Philosophy

The Daily Show recently featured an interesting interview with Yale Law School professor Jonathan Macey. One part of the interview that I found especially interesting was Macey’s “defense” of capital firms like Bain in terms of what seemed to be the necessity (in the logical sense) of corruption. Macey made the fascinating claim that social scientists regard corruption as on par with gravity-something that they simply must include in their analysis and something to be presumably treated as a natural force.

While I was on my morning run, I mulled over this idea in the context of my own classes and wondered about a key question: is corruption like gravity in this regard? Further reflection led me to consider what I take to be a better analogy, namely Thoreau’s analogy to the friction of a machine.

Thoreau notes that “all machines have their friction-possibly it does enough good to balance the evil. ” In this case, Thoreau’s machine is the government and the friction is the inefficiency and corruption of this government. As such, this seems to nicely match the point being made by Macey, namely that corruption seems to be a constant presence.

Both Thoreau and Macey seem to be correct: it seems  as difficult to imagine a large political and economic system free of corruption as it is to conceive of a frictionless machine. That said, there is still a rather interesting matter to address, namely whether or not the analogy truly holds.

It is rather tempting to simply accept that corruption is unavoidable, mainly because that seems to be the case. As I ran and thought about this matter, I saw litter on the streets, sidewalks and even the running trails (I picked up as much as I could carry). As might be imagined, I made the obvious comparison between corruption and litter: both seem to always be present and unavoidable. That said, there is still the matter of the nature of this alleged inevitability.

In the case of a literal machine, fiction seems to be unavoidable because of the nature of matter and motion. As such, a machine cannot help but have friction (unless, of course, truly frictionless machines are possible). After all, its friction is not a matter of its choice or decisions on its part. This might not, however, hold true in the case of corruption.

If the corruption of the political and economic system is comparable to the friction of a machine, then it would seem that being critical of the corruption and even blaming people for it would be as absurd as blaming an engineer because the engine she designed is not frictionless. The corruption, it would seem, would be something we must simply accept. The same would thus be true of litter-it is simply something that must be there.

As might be suspected, my comparison between litter and corruption is quite intentional. Litter is, obviously enough, the result of decisions on the part of the folks who littered. It is not the case that litter just appears or that people are compelled to engage in littering by the laws of litter. While some people will, it seems, always decide to litter it does make sense to say that they could, in fact, have chosen to do otherwise.  For example, I saw someone open his window and throw a fast food bag onto the side of the road. He was, presumably, not compelled to do this by some sort of litter law that ensures that the correct percentage of litter is on the ground. In contrast, the friction that slowed and stopped the bag was under the dominion of the relevant physical laws-the bag had no choice. As such, there could actually be a world without litter-if everyone decided not not litter, then there would be no (intentional) litter. This is unlikely, but it is not because it cannot be done-rather it will not happen because people will elect not to make it happen.

The same would seem to be true of corruption. The corruption in politics and economics exists because of what people elect to do (or not do). As such, there could be a system without corruption-if people decided to not act in corrupt ways. This, like a litter free world, is incredibly unlikely. But this is not because it cannot be done. It is unlikely because people will chose not to create such a system.

It might be replied that the system is beyond the control of people. After all, the political and economic systems involve millions (billions worldwide) and trying to fight corruption would  fighting a force of nature, like a tsunami. As such, corruption is a necessary part of the system.

Thoreau has an interesting reply to this sort of reasoning. He notes that he “has relations to the millions as men, and not mere brute or inanimate things, so appeal is possible.” It is also the case that although these systems are vast and complicated, they are created by people. As such,  any corruption (or litter) must be put there by people-the corruption (like litter) does not just appear it must be intentionally placed. If humans are capable of free choice, then they would presumably be capable of choosing not to have corruption-just as they would presumably be capable of choosing not to litter.

I suspect that people tolerate litter and corruption on a similar basis, namely the mistaken belief that it is inevitable and beyond our control. However, just as each bit of litter is the result of some person’s choice, each bit of corruption is also the result of choice. As such, the defense that corruption is part of the system is no better a defense for corruption that claiming that litter is just part of the system.

However, even if it is accepted that the machine of society  must have  the friction of corruption, then Thoreau’s words would still seem to apply: “when the friction has its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, let us not have the machine. ” As such, while we might no more be able to be rid of corruption than litter, this is not a reason to tolerate it or to allow it to dominate. Just as I can refuse to litter I can refuse to be corrupt. Just as I can fight the filthy messes of litter created by the lazy and immoral, I can also fight the corruption of the wicked. At the very least, I should not contribute or tolerate the misdeeds of either.

“I’m going out with my pal Rick for a beer tonight, he’s got himself into a spot of bother with the police again. Fighting.” said Dave.

I think for a minute: “Rick, I don’t think I know him do I?”.

“No” said Dave, “you’ve never met him. I know him from my anger management group.”

Dave is my running partner yet he and I are not alike. He has spent much of his adult life swirling around the British penal system and I, well, haven’t. But an interest in running can forgive a multitude of sins, and he has been gracious enough to forgive many of mine.

Dave’s back story makes for a cautionary tale of how the UK statutory services can infiltrate a life and subvert the identity of the person they purport to help. He has probation officers, social workers, outreach workers and counsellours, all vying for his time and all interfering with his attempt to construct a life, honest or otherwise. But he is fighting back, with the aid of his Penalty Box.

The idea is as follows. Whenever Dave has a meeting with a representative of any of the abovementioned agencies, he takes with him his Penalty Box, into which the relevant factotum must pay a forfeit if she uses any of the following expressions:

acceptable (or unacceptable); appropriate (or inappropriate); empower(ing); person centred (or person oriented); developmental; non-judgemental; rights-based; forward-looking ; in partnership.

If a project or service is ever said to be rolled out then Dave claims a double forfeit. And if any mention of the date is made in such a way as to imply it has a particular moral relevance then that is triple. Hence if a social worker were to say of his opinion that it is  “judgemental and not an appropriate comment to make in this, the 21st Century” then he’d hit paydirt.

But Dave has a Budweiser habit to feed and he wishes to go abroad for his Summer vacation so he is in need of funds. I therefore appeal, on his behalf, for any submissions which you the reader believe could plausibly be added to the above list.

Dave’s strategy has a pleasing consequence, one that is more than merely financial. He has discovered that in being denuded of the above expressions the social worker, probation officer and counsellour suffers a pleasing paralysis of expression and of thought.Meetings that used to take several hours are now over in minutes.  It has become obvious to him that the Wittgensteinians have a point: that there is no pre-linguistic “given”, that thought and experience are mediated by and logically consequent upon language. Strip these statutory representatives of their language game and they become like putty in his hands. He used to spend his time running from these people, now he knows that, with the help of his Penalty Box, he can philosophise them away.

This is the second in my very occasional series about amusing Prefaces (the first is here). I came across this one while browsing John Walker’s 1847 translation of and commentary on Murray’s Compendium of Logic. It seems he wasn’t a happy bunny about his involvement in the project:

It is the misfortune of some Authors, that they are rather obliged to write what they can as they can; than allowed by circumstances to write what they might, and as they would.

[…]

[T]he manner in which I treat the subject, has been determined rather by necessity, than choice. Were I at liberty to pursue it according to the dictates of my own judgment, I certainly should not have taken for the basis of my work that piece, on which I offer a comment. I have briefly described, in the Appendix, the kind of treatise which I would gladly have attempted, if time and other circumstances had permitted me.

Fantastic.

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It has long been a common practice on the right to accuse the media of having a liberal bias. Sarah Palin added a new spin on this approach by popularizing the notion of the “gotcha” question. As might be imagined, politicians continue to avail themselves of the notion that the media is out to get them.

In some cases the media does act in ways that seem to indicate that certain folks are out to get politicians. For example, CNN’s John King started off a presidential debate by asking Newt about what his second wife had said about his alleged request for an open marriage. While Newt handed King his rump on a platter, Newt also launched into an attack on the media.

On the one hand, Newt made some legitimate criticisms about how the media folks tend to bring up matters that are salacious yet lacking in actual merit as news stories. In the case of Newt, his character is relevant. However, as Newt points out, the story of his infidelity is old news and bringing it up at the start of the debate does seem to be rather uncalled for. This does, as one might imagine, raise some interesting questions about media ethics in regards to the timing of stories as well as the focus the media folks place on certain stories.

On the other hand, the media did not make up the story-Newt did, in fact, behave in ways contrary to his own currently espoused morality. Newt’s claim that the media makes it difficult for decent people to run for office seems to be questionable in that the professional media merely reports what people do and, as such, decent people would have no such sordid tales in their background. For politicians to complain that the media folks are reporting what they do and say is comparable to Meletus’ anger at Socrates for making evident his failings. The misdeed lies not with the person who reveals the misdeed but with the person who commits it.

More recently, East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. was asked by the press about the alleged harassment of Hispanics by members of the town’s police force. In reply to a very straightforward question about what he would do about the situation, he said he   “might have tacos.” As might be imagined, this did not go over very well.

While he did say he took responsibility for his actions, he also blamed the media and accused the reporter of asking a “gotcha” question. However, the question hardly appears to be anything that would legitimately count as a “gotcha” question in that it is not loaded, overly complicated, confusing, or otherwise trap-like in content. Also, the media folks presented his claim in full context. If they had, for example, asked him what he would have for dinner and then edited that in as his reply, then he could justly accuse the media of being unfair. However, he was asked a straightforward question and his reply was presented in context. As such, the only one he has to blame for his words is himself. Perhaps the biggest gripe that politicians have with the media folks is that they so often make public what politicians actually say and do (“how dare they report what I said!”). That, however, does not seem to be anything unfair or unjust on the part of the media. Rather, that seems to be their job.

While there are many excellent schools, there are also serious problems plaguing American and other education systems. People are, of course, eager to point fingers and these fingers are often pointed at teachers’ unions. Being a professor at a state school, it should hardly be a surprise that I am a member of the UFF, NEA and AFT. Because of this, my writing on this subject should be read with a critical eye so as to catch any bias in my claims or any trickery in my argumentation.

One stock argument against unions is based on the claim that the teachers’ unions are aimed at the good of the union members and this good is not always consistent with what is good for the students. There are, of course, harsher versions which involve claims that unions serve primarily to protect incompetent teachers and to do other wicked and damaging things.

This line of argument can have merit. After all, unions do (in theory) aim at benefiting their membership and the members of the teachers’ unions are teachers rather than students. There are also legitimate concerns that unions have enabled incompetent teachers to retain their jobs and that the lobbying power of teachers’ unions has been used in ways that might not lead to the best use of public money. That is, it could be argued that teachers’ unions function like pretty much all such organizations ranging from labor unions to corporations to political parties. This does not justify or excuse such behavior, but it does indicate that teachers’ unions are hardly unique in their sins. It also suggests that if organizations that serve the interest of their members but can be a detriment to the public good should be gotten rid of, then we should not just be rid of teachers’ unions but also corporations and political parties as well.

