issue 110, october / november 2015 Philosophy Now

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ISSUE 110 OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2015

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PhilosophyNow a magazine of ideas

Albert Camus & Absurdity Thomas Reid & Scottish Common Sense

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EDITORIAL & NEWS

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4 Liberty and Equality Rick Lewis 5 News in Brief

LIBERTY & EQUALITY

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Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher College), Prof. Charles Echelbarger, Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY - City College), Prof. Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.)

Equality & Liberty pages 6-23

26 Addled Essence Alienation, teen angst & philosophy: David Birch sees a link 29 Can A Robot Be Ethical? Robert Newman considers the recent speculations of IT gurus 30 Dancing With Absurdity Fred Leavitt only knows that radical skepticism is true 34 Shaping the Self Sally Latham is thankful for the memories 36 The Life & Death of Common Sense Toni Vogel Carey remembers Thomas Reid’s forgotten philosophy

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Personal Identity p.26, 34, Choice p.51

44 Film: Her David Taube investigates cyberlove 48 Book: Lying by Sam Harris reviewed honestly by Robin Davenport 49 Book: Running With The Pack by Mark Rowlands reviewed quickly by Scott F. Parker

REGULARS 24 Brief Lives: Albert Camus Stephen C. Small takes a snapshot of the Philosophy Idol 39 Echoes: Greek Economics: The Ancient Edition Peter Adamson’s new column shows the resonances between current events and philosophy throughout history 40 Letters to the Editor 51 Tallis in Wonderland: How On Earth Can We Be Free? Raymond Tallis on free will

The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Philosophy Now. Philosophy Now is published by Anja Publications Ltd

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REVIEWS

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ISSN 0961-5970

6 Liberty Requires Equality James Sterba has a radical manifesto for human freedom 9 Let’s Be Reasonable! Philip Badger asks, What’s so reasonable about inequality? 12 Mill, Liberty & Euthanasia Simon Clarke argues that liberty includes the freedom to die 14 Surveillance Ethics Seán Moran looks at the morality of our being looked at 16 The Paradox of Liberalism Francisco Mejía Uribe on confronting fundamentalism 19 Free Speech: A Paradox Ryan Andrews asks what speech we should rule in, and rule out 20 Philosopher-Kings in the Kingdom of Ends Richard Oxenberg has a plan for a politically aware society

OTHER ARTICLES

Contributing Editors

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ISSUE 110 Oct/Nov 2015

POETRY & FICTION

Camus An absurdly brief life, p.24

13 Poem: The Univocity of Silence Michael A. Istvan Jr hears different silences 53 Short story: The Ladybird Jackie Griffiths tells a tale of innocence and mortality October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 3

Editorial Liberty & Equality “The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hope for freedom.” (Lord Acton)

T

he most famous motto of the French Revolution was Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Yet the ink was barely dry on their badly printed leaflets and posters before les révolutionnaires began to squabble among themselves about how exactly the three terms should be understood, what order they should have been printed in and whether they were even compatible with each other at all. And those disputes have continued ever since. For the trouble with any moral or political system which is built on more than a single underlying value is that you can get tension between the different things that it values. If you launch a revolution calling for all good children to be given presents and for the strict prohibition of white beards, then you will have a problem to sort out when Christmas comes around. Sure enough, it is now a very widely held view that the political ideals of liberty and of equality are in tension with each other. (Fraternité caused less conflict, perhaps because it is such a nebulous concept in the first place, though its masculine overtones did provoke Olympe de Gouges – later guillotined – to respond with her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen) Anyway, over the years since, liberty and equality have become a well-known duo of antagonists, like Tom and Jerry. If your politics are driven mainly by a desire to promote the freedom of the individual, then you are at the very least accepting that this freedom may lead to inequalities of wealth. This is compatible with the most extensive equality of legal rights for all individuals, including individuals of different genders and races and other groups, but if your main concern is for equality of wealth and economic opportunities, then you will probably achieve it only by limiting some personal liberties (such as the liberty to move resources from one country to another; the liberty to invest for profit; the liberty to bequeath wealth to the next generation, and various others). Many people therefore consider complete liberty and equality to be incompatible, though it isn’t that you simply have to opt for one or the other; most modern societies combine a greater or lesser degree of personal liberty with some attempt at reducing poverty and economic inequality. How best to combine the two ideals and to strike a balance between them, is a very complex question, so liberty’n’equality provide fertile ground for political philosophy and a good topic for this issue of Philosophy Now. But how should we put together an issue devoted to the dynamic duo? Should we give pro-liberty contributors free rein? Should we give the equality advocates equal space? 4 Philosophy Now



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Yet, in his lead article for this issue, Professor James Sterba, a former president of the American Philosophical Association, confounds expectations with his surprising argument that the two values aren’t in opposition after all. He claims that on the contrary, liberty requires equality; that adopting the ideal of libertarianism requires you, out of consistency, to be in favour of extensive programme of welfare and wealth redistribution in order to establish material equality, both among people living today and with those who will be born in the future. Phil Badger also argues eloquently for an egalitarian version of liberalism. Other contributors in our ‘liberty & equality’ section explore the philosophical case for personal liberty in relation to such subjects as euthanasia, democracy, fundamentalism, free speech and surveillance, but as you’ll see, our guiding light in assembling this issue has been to ensure equality of outrage among you, our long-suffering readers. Whatever your own political views, I guarantee there will be an article here to annoy you. Indeed, I myself found the conclusions of one of the articles in this issue to be as crazy as a sack full of chipmunks. No, I’m not telling you which one. But I think it did me a great deal of good to read it and to think about why despite its subtle arguments I found it absurd. Talking of absurdity, we have ‘Dancing with Absurdity’ by Fred Leavitt on the difficulty of knowing anything at all, and we have a Brief Life of absurdism’s greatest philosopher, Albert Camus. And twice in this issue you will meet absurdity’s nemesis Thomas Reid (1710-1796), the Scottish philosopher of Common Sense. So maybe the absurd forms a subversive sub-theme that we didn’t even plan. How appropriate! Festival Time Is Here Again! On 21st November we’ll be holding the 3rd Philosophy Now Festival. Like the previous two, it will involve a whole range of philosophy organisations putting on events over the course of the day. There will be lectures, panels, philosophy games, the infamous Balloon Debate and philosophy workshops for children of all ages. The event will be free, family-friendly and open to all. As in past years, we are holding it as guests of Conway Hall at their large art-deco building in central London. We realise that many of you will be unable to make it to the Festival for geographical reasons. This year we’ll try to make up for this by putting more material from the Festival online, and by making it possible for readers around the world to email questions to us in advance so that they can be put to speakers. So put on a party hat, pour yourself a festive drink and settle down in front of your computer to enjoy the Festival. You will find full details on philosophynow.org/festival nearer to the time, and on our Facebook event page.

• Tots gain moral sense by 2 years • • French children to be taught more civics • • Heythrop College to close •

News

News reports by Anja Steinbauer. France Launches Emergency ReVamp of Moral and Civic Education The start of the new school year sees upheaval in the French national curriculum at primary and secondary levels. Education Minister Najat VallaudBelkacem announced new-style classes in Moral and Civic Education (l’Enseignement moral et civique) designed to inspire the traditional French values of liberty, equality and fraternity, as well as secularism, justice, mutual respect and the absence of discrimination. The new course explores four main areas: ‘Sensitivity’ (understanding your feelings and those of others), ‘Rules and Rights’ (understanding your legal rights and the rules of society), ‘Critical Thinking’ (making rational decisions) and ‘Social Responsibility’ (learning to become a responsible member of society). Teachers protested against the change, arguing they would not have enough time to prepare at such short notice and asking for the plans be pushed back by a year. The education ministry rejected this appeal, fuelled in urgency by the January shootings targeting Charlie Hebdo magazine and by the discussions concerning secularism and freedom of speech which followed the attack. Experiments on Babies Research by neuroscientists Prof. Jean Decety and Jason Cowell at the University of Chicago, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, claims to show that infants of between 12 and 24 months already have a moral sense. A series of experiments tested 73 babies and toddlers with respect to moral Child wearing EEG sensors watches animation

discernment. In the first experiment, they watched a short cartoon depicting characters engaging in either pro-social behaviours, such as sharing or helping, or antisocial behaviours, such as hitting or shoving. An EEG recorded brain activity and eye monitors showed researchers where the children’s attention was directed while watching the film. Afterwards, the tiny tots were given the choice to play with toys decorated with the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ characters from the film, and the researchers noted which toys the children reached for. The children also played a sharing game to test their altruistic inclinations. Finally, their parents were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to reveal their and their children’s inclinations to empathy and justice. The results appeared to show that the children’s reaction to the tests was not random, suggesting that they had a sense of the moral issues. Their behaviour was found to be strongly in line with their parents’ values regarding justice and fairness. Philo-Slam 2015 Swiss television channel SRF has a long history of presenting philosophy, having hosted the outstanding weekly philosophy show Sternstunde Philosophie since 1994. As part of the Biele Philosophy Days (philosophietage.ch) the channel now invites contributions from the public to their bilingual French-German philosophy competition Philo-Slam 2015. You are asked to make a five minute spoken and performative presentation on some aspect of the topic of ‘Animals and Philosophy’. If you would like to enter the Slam, email [email protected]. Heythrop College to Close Heythrop College, the University of London’s specialist philosophy and theology college, is to shut in 2018 with the loss of 91 jobs, bringing its 400 years of history to an end. The Governors announced on 25 June that it will close after fulfilling its commitments to its existing students, and blamed financial

pressures arising from the modest size of the college. Heythrop is a Jesuit foundation, and there had been hopes of saving it by forming a partnership with St Mary’s University in Twickenham to share administrative costs, but the plan fell through after an entire year of talks. A petition calling for the Governors to carry on exploring ways of saving Heythrop has now been signed by many of Britain’s most prominent philosophy professors. New Column Starts in this Issue Cressida Cowell wrote in How To Train Your Dragon that “the pasts haunts the present in more ways than we think.” This is certainly true of philosophy’s relationship with its own past, which can be both a burden and an inspiration to thinkers wrestling with problems today. To help the world with this, Professor Peter Adamson created a phenomenally popular series of podcasts called A History of Philosophy without any gaps (historyofphilosophy.net). The podcast has spawned a pair of books – and now a column in Philosophy Now, called Echoes (see p.39). Philosophy Now and Oxford University Press will be hosting a celebration of the A History of Philosophy without any gaps series at 7pm on Friday 6th November, as part of the OUP Philosophy Festival taking place at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford from 2nd-7th November. For a chance to win tickets to this event, email your name, location and contact details to [email protected]. For more information about the festival, visit http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/stores/ox ford-bookshop/events/ Peter Adamson

October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 5

Liberty Requires Equality James P. Sterba thinks libertarianism implies a right to welfare.

W

Conflicting Liberties Now, in order to see why libertarians are mistaken about what their ideal requires, consider a conflict situation between the rich and the poor. In this conflict situation, the rich, of course, have more than enough resources to satisfy their basic needs. In contrast, imagine that the poor lack the resources to meet their basic needs even though they have tried all the means available to them that libertarians regard as legitimate for acquiring such resources. Under circumstances like these, libertarians maintain that the rich should have the liberty to use their resources to satisfy their luxury needs if they so wish. Libertarians recognize The Ideal of Negative Liberty Let us begin by interpreting the ideal of liberty as a negative that this liberty might well be enjoyed with the consequence that ideal in the manner favored by libertarians. So understood, libthe satisfaction of the basic needs of the poor will not be met; erty is the absence of interference by other people from doing they just think that liberty always has priority over other political what one wants or is just able to do. Libertarians go on to charideals. And since they assume that the liberty of the poor is not acterize their political ideal as requiring that each person at stake in such conflict situations, it is easy for them to conclude should have the greatest amount of liberty morally commensuthat the rich should not be required to sacrifice their liberty so rate with the greatest amount of liberty for everyone else. that the basic needs of the poor may be met. Interpreting their ideal in this way, libertarians claim to derive a In fact, however, the liberty of the poor is at stake in such number of more specific requirements, in particular, a right to conflict situations. What is at stake is the liberty of the poor not life; a right to freedom of speech, press, and assembly; and a to be interfered with in taking from the surplus possessions of right to property. the rich what is necessary to satisfy their basic needs. Here it is important to note that the libertarian’s right to life Now when the conflict between the rich and the poor is is not a right to receive from others the goods and resources viewed as a conflict of liberties, we can either say that the rich necessary for preserving one’s life; it is simply a right not to should have the liberty not to be interfered with in using their have one’s life interfered with or ended unjustly. Of course, libsurplus resources for luxury purposes, or we can say that the ertarians allow that it would be nice of the rich to share their poor should have the liberty not to be interfered with in taking surplus resources with the poor. Nevertheless, they deny that from the rich what they require to meet their basic needs. If we government has a duty to provide for such needs. Some good choose one liberty, we must reject the other. What needs to be things, such as providing welfare to the poor, are requirements determined, therefore, is which liberty is morally enforceable: of charity rather than justice, libertarians claim. Accordingly, the liberty of the rich or the liberty of the poor. failure to make such provisions is neither blameworthy nor I submit that the liberty of the poor, which is the liberty not punishable. As a consequence, such acts of charity should not to be interfered with in taking from the surplus resources of be coercively required. For this reason, libertarians are opposed others what is required to meet one’s basic needs, is morally to coercively supported welfare programs. enforceable over the liberty of the rich, which is the liberty not to be interfered with in using one’s surplus resources for luxury purposes. Modern luxury: To see that this is the case, we need only “Welcome to my yacht!” appeal to the principle of non-questionbeggingness – that is, the principle that your reasoning shouldn’t assume the truth of what it is meant to prove – and apply it to conflicting liberties. So we will need to idealize a bit. First, consider a ranking of your liberties, from your most important liberty to your least important liberty. Now consider a ranking of the liberties of others from their most important liberties to their least important liberties. Now some of the liberties in these rankings will come into conflict with other liberties. Let’s set aside those cases where your high-ranking liberties come into conflict hat is a just society? In seeking a defensible conception of justice, it behooves us to start with the assumptions of the libertarian perspective, the view that appears to endorse the least enforcement of morality. I propose to show that this libertarian view, contrary to what its defenders usually maintain, requires a right to welfare; and that further, this right to welfare (which is also endorsed by a welfare liberal perspective), leads to the substantial equality advocated by socialists.

