
This effectively reduces the population of “qualified recipients” to about 8 or 9 million people (less than one-fifth of the 45 million legally registered UK Citizens). Which, of course, comes out to about £30 billion in new expenditures.
|
||||
|
||||
In otherwords, what we see being promoted heavily in the UK is not a “universal basic income” at all, but something else entirely. First and foremost, it is tool for social engineering, and for artificially constructing a new welfare constituency for the power elite. It is a thinly veiled attempt at manipulating young people into participating in a political system they instinctively recognize as corrupt and opposed to their best interests (and who express that instinct by refusing to particpate).
|
||||
|
||||
It is also yet another attempt at fomenting class resentment for the sake of income redistribution. I’ve avoided covering anything in [Ms. Jacobson’s lecture](http://www.meetup.com/ConwayHall/events/229462417/) up to this point, precisely because it was nothing more than a lazy, old-world Marxist anti-wealth screed. Rather than actually making an argument *in favor* of UBI, she spent the entire 25 minute lecture railing against the abuses of “wealthy property holders”, the deriding the idea of the Protestent Work Ethic — something nobody has been seriously defending for decades. But Jacobson did this, because she knew her audience: Elderly, old-world Marxist pseudo-intellectuals. People easily manipulated by class resentment. And this is the real core of the purpose of a UBI, at least as defined here in the UK (and I’d suspect pretty much everywhere).
|
||||
|
||||
The RSA Proposal is an attempt to convert the new, young tech economy into the same kind of easily manipulated political constituency that the public sector and the unionized working-class represented in the 20th century. When political elites have direct control over your income, you’re going to become very conscious of who those elites are. You’re going to suddenly have a stake in politics, because you’re going to be more or less controlled by it. And, given the choice, you’re going to use that involvement to choose the gentle master over the harsh one, again and again. The RSA wants to position itself as the new “good cop”, in our “good cop, bad cop” representative democracy.
|
||||
|
||||
I could repeat the analysis above with any number of other proposals from different countries and different organizations, but it would be redundant and boring. The basic tactic is always the same: a constant evasive oscillation between class resentment and lowered expectations, in an attempt to gain political power.
|
||||
|
||||
> “*There’s no such thing as a free lunch*” ~ Milton Friedman (nominally)
|
||||
|
||||
## The Physics Of Trade
|
||||
|
||||
This brings me to my last objection to the concept of a UBI. Continuing my theme of grade school levels of finance, it comes in the form of a basic tutorial in economics. One of the things I find most astonishing about the proponents of UBI, is just how ignorant they are of what an “**income**” really is. To illustrate this, I think it’s time I told a story:
|
||||
|
||||
Let’s imagine a world in which the idea of currency — either as a physical commodity, or as a fiat paper means of exchange — hasn’t even been thought of yet. It’s essentially a barter society: everyone trades goods and labor in kind with each other. Let’s further imagine a town square in this world, in which there are four shops: Bob’s Bakery, Sean’s Shoes, Sally’s Sewing, and Mike’s Meats.
|
||||
|
||||
One morning, Bob walks into Sean’s shop and asks, “Hey Sean, my shoes are getting pretty beat up. Can I get a new pair by Friday?”
|
||||
|
||||
“Sure Bob,” Sean replied, “problem is, I don’t really need bread right now. I’ve still got at least a week’s worth in my larder.”
|
||||
|
||||
Bob thought a moment, then pulled out a slip of paper and pen, and wrote on the paper: “Bob owes Sean 5 loaves and 2 baguettes. Redeemable anytime.” Bob handed the paper to Sean, with an eager smile.
|
||||
|
||||
“I see,” Sean said taking the paper from Bob, “I think that’ll work. I know you’re good for it!”
|
||||
|
||||
“Thanks, Sean! I’ll be back at the end of the week for the shoes”, Bob responded as he exited Seans shop.
|
||||
|
||||
The next day, Sally walked into Bob’s bakery, and handed Bob the familiar slip of paper. Only, Sean’s name had been scratched out, and Sally’s had been written in above it.
|
||||
|
||||
“I don’t understand?”, Bob said, confused and a little startled.
|
||||
|
||||
“Oh, sorry,” Sally explained, “Sean needed his shirt mended, but I didn’t need any shoes. So, he gave me your IOU instead.”
|
||||
|
||||
Bob hesitated a moment, then said, “Hmm… I guess this is ok. I’ll go have chat with Sean later today.”, and gave Sally her weekly bread order.
|
||||
|
||||
An hour later, Mike the butcher entered Bob’s shop.
|
||||
|
||||
“What’s up, Mike?”, Bob asked.
|
||||
|
||||
“Oh, hi Bob! Here!”, Mike extended his hand, and passed Bob a slip of paper. It read, in Sean’s handwriting, “Bob owes Mike 5 loaves of bread and 2 baguettes. Redeemable anytime.”
|
||||
|
||||
“Hey! What? I don’t owe you anything!”, Bob exclaimed.
|
||||
|
||||
“That’s not what Sean says”, Mike snickered.
|
||||
|
||||
Bob stormed out of his shop, marched quick-step down the street, and pushed his way through Sean’s front door.