Of course, it would be absurd to rid society of all organisations that might act contrary to the public good-after all, this would undo much of society itself. Rather it would seem more sensible to address the alleged harms done by an organization so as to determine whether the organization should be changed (or perhaps destroyed). After all, to be rid of teachers’ unions because it is alleged that they have some role in the woes of education would seem to be on par with being rid of financial corporations because they happened to wreck the world economy (any only the most radical are suggesting that).

Turning back to teachers’ unions, there would seem to be two main avenues of legitimate criticism. One would be that  teachers’ unions are somehow intrinsically damaging to the education system. That is, it is simply the nature of these unions that they will, of necessity, cause trouble. Interestingly enough, some critics of capitalism make similar claims about corporations and other business: they must, by their very nature, be exploitative and harmful.

The idea that organizations such as unions and corporations are inherently harmful is certainly an interesting idea and one that would be well worth investigating in more detail. However, it seems unlikely that teachers organizing into unions must, of necessity, create harm to the education system. To support this, I offer two arguments.

First, there is the example of Finland. It has a unionized education system that is, in fact, excellent. As such, if unions were of necessity a bane to education, then Finland should be doing badly rather than well. Of course, it could be argued that Finland is an unusual exception. This takes me to my second argument.

Second, if  unions are a significant cause of educational woes (as some critics claim) in the United States and elsewhere, then one would expect to see correlation between the presence of unions and such woes. To use the obvious analogy, if a toxin causes disease, one would expect to see more cases of the disease in areas where to toxin concentration is higher. Interestingly enough, educational quality in the United States does not seem to correlate with the presence or absence of unions, but rather with other factors. In the case of K-12 public education, the quality and problems seem to match quite closely the poverty or wealth of the school and the community.  That is, “poor” schools tend to have far more problems than “rich” schools. As such, it would seem that it is not primarily a matter of unions (after all, rich and poor schools alike are unionized) but rather other factors.

It might be replied that unions are still a problem but that the money enables the schools to counter the damage done by unions (just as a wealthy community might be able to counter a toxin by having more money to spend on treatment and prevention). This is a point worth considering, but what would be needed would be evidence that the unions are doing the damage rather than the other factors that seem to correlate with educational woes.

In regards to the claim that unions are inherently harmful because the serve the interests of teachers, one rather obvious reply is that students have no union and the organizations that are most likely to act in ways that are in the interest of students are teachers’ unions. After all, these unions generally aim at things like better schools, better funding for educational programs and so on. That is, the interests of teachers overlap the interests of students and teachers’ unions tend to provide students with the only organized voice in the realm of politics. As such, teachers’ unions do not seem to be intrinsically bad. There is also the obvious concern of how eliminating these unions would actually improve education-that is, what group would step in to see to it that the interests of the students and teachers were being taken into account.

Another avenue of criticism is to raise specific problems that particular actions by unions or union members cause. For example, if a union acts to prevent incompetent teachers from being fired at a specific school, then this act could be legitimately criticized and such problems should be addressed.

In general, it would be rather odd if unions did not cause some problems. If they did not, they would be truly unique. However, it seems more sensible to address these problems rather than simply condemning unions. Given the fervor with which these unions are being attacked, it might be suspected that some folks stand to make a profit by getting rid of these unions. But perhaps that is merely cynicism on my part. After all, I am sure that the people funding the attacks on unions and the politicians who will attack them are merely driven by a love of the public good and are doing it for the children.

 

 

 

 

Here in Australia there is an interesting debate going on around the views of Melinda Tankard Reist (“MTR”), a high-profile anti-abortion and anti-pornography activist, and Jennifer Wilson, a relatively obscure (at least until now) blogger and occasional online op.ed writer. The dispute blew up in public when Wilson received some kind of letter of demand, with a threat of defamation action, from MTR’s lawyers over highly critical comments on Wilson’s blog.

The comments included claims to the effect that MTR is driven by conservative theological views that merit our opposition, and that she is duplicitous and deceptive in not disclosing her religious motivation. Rather, it was alleged, she seeks to create a false impression that she is associated with the secular feminist movement. These claims were expressed somewhat more colourfully and the attack on conservative Christian views of women and sexuality was detailed. If you want to follow the brouhaha that was started by the action taken to date by MTR’s lawyers, a good place to start is over on Twitter, where you can search for the hashtag #MTRsues. This will lead you to many tweets, blog posts, and articles in the mainstream press – all commenting on aspects of the dispute.

My own disclosure: generally I am sympathetic to Wilson. I don’t think this was an appropriate occasion to invoke defamation law, I am concerned about the way defamation law can chill public debate on matters of policy, and I am especially worried about the opportunities for public figures, who usually have sources of funds for legal action available to them, bullying bloggers, who may be in no position to defend themselves in the civil courts – legal costs are enough to put most ordinary people’s life savings at risk and possibly ruin them financially. I’d like to see defamation law progressively tightened as far as possible to be restricted to rather egregious cases. If the matter ever goes as far as defamation proceedings being issued, I’ll be contributing some small sum towards Wilson’s costs and I’ll see if I can help in any other way. This is not because I know Wilson or have any particular bias towards her as an individual – before the dispute blew up a week or so back, I’d never even heard of her. It is squarely because of concerns about freedom of speech.

Other issues include the content of the word “feminist” and its cognates. In particular, can you be a feminist while opposing abortion rights? That raises a deeper issue of what feminism actually is, something that might be rather difficult to be sure about by now, with so many different feminisms having proliferated.

But for the purposes of this post, I want to focus briefly on another aspect – that of disclosure. Here, I’m not so sure that I agree with what Wilson has to say, or at least with all of it (though I defend to the death, or at least to a degree of personal inconvenience, her right to say it, etc.).

To what extent do participants in public debate about government policy come under a duty to disclose such things as their comprehensive worldviews? Prior to the #MTRsues dispute, I would probably have said, perhaps unthinkingly, “Not at all.” My reasoning is that all we can really demand of each other is that put aside religious (and perhaps some other) justifications of the policies we propose. We should offer secular reasons for them – e.g. we might argue that homosexual conduct ought to be banned because it causes some kind of secular harm (and there is then a question as to whether it must be a harm to non-consenting third parties); however, we should not cut any ice with public officials if we argue that homosexual conduct should be banned because it is disliked by God, or because it is an impediment to spiritual salvation, or because it “just is” morally wrong. The latter are, as it’s sometimes put, not publicly accessible reasons. I prefer to say that they are not worldly reasons, and that worldly reasons are the ones that should motivate officials in the secular government.

However, I would have said, you are entitled to be motivated privately by such reasons as “homosexual conduct is disliked by God” as long as you don’t propose this as a reason for the legislators. If you are prepared to enter into public debate on the basis that your publicly accessible reasons will be scrutinised on their merits, and that you will not fall back on your private reasons if the publicly accessible ones prove to be weak, then you don’t even need to reveal the private ones. Indeed, it may be better in some ways if you don’t.

I still think this is about right in an ideal world, but I now wonder how practical it is in the messy world that we actually live in. Perhaps we do get to insist that our publicly expressed and accessible reasons be assessed and debated on their merits if we have been rather purist about putting only those reasons. However, activists such as MTR tend not to be purist in that way.

I don’t know a great deal about MTR herself, but, as a generalisation, political activists use all sorts of methods to win people over to their various causes. This can include associating themselves with others who may be well regarded by the public, or key sections of the public; cultivating a public image, including an image of trustworthiness by the public (or key sections); attacking opponents for having biases, impure motives, etc. The list goes on. My question now is, “At least once you start campaigning in this more robustly political way, as opposed to a more abstract and intellectual way, how far are you entitled to keep quiet about things that would change the public perception of yoy – things such as any unstated motivations that you might have, your comprehensive worldview, etc.?”

It looks to me as if we should demand at least some level of disclosure from the more “robust” types of high-profile political activists (though not, perhaps, from academics, for example, if they take a more “purist” approach such as described above). I don’t have a strong or dogmatic opinion on this, but I do suspect that my view before the #MTRsues dispute made me think about it was a bit naive. What d’ya reckon?

Alain de Botton, co-founder of London’s School of Life and author of The Consolations of Philosophy, has been kind enough to be provide an interview for Talking Philosophy about his new book Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. Readers are invited to share their thoughts on Atheism 2.0. and what we might usefully take from religion.

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You were brought up as an atheist – could you describe your earlier views on religion and how you came to have a more positive view of religion and religious practices?

In my book, I argue that believing in God is, for me as for many others, simply not possible. At the same time, I want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that open up – we don’t need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the center stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to loose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger (note the tentative can) that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour is more easily overlooked – in other words, that evil becomes less incongruous.

Now, it is important to stress that it is quite possible to believe in nothing and remember all these vital lessons (just as one can be a deep believer and a monster). I simply want to draw attention to some of the gaps, some of what may be missing, when we dismiss God too brusquely.

In your book you write: ‘God may be dead, but the urgent issues which impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inacurracies in the tale of the seven loaves and fishes. ‘ What are those urgent issues?

I am not very interested in the doctrines of religions. What interests me is their organisational forms, and in particular, their capacity to make ideas powerful.

The secular world tends to trust that if we have good ideas, we will be reminded of them when it matters. Religions don’t agree. They are all about structure; they want to build calendars for us that will make sure that we regularly encounter reminders of significant concepts. That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten. Religions are also keen to see us as more than just rational minds, we are emotional and physical creatures, and therefore, we need to be seduced via our bodies and our senses too: this was always the great genius of Catholicism. If you want to change someone’s ideas, don’t only concentrate on their ideas, concentrate on their whole selves.

The starting point of religion is that we are children, and we need guidance. The secular world often gets offended by this. It assumes that all adults are mature – and therefore, it hates didacticism, it hates the idea of guidance and moral instruction. But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet modern education denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control though to my mind, we are far more desperate than the modern education system recognises.

In a recent review of your book Terry Eagleton wrote that:  “What the book does, in short, is hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.”

What do you make of this criticism?

My book occupies a curious middle-ground which is easy to shoot at from two sides. The very religious like Eagleton may take offence at the brusque, selective and unsystematic consideration of their creeds. Religions are not buffets, they will protest, from which choice elements can be selected at whim. But I disagree. Why should it not be possible to appreciate the depiction of modesty in Giotto’s frescoes and yet bypass the doctrine of the annunciation, or admire the Buddhist emphasis on compassion and yet shun its theories of the after-life? For someone devoid of religious belief, it is no more of a crime to dip into a number of faiths than it is for a lover of literature to single out a handful of favourite writers from across the canon.