6 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

with the high-ranking liberties of others – these cases are like lifeboat cases and any view is going to have some difficulty determining who should be saved when only a limited number can be. Far more numerous are cases where your high-ranking liberties come into conflict with the low-ranking liberties of others, or their high-ranking liberties come into conflict with your low-ranking liberties. To say which liberties should be respected overall in these conflict situations, we need to appeal to the principle of non-question-beggingness to determine their priorities. And if we think that more significant liberties matter more than less significant ones, but don’t otherwise assume which liberties are the more important (which is what we are trying to prove), this means that high-ranking liberties must be accepted to trump lower-ranking liberties. Let us now focus on just such conflict cases between the rich and the poor. So what we need to do here is appeal to the priorities that are determined by the principle of non-question-beggingness and have high-ranking liberties enforcibly trump low ranking liberties in these conflict situations. In this way, the high-ranking liberties of the poor in having their basic needs met will enforceably trump the low-ranking liberties of the rich in being able to use their surplus for luxury purposes. This, I claim, will ground a right to welfare . A Universal Right to Welfare Now for libertarians, fundamental rights are universal rights, that is, rights possessed by all people, not just by those who live in certain places or at certain times. Of course, when libertarians argue for this universalistic view of rights, they usually do not recognize that the right to liberty they champion leads to a right to welfare. In any case, all I am doing here is exploring the unintended, but, I think, clear consequence, of the libertarian view. So let me briefly show how the libertarian-grounded right to welfare that I have just established leads to substantial equality. To meet the basic needs of the poor throughout the world, Peter Singer has proposed a graduated tax on the incomes of the top 10% of US families, netting $404 billion annually, with an equal sum coming from the incomes of families in other industrialized countries. Singer is confident that this tax would go a long way toward meeting basic human needs worldwide. Yet although Singer’s proposal would doubtless do much to secure a right to welfare for existing people, unfortunately it does not speak very well to the needs of future generations. In the US, currently more than one million acres of arable land are lost from cultivation each year due to urbanization, multiplying transport networks, and industrial expansion. (This has slowed a bit with the economic downturn.) In addition, another two million acres of farmland are lost each year due to erosion, salinization, and water logging. The state of Iowa alone has lost one-half of its fertile topsoil from farming in the last century. According to one estimate, only 0.6 of an acre of arable land per person will be available in the US in 2050, whereas more than 1.2 acres per person are needed to provide a diverse diet (currently, 1.6 acres of arable land are available). Similar, or even more threatening, estimates of the loss of arable land have been made for other regions of the world. How then are we going to preserve farmland and other food-related natural resources so that future generations are not deprived of what

they require to meet their basic needs? And what about other resources as well? It has been estimated that presently a North American uses seventy-five times more resources than a resident of India. This means that in terms of resource consumption the North American continent’s population is the equivalent of 22.5 billion Indians. So unless we assume that basic resources such as arable land, iron, coal, and oil are in unlimited supply, this unequal consumption will have to be radically altered if the basic needs of future generations are to be met. I submit, therefore, that until we have a technological fix on hand, recognizing a universal right to welfare applicable both to existing and future people requires us to use up no more resources than are necessary for meeting our own basic needs, securing for ourselves a decent life but no more. For us to use up more resources than this, without a technological fix on hand, we would be guilty of depriving at least some future generations of the resources they would require to meet their own basic needs, thereby violating their libertarian-based right to welfare. Obviously, avoiding this would impose a significant sacrifice on existing generations, particularly those in the developed world, clearly a far greater sacrifice than Singer maintains is required for meeting the basic needs just of existing generations. Nevertheless, these demands do follow from a libertarian-based right to welfare. In effect, recognizing a right to welfare, applicable to all existing and future people leads to an equal utilization of resources over place and time. The farm of the future?

A Peaceful Road to Justice Clearly, the political and social changes required by my argument are both massive and wide-ranging. Just imagine a world where each person has just enough resources she needs to meet her basic needs, for a decent life, but no more, and think about the many changes that we would have to undergo to get from here to there. Now I propose that we attempt to achieve these changes by employing the argument just presented and implementing it both individually and collectively. Individual implementation involves recognizing that whatever we individually possess above what is necessary to provide a decent life for ourselves and those we personally care about can legitimately be taken from us by others who are in need through no fault of their own. This should lead us to take steps to transfer our present and future surplus, as best we can, so that others can also have a decent life. Individual implementation also involves action by the needy to take from the surplus October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 7

A warning about overurbanisation: Hong Kong skyline

possessions of the rich what they require for a decent life, as well as action by individual ‘Robin Hoods’ assisting the transfer of resources from the wealthy to those in need. Collective implementation involving appropriate institutions to guarantee that everyone has the resources for a decent life should be helped along by various forms of collective nonviolent action, such as protest marches, rallies, picketing, boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience, and sit-ins. Collective implementation should also be helped along by the nonviolent actions of organized groups of Robin Hoods acting on behalf of existing needy people or future generations. In this way, our lives, both individually and collectively, would be guided by a deep egalitarianism that alone can be rationally and morally justified. An Ideal Transformation Now just suppose that the entire adult population of the world came to accept my argument and began to act in accord with it. What would happen? In general, we should expect the following: 1) Those who are currently working in occupations that help to provide the basic needs minimum for others would continue to do so. However, the income these workers currently derive from their work, beyond what is required to secure the same basic needs minimum for themselves, would be allocated in two ways: (a) As taxes to democratically-controlled governmental agencies that are now committed simply to providing that same basic minimum to all as needed; (b) As investments and donations to organizations and corporations that are committed to producing and distributing that same minimum to all as needed. 2) Those currently working to produce and distribute luxury goods should look for ways to transition out of such employment. Such changes of employment will become necessary, in any case, as the demand for luxury goods decreases and an effective demand for goods that simply meet people’s basic needs increases. During the transition, workers still employed in luxury production would continue to allocate their income in just the same way as workers who are providing for a basic needs minimum. 8 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

3) Those who are currently just managing their own investments and pensions will need to act in comparable ways. They will need to redirect, if necessary, their investments and donations to support the provision of a basic needs minimum for all, pay their taxes to governmental agencies that are doing the same, and ensure that they are getting that same basic needs minimum themselves, but no more. Given that all these individuals are, as we are supposing, committed to acting in accord with my liberty-to-equality argument, they should be able, in collaboration with those who are also similarly committed, yet not similarly productive, to make use of the now-transformed governmental agencies, markets, and other institutions to effectively realize their egalitarian goals with a minimum of coercion. Of course, circumstances are never likely to be so ideal, with every adult committed to my argument. The point of this thought-experiment, however, is simply to show that if such a commitment to equality obtained, an effective realization of that ideal is fairly easy to imagine. Summary Let me end by simply summarizing my argument so far sketched. I have argued that even a libertarian conception of morality leads to a right to welfare. I further argued that extending this right to welfare, particularly to future generations, as I claim we must, leads to the egalitarian requirement that as far as possible we should use up no more resources than are necessary to meet our basic needs, securing for ourselves a decent life, but no more. I further showed how the egalitarian ethics I defended can be put into practice peacefully through a combination of individual and collective action. © PROF JAMES P. STERBA 2015

James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of peace and justice, is past president of the American Philosophical Association, the Concerned Philosophers for Peace, and the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. His most recent book is From Rationality to Equality (OUP, 2015).

Let’s Be Reasonable! Philip Badger tries to convince us to be optimistic about human equality.

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ne shared ambition of philosophy and social science has been to understand the origins of conflict in human society. The evidence from social psychology is mixed, with some studies suggesting that conflict can be reduced by the establishment of shared goals (Muzafer Sherif, The ‘Robbers Cave Experiment’, 1961), whilst others suggest that evolutionary pressures will always undermine such efforts. In The Righteous Mind (2012), Jonathan Haidt gives us the striking metaphor that the ‘irrational elephant’ (the visceral part of ourselves that has its origins early in our evolution) is always going to escape the control of the ‘rational elephant rider’. In their 2010 book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket argued that the evidence from social science shows inequality to be the key to understanding such social dysfunction. The evidence they cite is correlational rather than causal – it suggests that less equal societies tend to do worse on a range of indicators of well-being, including health and levels of violence, than more equal ones (though other factors such as environmental lead levels are also involved, complicating an otherwise clear picture). Research by Michael Marmot (‘Social determinants of health inequalities’, The Lancet 2005), and Carol Shively (American Journal of Primatology 2009), has given us an account of how inequality might cause the problems Wilkinson and Pickett describe. Inequality, at least in the extreme, is bad for us and for our societies. Responses to this idea have been interesting. Some have taken issue with the empirical status of Wilkinson and Pickets’ case; but the vitriolic quality of some, usually libertarian, critiques, suggests that they have poked someone’s metaphorical elephant with a mighty stick. For the sake of convenience, here’s a brief list of the antiegalitarian arguments: 1. Inequality is natural and so can’t/shouldn’t be altered; 2. Inequality is beneficial and so shouldn’t be altered; 3. Inequality is not great, but interventions to reduce it will make matters worse by, for example, creating welfare depen-

dency or destroying jobs; 4. Inequality is just and so shouldn’t be altered. Let’s consider each of these arguments in turn: 1. Inequality is natural and so can’t/shouldn’t be altered It is not hard to see that appeals from what is natural don’t have much traction in terms of what we should do: smallpox is natural but we worked hard to eliminate it. The thought that we can’t do anything about inequality is often based on the claim, reiterated by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in 2013, that inequality is genetic and so unalterable. In fact the research Johnson referred to – by Robert Plomin in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (2013) – suggests that while potential is fixed by genetics, its realisation is dependent on environmental factors. Additional evidence for this is provided by the Perry Preschool Project (1962 on), a study of the educational and lifetime impact of intensive preschool support for disadvantaged children. In a paper for the Society for Research in Child Development, Lawrence Schweinhart et al (2003) estimated that every dollar spent in that project saved sixteen dollars in lifetime welfare spending on its relatively socially mobile participants compared to a control group. 2. Inequality is beneficial and so shouldn’t be altered This argument amounts to the claim that because some inequality may be ‘beneficial’ in the sense of providing incentives for hard work, more inequality must be even more beneficial. The late Harvard philosopher John Rawls agreed that a limited amount of inequality might increase the prosperity of all by providing incentives, but argued that we should tolerate inequality only so far as it demonstrably benefits the worst off (This is his famous ‘maximin’ principle). Being a follower of Immanuel Kant, Rawls opposed the view that the justice of a policy depends entirely on its consequences. However, he suggested that consequences can be taken into account so long as we gave absolute respect to the ‘liberty principle’ – the idea that our actions should not be interfered with as long as they The reality of inequality: a slum setttlement

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3. Inequality is not great, but interventions to reduce it will make matters worse by creating welfare dependency or destroying jobs This is an apparently empirical argument against egalitarianism based on a deep faith in the powers of the free market to maximise welfare – what Adam Smith called the ‘unseen hand’. I use the words ‘apparently’ and ‘faith’ deliberately, because there is a set of assumptions at work here about what must be true. This set of assumptions comes under the collective name of ‘neoliberalism’. Neoliberal economists assert that: a) Goods in a market find their own price level in response to demand; b) Attempts to interfere with the price of a particular ‘good’ (such as labour) by setting, for example, a minimum wage, will reduce demand for that good (so unemployment will increase); c) Other attempts at inequality reduction (e.g. welfare spending) are misguided because they create a ‘perverse incentive’ for people to become ‘welfare dependent’. The message is simple; if we want to maximise human welfare, we should leave the market to itself. Karl Popper said that a theory is meaningless if there is no way to test if it is false; he gave Marxism as an example, but neoliberalism is apparently just as untestable; when catastrophe strikes the global market, as it did in 2008, neoliberal apologists are quick to deny that this is evidence of ‘market failure’. In fact, many eminent economists, including Nobel Prize winners (e.g., Paul Krugman, End This Depression Now!, 2012), tell a different story about our recent woes. For these theorists, the problem is again inequality, or, more precisely, too much of it. Specifically, the deregulation and deunionisation of the labour market, rationalised by neoliberals as being necessary for competitiveness (and suggesting that freedom is compatible with our being preyed upon by what John Stuart Mill called the “lesser harpies”) led to reduced wages and falling demand, which could only be ameliorated by increasing levels of private debt. Minimally-regulated banks were glib about this because the debt was backed up by assets (peoples’ homes) that were assumed to be likely to continue to rise in value (a spectacular bit of faith-based reasoning), and because they thought they could protect themselves by sheltering in a house of straw called ‘securitised debt trading’. It became clear that that house had no foundations when chaos ensued, leaving the perverse impression, once states bailed out the banks, that profligate public spending was the problem. This theory is controversial, but at the least it demonstrates something fishy about the assumptions of neoliberalism. A good introduction to this and other themes in the philosophy of economics, including an examination of whether we should see the economy simply as the sum total of individual actions or as having some kind of reality over and above this, can be found in Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: A User’s Guide (2014). Most interesting for us here is his rejection of the view 10 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

that neoliberalism gains credibility from being a ‘value-free’ approach to economics. Rather, Chang acknowledges that conflicts about values drive competing economic perspectives. In particular, he sees neoliberalism’s current dominance as the latest stage in the evolution of an ideological arms race between capital and labour (globalisation being its structural counterpart), which has hobbled progressive liberalism. In fact, since Thatcher and Reagan convinced most of us, including a now cynical electorate and political class, that “there is no alternative” to a radically free market, ‘trickle down’ has turned upside-down, into an ‘Archimedean screw’ conveying resources ever higher up the social scale, into the pockets of the increasingly rich (OECD Report, 2014). 4. Inequality is just and so shouldn’t be altered This argument’s proponents should get credit for being open about their aims. There is no pretence here of justifying inequality by reference to its alleged benefits. Instead, we have the claim that if I have wealth, then, provided I didn’t get it illegally, I’m entitled to keep it. The most prominent advocate of this position was the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, friend and sparring partner of John Rawls. In Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), Nozick argued that the record earnings of sportsman Wilt Chamberlain shouldn’t be subject to any kind of redistributive taxation, as advocated by ‘patterned’ theories of justice, such as that of Rawls. For Nozick such redistribution is a violation of Chamberlain’s ‘negative right’ to be left alone, and a kind of theft of what he has justly earned. However, there are problems with Nozick’s argument that one is simply entitled to what one can legally make. Firstly, it is not clear that one’s circumstances in life are always due to merit. I have a fairly pleasant lifestyle, for which I work hard, but it has only become possible because of my state-supported education. This is an example of an ‘autonomy enhancing’ result of the redistribution of wealth that economists call a ‘universal benefit in kind’, and an illustration of the truism that even equality of opportunity requires some reduction of free market inequalities. Giving my gains as a result of state taxation, justifications for keeping all I earn are already beginning to look churlish, and this makes me happy to pay into the collective pot.