|
||||
|
||||
“What the hell is going on here, Sean? What’s the meaning of this?”, Bob yelled as he tossed Mike’s note at Sean.
|
||||
|
||||
“But Bob,” Sean slowly began, “EVERYBODY needs bread, yes?”….
|
||||
|
||||
The point of this story, for those of you a little slow on the uptake, is to highlight exactly what is happening when we give each other money — and what happens, when that money loses its meaning. I can’t believe this is something that needs to be explained to full grown adults, but apparently, nobody understands it anymore.
|
||||
|
||||
Dollars and pounds are not little magic scrolls with arcane incantations written on them that make goods and services just suddenly appear out of the Cloud-Cuckoo dimension. They represent a finite and well-defined exchange of value between individuals. When I give you a dollar, I am giving you a dollar’s worth of some labor I’ve done for someone else, or a dollars worth of some real good that I’ve given to someone else. To complete the interaction, you give me a dollar’s worth of some labor or good. That is called a transaction. Like value exchanged for like, the value of which is negotiated between two individuals.
|
||||
|
||||
And this gets us back to the beginning of this essay. When you ask the state to give you money for no other reason than that you are breathing, you are essentially asking it to take something of value from someone else, and give it to you. As I said before, the state does not create value, it can only appropriate it.
|
||||
|
||||
So, when [Rutger Bregman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0#t=2m56s) proudly announces that he wants “Free Money For Everyone”, what he’s really saying, is that he wants to take property from someone somewhere, in order to give it to someone else, somewhere else. He wants to be Sean, handing out forged IOU’s from Bob’s shop, because he’s compassionate like that.
|
||||
|
||||
There are three ways a state can appropriate value from its citizens:
|
||||
|
||||
*The state can print it:* One cannot multiply the amount of value in an economy simply by multiplying the number of slips of paper representing value. So, when the state does this, the *real thing* that the slips of paper represent gets smaller in comparison. The slip of paper represents less and less of the actual product or labor it was meant to represent. This is called inflation. The real amount of value in the world now, goes down. The only way to fix this, is to increase the amount of actual *valued* products and labor being exchaged in an economy.
|
||||
|
||||
*The state can borrow it:* This is essentially the appropriation of value from other economies, or from the future, in order to use it in the present in the local economy. But what happens if the lender (or the future) is never repaid? The real amount of value in the world goes down again, only we don’t notice it right away. It is a sort of invisible inflation. One in which empty promises replace currencies that have already replaced real goods and services. Eventually someone’s descendants are rendered utterly impoverished. The Dickensian horror that the left loves to scare us with is something they are creating, with the very schemes they claim are designed to prevent such a thing.
|
||||
|
||||
*The state can tax it directly:*. As I’ve already discussed at length in the previous objection, taxation is the most visible form of appropriation. The RSA plan actually goes further than just income taxes (it proposes a restructured “progressive” tax rate scheme), including various forms of property taxation as well. While this would shrink the size of that £657 per week income tax bill, it is still extracting value out of real goods: If you take my spare bedroom away from me, I cannot use it as an art studio. If you tax my business equipment, I won’t have enough to buy additional equipment or hire new employees. And so forth. The fewer resources at my disposal, the less creative I will be. The real amount of value in the world not only goes down, it *can never be fully realized*.
|
||||
|
||||
This is essentially a human physical limitation of economy. A “law of economic physics”, if you will. And, the more we crawl up our own asses and refuse to accept the reality of what we’re doing to ourselves, the worse it will get. The harder and harder you work at taking other peoples’ things, without negotiating a genuine exchange of real value, the less and less real value there will be for *anyone*.
|
||||
|
||||
Fundamentally, if you look hard enough at ideas like Universal Basic Income, you realize what they really are. Far from creating a society of “universal economic suffrage”, we are enslaving ourselves to a world “universal economic servitude”.
|
||||
|
||||
> “*The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.*” ~Frédéric Bastiat
|
||||
|
||||
```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 1 December 2021]```
|
||||
|
||||
@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
|
||||
<div style="text-align: center;">
|
||||
<iframe src="https://anchor.fm/{{ index .Params 0 }}/embed/episodes/{{ index .Params 1 }}"
|
||||
height="95px" width="425px" style="border-width: 0"></iframe>
|
||||
height="95px" width="425px" style="border-width: 0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
3
layouts/shortcodes/note.html
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|
||||
<div class="note">
|
||||
{{ .Inner }}
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
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@ -124,4 +124,39 @@ i {
|
||||
.big-block {
|
||||
width: 40%;
|
||||
vert-align: middle;
|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
|
||||
p.note
|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
padding: 15px 60px;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
div.note
|
||||
{
|
||||
text-align: justify;
|
||||
position: relative;
|
||||
width: fit-content;
|
||||
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|
||||
margin-right: 10%;
|
||||
-moz-border-radius: 6px;
|
||||
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|
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
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|
||||
border: solid 1px #3498db;
|
||||
border-radius: 6px;
|
||||
line-height: 18px;
|
||||
overflow: hidden;
|
||||
padding: 15px 55px;
|
||||
}
|
||||
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue
Block a user