Atheists of the militant kind could also feel outraged, in their case by a book that treats religion as though it deserved to be a continuing touchstone for our yearnings. They will point to the furious institutional intolerance of many religions, and to the equally rich, though less illogical and illiberal, stores of consolation and insight available through art and science. They may additionally ask why anyone who professes himself unwilling to accept so many facets of religion – who feels unable to speak up in the name of virgin births, say, or to nod at the claims reverently made in the Jataka tales about the Buddha’s identity as a reincarnated rabbit – should still wish to associate himself with a subject as compromised as faith.

To this the answer is that religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture – a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the achievements of even the greatest and most influential secular movements and individuals in history. For those interested in the spread and impact of ideas, it is hard not to be mesmerised by examples of the most successful educational and intellectual movements the planet has ever witnessed.

What is your view of the so-called New Atheist critique advanced by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others?

Attempting to prove the non-existence of god can be entertaining. Tough-minded critics of religion have found much pleasure in laying bare the idiocy of believers in remorseless detail, finishing only when they felt they had shown up their enemies as thorough-going simpletons or maniacs.

Though this exercise has its satisfactions, the real issue is not whether god exists or not, but where one takes the argument to once one decides that he evidently doesn’t. The premise of my book is that it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling – and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm.

One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Fivefold Path and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring. In a world beset by fundamentalists of believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognise that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses. And secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

 

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The United States and many other nations currently operate military remote operated vehicles (ROVs) that are more commonly known as drones. While the ROVs began as surveillance devices, the United States found that they make excellent weapon platforms. The use of such armed ROVs has raised various moral issues, mainly in regards to the way they are employed (such as the American campaign of targeted killing). In general, ROVs themselves do not seem to pose a special moral challenge-after all, they seem to be on par with missiles and bombers (although the crew of a manned bomber is at risk in ways that ROV operators are not).

The great success of ROVs has created a large ROV industry and has also spurred on the development of true robots for military and intelligence use. While existing ROVs often have some autonomous capabilities, they are primarily directed by an operator. An autonomous robot would be capable of carrying out entire missions without human intervention and it is most likely simply a matter of time before “warbots” (armed autonomous robots) are deployed. As might be imagined, setting robotic killing machines loose raises some moral concerns.

On the positive side, warbots are not people and hence the use of warbots would lower the death and injury rate for humans-at least for the side that is deploying the warbots. Obviously, if warbots are deployed to kill humans, then there will still be human casualties. They will, however, be less than in human-human battles, at least in most cases. Given this fact, it would seem that warbots would be morally acceptable on utilitarian grounds: their use would reduce (in general) human death and suffering.

It could even be argued that future wars might be purely robot versus robot battles and thus eliminating human casualties altogether (assuming humans are still around: see for, example, the classic game Rivets). This would, presumably, be a good thing. Assuming, of course, that the robots would not be turned against humans.

While the idea of wars being settled by robots has some appeal, there is the concern that robots would actually make wars more likely to occur and easier to sustain. The current armed ROVs enable the United States to engage in military operations and targeted killings with no risk to Americans and this lack of casualties makes the campaign relatively easy to maintain relative to operations that involve American casualties. As such, one obvious concern about warbots is that they would make it that much easier for violence to be used and to continue to be used.

Imagine if a country could just send in robots to do the fighting. There would be no videos of dead soldiers being dragged through the streets (as occurred in Somalia) and no maimed veterans returning home. All the causalities would be on the side of the enemy, thus making such a conflict very easy on the side armed with warbots and this would tend to significantly reduce any concern about the conflict among the general population. Thus, while warbots would tend to reduce human causalities on the side that has robots, they might actually increase the amount of conflicts and this might prove to be a bad thing.

A second point in favor of warbots is that they, unlike human soldiers, have no feelings of anger or lust. As such, they would not engage in war crimes or other reprehensible behavior (such as rape or urinating on enemy corpses) on their own accord. They would simply conduct their assigned missions without feeling or deviation.

Of course, while warbots  lack the tendency of humans to act badly from emotional causes, they  also lack the quality of mercy. As such, robots sent to commit war crimes or atrocities (the creation of atrocitybots, such as torturebots and rapebots, is surely just a matter of time)will simply conduct such operations without question, protest or remorse.

That said, human leaders who wish to have wicked things done generally can find human forces who are quite willing to obey even the most terrible orders for such things as genocide and rape. As such, the impact of warbots in this area is a matter that is uncertain. Presumably the use of warbots by ethical commanders will result in a reduction in such incidents (after all, the warbots will not commit misdeeds unless ordered to do so). However, the use of warbots by the wicked would certainly increase such incidents dramatically (after all, the warbots will not disobey).

There has been some discussion about programming warbots with ethics (an idea that goes back to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics). Laying aside the obvious difficulty of creating a warbot that engages in moral reasoning (and the concern that a warbot that could do this would thus be a person), this programming is something that would be as easy to remove or change as it was to install. To use the obvious analogy, such restraints would be like the safety on a gun: it does provide a measure of safety, but can easily be switched off.

This is not to say that such safeguards would be useless-they could, for example, provide some protection from the misuse of warbots by people who lacked the technical expertise to change the programming. After all, the warbot is not the moral risk, rather those who give it orders are. This, of course, leads to the question of moral accountability.

WWII rather clearly established that human soldiers cannot simply appeal to “I was just following orders” to avoid responsibility for their actions.  Warbots, however, can use this defense (at least until they become people). After all, they simply do what they are programmed to do-be that engaging enemy troops or exterminating children with a flamethrower. As such, the accountability for what a warbot does lies elsewhere. The warbot is, after all, nothing more than an autonomous weapon.

In most cases the moral accountability will lie with the person who controls the robot and gives it is mission orders. So, if an officer sends it to kill children, then /she is just as accountable for those murders as s/he would be for using a gun or bomb to kill them in person.

Of course, things become more complicated when, for example,  a warbot is sent on a legitimate mission with legitimate orders but circumstances lead to a war crime being committed. For example, imagine a warbot is sent to engage enemy forces on the outskirts of a town. However, a manufacturing defect in its sensors leads it to blunder into a playground where its buggy target recognition software causes it to engage six children with its .50 caliber machine guns. It seems likely that such accidents will happen with the early warbots, but it seems unlikely that this will seriously impede their deployment-they are almost certainly the wave of the future in warfare. Unless, of course, something so horrible happens that puts the entire world off robots. However, we have a rather high tolerance level for horror-so expect to see warbots coming soon to a battlefield near you.

Sorting out the responsibility in such cases will be, as might be imagined, a complicated matter. However, there is considerable precedent in regards to accidental deaths caused by defective machinery and no doubt the same reasoning can be applied. Of course, there does seem to be some difference between being injured as the result of a defective brake system and being machine gunned by a defective warbot.

Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (by Russell Blackford, 2012)

If we use Amazon’s date for it, at least the date that is there this morning, today is the publication date for Freedom of Religion and the Secular State. In practice, the book will be available at slightly different times in different countries. I see that Amazon UK actually has a date of January 6 on its site.

I’m not sure when it will be in your local bookshop, but you should at least be able to get it now/soon from Amazon or Amazon UK … or direct from John Wiley and Sons if you have an account there.

Briefly, what the book is – Freedom of Religion and the Secular State deals with many of the hot-button issues that arise when religion and politics meet. It examines the nature of religion and secularism, and the classical idea of liberalism. It does so in historical and philosophical context, as I actually defend an updated version of Locke’s arguments in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), while applying these in ways that Locke would not necessarily find palatable.

What the book is not – it is not an anti-religious book, even though I am openly an atheist and have argued forthrightly in favour of atheism elsewhere. The main arguments of the book should appeal to many religious people as well as to secular humanists and other non-believers. Indeed, Locke was himself a religious believer. The arguments and views should be acceptable to moderate and liberal Protestants and many of the arguments should even be acceptable to relatively conservative Protestants. They will not be acceptable to someone who strictly follows the Vatican line on freedom of religion, but many Catholics will be able to accept them anyway (since many Catholics don’t strictly follow the Vatican line on anything!). Likewise, many moderate religious people from other traditions will be able to accept their premises and adopt their conclusions. Conversely, some hard-line anti-theists will probably think that I am “soft” on certain issues.

It all comes down to how you regard the role of the state, taking into account its history and various philosophical arguments about state power. In particular, what role should the state have in relation to teachings about an otherwordly realm, spiritual transformations, and the like?

The other thing that the book is not is a proof all the way down that the state should be essentially secular – i.e., guided by this-worldly considerations. I don’t claim that the arguments will be intellectually compelling to all comers, irrespective of their initial premises (which may be theological ones). Some people would not be able to accept the arguments in the book without first abandoning their current theological positions (not necessarily becoming non-believers, but at least adopting theological views more congenial to a functional separation of spiritual teachings and state power). In my opinion, that is inevitable. I don’t think that we are ever likely to find arguments that work all the way down in this sense, at least not arguments relating to issues of this sort.

We can, however, find arguments that ought to be persuasive to many people with a variety of worldviews. Or so it seems to me, and I hope to you.

Image via Wikipedia

Assassination was, obviously enough, not invented by Americans. While we were rather late to the game in this regard (being a young country, we deserve to be cut some slack) we have added our own American touch to the practice. While old school assassinations required that the assassin go in person to do the killing, American assassins can terminate targets across the planet and do so while sitting in a comfy chair. They can do this because we have a variety of Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs ) or, as they are popularly known, drones. Our standard flying angel of death is the Predator, which was upgraded from a mere surveillance vehicle to a Hellfire missile carrying killing machine.

As might be imagined, the idea that American intelligence services are shooting Hellfire missiles at people (including American citizens) raises various moral and legal questions. Naturally, I will focus on the moral aspect of the matter.

One stock defense of these targeted killings (or, if you prefer, assassinations) is that they are legitimate military operations in a time of war. While this might seem like a rather convenient sort of justification, it is worth considering. After all, if killing in war is morally tolerable, and these attacks are legitimate acts of war, then they could be morally tolerable.

While this oversimplifies things, what morally justifies killing in war tends to be the fact that the actions are conducted within the rules of war and are conducted by legitimate combatants. To use the obvious analogy, if I am boxing someone in a legitimate boxing match, then our beating each other in the face and torso is morally acceptable because we are legitimate combatants operating within the constraints of a rule governed activity. In contrast, if I just start attacking people on the street, then that is quite another matter. It would also be quite another matter if I used a knife in the boxing match or started attacking spectators.