Wilt Chamberlain, philosophy’s only famous basketball player

PIC OF CHAMBERLAIN. © FRED PALUMBO 1959

don’t impinge on the liberty of others. So he suggested a ‘lexical ordering’ of principles – in other words, a hierarchy – in which weight could be given to consequences under certain circumstances. This matters to our discussion because while Rawls favoured some reduction of inequality in the United States, he might have done so more strongly given the evidence provided by Wilkinson and Picket.

Secondly, I may inherit some wealth. This might arguably be ethically justifiable, but even so, the notion that I have done anything to ‘deserve’ it seems highly questionable (Mill favoured high inheritance taxes on these grounds, and one pertinent criticism of Wilkinson and Picket is that they ignore the role played by inherited wealth in maintaining inequality – see Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, 2013). Where Do We Go From Here? If we are convinced by Wilkinson and Picket’s evidence that the engine of social conflict is (growing) inequality, and we find no decisive arguments against reducing it, we still have to decide how we might best do so. For Wilkinson and Picket themselves, welfare is the answer. There are reasons to think they are only partly right. Firstly, some, such as the journalist David Goodhart in an article in Prospect in February 2004, have argued that societies with high degrees of cultural diversity can’t sustain the levels of welfare spending possible in monocultures, because people have insufficient sympathy for those unlike themselves. Recent falls in Swedish support for welfare have been attributed to increasing ethnic diversity, for example. Perhaps trust and solidarity between groups might be increased by establishing shared goals (as Sherif’s research seemed to indicate). But even so, enhanced welfare raises the danger of perceived dependency. Anyway, if we want to promote the autonomy of our fellow citizens, they need more than charity. A better approach would concentrate on raising the wages of the working poor. Neoliberals assume that welfare cuts ‘make work pay’, but higher wages would do this even better, and mean that indigenous workers might afford to take the jobs currently filled by migrants. The problems here are twofold: firstly, that increasing wages may decrease the demand for workers, causing higher unemployment; secondly, that the causes of pay stagnation in developed economies run deeper than can be fixed by simple wage legislation. Specifically, highly skilled jobs have been outsourced through globalisation, filled by skilled migrant workers (whose training costs the host economy has avoided), or destroyed by automation. To take the UK (where I live) as an example, this has left an economy polarised between a high earning financial services industry, and a poorly trained and poorly paid service sector, in which workers have little prospect for advancement. Politicians often blame low levels of student aspiration and poor skills on schools, but it’s the missing rungs of the ladder that demotivate young people, encouraging instead an escapist culture of celebrity fantasy. What has been called ‘absolute mobility’ is dependent on quality jobs for people to move into. Economies which are focused on shortterm profit maximisation, and which use socially-destructive deregulated cheap labour and long hours to compensate for low levels of investment, aren’t good at that. In fact, both US and UK Governments subsidise low wage jobs by paying ‘tax credits’ to workers (making businesses ‘welfare dependent’). The solution could involve diverting this money into grants for companies to invest in R&D, training, and capital expenditure (especially when it’s ‘green’), while making them pay a regionally variable living wage. This might promote the kind of structural and regional ‘rebalancing’ of their

economies that politicians and economists favour (see Danny Dorling, All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster, 2014). Some economists argue that the processes that have reduced the skilled manual sector to a shadow of its former self will do the same for middle class occupations. Fifty years from now, it is indeed possible that children won’t be spending most of their time in schools, and that many of today’s medical experts will have technological replacements (Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 2014). Perhaps new occupations will emerge; but we might have to consider ‘work rationing’ (starting with incremental moves towards shorter working hours) and paying people a ‘social wage’. This would be moving beyond both modernist and postmodernist notions of identity – modernity defines us by what we do, and postmodernity by our consumption choices – so that we come to define ourselves by the quality of our relationships and our efforts to improve ourselves according to our large-scale concepts of ‘the good’ (J.M. Keynes predicted as much in 1930). But this change may be crucial if our current model of economic growth has to be abandoned in the face of climate change and the suffering it will bring. Then we’ll have to give up relying on a ‘rising tide’ of wealth to ‘lift the boats’ of the poor, and take redistribution seriously. Some Final Points Apart from reiterating the divide between ‘progressive’ and ‘neo’ liberals (the former see freedom as demanding more than benign neglect), other points of philosophical interest emerge. Firstly, social science might count as a ‘real science’ after all: The policies I’ve talked about should bring about ‘better than trend’ improvements in the mental and physical health of the population, and falls in violence. But if they don’t, the theory behind them is falsified, in good Popperian fashion. Secondly, with our ‘elephants’ calmed, philosophy might play a larger role in education. The Age of Reason might actually arrive, freeing us from what Mill called ‘the despotism of custom’, and enhancing our capacity to re-evaluate the narratives that shape our identities. This idea will seem strange to those economists who see education in strictly utilitarian terms, but not to philosophers. (For a robust defence of liberal notions of education see Stephen Law, The War for Children’s Minds, 2006.) For Kant, freedom (that is, autonomy) involves more than being able to act on our instincts and socially-conditioned desires without reflection. His view has seemed to some (for example, Isaiah Berlin) close to paternalism; but borrowing from the ‘capabilities’ approach of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, I’ve maintained liberal neutrality and avoided telling anyone how to live or what their large-scale concepts of the good should be. My only requirement is that people have the opportunity to form such concepts, and live by their lights. What we find good or not good are matters of individual inclination and conscience; but the limitation of suffering and fullest realisation of our autonomy depend upon collective effort. © PHILIP BADGER 2015

Phil Badger studied social sciences, including economics, psychology, and social policy, with philosophy, and teaches at King Edward VII School in Sheffield. This article is dedicated to his father, William Badger (19232014), who first inspired his love of argument and debate. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 11

Mill, Liberty & Euthanasia Simon Clarke argues that deciding when to die is a matter of individuality.

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eople in liberal democracies have various restrictions on their freedom – there are laws against defamation and breaking contracts, for example. But we also have a large degree of freedom compared with people in other societies. Some restrictions of freedom – such as laws against murder and assault – seem reasonable, while others may not. How much individual liberty should people have? Is there a general principle for how freedom should and should not be restricted? John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had such a principle. His Liberty Principle states that people should be free from restrictions as long as they are not harming others. (Please note that for Mill, and for this article, freedom means no restrictions or coercion from society.) As Mill put it, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859, ch.1). Some major practical implications of the Liberty Principle are that people should have freedom of thought and speech, freedom of tastes and pursuits, and freedom of association, so long as we don’t harm others. Why should we accept this principle? Sometimes liberty is thought of as a fundamental value, intrinsically good for its own sake, for which no further justification need, or could, be given. Mill, however, provides various arguments for the principle, such as the general benefits accorded to society when people are free. Mill’s main justification, however, is that liberty is good for the person who has it. A person is better off when free. The argument is outlined below, followed by an application of it to a particular issue of individual freedom – voluntary euthanasia.

ILLUSTRATION © HANNAH MCCANN 2015 /WWW.BEHANCE.NET/HANNAHMCCANN

The Importance of Individuality Mill’s godfather, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, said that what is beneficial for people (their utility) is pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill thought this was too subjective a conception of the good life. We don’t just want a

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life that feels good, we want one that actually is good. An objectively good life, on Mill’s (Aristotelian) view, is one where a person has reached her potential, realizing the powers and abilities she possesses. According to Mill, the chief essential requirement for personal well-being is the development of individuality. By this he meant the development of a person’s unique powers, abilities, and talents, to their fullest potential. Individuality is achieved by critically reflecting upon life’s options, choosing that which most suits one’s talents and capacities, and actively pursuing those activities. It is to be contrasted with passively accepting whatever lifestyle one drifts into, or unreflectively imitating others. An occupation that develops your unique talents is usually better for you than one consisting of mundane and repetitive tasks, for instance. It is important to note that Mill is not against custom and tradition. He does not say that people must resist their culture to work out their own way of life. In his view, what is important is how one engages with one’s culture and its traditions. Passively following in your parents’ footsteps would be a way of life that lacks individuality on Mill’s view. But if a person critically chooses their father’s occupation (say) as the available option that best suits their abilities and temperament, then that would meet Mill’s standards for the free development of individuality. Liberty Instrumental for Individuality Given the importance of individuality, the next step of Mill’s justification of the Liberty Principle is to outline what sort of culture will make it more likely to develop. One necessary condition for the development of individuality, says Mill, is an extensive degree of individual freedom. Without such liberty, we would be unable to find and pursue the activities most conducive to the achievement of individuality. A common objection to this step of Mill’s justification is that in some circumstances extensive personal freedom is not conducive to the development of individuality. For instance, people might sometimes lack the motivation to develop their abilities, or be poor judges of what activities will help them to do so. In response, Mill maintains that people are usually the best judges of their own interests. People may not be perfect at making these judgements, and will sometimes make mistakes. Occasionally, others might be in a better position to see that mistakes are being made. But on the whole, individuals are more likely to be better judges in their own case than others are. They are generally also the people most motivated to find the things in life that best suit them. Others may be genuinely concerned with my welfare; but they’re not as concerned as I am. Since I am the one who cares most about what happens to me, it is best to let me decide what I want to do about it. Because of these considerations, as a general policy, the Liberty Principle – the maximisation of the individual’s freedom to choose their own lifestyle – is the best way of bringing about individuality. As Mill wrote, “Liberty is the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement.”

This is Mill’s main argument, and despite more than a hundred and fifty years of discussion and criticism, it still stands as a convincing case for individual liberty: the highest value of freedom lies in its being necessary for people to lead objectively worthwhile lives. Mill’s argument presents freedom as a universal value rather than a culturally relative one. Every person, no matter his or her culture or society, should enjoy individual freedom. Freedom is not the only thing needed for realizing individuality. Mill also thought that people had to have vigour and other appropriate personal qualities, which can be instilled by appropriate upbringing. Society also needs to offer a variety of situations, so people could choose something suited to them. However, people must also have individual freedom. Excepting children and the insane, for whom intervention for their own good is permissible, people should be free to make their own choices in life, so long as they do not harm others. (Freedom for the sake of individuality does not allow the harming of others, because that would damage the individuality of others.) Freely-Chosen Euthanasia In most countries (exceptions include the Netherlands and Belgium), people with terminal illness are not free to end their own lives even when they face a long, drawn-out, painful death, because it is against the law for doctors or family members to assist them to die. According to the Liberty Principle, however, so long as the person is a mentally competent adult and his family or doctor are willing to help him, then no one else is harmed, and so an individual should be free to make that choice. On the face of it, it is not clear how having such a freedom would help people develop their individuality. How does ending one’s life promote the realisation of one’s talents and abilities? Once we appreciate the deeper meaning of individuality, however, the connection becomes clearer. We’ve seen that on Mill’s view, leading an objectively worthwhile life consists in attempting to live up to one’s potential regarding one’s unique set of capacities. Yet a person may have reached a point in her life when no higher self-realisation is possible. In fact rather than merely fail to add to her achievement of

The Univocity of Silence Silence is just silence, it seems. But silence – that lack – does it not come in diverse flavors? The silence of the tower bell differs from that of the music teacher’s triangle, no? Sometimes we sense the contrast in subtle tones given off by each – low intensity vibes reflecting our own breath, our own warm presence, or the background notes of some obscure warbler. Other times we are simply bringing to bear our understanding that were each one to ring there would be contrast: hollow versus tinny. But what, now, of the silence of ears pricked out for prowlers, versus that of delta-wave slumber, or of biting one’s tongue? ‘Noise’ inside such silent ones (hope, fight, flight; low blood pressure; pent up umbrage) explains – indeed, explains away – the contrasts. © MICHAEL ANTHONY ISTVAN JUNIOR 2015

M. A. Istvan Jr. teaches philosophy at Texas State University. He is infamous in his department for promoting erotic mentorship. For more information please visit txstate.academia.edu/MichaelIstvanJr individuality, continuing to live an increasingly incapacitated life may even detract from it. Having already reached her fullest potential, a much-diminished continued existence may significantly undermine it. To prevent this happening, a person must have the freedom to choose the timing and manner of her death. Consider again the two reasons Mill gives for why free choice is necessary for individuality: that people are the best judges of which activities are conducive to their own selfdevelopment; and that they are the most motivated to ensure they live the best lives they can. These reasons are just as true for euthanasia decisions as for decisions in general. At the end of a life during which a person has developed his talents and capacities, it is that person who is in the best position of being able to judge whether further self-development is possible or if his individuality has reached its fullest potential. Moreover, others may be concerned about how long I live, but I am the one who is most motivated to make sure I live the ideal length of life – and I may judge that that is not the longest possible life. So freedom is instrumentally necessary for individuality regarding the matter of life’s ending too. We may worry that people in these situations may have hampered decision-making capacities, but that is a reason for caution rather than complete restriction. The person who is terminally ill is still often the one most likely to judge accurately the meaning and purpose of her present life – more accurately than others who could choose for her. By reflecting on that meaning and purpose, under certain conditions a terminally ill person may reasonably decide that her life is no longer worth living. © DR SIMON CLARKE 2015

Simon Clarke is Associate Professor at the American University of Armenia. He is the author of Foundations of Freedom: WelfareBased Arguments Against Paternalism (Routledge, 2012). October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 13

Surveillance Ethics Seán Moran is watching the watchers.