One point of moral concern about the drone attacks conducted by the CIA and other such agencies is that they are not military entities. That is, they would not seem to be legitimate military combatants. This is supported by the intuitive view that when intelligence agents kill people, they are seen as engaged in assassination rather than in combat operations.

An obvious reply is that intelligence agencies could simply be regarded as military entities, although they do not undergo military training, they do not  fall under the military chain of command, and they are not subject to the same sort of moral and legal restrictions as the professional military. However, even if they are considered military entities, there is still the question of whether or not such targeted killings are morally acceptable.

One stock argument for these targeted killings is that they are killing terrorists with lower civilians and military casualties than a more conventional approach would create. After all, shooting a Hellfire missile into a house is far less risky (for Americans) than sending in an American special operations team and less damaging than simply bombing the area.  As such, this tactic can be justified on utilitarianian grounds: drone killings kill more “bad guys” at the cost of less “good guys” and “innocent folks.”  This is a rather appealing line of reasoning, but there are still some concerns.

One concern is that for every intended target killed, drone strikes kill an average of ten civilians. If it is assumed that killing civilians is wrong (which seems reasonable), there is the question of whether or not the killing of the intended targets is worth the deaths of the civilians. To be cynical about it, we do tolerate a certain number of deaths in most aspects of life and regard this as acceptable. For example, tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents each year, yet we consider driving to be morally acceptable. As another, perhaps more relevant example, we accept civilians casualties as part of war. As such, perhaps this ratio of targets to unintended kills is acceptable under the ethics that governs warfare.

Another concern is that the drone strikes are not aimed at conventional military goals, such as taking a strategic objective or destroying the enemy’s military assets. The objective is to kill (assassinate) a specific person or persons. In some cases these targets have been American citizens, which raises another set of legal and moral concerns. Intuitively, there seems to be an important distinction between, for example, trying to capture a city and trying to kill a specific person.

One obvious counter to this is to cite the example of Operation Vengeance. In WWII, American P-38 fighters  were sent to intercept and kill Japanese Admiral Yamamoto. The Americans succeeded in downing Yamamoto’s “Betty” bomber and his body was subsequently found by the Japanese. This, as might be imagined, had a significant impact on the war in terms of morale and as in terms of the elimination of one of the top Japanese leaders.

However, there are some obvious distinctions between the killing of Yamamoto and drone attacks. In Operation Vengeance, the pilots were Army pilots and they engaged armed enemy aircraft in battle (the Japanese escort fighters and armed bombers were shooting back). That is, the operation was clearly a military operation.

It might be replied that these difference are not relevant and that what matters is that a specific individual was targeted for killing. If it was morally acceptable to kill Yamamoto  by shooting his plane down, then it would seem equally acceptable to blow up a terrorist with a Hellfire missile.

On one hand, this seems like a reasonable reply. After all, the means do not seem as critical as the results when assessing the ethics of the matter. On the other hand, the process does seem to matter. After all, there does seem to be a moral distinction between a combat mission against armed opponents and a drone shooting a Hellfire missile through an alleged terrorist’s window. To use an obvious analogy, the police can morally down a suspect who is shooting at them, but it would not be acceptable for them to put a bomb in a suspect’s car simply because they found it hard to arrest him.

But, some might say, the fact that the target is a terrorist changes things. While the Japanese did attack Pearl Harbor in a sneak attack, that was a military operation and the war was fought as a war. The modern terrorists do not wear uniforms, they do not fly fighter planes with clear markings, they hide among civilians, and they try to avoid directly engaging with enemy forces in battle. As such, they cannot be engaged using the conventional means or rules of war and perhaps this morally justifies the use of targeted drone attacks. It can also be argued that the targeted drone attacks are morally superior to the terrorists’ tactics. After all, the drones are sent to kill  suspected terrorists and the idea is to avoid killing civilians. In contrast, terrorists tend to make no such distinction and their attacks are generally aimed at killing anyone in the area regardless of who they are. Of course, merely being better than a terrorist might not be quite good enough to make the practice morally acceptable.

One final point of concern is one that has been raised by others as well, namely that by engaging in targeted killings we are changing the game by setting a legal and moral precedent. By engaging in the targeted killings of our foes, we present a most eloquent argument for our acceptance of the practice. As such, when Americans become the targets of foreign drones, we will see our robotic chickens come home to roost (and to lay explosive eggs).

 

Image via Wikipedia

 

In the face of the economic mess, American states and the federal government have been cutting education spending. In some cases, this is no doubt a matter of legitimate necessity. In other cases the economic woes have been used as a cover to “justify” certain policy changes. Regardless of the cause, American public schools are experiencing serious budget woes. Interestingly, college enrollment is up and this makes things even worse since schools must do ever more with ever less money for the actual process of education. As might be suspected, the administrative side of most schools is generally doing great in terms of numbers employed and salaries.

In contrast to the woeful state of public funded schools, the new for-profit schools have been doing quite well. For example, 20 for-profit schools saw their income from military benefits alone (acquired by taking military personnel as students) increase 683% over four years (from $66 million to $521 million). These for-profit schools also get a significant percentage of their income from public money, namely federal student aid.

Given that for-profit schools are making profits off public funding, one might wonder why public schools are suffering budget cuts and are thus less able to serve the public good by providing high quality education to students. After all, it does not seem to make any sense to funnel public money away from public institutions so that for-profit schools can make a profit at the expense of taxpayers.

Of course, one can try to counter this sort of concern by the stock mantra of the private sector proponents: the private sector is better than the public sector. That is, the for-profit schools are doing a better job and hence it makes more sense to turn public dollars into private profits rather than turning public dollars into public education.

If the for-profit schools were doing a better job, this would make at least some sense. After all, if the goal is to get the most education bang for the public buck and private schools delivered a bigger bang, then perhaps they should get the bucks. However, this is not the case. The average graduation rate for the for-profits is around 28% and this is about half that of the national average. The big state schools often have excellent graduation rates.

Also of concern are the fact that those who graduate from the for-profit schools seem to have a much harder time securing employment. They also graduate with far more debt than students at traditional schools (half of all student loan defaults are from students who attended for-profit schools). As such, the for-profit schools cannot claim that they are providing a better return on public dollars than public schools. In fact, they are doing far worse.

The United States congress recently focused its attention on the severe problems with the for-profit schools. However, intense lobbying on the part of the for-profits succeeded in watering down legislation intended to make such schools more accountable for their effectiveness in order to continue to siphon public money into their coffers. This has apparently been a bi-partisan effort with Republicans and Democrats answering the call of the lobbyists. Interestingly, the usually pro-education Democrats proved to be excellent allies of the for-profit schools, or at least allies of their lobbying money.

One particular egregious practice of the for-profits has been targeting  military veterans. Holly Petraeus, wife of General David Petraeus, has written that veterans are “under siege” by the for-profit colleges. These colleges have even been accused of targeting veterans who have brain injuries, which is particularly reprehensible.

Veterans are a very desirable commodity for the for-profits. As noted above, there is a lot of money available from military benefits and these can spell major profits for schools. More importantly, there is a “90/10″ rule for these schools: at least 10% of the revenue for a for-profit must not come from federal financial aid funds. Coincidentally, military benefits do not count as federal financial aid funds, so this money can count as the 10%. This entails that for every military student enrolled by a for-profit, they can have 9 other students who are paying 100% using federal funds. In short, with the right number of military students, a for-profit can get 100% of its revenue from federal funds.

This, as might be imagined, bodes ill for higher education in America. First, federal funds will continue to be diverted from public education to the for-profits. This means that the public schools will continue to suffer. To give a concrete example, enrollment at my university has increased significantly while our budget has dropped significantly. Faculty salaries have stagnated, class sizes have increased dramatically, financial aid has been significantly reduced, and so on. In short, public schools such as my own will see underpaid faculty teaching oversize classes packed with students who often must struggle to pay for their education. Meanwhile, the politically connected for-profits will be making profits on public dollars. Second, while a for-profit education need not be inferior to a traditional public or private college education, it (as a matter of actual fact) has been markedly inferior in terms of graduation rates, job placement and the debt students graduate with. As such, it seems reasonable to conclude that federal funding is being misdirected in ways that are not conducive to providing students with the best education, the best chance of graduating, the best chance of getting a job, and the lowest debt upon graduation.

Unfortunately, the for-profit schools for profit model means that they have plenty of money for lobbying and hence they seem to have been able to get their way in Washington. As such, it seems likely that education will continue to decline in the United States. But, at least some folks (including lobbyists and politicians) will be making some sweet profits. That is what really matters, right?

 

I went to the launch last night of a report by fellow tpm blogger, philosopher and green campaigner Rupert Read, under the auspices of the new think tank Green House.  The report is called ‘Guardians of the Future:  a constitutional case for representing and protecting future people’.  You can read it here.  The general idea is that democracy means government by the people, and since society exists over time, the people in question aren’t just those alive now.  So future people ought somehow to have a say in the political decisions we make, particularly because our choices sometimes affect them in negative ways.  So Rupert proposes a jury of guardians with the power to veto legislation that seems likely to harm future people.  Such a body might do something about the short termism we seem mired in — moreover, it’s a leap towards actual intergenerational justice.

Pie in the sky stuff?  Maybe not.  The launch happened right in the middle of the UK government, in the Houses of Parliment, and was attended by three MPs who all spoke in response to the report.  What’s more, a number of governments already have or are exploring similar things — I discovered last night that Hungary has a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations.  The report is getting attention in the broadsheets, too.

Perhaps the most interesting point was made last night by Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP.  She said maybe a super jury with veto power might not be the right mechanism, but if not that, then what?  When she put it in this way, I had the feeling that Rupert and Green House have, in a way, already done something substantial.  A very large question is now on a number of new tables:  what are we going to do about the harm we cause to future people?  Good quesiton.  What’s your answer?

There has of late been some discussion of free will and determinism, and particularly the relative merits of compatibilism versus incompatibilism, at various blogs. (See, for example, here, here and here.)

I must confess that I’ve not followed these discussions closely, despite having a longstanding interest in this issue (see here and here, for instance), so I don’t really have anything substantive to say about the debate, except, I guess, that I’m inclined towards the sort of incompatibilism espoused by Jerry Coyne (my hands were strangely reluctant to type that).

However, this does seem like an opportune moment to ask the readers of Talking Philosophy for their advice and opinions about an interactive activity that I put together at Philosophy Experiments, which explored some of these issues through a look at a Frankfurt Case and some other stuff. It’s here:

Get That Chip Out of My Brain!

Thing is, I programmed the activity about six months ago now, but I was never happy with it, and haven’t added it to the front page of the site (it’s been played quite a lot because of traffic that comes in via Google, etc).

Basically, my view is that most people will find the stuff about “Transfer NR” (John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza) confusing and philosophically suspect – it seems tricksy – and I tend to think that I ought to rewrite the whole activity, focussing on the Harry Frankfurt stuff, which I think works much better.

If anybody felt inclined to play through the activity (it’ll only take a few minutes), and let me know if they agree, disagree, or have any other thoughts, that would be really helpful. If it turns out that even a few people think it doesn’t work, then I’ll almost certainly rewrite the thing (because I think there is a good interactive exercise in there somewhere, but I’m not sure this is it).

Image via Wikipedia

Here in the States we are going through the seemingly endless warm up for our 2012 presidential election. President Obama is the candidate of the Democrats and the Republicans are trying to sort out who will be their person.  The Republican candidates for being the presidential candidate are doing their best to win the hearts and minds of the folks who will anoint one of them.

In order to do this, a candidate must win over the folks who are focused on economic matters (mainly pushing for low taxes and less regulation) and those who are focused on what they regard as moral issues (pushing against abortion, same sex marriage and so on). The need to appeal to these views has caused most of the candidates to adopt the pro-life (anti-abortion) stance as well as to express a commitment to eliminating regulation. Some of the candidates have gone so far as to claim they will eliminate the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) on the grounds that regulations hurt the job creators.

On the face of it, these seems to be no tension between being pro-life and against government regulation of the sort imposed via the EPA.  A person could argue that since abortion is wrong, it is acceptable for the government to deny women the freedom to have abortions. The same person could, quite consistently it seems, then argue that the state should take a pro-choice stance towards business in terms of regulation, especially environmental regulation. However, if one digs a bit deeper, it would seem that there is a potential tension here.

In the States, the stock pro-life argument is that the act of abortion is an act of murder: innocent people are being killed. There are, of course, variations on this line of reasoning. However, the usual moral arguments are based on the notion that harm is being done to an innocent being.  When people counter with an appeal to the rights or needs of the mother, the stock reply is that these are overridden in this situation. That is, avoiding harm to the fetus (or pre-fetus) is generally more important than avoiding harm to the mother. In some cases people take this to be an absolute in that they regard abortion as never allowable. Some do allow exceptions in the case of medical necessity, rape or incest.  There are, of course, also religious arguments-but those are best discussed in another context.

If this line of reasoning is taken seriously, and I think that it should, then a person who is pro-life on these grounds would seem to be committed to extending this moral concern for life beyond the womb. Unless, of course, there is a moral change that occurs after birth that create a relevant difference that removes the need for moral concern. This, however, would seem unlikely (at least in this direction, namely from being a entity worthy of moral concern to being an entity who does not matter).

It is at this point that the matter of environmental concerns can be brought into play. Shortly before writing this I was reading an article about the environmental dangers children are exposed to, primarily in schools. These hazards include the usual suspects: lead, mercury, pesticides, arsenic, air pollution, mold, asbestos, radon, BPA, polychlorinated biphenyls, and other such things.

Currently, children are regularly exposed to a witches brew of human made chemicals and substances that have been well established as being harmful to human beings and especially harmful to children. They are also exposed to naturally occurring substances by the actions of human beings. For example, burning coal and oil release naturally occurring mercury into the air. As another example, people use naturally occurring lead and asbestos in construction. As noted above, it is well established that these substances are harmful to humans and especially harmful to children.

If someone hold the pro-life position and believes that abortion should be regulated by the state because of the harm being done, then it would thus seem to follow that they would also need to be committed to the regulation of harmful chemicals and substances, even those produced and created by businesses. After all, if the principle that warrants regulating abortion is based on the harm being done to the fetus/pre-fetus, then the same line of reasoning would also extend to the harm being done to children and adults.

If someone were to counter by saying that they are only morally concerned with the fetus/pre-fetus, then the obvious reply is that these entities are even more impacted by exposure to such chemicals and substances. As such, they would also seem to committed to accepting regulation of the environment on the same grounds that they argue for regulation of the womb.

It might be countered that these substances generally do not kill the fetus/pre-fetus or children  but rather cause defects. As such, a person could be against killing (and hence anti-abortion) but also be against regulation on the grounds that they find birth defects, retarded development and so on to be acceptable. That is, killing is not acceptable but maiming and crippling are tolerable.

This would, interestingly enough, be a potentially viable position. However, it does seem somewhat problematic for a person to be morally outraged at abortion while being willing to tolerate maiming and crippling.

It might also be argued that businesses should be freed from regulation on the utilitarian grounds that the jobs and profits created will outweigh the environmental harms being done. That is, in return for X jobs and Y profits, we can morally tolerate Z levels of contamination, pollution, birth defects, illness and so on. This is, of course, a viable option.

However, if this approach is acceptable for regulating the environment, then it would seem to also be acceptable for regulating the womb. That is, if a utilitarian approach is taken to the environment, then the same would seem to also be suitable for abortion. It would seem that if we can morally tolerate the harms resulting from a lack of regulation of the environment, then we could also tolerate the harms resulting from abortion.

Thus it would seem that a person who is pro-life and favors regulating the womb the grounds that abortion harms the innocent, then that person should also be for regulating the environment on the grounds that pollution and contamination also harm the innocent.

From issue 55 of The Philosopher’s Magazine, this is Cynthia Freeland’s essay on Steve Pyke’s collection of photographs, Philosophers.  The table of contents for issue 55 is here. Issue 56 is now available at good bookstores everywhere–table of contents here. 

What does a philosopher look like? The label calls to mind a classical bust of a man with noble brow, beard, and blank inward-seeing eyes. His high forehead conveys deep wisdom, like those super-smart aliens on the original Star Trek with their big-brained bald heads. In art history, philosopher portraits range from the impish-looking Descartes (possibly) painted by Frans Hals to Holbein’s Erasmus, sensitive hands carefully crafting a letter. Or there is the moustachioed Nietzsche painted posthumously by Edward Munch, gazing across a blustery Expressionist landscape. In the twentieth century we acquired iconic images of philosophers through photographs – Bertrand Russell (angular head, white hair, pipe), Jean-Paul Sartre (wall-eyed, thick lips gripping a cigarette), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (handsome and aristocratic). Women philosophers too entered our consciousness, from Simone de Beauvoir with her elegant chignon to the Afro-crowned activist Angela Davis.

What do philosophers actually look like? Rather odd, I’m afraid, or if truth be told, unappetizing – at least if we are to go on this collection of portraits by Steve Pyke. The book includes an interview with Pyke by Jason Stanley, and there the artist explains that, given his own origins among the working classes, he initially approached intellectual heavyweights like A J Ayer feeling intimidated. But now he sees them as more human. The pictures suggest that Pyke also finds philosophers strange. Here we find philosophers, warts and all: wild eyebrows, unkempt beards, lank hair, lantern jaws, crossed eyes, weak chins, bad teeth, weird noses. Smiling philosophers are rare. Among the few who do smile, one appears gleeful (Robin Jeshion) and another maniacal (Hartry Field). Pyke seems to have wandered into the territory of Théodore Géricault who depicted people suffering from “monomanias” in the asylum at Ivry in the 1820s.

I have argued in my book Portraits and Persons (Oxford, 2011) that we are drawn to portraits in part because in human evolution it was important to recognise individual faces and track the facial expression of others’ emotions. We encounter other human beings through their bodies and prepare responses to actions forecast by their faces. But the reasons to look at images of philosophers are more specific. The label is often employed as an honorific, designating someone with wisdom and depth. Not everyone who is a philosophy professor can claim to be a “philosopher” in this sense. To pose as a philosopher, an individual must rise to the occasion.

What should a philosopher look like? In a fascinating but frustrating introduction to the volume (“The Face of Philosophy: Steve Pyke’s Gallery of Minds”), Arthur Danto (who is himself included) says that all of the people shown here look “fiercely smart”. I beg to differ. A few (you will understand my not naming names) look a bit vacant. Judith Thomson looks mischievous, Peter Singer tired, Timothy Williamson meek, and Sydney Morgenbesser sad. Some of them (Ernie LePore, Harry Frankfurt) just look like nice guys to have a beer with at the local pub. Why the “fiercely smart” label, anyway? Philosophers should be smart, sure; but why “fiercely” so? There are other qualities we might wish for from our philosophers, such as that they be judicious, insightful, sceptical, kind, witty, or compassionate. (The face of the Dalai Lama comes to mind.)

The representation of individuals as members of a type is of course not new with Pyke. There are many previous examples both in painting (Rembrandt’s “Night Watchmen”, Gerhard Richter’s “48 Portraits”) and photography (Edward Curtis’s Native Americans, August Sander’s Germans, Diane Arbus’s outcasts and socialites, Richard Avedon’s denizens of the still-wild West). The artist in effect compiles a sociological study with possibly diverse aims, from Curtis’s glorification of “noble savages” to Arbus’s penchant for the freakish.

Pyke too is undoubtedly moulding the subjects he photographs in some way. The problem is that there is not really anything to be seen about philosophers per se. The group in question displays no characteristic uniform or accessory attesting to its activities. One might as well guess instead “chemists” or “magicians”. Their outward appearance can seem unkempt. Pyke is interested in the fact that these philosophers form a community, but this suggests that a group shot might have been more intriguing (if harder to arrange). I love the thought of a photograph constructed à la The Night Watchmen, in which philosophers from a given field – say, ethics – are shown as an investigative team bursting out from interior spaces of moral darkness, led into the light of certainty by some stalwart individual.

Related to the problem of trying to show a community by depicting its members in isolation is another problem: the philosophers seen here are mostly heads (remember those aliens from Star Trek). Rarely do they have bodies. Nor do they employ any tools of their trade – apart from Michael Friedman, who is shown in front of a blackboard covered in glyphs (and incidentally, wearing a zippy tie). We don’t see Brian Leiter, prominent blogger, before a keyboard, nor Aristotle scholar Alan Code puzzling over the Greek text of Metaphysics Zeta. We don’t see any other people here working in the settings where philosophers do work: at a desk, in a classroom, at a convention, or even, in these days of cognitive science, examining an fMRI. There are no Peripatetics here, no Cynics walking around with lanterns seeking an honest man.

Traditionally, philosopher portraits did depict tools of the trade: Helleman showed Descartes with his foot on the works of Aristotle, and Ramsay placed Tacitus’s history under Hume’s plump arm. Often philosopher portraits showed more of the thinkers’ bodies in action, conversing, as in the famous juxtaposition of Plato and Aristotle, hands gesturing impatiently upwards or down, in Raphael’s The Academy of Athens. Or think of David’s Socrates, with sturdy leg and strong chest, firmly pointing to the soul’s higher destiny even as he reaches for the fatal cup of hemlock while those around him wail and weep. (Now there’s a picture of a community!) Removing the body from a portrait erases a lot of information about size, posture, and setting, all of which are used by artists to convey character, including status and duties. Ramsay famously depicted Hume in an elegant (the King thought too elegant) scarlet uniform while Rousseau, in the companion portrait, wore rustic furs and a bed-coat.