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e are being watched. As we go about our daily business, closed-circuit televison cameras observe and record our every move. There are over six million CCTV cameras keeping an eye on the public in the UK alone, and public surveillance is at a similar level in all developed countries. In some cities we can expect to be seen by security cameras around three hundred times during a single day. The increasing pervasiveness and sophistication of surveillance technology raises philosophical questions both epistemic (to do with the acquisition of knowledge) and ethical (concerned with living the good life). Surveillance Asymmetry Epistemic considerations preoccupy the CCTV users: governments, law enforcement agencies and businesses. Their desire is to capture specific types of knowledge about us reliably and efficiently. They wish to form justified true beliefs about our actions and intentions so that they can identify enemies of the state, detect crimes, and protect property, among other things. ‘Justification’ here is the means by which a belief can be shown to be true. A particular true belief is justified, and hence can be regarded as knowledge, if a person comes to have that belief in the right sort of way. In the case of surveillance systems, justified true beliefs about individuals might be formed by tracking them: by capturing high-quality moving images of them and analysing their actions in well-founded ways. The CCTV operator, watching a bank of monitors, and zooming and panning the cameras by means of a joystick, is somewhat similar to a police officer walking the beat, watching certain people who catch his or her attention, and making inferences from what is observed, such as “I’ve just seen a mugging.” There are differences between the two cases, though. The hunches of the CCTV operator concerning whether a particular individual is up to no good are gradually being supplemented by software that can analyse the body language, facial expressions and behaviours of large numbers of people, in order to identify those who may be worth closer scrutiny. Already a single operator can keep tabs on many more citizens than the officer on the beat. This is a quantitative difference. But there is a more important qualitative distinction to be made, involving the breakdown of epistemic symmetry. The Panopticon In 1787, utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a structure for observing prisoners that he called the Panopticon (from the Greek for ‘all-seeing’). The principle was that a central lodge in a circular prison would house an inspector who could look out at the cells arranged all around the circumference, as if from the hub of a wheel, and so could observe any prisoner he chose. Importantly, however, since the inspector would be hidden by a system of blinds, the prisoners would never know if they were being watched or not at any given 14 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

time. The inspector could observe many prisoners, but could not himself be observed. This is a disruption of epistemic symmetry: the knowledge is all one-sided. Prisoners thus had to make the assumption that they were being spied on all the time, so would self-regulate their conduct accordingly. There are those who like to compare modern states to updated versions of Bentham’s Panopticon, in which through CCTV the few observe the many without themselves being observed. As Michel Foucault puts it in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, power needs to be visible but unverifiable, in order to give the illusion of omniscient authority, and thus make us regulate our behaviour. This epistemic asymmetry in our being under CCTV surveillance raises significant ethical issues. Many feel uneasy at the rise of surveillance. They claim that civil liberties are being eroded and our right to privacy infringed. While few would object in principle to the authorities observing genuine criminals or dangerous conspirators, defining these is not a simple matter. There are fears that innocent members of the public are in effect being regarded as possible criminals, and that the category ‘enemies of the state’ might be extended beyond those plotting its violent overthrow, to those who are merely inconvenient to the government of the day, or just unconventional in some way. We see a frightening working-out of this dystopian vision in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. There surveillance has spread even to the domestic domain. The Thought Police monitor citizens visually and audially, influencing them by means of propaganda shown on telescreens that can’t be switched off. Any hint of non-conformity is ruthlessly suppressed. Even pulling an improper expression (for example, incredulity when a victory is announced) is an offence: Facecrime. As in Bentham’s panopticon, citizens don’t know whether they are being watched or not, so they habitually wear blank expressions and behave compliantly. The Ethics of Surveillance Although there is a widespread ethical intuition that something is wrong with an Orwellian proliferation of surveillance

Bentham’s Panopticon in operation

Surveillance in Valencia by Séan Moran, 2010

technologies, it is surprisingly hard to mount a principled ethical argument against the spread of CCTV. Indeed, some philosophers argue that there is no objection on the grounds of ethics. In Res Publica (2007), Jesper Rydberg compares a surveillance camera to old Mrs Aremac ('camera' backwards), who spends her days watching the street below from her third floor apartment. She is doing no harm to the people she watches, and they have no strong right to privacy, since they are in a public space. So, argues Rydberg, were a CCTV camera to be positioned outside her apartment to view the same scene, this would be equally harmless. A CCTV camera, though, is not a benign (if nosy) old lady. It is part of a ‘surveillance assemblage’ of millions of other cameras, operators, software and communications systems. If there were six million old ladies watching the streets, each keeping a log of what they saw, and reporting anything ‘suspicious’ to the authorities, like the Stasi informers of Cold War East Germany, we would regard them less sanguinely. Someone might also argue that our awareness of the presence of the cameras has a chilling effect on us, and since they are causing distress, they ought to be banned. This argument doesn’t stand up, however. Lots of things about a street scene might distress us, including the poor taste of the architecture, the crassness of the advertising, and the grumpy faces of the other pedestrians, but our reaction does not justify banning any of these things. Furthermore, the chilling effect is just what the authorities are seeking: it’s the secular equivalent of the warning that God is watching and taking note of any sins you commit in order to mete out punishment later. The cameras are ‘hidden in plain view’ (did you spot them in my photo?) so that the innocent citizen may not necessarily notice them, but the potential criminal will be discouraged by their unnerving presence. Looking At The Future Our willingness to endure personal privacy infringements for the sake of a perceived greater public good may allow a pernicious encroachment on our privacy that’s disproportionate to the gains in public safety. And it seems that the epistemic advantage enjoyed by the users of surveillance technologies will only increase, since the quality and detail of the beliefs they can form about us are likely only to improve.

Cameras do seem to reduce crime, or at least improve clearup rates after the event; but this does not necessarily justify putting the whole population under suspicion. A point may be reached where the statement ‘If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear’ will start to ring hollow. This is a slippery-slope argument, however, and it is hard to define the point at which legitimate crime prevention slides into insidious social control. For example, it won’t be long before individuals can be reliably identified by computers using face recognition software, removing the possibility of public anonymity. Add the joined-up use of data mined from our online activities, supermarket loyalty cards, and other computerised records, and knowledge-driven businesses will flourish. This is well illustrated in the 2002 film Minority Report, where biometricinformation-linked surveillance technology identifies the Tom Cruise character as he walks through a shopping mall and billboards call him by name, tailoring their advertising messages specifically to him. This scenario may not be far off in reality, if recent developments in Las Vegas, London and Tokyo involving smart CCTV linked to advertising displays are anything to go by. At this point the control element of surveillance technology will go beyond crime prevention, and become a powerful attempt to make us behave in ways congenial to commercial interests. Here the epistemic asymmetry of surveillance has intruded on our personal autonomy to an arguably unacceptable degree, without even the benefit of the argument that it is for the greater good. Sousveillance in the Hyperopticon So what can be done to mitigate the negative effects of proliferating increasingly sophisticated surveillance systems? Some states have responded by enacting data-protection legislation to prevent the unscrupulous harvesting of information about individuals. However, the business potential for increased profits and the political advantages of a biddable population that joined-up surveillance can offer, may make efforts to over-ride these ethical checks and balances irresistible. One attempt to revoke the epistemic asymmetry on which surveillance relies can be seen by considering Juvenal’s question ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ – ‘Who watches the watchers?’ The answer now is: ‘We all can’. As well as the surveillance technology of the authorities and business, many citizens now have their own personal sousveillance (sur = above, sous = below, veillance = seeing) equipment, in the form of mobile phones with built-in video cameras. In an inversion of the usual relationship between watcher and watched, these are increasingly being used to hold the powerful to account – witness their role in the Arab revolutions, and in cases of police misbehaviour in the USA and UK. The output of this sousveillance by members of the public can be distributed using the Internet, to form a synopticon, in which the many watch the few. So the partial restoration of epistemic symmetry that sousveillance enables may be seen as an ethical act that contributes to the good life for us citizens of the hyperopticon. © DR SEÁN MORAN 2015

Seán Moran is a philosopher in Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. In his spare time he uses vintage Leica cameras to photograph life on the streets. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 15

The Paradox of Liberalism Francisco Mejia Uribe explains why the rise of fundamentalism poses a problem for liberals, and suggests what they can do about it.

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undamentalism is creating a paradoxical situation for us Westerners. Pluralism and moral autonomy, the very concepts that once helped us overcome the bitter fundamentalism of the wars of religion, now seem to prevent us from counteracting the current rise of fundamentalism. In other words, while we feel the need to defend our moral convictions in the new global battle for beliefs, the core liberal assumption that moral conflict is irresolvable (pluralism) together with the belief that individuals should be free to choose and act on their own values (moral autonomy) seem to prevent us from engaging in direct moral conflict. This paradox is something we need to acknowledge and resolve before we can mount a convincing case against fundamentalism. Allow me to elaborate.

The Problem with Moral Conflict As citizens of liberal secular societies, it is no mere coincidence that we feel queasy when thrown into the arena of moral conflict. The history of Western liberalism, the viewpoint which underpins our current secular political structures, is a story of gradual moral privatization and a steady retreat from moral conflict. We are ill prepared to defend our own moral intuitions precisely because we live in societies where moral conflict was, until recently, minimized by design. So it comes as no surprise that we do not really know how to respond to the

rise of global fundamentalism, with its impetus to aggressively moralize the public sphere. The philosophical reasons why we avoid moral conflict were clearly articulated by Alasdair Macintyre in his classic book After Virtue (1981). In a nutshell, once we discarded the Aristotelian program of explaining things in terms of their purposes and instead embarked in the Eighteenth Century on the Enlightenment’s project of providing a rational justification for objective morality, we found ourselves sliding down a slippery slope that led eventually to our having to give up the idea of being able to provide any justification for an objective morality, and thence to what Macintyre describes as an ‘emotivist’ society – one which takes moral conflict as irresolvable. Macintyre’s explanation is rather simple but nevertheless powerful: from the analysis of what the world is we have failed to derive what it should be. We have been trying to do this at least since Descartes, but without a defined human nature that reveals our essence such as Aristotle had, we simply cannot seem to derive what we ought to do. Aristotle’s ethics had humans as they in fact are on one side, and humans as they would be if they achieved their essential nature on the other; and ethics was the enterprise of bridging the gap. But if you dismiss Aristotle’s assumption of an essential human nature and purpose, you’re left with trying to discover the rules of moralNaked moral politicking: A scene from the European wars of religion

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ity by looking solely at what is, with no Aristotelian ought posited in advance. It’s like building a bridge to nowhere. Logical Positivism, the philosophical movement born in Vienna in the 1920s and brought to English speakers by A.J. Ayer, also contributed to the demise of belief in absolute morality. According to Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936), moral propositions are meaningless because they cannot be empirically verified. Morality doesn’t ‘hook’ to anything in the observable world; so it unverifiable and hence vacuous, meaningless. Think what you like about Logical Positivism’s extreme argument, but objective morality never really recovered from its attack, combined as it was with many other Twentieth Century attacks on it. Philosophical debate about the status of morality is ongoing, but in practice, Western secular society gave up on moral absolutes long ago; and if faced with moral conflict, we shun it as a pointless and irresolvable clash of opinions. Liberalism to the Rescue The recent evolution of political liberalism can be understood precisely as an attempt to deal with this capitulation over moral conflict. I would even argue that liberalism is above all a brilliant political answer to what was originally an epistemological question – a problem concerning what we can know. If we have no way to know what is morally correct, and so choose among competing and irreconcilable moralities, how can we still carry on with our lives in a peaceful manner? Answering this question is the fundamental task of liberalism. From day one, liberalism’s laudable goal was to craft a system where, despite their diverging beliefs, free individuals could agree on a set of political rules that respect their freedom whilst guaranteeing a just and stable society. In other words, liberalism did not only want a solution to the drama of irresolvable moral conflict, it wanted a solution that protected individual liberty. Liberalism’s central emphasis is then, as the name suggests, on liberty. And according to the liberal tradition, to be free is to be autonomous – to be able to direct one’s own life according to one’s own beliefs. True to its Christian roots, yet given a secular twist, at the core of liberalism resides the powerful idea that human beings should be equally free to live their lives according to their own beliefs. The brilliance of liberalism was to identify the one thing we could all agree with, despite our seemingly irreconcilable beliefs, and build from there. This one thing we could agree with is that we are all free in the sense of not being naturally subject to others’ moral and political authority. Note that it is no coincidence that Western society could agree on this point: this was made possible by a shared Christian tradition that preached the value of the individual and individual salvation. However, by emphasising the concept of autonomy, liberalism avoided the pitfall of trying to justify political arrangements through any of the contested worldviews that characterize a plural society. The dilemma of moral conflict then dissolved, as we were finally in possession of a set of commonlyagreed rules that cut through our substantive disagreements. The first step upon launching this bold enterprise was to focus on the thing we all shared: our idea of individual liberty or autonomy. The core objective of political activity then became the protection of individual liberty – which means that

political discourse needed to abstain from favoring any particular moral or religious view. Hence the overriding insistence on state neutrality in regards to moral debates. This meant privatizing contested moral beliefs. In a liberal culture, coercing everyone into a unified moral outlook is recognized as impossible, since the point of departure is the presumption of our autonomy – our inalienable right to elect our worldview. Liberalism’s stroke of genius was to see moral and religious diversity precisely as the normal outcome of letting individuals exercise this autonomy. Suddenly, the fact that we disagree about our basic beliefs – the fact of pluralism – ceased to be viewed as a corrosive threat to social order. Instead, it became the mark of freedom, the manifestation of liberty in action. The philosophical capitulation on moral conflict suddenly became a virtue rather than a problem. In other words, for us Westerners, to be reasonable is precisely to understand and accept pluralism – the fact of irreconcilable moral conflict. Now, in a liberal culture, refraining from trumpeting our morality to others is the ultimate mark of reasonableness. Liberalism & the Rise of Fundamentalism If as good liberals we take moral autonomy and irresolvable pluralism as givens, is there anything we can do against those that lever their autonomy to pursue the fundamentalist agenda of denying other people theirs? In a society that has grown to embrace pluralism and equates moral conflict with unreasonable squabbling, what can we do to stop fundamentalism? What’s the problem? To conceive of others as being both free and morally and legally equal requires us to respect their boundaries and refrain from demanding that they endorse beliefs they do not have reasons to support, even if their own beliefs strike us as unjustifiable, even repugnant. Full autonomy in choice of values is part of what it means to be free. But here the paradox of liberalism comes into focus: wouldn’t it then be tantamount to coercion to impose our liberal values on fundamentalists? After all, if fundamentalists have their own reasons to support their beliefs, isn’t it a violation of their autonomy to force them to behave in a manner contrary to those beliefs? Perhaps even more worrying, isn’t it a violation of state neutrality to turn these moral discussions into public affairs, with the state siding with a particular view? Finally, even if we were to put these moral considerations aside and engage in moral conflict, wouldn’t it be pointless anyway, since we take moral conflict to be irresolvable to begin with? Many would rightly point out here that state neutrality and the promotion of autonomy do not mean absolute quietism with regards to others’ beliefs. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill famously argued that we should be free to pursue our own good in our own way, as long as we do not attempt to deprive others of their freedom to do the same. If so, then when fundamentalists cross the boundaries of others’ moral autonomy – as they often do – both liberal civil society and the liberal state are fully justified in responding, either through overt criticism or coercive force, depending on the gravity of the matter. But perhaps the deeper question is: do we really need to wait for fundamentalism to foster violent or oppressive behavior before we are prompted to engage in moral conflict? The danger is that liberalism’s well-intended conviction that October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 17

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the moral autonomy of others is to be respected, coupled with its position that moral conflict is irresolvable, leads to an unwillingness to engage in moral debate that gives fundamentalists ample room to fortify their positions, since, in the words of Michael J. Sandel, “fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread” (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982). The paradox of liberalism is now fully evident: the very freedom it has fostered, and the pluralistic world it has created, are giving fundamentalists both the room and the apparent reason to come after us and oppose this freedom. Escaping the Paradox To respond to the growing threat of fundamentalism, we need to escape this paradox and figure out a way to defend Western liberal values without violating others’ autonomy. Let me offer three suggestions. First and foremost, we need to reconnect with the moral content of liberalism. We cannot successfully defend our way of life if we do not understand the roots of its moral authority. To a degree, in carving out a private sphere for moral autonomy to flourish, we’ve become victims of our own success. We often confuse our freedom to self-elect our worldview 18 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

with crass individualism, and fail to recognize the moral dimension behind the liberal conception of individual freedom and moral equality. In his illuminating book Inventing the Individual (2014), Larry Siedentop provides us plenty of tools to repair this neglect. He shows us how Christian moral intuitions about the value of individuals and of individual beliefs played a crucial role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism. He helps us remember that the institutional arrangements of liberal secularism did not simply happen: they have a rich history which underpins their moral authority. We can recognize ourselves as individuals precisely because we are united in a shared moral tradition that fosters diversity. Understanding that tradition will help us regain a fertile ground from where we can mount a defense of our way of life against those who seek to undermine it. But grasping the profound moral content of the liberal tradition won’t be sufficient, if we do not reengage in moral debate with fundamentalists of all sorts. Although we cannot objectively ground morality, we still have a powerful tool we can use in our effort to reshape the moral conversation: we can argue hard for the practical consequences of our beliefs; and we should do so. Thus, we should steer the debate away from antagonistic discussions on whose moral beliefs are purer, better grounded, more legitimate. Rather, for moral conflict to lead somewhere, we need to turn it into a conversation about the practical effects that a life of freedom and moral equality has on our well-being in comparison with the effects of a life of fundamentalist dogmatism. This is our turf, and it’s where we’re more likely to take the upper hand. We need to show our opponents the appalling consequences of fundamentalist attitudes and the countless lives it destroys and opportunities it forecloses. This is the only road to moral victory. Its effectiveness is well documented in the very liberation struggles of the Western world, where oppressive beliefs have been defeated time and again by those who dare to point out their hideous consequences. Similarily, we need to shame fundamentalists into respecting the autonomy of others by demonstrating how a dogmatic morality falls short. Besides reconnecting with the moral content of liberalism and encouraging debate around its practical consequences, we need a final step to fully escape our paradox: we need an amplified concept of autonomy that allows us to engage in moral conflict without contradicting ourselves. In this case, the capacity to live our lives according to our self-elected moral beliefs should come to be seen as only the first step in achieving full autonomy. A freedom that deserves the name should seek to enlarge understanding, and itself, through a process of ongoing social debate. Before we can consider ourselves truly autonomous, we must subject our private values to open-ended debate. Moral autonomy that is not held accountable through such debate leaves us at the mercy of our own self-enslavement. It also corrodes our capacity to defend our way of life. If there is any silver-lining to our dark times, it is that the struggle against fundamentalism will in the end strengthen our own freedom. © FRANCISCO MEJIA URIBE 2015

Francisco has philosophy and economics degrees from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and works in the financial industry in the City of London. His philosophy blog is PostmodernPerspective.com

Free Speech: A Paradox Ryan Andrews reminds us what free speech is for. Tom: (tuts over his newspaper) Of course, religious extremists

and state censors are not the only enemies of free speech. There are also moral-majority conservatives, left-wing egalitarians, and many more overly-sensitive souls of every stripe. The variables are different, but they all follow the same formula: ‘If the idea expressed is sufficiently antithetical to our values, it should be suppressed’. If that’s free speech, then every society that has ever existed has allowed free speech. But for me, the logic behind real freedom of speech is simple: what constitutes the Good is entirely subjective, and the knowledge on which we base our judgements will always be incomplete anyway, so we have a constant need for new ideas – for new speech. Therefore, individually and as a society, we should act according our factual and ethical beliefs, but always allow for the possibility that we are in error, and that there is a new thought that we should be allowed to hear. Alex: I think, in general, that what you say is true, oh Socrates.

Tom: Sure. But where’s the wisdom in exacerbating the situation? Protest against the expression of political opinions is a preventable evil. Alex: But where do you draw the line? Am I infringing on someone’s free speech if I ignore her? Should we have a ‘fairness’ law that requires everyone to hear everyone’s opinion on everything? Tom: Well, most of us believe that the more medical research, the better – but this doesn’t mean that we think that all our resources should go to medical research. Likewise, my idea that the more speech the better doesn’t mean that we all should spend every waking hour actively trying to maximize the amount of available speech. My proscription for both, in fact, is that, as a minimum, we not actively interfere with their free availability. Alex: I understand that. But then should we limit free speech in order to preserve as much speech as possible?

Tom: (grimaces) So we agree that the right to free speech is not

an end in itself, then. I mean, we don’t simply want to allow a citizen the satisfaction of getting something off his chest … nor are we concerned that he enjoy some psychological feeling of freedom. Not that we begrudge him these comforts; but the reason we wish free speech to be a permanent feature of society, is that we want the actual speech. Alex: You are right there, oh Socr... Tom: (hastily) And if the point of free speech is that we want

more speech, the enemies of free speech are not just government censors, or those who would use violence to intimidate people into silence. Those would-be censors who protest or boycott others’ speech should also be counted as hostile to free speech. Words are weapons, it is true, and so they should be aimed at encouraging or discouraging action – never to expressly discourage other speech.

Tom: No, because if our support for freedom of speech depends on a belief that our knowledge will always be incomplete, and that what is believed to be good will always be subjective, then we cannot privilege the right to express one idea over the right to express another. Alex: That cuts both ways though. I understand the logic of your laissez-faire attitude; but if we can’t privilege the right to express one idea over another because our knowledge is always incomplete, and good is always subjective, then perhaps we should suppress that speech which would subtract from our total potential speech. Tom: But how would we know what speech to suppress? Alex: I know our knowledge is always incomplete; so let’s just accept the idea hypothetically.

Tom: Of course. But get to your point – we need to wrap this

Tom: Fine. Good is subjective, but the subjectivity of values does not necessitate the equality of values. You suggest that since we don’t know which speech is correct, it stands to reason that we should suppress that speech which would subtract from our total potential speech. So if the expression of an idea limits the sum of our ideas, I think we have to accept that sacrifice, and precisely because what’s good is subjective. If good is subjective, who’s to say that any sacrificed idea is not worth more than all the other ideas its articulation would prevent us from hearing?

up by the time I’m done with my coffee, so I can carry on with my editing.

Alex: (finishing his muffin and smirking) You must see the paradox

Alex: An admirable sentiment. But just to clarify: you’re not

saying that people should be prohibited from arguing against free speech, right? You’re just saying that speech should not be used to actively prevent speech? At the same time, if I hire someone to sell shoes, and instead he spends all day speaking on behalf of his pet cause, I’m not violating his freedom of expression if I fire him, correct?

– the paradoxes – in your argument? Alex: Well, almost all speech has the potential to discourage

other speech. The dominance of any widespread opinion discourages people from voicing contrary opinions; or perhaps even thinking them, I have to imagine.

Tom: (draining the last of his coffee) Yes. Hopefully we’ll be free to discuss it all further sometime. © RYAN ANDREWS 2015

Ryan Andrews is the author of The Birth of Prudence, a novel. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 19

Philosopher-Kings In The Kingdom of Ends Richard Oxenberg tells us why democracy needs philosopher-citizens.

I

would like to begin with a bit of a riddle: How do you turn a democracy into a tyranny? The answer, as those familiar with Plato’s Republic (380 BCE) will know, is: Do nothing. It will become a tyranny all by itself. Plato spends a good part of the Republic developing his argument for this, and yet the gist of his argument might be found in the word ‘democracy’ itself. ‘Democracy’ is derived from two Greek words: ‘demos’, which means ‘people’, and ‘kratos’, which means ‘power’; and so democracy might be defined as ‘power of the people’. This corresponds with Abraham Lincoln’s famous designation of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” – which he hoped would not perish from the earth. But what exactly are we to understand here by the word ‘people’? I can illustrate the problematic character of this word through the title of a book I was assigned to read many years ago when studying for my Bar Mitzvah. The book was entitled When the Jewish People Was Young. Even as a twelve-year-old the title struck me as grammatically odd. Shouldn’t it be: When the Jewish People Were Young? No, because the phrase ‘The Jewish People’ was not intended to refer to a multitude of Jewish individuals, but rather to a singular entity made up of those individuals. The word ‘people’ – generally a plural – was here functioning as a singular. So when we define democracy as ‘power of the people’, are we using the word ‘people’ in the singular or the plural sense? Do we mean a collection of separate individuals, or do we mean some singular entity made up of those individuals? It’s not altogether clear. Indeed, it turns out that however we answer this question, we run into problems. If by ‘people’ we mean a multitude of individuals, then what can it mean to say that power is vested in the hands of the people? Surely a collection of individuals, each pursuing his or her separate ends, cannot be expected to achieve unanimity in all, or even very many, matters of importance. If, on the other hand, we mean by ‘people’ a singular entity made up of those individuals, then how are we to understand the relationship between those individuals and that entity? Do the individuals owe the entity allegiance? Must they put aside their private interests for its sake? And what, anyway, is this entity? Does it have its own independent existence? Or is it merely, in the words of Jeremy Bentham, a ‘fictitious body’? If the latter, what claim can a merely fictitious body make upon the very real individuals who supposedly compose it? We can further pursue this problem by considering a phrase lifted from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “government by consent of the governed.” Consent of the governed, Thomas Jefferson tells us, is the principle upon which the just powers of government rest. But what if all the governed do not consent to the same directives of government? On what basis

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should conflicts of interest be decided? The simplest, but clearly wrong, answer is ‘majority rule’. That principle, applied to the antebellum South, for instance, would have justified slavery. Jefferson’s own answer was ‘natural rights’. Government exists to protect our natural rights. But what are natural rights? Where are natural rights? And how can a citizenry who cannot see, touch, taste, smell, or hear these natural rights be expected to govern their lives in accordance with them? Various theorists of liberal democracy will have their various answers to these questions.It is not my purpose to explore these answers but to touch upon an issue fundamental to all of them: that for such answers to be effective, citizens must be able to recognize the validity of certain overarching moral truths. In particular, they must be able to intellectually apprehend moral imperatives that derive their legitimacy from something more universal than the individuality of individual interest. Indeed, the specific problem Plato saw in democracy is that, through its emphasis on the supremacy of the individual, it tends to undermine the capacity for recognition of such universal truths in society. How then does a democracy turn into a tyranny? It’s the epistemology, stupid! Philosopher-Kings Let us consider Plato’s critique of democracy more closely. As he writes, “In a city under a democracy you would hear that [freedom] is the finest thing it has, and that for this reason it is the only regime worth living in for anyone who is by nature free” (The Republic of Plato, 562b-c, trans. Allan Bloom). A society that exalts individual freedom would seem the diametric opposite of a society under the oppression of a tyranny. But here we encounter a paradox. For if individual freedom is understood as the capacity to exercise one’s will without restraint, the ideal of individual freedom is the ideal of the tyrant as well. Indeed, we might define the tyrannical character precisely as one unwilling to submit to any higher principle than the unrestrained exercise of his or her will. Thus, ironically, democracy shares the same ideal as tyranny, at least insofar as individual freedom is heralded as its highest good. Plato saw that a society that presents to its citizens no higher ideal than the freedom to satisfy their own private interests, will, by that fact, become a society of aspiring tyrants, competing each with the other for dominance. Eventually, those most skilled at the arts of manipulation and acquisition will come to lord it over everyone else, and the society that most exalted freedom will become the one that is most enslaved. What might the defender of democracy say to such a charge? I believe she would have to say something like this: As a matter of fact, individual freedom is not the ideal on which a true democracy is founded. Rather it is founded on the ideal of respect for individual freedom – both one’s own freedom and

that of others. It is just such respect that the tyrant lacks. Hence, a sharp distinction can be drawn between the democratic and tyrannic ideals. Unlike tyranny, democracy demands that individuals curtail the unbridled exercise of their individual freedom where such exercise would impinge upon the rightful freedom of others. This distinction between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of respect for freedom is subtle and challenging. In particular, it is not so easy to say whence the ideal of respect for freedom