Clothing is often a clue enabling us to read people’s identity in pictures. Scholars hypothesise that when Rembrandt’s Aristotle contemplated the bust of Homer, he did so wearing costly robes and a jewelled belt (the putative gift from his former student Alexander) to illustrate the choice between the unadorned life and a more magnificent one. In photographs too, clothing is crucial, as with the impressive head-dresses in Curtis’s Native American portraits. Dress is also revelatory in Sander’s oeuvre, from the ill-fitting Sunday suits on his workers going to town to the slinky black silk of his androgynous secretary. Arbus’s famous little girl twins are made more creepy by their matched dresses with Peter Pan collars and white hair bands. And Avedon’s waitresses, drifters, and carneys wear shabby and even filthy clothes that speak of their bitter lives. But Pyke’s philosophers have no clothes. It’s not that they are naked, of course, but their clothes are irrelevant, since after all they are simply heads, homes for minds. Scorn for fashion has long been a hallmark of the profession, ever since its beginning in barefoot Socrates. The rare exception here is Frances Kamm, whose beautifully patterned shawl must have compelled the camera’s respect.

Let us infer some things, if we can, from the heads of philosophers shown here. Pyke shoots with a twin-lens Rolliflex using Tri-X film and available light. In some cases the result he gets is quite beautiful, as in his portrait of Robert Stalnaker, shown in three-quarter view with lovely side lighting. His portrait of Malcolm Budd is powerful: Budd confronts us directly, and the bristles of his incipient beard add interesting visual texture. In a surprising number of cases, though, the results are blurry enough to have been rejected by a regular studio artist (Ludlow, Strawson,Papineau, Longuenesse, and Langton). I cannot tell that this blurriness has any specific emotional or aesthetic effect. Pyke’s New York exhibit of the series included original proof sheets, and it would have been very interesting to peruse these to examine his choices, including the reasons for occasional profile views.

Pyke’s lens choices (I suspect he uses Rolleinar close-up attachments) can distort facial features in unflattering ways, making nice-looking people appear to be missing chins or to have huge noses. In more than a few cases the philosophers look either cross-eyed or wall-eyed (an impolite name for the condition Sartre suffered from, strabismus). There are several cases in which the prints show the face of a sitter as bright white against a dark background, making it seem to float above the picture plane (Mothersill, Sperber, and Williams). Such faces are frozen like painted masks in Noh drama, inducing a kind of alienation effect. These instances contrast with some more full-bodied portraits, as in the wonderfully sculptural image of a reflective Arthur Danto. A few of the portraits in Pyke’s series seem to have wandered in from another photographer’s studio, such as the chiaroscuro silhouettes of Ruth Millikan and Ruth Barcan Marcus, which would fit well in the nineteenth-century Romantic pictorial oeuvre of Julia Margaret Cameron. Perhaps his respect for wise, older women prompted Pyke to associate them with icons of the Victorian period.

It has been argued that photography affords a superior form of realism: Kendall Walton alleges that we literally see Abraham Lincoln, for example, in photographs of him. In the interview, Pyke tries to deflect claims about truth, saying, “The contents of a photograph are not facts, nor reality, nor truth. They are a means we have created to extend our way of seeing on a search for truth”. However the book’s presentation screams “Truth”, with its black and white format and spare layout – just one photograph printed full-frame on each two-page spread. And furthermore the specimens are exhibited in alphabetical order, “Philosophers from A-Z, Albert to Žižek”.

As sociology, Philosophers reveals various things about the profession. The ratio of women to men is about twenty per cent, fairly representative of women’s lamentably low inclusion in the field. More disgraceful is the paucity of non-Caucasians (Anthony Appiah and Jaegwon Kim are the only two). Among the women more are smiling here than men. Is this because women simply did smile more at Pyke, since women in general seek to please in social interactions? The non-smiling women are austere. This renders any small adornments, like a trace of lipstick or the flash of an earring, startling in contrast with their overall sober mien. The two images of philosopher relationships, at the back of the volume, are interesting. (There could have been more, but in the book two well-known philosophy couples, the Kitchers and the Churchlands, are shown individually, not pairwise.) In their joint photo, Sally Haslanger gazes off to the side while husband Stephen Yablo looks at the camera. Haslanger looks as if she would rather not be there. Their poses reverse the common trope of marriage portraits in 19th century photographs, showing a wife who looks toward her husband while he gazes straight ahead. (I have just such a wedding photograph of my great-grandparents.) In the photograph showing daughter-father couple Elizabeth and Gilbert Harman, she looks toward her father as he talks, but this could connote filial respect rather than gender hierarchy.

I have written so far as if the book includes only photographs, but this is not correct. Pyke asked each person to provide a digest definition of philosophy. It is intriguing to see how the diverse figures here met the capsule challenge, probably more so for those of us in the business than for others. But the blurbs bear little relationship to the image on the facing page. The only exception might be the image of Louise Antony. She speaks about her lifelong desire to “figure it all out”, a sentiment that fits perfectly the image showing her as rather toothily voracious.

The most interesting of the comments for my purposes was also the only one that connected philosophy to the portrait process itself, by Richard Moran. Moran says he doesn’t recall the moment of each picture or what he was expressing, and this means it is just up to the viewer to see. “This abandonment of control over meaning can seem to compromise one’s autonomy; it can also seem a condition of embodiment and expressivity at all.” Pyke echoes Moran’s sentiments when he describes the person in a photographic portrait as experiencing a sense of puzzlement about the picture, “How is that me?” This is indeed the ultimate challenge of the portrait encounter: the artist is in control of the depiction, but must also render the subjectivity – the personhood – of the sitter. Portraiture often places the artist and subject in a competitive relationship, a struggle for dominance about who controls the final image. Many famous portrait artists detested their work because of the requirement to please sitters. Those who work today without such restrictions, like Lucian Freud, can afford to treat subjects (even the Queen!) with hostility.

In an Youtube clip called “Mind the Gap”, Pyke says that using the Rolliflex meant he had a more passive relationship with his subjects, looking down at the camera to focus rather than through it and at them, getting “in their face”. He says he appreciates philosophers’ passion for creative activity because it is something he shares. He does not pretend that we can understand philosophy, as he puts in it in the book, “by looking at the faces of its practitioners”. Rather, he is showing people as part of a community or almost a family. He explains, “The Philosophy Tribe is made of thinkers, which is an honourable profession that deserves a wider audience. My series ‘outs’ these thinkers”. The problem I have with this may come back to the ambiguity of the label “philosopher”, between the honorific sense and its usage as the title for someone who works as a university teacher of philosophy. “Outing” philosophers in Pyke’s oeuvre appears to involve showing them as people who are fixated on sometimes odd problems and pursuits. They have a form of life that is alien to many and that does not require meeting conventional standards of attire or grooming. Publicity from his New York Gallery, Flowers, puts the point this way: “Through the stark detail of his portraits Pyke is able to erase the lofty reputation that is often placed on philosophers who ponder life’s seemingly unanswerable questions” (my emphasis). The aims of “outing” and “erasing lofty reputations” may account for the somewhat odd look of so many of the people in these portraits. But it also means, unfortunately, that if we seek the mystique of the philosopher as sage here, we will not find it.

Cynthia Freeland is professor of philosophy at the University of Houston.  She is the author of Portraits and Persons and But is it Art?, both published by Oxford University Press.

Steve Pyke’s Philosophers is published by Oxford University Press

A printable PDF of this article is here.

This doesn’t have a lot to do with philosophy, but it’s a curious thing, so what the hell, I thought.

I’ve been having a mid-life crisis for about the last fifteen years. Obviously, chasing girls, oops, sorry, women, is a large part of the story, but I’ve also become pretty interested in the link between ageing and physical decline.

Anyway, I’ve just noticed that a new piece of research has been published in the BMJ, which shows that cognitive decline is already evident by the time people hit middle age. Basically, they looked at tests of memory, reasoning, vocabulary, etc., and found that

all cognitive scores, except vocabulary, declined in all five age categories (age 45-49, 50-54, 55-59, 60-64, and 65-70 at baseline), with evidence of faster decline in older people.

So that’s pretty depressing, but perhaps not all that surprising. I remember Norman Levitt once telling me something to that effect about the career path of mathematicians:

You do slow down. Not everybody, but there is a tendency to be really bright when you’re twenty-two, and then it becomes more of a slog as you get older. People’s really brilliant stuff tends to happen when they’re younger. There are exceptions, but you can look at people’s career paths and you find that whilst they might be brilliant at twenty-four this eases off as they get older. It comes with the territory.

But here’s the thing, and perhaps somebody who knows this field, might be able to shed some light on this matter. If you’re doing that sort of longitudinal study, how do you control for motivation? If I had ever taken an IQ test in my 20s, or perhaps even my 30s, I’d have been pretty keen to do well. But now, well I wouldn’t give a bugger. Even if I told myself I had to perform to the best of my ability, I’m pretty sure it’d be futile, because I just don’t care enough. Possibly I’m unusual in this respect, but I doubt it, and certainly it’s an open possibility that motivation will decline with age (which might have a physiological component, of course, but which might not generalize – in other words, it’s possible that if one was doing some task that one considered important, then motivation levels would stay high, with concomitant improvements in concentration, and thereby performance).

So that’s my question. How do you control for motivation in these sorts of longitudinal studies?

This is a guest post by Professor Michael Ruse.

In 1986, in my Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy, I laid out a Darwinian approach to ethics. I really have not changed my mind very much at all since then, and have repeatedly given shorter expositions of my position. As it happens, the Christian evangelicals seem to understand my thinking very well. Unsurprisingly, they don’t like it! To my astonishment, many of my fellow evolutionists and philosophical naturalists seem not to understand my thinking very well. Surprisingly, what they do understand, they don’t like either! So in the hope of advancing discussion, like me try one more time. I don’t mind so much being thought wrong, but it does irritate me a bit to be thought wrong for the wrong reasons.

I am a philosophical naturalist. By this I mean (or at least my meaning includes) being eager to accept the findings of science and to use them in my philosophizing as far as possible. So, I start my thinking about ethics by looking to Darwinian biology on human social behavior and I come away with the belief that ethics – meaning by this substantive or normative ethics (“What should I do?”) – is a product of natural selection (on individuals) to further reproductive success. Substantive ethics is an adaptation like eyes and noses and penises and vaginas. I should say that (and I am still at the level of science) I don’t think there is any need of external ethical principles (Mind of God, non-natural properties, Platonic Forms) to get this result. So ethics in a sense is different from say our knowledge about railway engines. Without existing independent railway engines, I don’t see that you could have a science of railway-engine-ology. I don’t think you need these external referents to get ethics. Ethics in this sense is not so much about the real world as it is about social relationships between fellow species members.