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The Kingdom of Ends by Federico De Cicco 2015

derives its commanding force. It is easy enough to understand why we value our own freedom, as this is a direct implication of our desire to satisfy our appetites; but this says nothing as to why we should value the freedom of others. We cannot derive the value of respect for the freedom of others from this valuing of our own freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, where individual freedom is heralded as supreme, we eventually get something far more like tyranny than democracy. Indeed, we can take this a step further. Not only does the valuing of one’s own freedom not imply a more general respect for freedom, but the two values stand in decided opposition to one another, at least where we understand freedom as the freedom to satisfy appetite. Appetite, by its very nature, is self-referential; it is a demand for its own satisfaction. Respect for the freedom of others, on the other hand, demands a transcendence of strictly self-referential concern. Where within us can we find the capacity for such self-transcendence? As Plato makes clear, certainly not in our appetitive nature. It is only in our rational capacity to rise above our self-referential appetites and sentiments, says Plato, that we can hope to achieve the self-transcendence necessary for the establishment of a just society that values the freedom of all. It is in this conOctober/November 2015  Philosophy Now 21

text that we can begin to understand Plato’s call for a ‘philosopher-king’. “Unless,” writes Plato, “political power and philosophy coincide in the same place… there [will be] no rest from ills of the city… nor I think for human kind” (Ibid, 473d). He’s saying that the rulers of a just state need to be disinterested philosophical thinkers, or philosopher-kings. Plato was aware of how outlandish this proposal sounded even as he wrote it, and much attention has been paid to the despotic potential of this political vision. However, his basic point remains compelling: society must be governed by those who are able to rise above the intensive self-centeredness of their emotive, appetitive, and egoistic impulses, so as to concern themselves wisely and dispassionately with the common good. The only human faculty capable of such self-transcendence is reason; hence only the philosopher, dedicated to the cultivation of reason, is suited for governance. To understand this argument we must recall that by the cultivation of reason (logismos), Plato does not just mean the cultivation of technical acuity, but the cultivation of that capacity within us that is able to apprehend the logos – the good order – of things. Plato’s contention is that those able to see this good order will also see that their personal good is best realized through it. And to Plato it is just such seeing that philosophy pursues. It is only the philosopher, then – the true philosopher – who will have the intellect, character, and (therefore) the motivation to rule justly and wisely. What are the implications of this argument for democracy? The answer seems plain: in order for ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ to avoid degeneration into tyranny, the people themselves must have something of the character of Platonic philosophers. To govern themselves justly, the people must be their own philosopher-kings, if you like. Or in other words, in order for democracy to succeed, it must cultivate ‘philosopher-citizens’, whose political commitments will be to something beyond the satisfaction of private, appetitive, interests. The need to cultivate this sort of citizen further implies that an education into political values is crucial to the health of democracy. But here we again run into a problem. Almost everyone will agree that education is generally a good thing; but many will balk at any deliberate cultivation of values, especially in the context of democracy. Values, we like to suppose, are a private affair. Everyone in a democracy has a right to pursue what values she will. The paradox is that this assertion is itself the expression of a political value that must enjoy general currency for democracy to function. It is not the case, then, that democracy entails the right of everyone to ‘pursue what values she will’; but rather, the right to pursue those 22 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

values consistent with the ideals of democracy itself. This leads us to the question: What values must inform a democratic citizenry if they are to avoid descent into tyranny? To consider this we will look at Immanuel Kant’s conception of the ideal democratic society, which he calls ‘the Kingdom of Ends’. The Kingdom of Ends Despite Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated pronouncement that the ideals of democracy are “self-evident” truths, they do not have obvious roots in human nature. Rather, what is most evident in human nature, as Thomas Hobbes most famously pointed out, are the ideals of tyranny: each of us wants what we want and would be happy to have everyone else conform to our wants. Because of this, the appeal of democracy can be somewhat deceptive, since its emphasis upon the sovereignty of the individual and the sanctity of individual freedom can leave the impression that the democratic citizen has no responsibility to anything beyond her own private will. But that is a misimpression. Instead, the democratic form demands that each citizen affirms their responsibility to respect what Kant calls the ‘dignity’ of every other citizen, and recognizes that this responsibility supersedes commitment to their strictly individual interests. Kant calls the ideal society organized along such lines ‘the Kingdom of Ends’ (see his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1785). In the Kantian Kingdom of Ends, each member is at once the end for whom the society exists, the sovereign who issues the law of respect for each citizen as end-in-themselves, and the subject who dutifully abides by that law. We can immediately see that a society of tyrants, or of those disposed to tyranny, cannot constitute a Kingdom of Ends, since a Kingdom of Ends can only exist where each member willingly affirms the principle that respect for the person of the other must override the demands of private interest. Kant manages to equate adherence to this principle with the ideal of individual freedom. However, the freedom of which Kant speaks is at a far remove from what is currently understood by that term in popular culture: it is not the freedom to do whatever one wants, but the freedom to do what is right. It is a freedom, thus, fully coincident with a selfchosen morality. That Kant is able to speak of such moral constraints as ‘freedom’ is due to his idealized conception of the rational person, as someone who willingly affirms a duty to do what is right as the highest expression of his own free will. If we now compare Plato’s take on democracy with Kant’s, we find that their differences lie not so much in their conception of the just society as in their different estimations of the democratic citizen. For Plato, democracy is inherently unstable, since its valorization of individual freedom yields a society in which everyone aspires to tyranny. For Kant, a sound

democracy implies a society in which each person recognizes respect for the freedom and dignity of every other person as the highest expression of individual freedom. At the heart of their disagreement is a different estimation of the moral and intellectual potential of the average person. For Plato, only a moral and intellectual elite – the philosopher-kings – can be expected to rise above the promptings of their appetites to willingly prefer social justice over self-gratification. Kant, on the other hand, envisions, at least potentially, an entire society of such people: an entire society, so to speak, of philosopher-kings. Toward a Democratic Education Again, what this implies, is that the right kind of education is essential to a sound democracy. To be workable in the long term, democracy demands that its citizens embody a specific, and identifiable, set of moral and intellectual virtues. It is thus the educational establishment – not the press – that should be regarded as the ‘Fourth Estate’ of democracy. As we increasingly see, without an educated citizenry, the press will only pander to the citizens’ appetites and sentiments. But it is not enough to simply laud the value of education, as is often done: the education needed must be one that cultivates those intellectual and moral virtues integral to the democratic ideal – which, again, is not the ideal of individual freedom per se, but of respect for the freedom, and, hence, the person, of others. Democracy entails the belief that such respect, and not the pursuit of appetitive gratification, is the highest expression of individual freedom. To enact such an educational program would require a major shift away from the technology- and market-centered focus of our modern educational system – a shift in the opposite direction to that in which, sad to say, we have been trending for some time.The problem is that technology, by its very nature, is ethically neutral, and that the culture of consumercapitalism fills this ethical void with a continual stream of messages equating happiness with self-gratification. The confluence of these two trends – technologism on the one hand, and consumerism on the other – has led to a conception of education that sees its principle purpose to be the imparting of technological skills for success in the marketplace – a marketplace largely driven by appetitive pursuits. If Plato’s analysis is at all

sound, this does not bode well for the future of democracy. What then is needed? Perhaps we can gain a general sense of what’s needed by recalling Plato once again. In his Apology, Plato has Socrates tell the famous story of his (Socrates’) encounter with the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle’s designation of Socrates as the wisest man in Athens leads him to interrogate its prominent citizens to see if he can find one wiser than he. After interrogating the technicians of Athens, Socrates reports that “they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom” (Apology, 22d-e, trans. Benjamin Jowett). Our educational system has largely lost sight of what Plato here calls ‘high matters’ – by which he means the disciplined examination of the values that govern private and public life. If the above analysis is sound, the democratic form will not survive such neglect forever. So what is required is an educational program that, beginning in the early years of high school, actively engages students in the practice of value inquiry, with the aim of imparting in them an understanding of the central role of values in guiding conduct in both private and public life. This, in turn, might then serve as the foundation for an extensive examination of the values integral to democracy itself. Only in this way may we have some hope of placing the ‘high matters’ of which Plato speaks into the thinking of the average citizen. We thus arrive at a conclusion that will seem to some as outlandish as Plato’s seemed to some in his day: For democracy to survive and flourish we must make philosophy – specifically, ethics, or value-centered thinking – the heart of the public school curriculum. The challenge for those who would craft a pedagogical program in support of democracy is to consider how we might best do this. Conclusion: The Power of the People To conclude we might recall the ambiguity in the word ‘people’ with which we began. When we speak of democracy as ‘the power of the people’, do we use the word ‘people’ in the plural or the singular sense? Our reflections indicate that the answer must be: both. A sound democracy must be peopled by citizens who see concern for the dignity of others, and for the good of society as a whole, as integral to their own private good, such that private and public interest coincide. This requires a degree of moral and intellectual sophistication that can only be achieved through a robust program of value-oriented, ethical, broadly ‘philosophical’ education. The morallyrealized citizen-kings of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends can become such only as they approximate to Plato’s intellectually-realized philosopher-kings. So a value-oriented education is essential to the democratic form as such. In the absence of such education, to recall Plato’s words, “there will be no rest from ills of the city, nor, I think, for human kind.” © DR RICHARD OXENBERG 2015

Richard Oxenberg received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University in 2002. He taught for eight years at Boston University and is currently teaching at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 23

Brief Lives

Albert Camus (1913–1960) Stephen C. Small looks at the life of one of philosophy’s rebel heroes.

24 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

boundaries of Paris. During these ventures he sought out other voices and differing worldviews. This unorthodoxy was mirrored in his novels and plays. His untimely death ended a most promising life. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in an automobile crash in Burgundy. His friend and publisher Michel Gallimard was at the wheel of the sports car, and also died a few days later from injuries sustained in the crash. Political Engagement As a progressive public-spirited intellectual, Camus abhorred capital punishment, militarism, state-sponsored violence, and manipulative control over peoples’ minds, and fre-

PORTRAIT OF ALBERT CAMUS © GAIL CAMPBELL 2015

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lbert Camus was born into poverty in Mondovi, Algeria, on November 7, 1913. He was raised as a slum kid by his mother, an illiterate charwoman. The family subsisted in a cramped three-room apartment. His father, a wine-shipping clerk turned army reservist, died of wounds suffered during World War I, thereby exacerbating the family’s economic plight. Such an unpromising start might have stunted the ambitions of a lesser person. Undaunted, Albert Camus transcended his social and economic challenges by way of his relentless drive. Having risen from abject poverty, he once wrote that physical hunger had better instructed him on Marxism than had Marx’s tome Capital. No stranger to physical illness either, he caught tuberculosis in 1930 – a recurrent aliment that might have killed him. And yet by 1936 he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. He was a handsome man, and romantically involved with many beautiful women. He was also married, and divorced, twice. On 5 September 1945, his second wife, Francine, gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean. However, connubial life was an anathema to Camus, who thought marriage a constricting and outmoded institution. More successful in the life of the mind than in his relationships, he thrived in his art, becoming a world-renowned literary success in his own lifetime – he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. A revealing story has it that one of his thesis advisors scribbled in the margins of Camus’ dissertation, “Camus is more writer than philosopher.” Whether the story is apocryphal or not, the comment is true enough, for unlike other existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) or Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Camus lacked a systemized philosophy. Nor can he be easily categorized as an existentialist (a label rejected by both him and Heidegger). Rather, in his thought Camus identified himself with nature and the ancient Greeks. As for his writing, Camus was best known for his novels. His most celebrated writings include The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Outsider (1942), and The Plague (1947). Camus was an Algerian of Spanish and French ancestry – and as such, an outsider in both Algeria and France, albeit that his literary accomplishments gave him access to the Parisian elite. But those who lionized the former slum boy were also sometimes condescendingly dismissive of him, and his vision of the authentic life took him well beyond the

Brief Lives quently placed himself in opposition to forms of oppression. In 1935 he joined the French Communist Party, hoping to inspire people to unite to pursue justice and positive change. Not everyone found his renegade style of Marxism endearing. In 1937 he was accused by doctrinaire Communists of being a Trotskeyite traitor – this being but a covering strategy for those dismissive of the horrors then rife in the Soviet Union. Camus responded with his own accusations, thereby stirring up the ire of the apologists, and alienating friends. During World War II Camus joined the French Resistance to fight against Nazi occupation. During that period he met and befriended Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus became the Editor In Chief of the Parisian underground resistance newspaper Combat, and Sartre helped found the underground group Socialisme et Liberté – albeit the group soon dissolved, leaving Sartre to a relatively unmolested life of intellectual pursuits. Unlike many of his colleagues, Camus’ thinking was politically nuanced. This was demonstrated by his having taken unpopular positions on controversial issues. Notably, he was among a handful of journalists to criticize the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. In 1948 he swapped the red flag of communism for the black flag of anarchism, joining the French anarchist student movement. He also wrote articles in support of Mediterranean humanism, central to which was the privileging of nature and moderation over ideology and violence. In 1952 an acrimonious break occurred between Sartre and Camus. The flashpoint arose in the divergence of their views about the Soviet Union. Sartre was seemingly in denial about the magnitude of Stalin’s Terror, and Camus saw in Sartre’s ultra-Bolshevism a willfully hypocritical stance. Sartre and Camus reputedly never spoke to each other again. Nevertheless, when Camus died, Sartre authored a heartfelt eulogy in the France-Observateur, praising Camus’ life and works. Camus’ Absurd Coping Strategies Absurdism is Camus’ variant of existentialism. So what is the absurd? According to Camus, ‘absurdity’ means a vast, almost comical gap between aspirations and reality. He claimed that life itself is absurd because of the the chasm between the meaning and planning we invest in our lives and the mocking indifference of the irrational universe, and explored this idea in his works. The idea of absurdity is also well showcased by the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924). In Kafka’s disturbing novel The Trial, the protagonist Joseph K is caught up in a waking nightmare. He struggles against a byzantine court system of interlocking threats, accusations, innuendo, but nothing works as it ought to, and he is stymied by all he sees and hears, only to be eventually executed by two bureaucratic buffoons. Like Joseph K, we cannot fit into the absurdity that surrounds us; nor can we escape it. Camus explains how our absurd situation often compels us to choose inauthentic coping strategies. The first such coping strategy is that of actual suicide, since the absurdity of life begs the question, if the universe is so indifferent to us, why not just kill ourselves and get life over with? The Myth of Sisyphus begins by exploring this question. But Camus argues that to destroy the self is an act of resignation bordering on the cowardly – an unseemly giving-up when one has the freedom to instead revolt.