Now one more important empirical claim. Obviously in some sense I think that ethics is a bunch of emotions, if you like, and in the sense of not having external warrant is subjective. However, I think that phenomenologically, as one might say, ethical beliefs differ from other emotions in having a character of value and obligation. They are not simple emotions like “I like spinach.” They come across with moral fervor. “Murder is wrong. One ought not murder.” In other words, and I guess I am getting into philosophy here, I am not a non-cognitivist. I think ethical claims are perfectly meaningful. “Murder is wrong” means murder is wrong. It doesn’t mean “I don’t like murder, boo hoo, don’t you do or like it either.” I believe also – and I am pretty certain I got this from John Mackie way back when – that ethical claims have the appearance and meaning of being objective claims, in the sense of not just subjective emotions but about external standards.

Scientifically, I would say that there is good reason for this. If we thought it was all a matter of liking and disliking, ethics would break down rapidly. Why would I bother to risk my life for you if I knew that there was really no reason for it? But if I genuinely think that there is an objective moral norm demanding such risk-taking, I might well go along with it. Philosophically, and obviously we are starting to get into metaethics here, I think that the belief about objectivity is erroneous – so if this makes me what is known as an “error theorist,” I am that. I am on record as saying that ethics (meaning substantive ethics) is an illusion put in place by our genes to make us social cooperators. But notice I am not saying that ethics as such is an illusion – I very much don’t think this – rather I am saying that the belief that ethics is objective is an illusion. We “objectify” – and I think that rather ugly word did come from Mackie.

I should say, and I am not trying to weasel out of my position or qualify it to nothingness, I really don’t much like talking about “error” at this point. I don’t think “murder is wrong” is erroneous, nor do I think it subjective in every sense of the word. It is subjective in the sense that it doesn’t have an external referent – I am a moral non-realist – but it is not subjective in the sense of “I don’t like spinach.” There is an equivocation on the word “subjective.” In the collection of emotions that make up human nature, “I like spinach” is subjective, but “Murder is wrong” is absolute or objective or binding or whatever. It is not a matter of choice. I would say that we believe this because of our biology; but the point is that, as we think and act, morality is laid on us not decided by us. Of course, we may or may not decide to act morally, but that is another matter. Morality as such is not up for grabs or discussion. Only French existentialists at their most nutty have ever thought otherwise, and they didn’t really.

I realize that my position is simply not going to be acceptable to a lot of people, Christians particularly. They think that without external standards it is all phony. I cannot change that, but I can at least say that I understand where they are coming from and why their feelings that I am wrong are so strong. Ethics does come across as objective, in the sense of moral realism. It wouldn’t work if it didn’t! But I just don’t think it is objective in this sense, and that is all there is to it. Except it is not really all there is to it, because once you are in the ethical game, as one might say – a game that is thrust upon us as humans thanks to natural selection — then within the game you can perfectly well distinguish the binding or the objective from the subjective. Think cricket or baseball. Having won the toss, are you going to bat first? Playing in the American League, are you going to use a pinch hitter? But six balls to an over; three strikes and you are out — these are objective, binding.

Four final points. Am I an ethical relativist? Not in the sense of undergraduates who have just taken a couple of courses in sociology. Let me let you into a dirty, little, Ruse secret. I loathe relativism so much that that is the reason I became a philosopher of science rather than a student of ethics. I grew up as a Quaker and if nothing else it left me with a very strong feeling about the absolute nature of ethics. In the mists of distant time past, as a baby philosopher, the options in ethics were an unacceptable moral realism – non-natural properties or God or both – or an even-more-unacceptable logical positivism or some successor. The latter seemed to me and still seems to plunge one right into relativism – meaning a kind of subjectivism of the second kind I mentioned above, and that was completely wrong. So I moved away from ethics because I thought ultimately it was either false or morally pernicious. Now, thanks to my years in the history and philosophy of science, I think I have enough to go back profitably to ethics. I don’t think that one has to be a relativist here on earth given my position. In fact, the social nature of ethics, combined with the fact that we are all one species that was probably very small in number in the past hundred thousand years or so ago, suggests to me that today all humans share the same basic moral sense, qualified of course by cultural differences such as different beliefs about the nature of the world.

Having said this, I would not deny some form of intergalactic relativism. In the Descent of Man, Darwin wrote:

It may be well first to premise that I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours. In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience.

I suspect that Darwin is right here – although I’d make things genetic rather than just rearing — but until we do encounter intelligent beings from outer space, I for one am not going to worry about this kind of relativism. Although it does seem to me relevant to my position inasmuch as it suggests that there can be no extra-human (that is extra-intelligent-being) moral norms because, if there are, how could such extra-terrestrials live and work and play in total ignorance of them? If moral norms are not recognizable and don’t have some kind of compulsion then I don’t know if they are still moral norms, at least not as generally understood. So that is certainly part of the reason why I am a moral non-realist.

Second, in telling you all about the way in which the genes deceive us for our own good, am I not giving the game away and won’t people now start to sin happily – a sort of Darwinian equivalent to what Nietzsche tells us all about? My own feeling is that, although philosophy may lead to skepticism, psychology makes it impossible to live that way. I am with David Hume on this. We are human beings and so, thank god, we are going to act like human beings.

I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life.

Third, talking of Hume, I don’t claim any particular originality in my position. I think I am arguing very much in the Humean tradition. The Humean tradition brought up to date by Charles Darwin. So notice that I am very keen on the is-ought distinction. I think there is a real difference between moral claims and scientific claims, and while the latter can be used to explain why we hold the former, they cannot be used to justify the former (which in the end have no justification in that sense). This sets me off from traditional Social Darwinism, from Herbert Spencer through Julian Huxley and on to Edward O. Wilson. They think that the progressive nature of the evolutionary process justifies promoting the welfare of humankind. I don’t think that evolution is progressive in that way and I am with Julian Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, in thinking that you cannot go from the course of evolution to justifying moral action. (THH, like me, was pretty keen on Hume.)

As I said at the beginning, I blame myself for obviously not making my thinking clear. But there are days when I wonder if the hostility I encounter from those that I would think sympathetic stems, not so much from my thinking on ethics as such, but from the fact that, although no believer myself and certainly doing anything but relying on a deity in my moral philosophizing, openly I argue that a Christian can be a Darwinian. In particular, I think the kind of position I have just sketched should be welcomed by a Christian influenced by naturalism, and I am thinking here of course of Thomas Aquinas and the influence of Aristotle. As a Darwinian, I think we should do what is natural. As an Aristotelian, the Thomist thinks we should do what is natural. I see a meeting point here. It doesn’t incline me to be a Christian but I see how a Christian could start with my position and then put it in a theological context. But that is another story. I mention it only because I suspect it is here that the real opposition to my thinking resides.

Although I would say that wouldn’t I, because the other alternative is that I am both wrong and a rotten thinker to boot.

Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at The Florida State University.

Jerry Coyne has an interesting article on free will in USA Today and a follow-up post at Why Evolution Is True. It all seems to be triggered by the publication of a new book about free will by Sam Harris.

Both Harris and Coyne point-blank deny that free will exists. The USA Today piece is well worth reading, but the passage quoted from the Sam Harris book, in the post at WEIT, doesn’t impress me. In particular, I disagree about the “changing the subject” claim as a way of dismissing compatibilism. Come on, Dr Harris, that is a rhetorical tactic to put down thoughtful and intellectually honest opponents, rather than trying to appreciate the real strength of what they are saying. (Of course, you may not have any choice as to whether or not you argue like this.)

It’s just not at all clear that the original “subject” was some spooky power to act contrary to our own desires and whatever physical substrate they supervene on. In fact, I doubt that any serious philosopher thinks of it quite like that, and I doubt that ordinary people do either – though the attempts by some libertarians (in the sense relevant to this debate) to preserve our motivations while giving us a radical power to act independently of the causes that shaped our personalities are, indeed, sometimes baffling. It seems that they want to have it both ways, which places them in danger of saying something incoherent. As for what ordinary people think about all this … well, it’s likely to be very confused.

I agree that there is no free will in any spooky libertarian sense. I don’t think the idea can be rendered coherent, whether physical determinism (at the level of the brain’s functioning, say) is true or not. But this is all a very modern way of thinking about it. It may be what’s bugging some people, but historically the questions were more along the lines of: “Am I a plaything of fate or destiny or necessity or mere chance or the will of the gods?” “Is it rational to deliberate about what I do, if the outcome is fated anyway (or, conversely, a matter of mere luck)?” “Are my attempts to shape my own life and to make a difference to the world all futile?” These are the questions that are at stake in the traditions of myth, literature, and even, to a large extent, philosophy.

Even now, much popular fiction involves themes of, “Can I overcome my destiny?” “Can I forge a better life for myself?” This kind of thing, arguably, is what gnaws at ordinary people outside of any formal theological or philosophical context. Do we have the power (or some power, at least) to shape our lives? It seems obvious that we do, or why bother making decisions at all (unless we simply can’t help it, right?). Why deliberate about what career to pursue, if it’s all controlled by God or the stars, anyway? But we do, ordinarily, think it’s worthwhile deliberating about what career to pursue, what skills to develop, etc. Deliberating certainly doesn’t seem irrational or futile.

This obvious appearance is challenged by various plausible-looking arguments, ranging from arguments about the foreknowledge of God, to arguments about physical determinism, to arguments about living in an Einsteinian block universe, to arguments based on the law of excluded middle (after all, all statements about the future are either true or false … aren’t they?). And doubtless many others. These arguments suggest that our sense of having some ability to shape our own lives is an illusion. That is exactly what Harris and Coyne think it is.

Well, perhaps one of those arguments works, but if you’re going to show why they probably don’t, and why the everyday appearance that we can make decisions, act on the world, and, to some extent, shape our own future lives, is not just an illusion after all … well of course you’re going to have to do what philosophers do. I.e. we make distinctions, try to clarify issues, etc. That isn’t arguing in a contrived or dishonest way, or “changing the subject”. It’s our job. It’s how we earn our supper.

When philosophers try to clarify, and perhaps dissolve, these concerns, showing, perhaps, that the concerns don’t make good sense on closer analysis, we are playing a time-honoured role. Indeed, the Stoics (or certain of them) gave a “compatibilist” answer to the question of whether outcomes can be up to us, in some sense – despite there also being some truth about what we will decide – way back in Hellenistic and Roman times.

The issue of free will in the specific sense that I mentioned in the third paragraph above becomes important in debates about whether God could be absolved of responsibility for evil actions by us. If some sort of spooky free will exists, it’s thought by some theologians and philosophers that this creates a gap between the creative activity of God and the evils perpetrated by us, thus solving the ancient problem of evil.