The second strategy for confronting the absurdity of life is to commit philosophical suicide – the death of our critical thinking. Camus characterizes philosophical suicide as the stopping up of thinking to avoid uncomfortable thoughts in a scary world. So instead of facing the uncaring universe directly, we accept a plausible cover story. Thus, various religious and secular doctrines serve to foster hope that somehow the universe cares about our personal fate. Judaism, Christianity and Islam can each have a palliative effect on the dutiful believer. Or this same coping strategy might rely on a secular belief structure. For instance, Karl Marx espoused a utopian vision in which the communist hunts in the morning, fishes in the afternoon, raises cattle in the evening, and debates after dinner. So too G.W.F. Hegel considered that Geist (the spirit of history) guides us via the cunning of reason to an ideal society. Yet Camus saw Hegel’s work as little more than glorifying power and the state. Religious or secular, all such thinking is underpinned by the belief that some higher being or force (such as dialectic) is at the helm. Camus interpreted such ideas as an exercise in self-deceit. Our escape from the absurd takes us down some strange paths. From motorcycle gangs to consumer culture, we are replete with escapist strategies – but such solace affords only a temporary respite from the icy indifferent stare of the universe. Philosophical suicide of the religious type is also found within the writings of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 -1855). Kierkegaard and Camus both testify to life’s absurdity, but they diverge on an important matter. To Kierkegaard, there is something far greater than worldly existence – belief in God – to which rationality does not fully apply; whereas to Camus the meaningless is made meaningful by way of revolt. There is a good example of a Camus-like revolt in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick (1851). The ship’s officers Starbuck, Flask and Stubbs are considering seizing command of the whaling ship Pequod from the obsessively vengeful Captain Ahab. Stubbs concludes their portentous discussion by asserting that “a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer” to all that’s strange in life. This attitude is a revolt against life’s absurdity. Camus’ revolt may provide us with a royal road to an exhilarating sense of freedom. No longer bound by the prospect of thought-stopping philosophic suicide, we revolt not to avoid the absurdity, but to embrace it. Postscript Found at the site of the crash that killed Camus was a fragment of a novel whose plot resembles his early life, entitled The First Man. His widow Francine blocked its publication for thirty-four years. But rethinking the matter in the mid-90s, she had it published to great renown. And so Camus’ legacy transcends his brief life, although leaving us no easy answers to the issues he confronted. As Camus succinctly put it, we must “be happy with our friends, in harmony with the world, and earn our happiness by following a path which nevertheless leads to death” (Notebooks 1935-1942). © DR STEPHEN C. SMALL 2015

Stephen C. Small received his PhD in Military Studies from The Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio. He also holds an MLS in Liberal Studies from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, and a BA in Political Science, Excelsior College, New York. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 25

Addled Essence David Birch looks for the links between the teen spirit & the philosophical impulse.

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ear the beginning of his film Crimes and Misdemeanours, Woody Allen’s character offers his niece some advice. “Don’t listen to what your schoolteachers tell you,” he instructs her: “Just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really going to be like.” Besides Allen’s presumptions that the role of a teacher is to show us what life is like, and the Wildean suggestion that our bodies give away more than our words, his words also imply that in order to understand something you just need to look at the people who do it. You will, for instance, learn more about the Last Night of the Proms [British concert series] by watching it on mute than by listening to it blind. The audience says it all; and in life, the livers say it all. It’s an idea we might apply to the old dog-chasing-its-tail question of what philosophy is. Rather than think about what it is, we might wonder who it is for. What, for instance, do we notice when we peruse the people who take up this odd life? What family resemblances do they share? Who is it that we find hanging out in that part of the culture we call philosophy? Having spent some time in the high-security quasi-corporate environment of the twenty-first century secondary [high] school, I have been led to wonder whether there may be a thread of resemblance running between the adolescents I teach and the philosophers I am taught by, the philosophers I read. Adolescents are often drawn to philosophy, and if adolescents are drawn to philosophy, perhaps there is something adolescent about philosophy, and the philosophers who do it. The logic is loose, but the thought is intriguing.

Analysing Adolescence with Philosophy As a way into that thought, let’s start by thinking about something else. Though I teach philosophy in both primary [elementary] and secondary schools, I do not use the same material in both. I am less inclined, for instance, to ask secondary school children to philosophise about, and from, stories. Why is this? Why can’t the same content that is used to teach philosophy to children be used to teach teenagers? What’s the difference? A defining difference, it seems to me, is that adolescents possess a greater reality hunger. Adolescents are less interested in being told and sold stories; in entering into a situation that bestows tem26 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

porary omniscience upon the storyteller. Adolescents are less willing to accept neat endings, resolutions of conflicts. For them conflict and confusion cannot be silenced with a conclusion. Adolescence involves a waking-up to the world and seeing that frustration, conflict and desire cannot always be put to bed, even if they can be taken there. Where children are preoccupied with questions of fairness, adolescents become concerned with justice; where children think about play and wishes and fun (icecream and games), adolescents are drawn to love and sex and danger (bodies and consequences); where children stretch the rules, adolescents start to stretch the law. Adolescence, in other words, is leaving home: it is exchanging the family for the world; it is finding out what is on offer outside of the family – and that involves leaving behind the stories that hold the family together, the fictions that adults and children conspire to create. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has noted that ‘adolescent’, like ‘immigrant’, is mostly used as a pejorative, and often for comparable reasons. Adolescents and immigrants are alike in that they have left, or are leaving, something behind. They advertise the ways in which the old can be exchanged for the new; they live as though permanence is dependent upon the available satisfactions. And their freedom – their ability to unsettle our sense of borders and place – turns us, the natives, against them. They ruffle our feathers. Their abnegation of their origins strikes us as a kind of betrayal. They confuse our idea of home. Although the term is generally used with less disapprobation, I would like to suggest that ‘philosopher’ is a cousin to these pejoratives. Wittgenstein wrote, “the philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher” (Zettel, 1967). The philosopher, like the adolescent and the immigrant, is uprooted. The philosopher is someone who has left home and is wondering what comes next. “A philosophical problem,” wrote Wittgenstein, “has the form: I don’t know my way about” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). The picture of the philosopher as outsider is affirmed in the lives, as well as the work, of many philosophers. Wittgenstein was himself an immigrant, and others come to mind: Hobbes in exile, Rousseau in exile, Socrates the martyr, Nietzsche the nomad (he

addressed his readers as “we homeless ones”), Spinoza the excommunicated, Russell the jailbird, Thoreau in his hut in the woods, Diogenes in his barrel, Abelard disowning his inheritance and title, and so on. Stopping with the writings of Thoreau’s close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s a moment: these are not only notes from the outside, they are rhapsodies on the unceasing pursuit of the outside. He speaks of endless seekers, souls bursting over boundaries, the heart refusing to be imprisoned, limitation as the only sin, old age as the only disease, and the need to be permanently unsettled. We might speculate that the reason America so early and so resoundingly found its voice in philosophy with writers such as this pair, was because, as an immigrant nation that had less than a century before severed the cord that tied the Old World to the New, philosophy was a conversation it knew something about. Whenever things are fixed there is an authority at work, but a philosopher is someone who doesn’t defer to authority. Philosophy cannot be contained by the authority of individuals or communities. It is impelled by uncertainty, dissidence, apostasy, non-compliance. Another psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, saw adolescence as “the struggle to feel real, the struggle to establish a personal identity, not to fit into an assigned role… [The adolescent does] not know where they are, and they are waiting. Because everything is in abeyance, they feel unreal, and this leads them to do certain things which feel real to them” (The Family and Individual Development, 1965). The philosopher too is in abeyance, a state that Socrates called bafflement (‘aporia’, meaning ‘without passage’), Descartes called doubt, Emerson called a self-evolving circle, and Hannah Arendt called thinking. In Descartes’ mad image of philosophy – an image that combines the strange mix of revolution and regression that is found both in adolescence and in love – we must demolish everything and start again. Bafflement and destruction are necessary for something new. The philosopher seeks reality with all the experimental cloddishness of the adolescent. And just as Winnicott spoke of the adolescent as feeling ‘unreal’, so Socrates spoke of philosophy as beginning in

‘numbness’. Every great work of philosophy is an exhibition of the struggle to feel real.

A child largely lacks the capacity to change reality. They live inside the family; a world that has made them and is not of their making. For this reason there must be consolations and acquiescence. For the child there is such a thing as too much reality. For the adolescent, and the philosopher, reality is not an excess to be avoided, but a desire under pursuit. The Quest for Reality At School A thirteen-year-old recently exclaimed in the middle of my lesson, “I’m so confused about life!” It is within this confusion that there is space for an auspicious meeting between philosophy and adolescence. Philosophy in secondary school provides pupils with a means of staying with their abeyance, and through talking and thinking, of encouraging their quest to feel real. I do not believe that teaching philosophy in secondary schools is a preliminary to academic study. The attempt is not to produce proto-professionals. Rather than speak of teaching philosophy, then, it may be more useful to speak of teaching philosophical conversation and philosophical writing. The conversations and writings are animated by many of the same questions that concern academic philosophers, but these questions are being used as catalysts, as solvents: they are not demands, nor ends in themselves. Answers aren’t quite the point; questions are asked not to be resolved so much as to fission. The approach is exploratory, experimental, curious. The virtues being sought out are not the virtues of intellectual or scholarly activity, but the virtues of adolescence. Philosophy thus offers pupils one way in which they can be themselves. It is perfectly conceivable for a pupil who loves this approach to philosophy to hate academic philosophy, and vice versa. The lessons I give work on the basis of negative liberty – that is to say, I seek to remove impediments to thought. The lessons provide the opportunity to discuss questions on value, reality and meaning, and let pupils make of these what they will. Whereas other approaches to teaching philosophy in schools, such as P4C, have an aim in mind – say, to produce reasonable, caring and autonomous thinkers – the aim of such approaches falls more on the side of positive liberty – of imparting freedom rather than merely allowing it. I’d rather not be so goaloriented, I’d

rather jettison agendas: better to let things happen rather than make them happen. Within this ethic is the belief that philosophy does indeed harbour October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 27

the potential to let things happen. In this there is an overlap between philosophy’s virtues and the virtues of adolescence, namely, as we have seen, virtues of uncertainty, abeyance, noncompliance, apostasy, dissidence, subversion, reality hunger. These are the qualities to be cultivated and permitted. There may of course be beneficial side-effects, such as thinking skills and so on, but these are a bonus and not the point. Enacted virtues deliver pleasures. The pleasures that constitute this practice of philosophy in the classroom include listening to others – being influenced by, and mixed up in their ideas; riffing off each other; being listened to without correction or praise; the freedom to discover new thoughts and ideas; the freedom to speak without concern for the status quo; to be an idiosyncratic individual in the presence of others; an immersion into uncertainty – the uncertainty of questions, of where the conversation might go, of what you might think; surprise, confusion; treating the world as something to be customised rather than complied with; encountering conflict without having to either resolve differences or agree to disagree; encountering conflicts for which neither violence nor peace are the answer – where conflict is neither a state to be cured nor a condition to be tolerated; finding new ways of talking, new uses for old words; finding out what you believe and the things that matter most to you; or finding out what you disbelieve and the things that matter least to you. The conversational aspect of philosophy lessons hopes to show that through our influence on other people, what we say about the world can change it. Conversation is a way to quench one’s reality hunger. The virtues that sustain this kind of practice coincide, I believe, with the virtues of adolescence. Yet the breed of virtues that tends to be promoted in schools and in P4C is somewhat antithetical to this approach. Both schools and P4C attribute great value, for example, to the idea of respect. But respect belongs to a morality of distance (of preservation and order) rather than a morality of intimacy (of clutter and flux). And conversation is a form of intimacy – a kind of clutter and a certain flux. It doesn’t work at a safe distance. A philosophical tradition ridden with respect would not, I suspect, have produced Wittgenstein, or Nietzsche, or Diogenes, or Thoreau, or Rousseau, et al. Philosophy is not characterised by decorous sta28 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

bility. The history of philosophy is graffiti: a brick wall cluttered and splattered with the competing thoughts and overlapping words of philosophers seeking to redefine the conversation. Philosophy is a subversive activity. It begins when we think other people have got it wrong. Respect, reasonableness and care are of no particular use to a classroom of subverts, and being an adolescent is itself a decidedly disrespectful thing to be. So though my philosophy lessons are democratic, I am not altogether sure they are civilised. Philosophy teachers, as good democrats, should believe in throwing things in the mix, in being part of the mix, and in sustaining the mix. When we see our thoughts enter the commerce of conversation and alter the constitution of it, we see our thoughts become real and effective. We start to get a feel for the voice. Lacking clear academic targets, it would of course be difficult for this kind of teaching to find a place in the curriculum. No targets, no measures; no measures, no control; no control, no government-imposed standards – an outcome that sounds as sweet as it is far-fetched. And perhaps this is not so terrible. One of the best things about philosophy for me when I was at school was that it was not taught at school. It was an academic counter-culture, an underground: A.J. Ayer was on a spectrum with punk rock. If philosophy were made compulsory, its dorsal fin may flop listlessly over. It is impossible to centralise vagrancy or institutionalise bafflement. For Adam Phillips, adolescence is “a state of mind, not some putative stage to be outgrown” (On Flirtation, 1994). For Winnicott it is a period of “struggling through the doldrums” – an affliction with an exit. Despite their differences, both believe that adolescence is something that should be neither cured nor blithely accepted. My suggestion is that offering philosophy in high schools is one way in which adults can go about not curing adolescence, not shouting it down, nor anaesthetising it. Rather, it gives students a chance to be themselves, to speak in search of themselves, for a small portion of the day, amidst so many days spent clock-watching. The presence of philosophy can help prevent high schools from being mere detention centres for the lost – for those who, as Wittgenstein said, don’t know their way about. © DAVID BIRCH 2015

David Birch is the author of Provocations: Philosophy for Secondary School (2014) and works with the Philosophy Foundation (philosophy-foundation.org) to teach philosophy in London schools.

Can Robots Be Ethical?