Others may try to argue for spooky free will in an effort to preserve moral responsibility. They think that we can’t be (morally) responsible for our actions unless we are somehow responsible for them all the way down. Thus, they want to create a gap, not between our actions and God but between our actions and whatever events formed us as we are. Indeed, this issue has become central in the contemporary debate about free will among professional philosophers. It’s now largely a debate about whether and when we are responsible for our own actions.

But once again, compatibilists who are involved in this debate are not engaging in any dishonest or contrived reasoning. It is strongly arguable that no spooky gap between us and the events that formed us is required for us to, quite rationally, hold each other responsible for our choices and actions. You may disagree with this, but it’s inevitable that a question like that is going to require both sides to engage in attempts at conceptual clarification. This is not “changing the subject”.

Jerry Coyne rightly points to these – i.e. theodical reasoning and arguments about moral responsibility – as two areas of discourse where a spooky gap is invoked. Since he evidently thinks that spooky gaps are needed for moral responsibility, he denies, if I read him correctly, that we have moral responsibility.

Let’s set aside the theodical arguments. I agree that the free will defence is unpromising as a solution to the problem of evil. But what about (moral) responsibility? Surely getting all this clear requires that we examine what the concept really amounts to – and that is a non-trivial exercise in conceptual analysis, since the concept of (moral) responsibility, as it appears in everyday discussion, does not look straightforward, or even coherent, and it is tied up with many other difficult concepts, such as concepts of fairness, justice, and desert. There’s conceptual work to do here, and the best approach is simply not obvious.

Michael Ruse has been in one of his frequent dust-ups with people whom he regards as purveyors of “scientism”, etc., etc. It gets a little complicated trying to track back through the debate to see who was responsible for its train-wreck quality, so I’ll avoid that today. However, it led Ruse to claim that there are various domains where objective knowledge can be found without using the methodology of science.

I don’t disagree with that, as far as it goes. First, there is no such thing as the methodology of science. Science has refined various techniques for exploring the cosmos beyond what I (not in an especially original way) call the middle world – the world that is spatially more or less in scale with us, and which is about as old as human texts, buildings, etc. However, science does not have a monopoly on any of its techniques. They are also available to, and sometimes useful to, humanities scholars, among others. Indeed the dividing line between the humanities and the sciences is rather arbitrary, and is set for pragmatic reasons rather than because they are totally isolated from each other in the methods that they use.

Second, the humanities have their own distinctive techniques for finding out stuff. These are available to scientists as well, and to anyone else, but some of them would be useful to today’s professionalised institution of science only in weird fictional scenarios. For example, someone wanting to discover new knowledge about Greek literature would do well to learn ancient Greek. But doing so is unlikely to help a team of twenty-first-century particle physicists. (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine some weird scenario in which it just might be.)

I don’t doubt that there are facts that we can find out without doing anything distinctively scientific. Sometimes, doing so will require the use of challenging scholarly techniques that are more distinctive of the humanities – techniques that can sometimes require much talent and training. Mastering ancient Greek or seventeenth century English prosody is not straightforward, but it is needed to engage in certain scholarly inquiries and draw plausible conclusions.

But none of this was Ruse’s approach. Instead, he named mathematics, morality, and philosophical epistemology as fields where there are objective truths to be found by non-scientific methods. These are all controversial examples, and I’ll set aside the first and last. I hope I’ve established that I don’t believe all truths that we can discover are available to us only by distinctively scientific means.

What, then, about morality? Relying on the existence of objective moral truths to disprove “scientism” seems like a case of defending a not-terribly-controversial conclusion using a highly controversial premise. To labour the point, we find out many things about the middle world without relying on distinctively scientific methods. But are there objective moral truths that we can learn through some non-scientific methodology? I very much doubt it.

It does, of course, depend on what you mean by “objective” – clearly enough, there are truths that take this form: “Among the Martians it is regarded as immoral to bury your parents without first eating their flesh.” There are plenty of truths about the standards of behaviour adopted in particular societies, or cultures, or sub-cultures. But are there truths about standards of behaviour that transcend (or somehow lie outside of) human subjectivity, human cultural institutions, and the like, standards that simply bind us to act in certain ways in the nature of things, and irrespective of our desires?

The trouble is that Ruse himself doesn’t think that. In his latest contribution to the debate, he pretty much concedes this by writing: “You may complain that this is not enough. You want a firmer foundation—meaning you still want some outside foundation—for morality. I cannot give you that.” Okay, but if that’s his position he is saying that people who imagine that there are moral claims with some sort of “outside foundation” are in error. The only question is how pervasive that belief is, and how far it is built into our moral language and thinking. Presumably he realises that it is pretty common, in which case our ordinary moral language and thinking is, to some extent, shot through with error.

That might not take Ruse all the way to moral error theory, if the latter is the position that all first-order moral claims are just false. That (or some refinement of it) is how contemporary metaethicists usually conceive of moral error theory, though its leading twentieth-century exponent, J.L. Mackie, arguably did not go so far. In any event, Ruse should at least concede that his view is somewhere on the way towards moral error theory and is not an objectivist theory at all. On Ruse’s own account, there are no truths about standards that simply bind us in the nature of things. Thus, there is no body of such truths to be discovered through non-scientific methods.

Once again, there may be truths about the standards of various societies, etc. I’m sure there are. There may also be truths about which of these standards we should support, given our deeper values, goals, sympathies, etc., though the word “we” is very tricky here – do all of us reading this really have the same deeper values, goals, sympathies, etc.? I rather doubt it. There may also be truths about deeper values, goals, etc., that we tend to share, but once we reach that point we’re getting into areas where science may, indeed, have much to say, along with the humanities. As I said above, the boundary between them is rather arbitrary in any event, and it tends to break down with these sorts of philosophical inquiries.

All very strange. Since Ruse rejects objectivism as metaethicists usually understand it, what was his point about morality in the first place?

To be fair to him, some people do seem to get very upset at the idea that we are able to find out stuff through means that are not especially scientific. So, yes, I suppose they have a scientistic tendency. Some commenters in the blogosphere react to harmless statements about the humanities and everyday observation almost as if science’s honour is at stake. But I doubt that anyone is seriously guilty of scientism as people like Ruse conceive of it. And even if someone is guilty of such an error, it’s easy enough to point out simple examples to them: e.g., discovering some historical fact by translating an ancient document. If the person then defines “science” so broadly as to include such an activity, we are now involved in an argument about semantics. You don’t need to tie yourself in metaethical knots, as Ruse does, to make such points.

In anticipation of teaching my Modern philosophy class in the upcoming spring semester, I have been perusing my notes. Since I recently did a post on God and punishment, re-reading Locke got me thinking about this matter once again.

Locke, like other political thinkers of his age, made use of the state of nature in his consideration of rights and authority. Roughly put, the state of nature is a situation in which there is no political authority: no politicians, no police, no judges, no man-made laws and so on. In short, there is no artificial society-just people existing in a natural state.

Thomas Hobbes also envisioned such a state, but he saw this as  a state of perpetual war. Since many of my students play video games, I always illustrate Hobbes as presenting a “death match” view of the state of nature: everyone against everyone, whatever you can grab is yours (until someone kills you and takes it), and so forth.  Locke, however, envisioned a nicer state in which people possessed natural rights to life, liberty and property.

Locke also contended that there is a law of nature that should be observed and that this law “wills the peace and preservation of all mankind.” Locke also noted the obvious: if there is no one to execute or enforce the law of nature, this law would be in vain.

To solve this problem, Locke claimed that in the state of nature everyone has the right to execute the law of nature by punishing wrongdoers who violate the right to life, liberty or property.  Locke, of course, grounds these rights on God. Our right to life rests on his view that we are God’s property and our right to property rests, in part, on God’s gift of the world to us. Put a bit simply, God is the legislator of the law of nature and the author of our rights. However, given what Locke claims, God respects the distinction between the executive and the legislative in that He does not enforce the law of nature nor does He act to prevent or punish (on earth) the violation of rights. He does not even dispatch angels to act as divine police. As such, on Locke’s view the state of nature is governed by divine law but God does deploy any enforcers.

In human societies when laws exist but there are no official enforcers, people sometimes turn to vigilantism. That is, people take the law into their own hands. In human societies, this practice is generally frowned upon-at least when law enforcement does exist. It is, as might be imagined, tolerated more (or even encouraged) when official law enforcement is lacking.

Given that in the state of nature there is law (the law of nature) but no official enforcers, what Locke is arguing for is vigilantism. In short, he calls upon people to serve as God’s vigilantes. Naturally, it might be wondered why God would need vigilantes rather than having official law enforcement in operation. After all, God surely cannot lack the funding or personnel to provide adequate policing. Given that He supposedly created the universe and all its contents, surely He could create a divine police force to supervise us here on earth. This force would not, of course, impede our free will anymore than our own police forces do: people are always free to chose to do wrong-they just get punished if they get caught and convicted.

As far as the view that God does not punish and hence does not need police , given what most faiths claim, God has no compunction against punishing people. He just seems rather reluctant to do so when people are watching.

It might be argued that God has deployed a police force, namely us. We are, of course, also the criminal element and the judges as well. However, this seems a rather odd way of doing things. Consider the following analogy: imagine a federation or empire with unlimited resources that is engaged in colonization. The way it colonizes is that it just dumps people on a habitable world, but provides them with no technology, no police, no education and so on. While this would make some sense for a poor empire that cannot afford proper colonization efforts, this would seem absurd for such a wealthy empire.

In the case of God, it seems absurd that He would just dump us on a planet and have us “go to it” on our own with no support or police.  This hypothesis seems, on might suspect, more absurd than the hypothesis that humans are the result of a seriously lame (or badly failed) colonization attempt by a space empire. After all, to say that we are ruled over by a God who makes rules, but provides no police or judges here on earth seems rather like saying that we are ruled over by a space empire that laid down our laws, but provides no police, judges or any contact with us.

This analogy also provides the obvious response to the claim that God punishes people in the afterlife. Imagine if someone claimed that we are part of a space empire and that just before people appear to die they are whisked away by transporters and their bodies replaced with duplicates. The supposedly dead people are then brought to the Court of the Space Empire and then tried by Space Lawyers before the Space Judges. If they are found guilty of crimes, they are cast into Space Hell to be punished. If they are found to be innocent, they are transported to Space Heaven and rewarded. Naturally, we are all really immortal-we just seem to die when we are transported away and replaced by a fake corpse (or ashes or whatever).

Just as we have every reason to think that the space empire story is just bad science fiction, it would seem that we should think that the story about God is just a bad fantasy story.