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hould the driverless vehicles being developed by Apple, Google and Daimler be programmed to mount the pavement to avoid a head-on collision? Should they be programmed to swerve to hit one person in order to avoid hitting two? Two instead of four? Four instead of a lorry full of hazardous chemicals? Driverless cars programmed to select between these options would be one example of what the science journal Nature has taken to calling ‘ethical robots’. Another is the next generation of weapons. If drones weren’t bad enough, the US Defence Department is developing Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). These select their own kill list using a set of algorithms, and need no human intervention, at however remote a distance. Autonomous drones in development include tiny rotorcraft smaller than a table-tennis ball, which will be able to float through homes, shops and offices to deliver a puncture to the cranium. In July 2015, Nature published an article, ‘The Robot’s Dilemma’, which claimed that computer scientists “have written a logic program that can successfully make a decision... which takes into account whether the harm caused is the intended result of the action or simply necessary to it.” (I find the word ‘successfully’ chilling here; but not as chilling as ‘simply necessary’.) One of the scientists behind the ‘successful’ program argues that human ethical choices are made in a similar way: “Logic is how we... come up with our ethical choices.” But this can scarcely be true. To argue that logic is how we make our ethical decisions is to appeal to what American philosopher Hilary Putnam describes as “the comfortable eighteenth century assumption that all intelligent and wellinformed people who mastered the art of thinking about human actions and problems impartially would feel the appropriate ‘sentiments’ of approval and disapproval in the same circumstances unless there was something wrong with their personal constitution” (The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, 2002). However, for good or ill, ethical choices often fly in the face of logic. They may come from emotion, natural cussedness, vague inkling, gut instinct, or even imagination. For instance, I am marching through North Carolina with the Union Army, utterly logically convinced that only military victory over the Confederacy will abolish the hateful institution of slavery. But when I see the face of the enemy – a scrawny, shoeless seventeen-year-old – I throw away my gun and run sobbing from the battlefield. This is an ethical decision, resulting in decisive action: only it isn’t made in cold blood, and it goes against the logic of my position. Unable to do the difficult human business of working through incompatible ideas, an ethical robot’s program simply

excludes them. If, for example, the US Defense Department wants LAWS to be a ‘successful’ weapons system, their ethical data entry had better exclude the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), with its provisions on the security of persons, procedural fairness, and rights of the accused – or else the drone might turn tail and direct its fire at those who gave wings to its eternal mission of unlimited extra-judicial killing. Talk of procedural justice brings us to a philosopher whose work, I think, offers valuable insights into the problems associated with ‘ethical robots’. As an intelligence officer in World War II, Stuart Hampshire’s interrogation of senior Nazis led him to argue for the primacy of procedural justice over all other concepts of justice. There can be no justice in the broad sense without justice in the narrow, procedural sense, he said. Even if the outcome of a jury trial is identical to the outcome of a kangaroo court, due process leaves one verdict just and the other unjust. It’s the same with automated law. All the gigabytes in the world will never make a set of algorithms a fair trial. Rather, justice entails being judged by flesh and blood citizens in a fair process – flesh and blood because victims increasingly demand that the court consider their psychological and emotional suffering. By its very nature, justice cannot be impersonal The Descartes and still be just. “Use every man after System his desert,” Hamlet snaps at Polonius, by Peter Pullen “and who shall ‘scape whipping?” Delegating ethics to robots is unethical not just because robots do binary code, not ethics, but also because no program could ever process the incalculable contingencies, shifting subtleties, and complexities entailed in even the simplest case to be put before a judge and jury. And yet the law is another candidate for outsourcing, to ‘ethical’ robot lawyers. Last year, during a BBC Radio 4 puff-piece on the wonders of robotics, a senior IBM executive explained that while robots can’t do the fiddly manual jobs of gardeners or janitors, they can easily do all that lawyers do, and will soon make human lawyers redundant. However, when IBM Vice President Bob Moffat was himself on trial in the Manhattan Federal Court, accused of the largest hedge fund insider-trading in history, he inexplicably reposed all his hopes in one of those old-time human defence attorneys. A robot lawyer may have saved him from being found guilty of two counts of conspiracy and fraud, but when push came to shove, the IBM VP knew as well as the rest of us that the phrase ‘ethical robots’ is a contradiction in terms. © ROBERT NEWMAN 2015

Robert’s BBC Radio 4 series begins transmission on October 8th, 11.30 pm, called Robert Newman's Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution. The similarly-titled book, The Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution, is published Oct 1st by Freight. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 29

DESCARTES IMAGE © PETER PULLEN 2015 PLEASE VISIT WWW.PETERPULLEN.WEEBLY.COM

No, says Robert Newman.

Dancing with Absurdity Fred Leavitt argues that our most cherished beliefs are probably wrong.

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magine that you’ve developed a new lie detector test and recruit a thousand people to try to beat it. You give them a series of questions and ask them to tell one or more lies among their answers. Your device detects every lie and never calls an honest response a lie. Then comes subject 1001. Asked a question, he answers “yes” and your device indicates that he’s telling the truth. But you ask virtually the same question immediately afterwards, he says “no,” and the device again registers truthfulness. The man swears that he believes what he said. He submits to a psychiatric evaluation and is found free of any major disorder. He is not delusional. How is this possible? Here are the two questions: 1. Do you anticipate with near certainty the occurrence of thousands of events: the sun will rise, the alarm will ring, the car will start, food will have a certain taste, and friends and enemies will behave in broadly predictable ways? 2. Do you believe you can know that the sun will rise, the alarm will ring, the car will start, food will have a certain taste, how friends and enemies will behave; or indeed, know anything with more than the slightest probability of being correct? Albert Camus wrote that human beings try to convince themselves that their existence is not absurd [see Brief Lives in this issue – Ed]. What could be more absurd than to be certain of two important beliefs that contradict each other? I am subject 1001, and my contradictory beliefs make me lonely. I long for company. That’s my motivation for writing this. Read it and you too will dance with absurdity.

Radical Skepticism Plato wrote that we’re like prisoners in a cave with our backs to a fire which casts shadows on the wall in front of us, and the shadows are all we can know. Other major philosophers have concluded that we can know nothing with certainty – or even with probability. Many have tried to refute this position, called radical skepticism. They have failed. Of course they did: radical skepticism is the correct worldview. Even most cynics believe some things more than others: they trust analytic chemistry more than weather forecasting. They know that the outcome of a single toss of a fair coin is uncertain, but would gladly bet against heads turning up one hundred times in a row, and be sure of chicanery if it did. Radical skeptics sneer at these cynics for being too trusting. They see no difference between analytic chemistry and ouija boards. They deny the possibility of any knowledge – except for the indisputable conclusion that we can’t know anything. They contend that a coin is no more likely to turn up heads than become a Rembrandt painting or Tucson, Arizona. Camus opened his Myth of Sisyphus (1942) with the sentence, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Radical skeptics reserve judgment about the certainty of death, or that someone named Camus ever existed. 30 Philosophy Now



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The burden of proof lies with whoever claims knowledge. Nobody has disproved the existence of ghosts, but that’s not evidence for their existence. Similarly, even if arguments for radical skepticism were deficient (and they’re not), knowledge claims would be unjustified without adequate evidence. An infinite number of alternatives always exist to even the most persuasive inferences from any evidence. The butler did not always do it, even when all the evidence points in his direction. The Four Pillars Four separate pillars (seemingly) support our understanding of the world. That is, everything we think we know comes from one of four sources. Immanuel Kant proposed one source. He argued that we are born with certain innate knowledge. Religious revelation is a second pillar. People of faith are told who created the world, when He did it (almost always by a He, and in some religions, to the day), and what will happen when we die. Reason is a third pillar. Humans discern patterns, and use mathematics and logic to make deductions. The fourth pillar is sensory data. We interact with the world through the five senses, and then we combine this with logic to advance from simple observations to complex inferences. The naïve view is that we observe, and then we know. Seeing is believing. Ha! Innate Knowledge Kant claimed that certain key beliefs, such as ‘Every event has a cause’, precede all experience, because they are preconditions for human thinking. Experiments have shown that even six-month old babies act as though they understand connections between causes and effects. In Don Marquis’s Tales of Archy and Mehitabel, Archy the cockroach pities humans because they are born ignorant and must struggle to learn the ways of the world. Archy says that insects are born knowing all they need to know. Archy would have approved of Kant. But radical skeptics question the correctness of beliefs, not their origins. Newly hatched ducklings ‘know’ that the first moving object they see will be their mother, so they follow it. But when nasty biologists substitute objects like shiny balls or shoes, the ducklings follow those too. Their ‘knowledge’ is incorrect.

Religious Revelation Imagine a science fiction scenario in which extraterrestrial beings assemble the leaders of today’s more than 730 world religions. Eager to know which is correct, they give each leader two days to make his or her case. What evidence might the leaders give? Typical arguments might include, “God told me this” or “On Easter Sunday I bought a bushel of potatoes, and one of them was the spitting image of the Virgin Mary.” Would a Christian’s argument that the Son of God rose from the dead play better to the aliens than the Hindu idea that each soul undergoes many reincarnations until united with the universal soul? Maybe the major religions would expect their large numbers of devotees to count in their favor; but large numbers of believers do not constitute proof of a belief. Furthermore, no religion attracts a majority of the world’s people. ET would end up shaking her three heads in dismay. Moreover, if religious beliefs were culturally independent, religious preferences would be independent of time and place of upbringing. They are, of course, not. More Baptists live in Biloxi than Bombay, more Jews in Jerusalem than Jakarta, and more Muslims in Malaysia than Mississipi. This reflects the obvious fact that people living within a broad general region are exposed to the same influences, and are therefore influenced to have the same beliefs. Reasoning Many philosophers believe that the only path to certain knowledge is through reason. But reasoning abilities are greatly overrated (which presents us with a paradox, since this article attempts to persuade through reasoning). The skeptic philosopher Agrippa (1st C AD) contended that all arguments claiming to establish anything with certainty must commit at least one of three fallacies: 1. Infinite regress. The claim that a statement is true needs evidence to support it. But the evidence must also be supported, and that evidence too, and on and on, ad infinitum. 2. Uncertain assumptions. Foundationalists claim that some beliefs are self-evident, so can be used as starting points for complex arguments. For some foundationalists, mathematics and logic provide such basic beliefs: ‘2+2=4’; ‘If X is true, then X cannot be false’. Other foundationalists insist that basic beliefs come from direct sensory experience: ‘That cat is black’. Internal feeling is another candidate: a person who claims to have a headache may be lying, but it is hard to see how he or she could be mistaken. Nevertheless, none of these basic belief candidates lead to the enormous number of complex, detailed beliefs that are part of everyone’s worldview. 3. Circularity. The argument involves a vicious circle. Coherentists assert that statements can be considered provisionally true if they fit into a coherent system of beliefs. But coherentism is circular: A explains B, B explains C, and C explains A. Circular arguments are invalid. Furthermore, statements may cohere with many others, some of which are false. So it is possible to develop a belief system that is both coherent and entirely untrue. If reason were so powerful, people would more often be persuaded to change their views. Yet throughout history, illustrious philosophers wrote lengthy, reasonable arguments, and illustri-

ous others rebutted them. Similarily, every year, brilliant lawyers present arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court. Every year the nine Justices, chosen in large part because of their exceptional powers of reasoning, listen attentively. But whenever the dust has settled on arguments concerning gun control, abortion, affirmative action and so forth, the votes of most judges have been highly predictable. Brilliant Antonin Scalia drew one conclusion, brilliant Ruth Bader Ginsburg the opposite. And brilliant Clarence Thomas was mute. “So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to” – Ben Franklin. Jean Piaget showed that young children invariably think illogically in some situations. How can we be so arrogant as to assume that Twenty-First Century adult Homo sapiens has reached the pinnacle of logical thinking! A lot of everyday reasoning (and most science) is inductive. This means that our senses reveal the immediate present, and we use reason to generalize about the unobserved world from what we immediately see. But the generalizations require the assumption that what has not been observed is similar to what has been observed, or that the future will resemble the past. And as David Hume noted, we cannot justify that assumption from experience. To show this, Bertrand Russell invoked a chicken, fed by a man every day of its life and eventually learning to expect its daily feedings, but in the end having its neck wrung by the same man. Russell added that although we believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, we are in no better position to judge than about tomorrow than was the chicken. Russell concluded that there is no rational basis for induction. Following are two examples of inductive reasoning in mathematics. The first leads to a true conclusion, the next to a false one. 1. Consider the numbers 5, 15, 35, 45, 65, 95. Every number ends in 5 and is divisible by 5. An inductive inference is that every number that ends in 5 is divisible by 5. This inference is correct. 2. Consider the numbers 7, 17, 37, 47, 67, 97. Every number ends in 7 and is a prime. An inductive inference is that every number that ends in 7 is a prime. The inference is false. For example, 27 is divisible by 3 and 9. Here is a nonmathematical example in which an inductive inference may be incorrect: He is 50. He is articulate and healthy-looking. He drives a nice car. Therefore, at some point in his life he probably worked for a living. However, it’s quite possible that somewhere on earth lives a bright middle-aged Kuwaiti emir, or Rockefeller, or Bush, with hands never soiled by work, who drives a different luxury car every day. Hume destroyed the illusion that induction can be rationally justified, and Nelson Goodman put a stake through its dead heart. Goodman showed that a limitless diversity of inductive inferences can be drawn from any October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 31

body of data. For example, since all emeralds ever observed have been green, the obvious inductive inference is that all emeralds are green. So Goodman coined a new word, ‘grue’, which refers to objects that are green before a certain date in the future and blue from that date on. Prior to that future date, all evidence supporting the induction ‘All emeralds are green’ equally supports ‘All emeralds are grue’. And using similar definitions, ‘All emeralds are grack, grellow, or gravender’. So inductive reasoning is imperfect. But deductive reasoning, which does not depend on evidence from the world, follows universal principles based on rules of logic, probability theory, and decision theory. Conclusions from such reasoning must be correct – with iron-clad certainty. Or maybe not. William Alston observed that “anything that would count as showing that deduction is reliable would have to involve deductive inference and so would assume the reliability of deduction” (The Reliability of Sense Perception, 1993). Complicating matters even further, logicians have proposed many principles of reasoning, several of which are incompatible with each other. Moreover, even if two disputants each reason flawlessly, they might never come to agreement if they start from different premises. And premises come from observations, which, as shown below, are unreliable. Consider a syllogism: All A is B. Some C is not B. Therefore, some C is not A. Whether or not you judge the reasoning valid, unless you know from observation what A, B, and C represent, you have not increased your knowledge of the world. As Albert Einstein said, “All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality” (Ideas and Opinions, 1954). Sensory Data Empiricists believe that everything we know comes through observations and inferences induced from them. Maybe, but almost all important observations are second- or third- or tenthhand. Few people have walked on the moon or seen the chromosomes of a fruit fly, and nobody I know attended the signing of the Magna Carta. Furthermore, observations don’t help distinguish truth from illusion. Mental institutions are crammed with people who hear voices, or speak with long-dead relatives. And just because people outside institutions are in the majority does not necessarily make their visions more credible. Empiricists don’t insist that we see the world with total accuracy. They acknowledge the occurrence of hallucinations and sensory 32 Philosophy Now



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illusions; but they say that hallucinations are rare, and that illusions play a trivial role in daily life. They conclude that sensory data are generally accurate. Moreover, empiricists Gilbert Ryle and John Austin argued that our ability to detect illusions is evidence for the general trustworthiness of our senses. That is, from the fact that imperfections are infrequently detected, they made the dubious inferences that imperfections are rare and perceptions are typically accurate. Yet reliable estimation of the frequency of illusions and hallucinations is impossible. You may be experiencing one this very moment and not know it. Furthermore, even if our sensory systems were perfect, we’d still face two insurmountable obstacles to certainty. First, the fidelity of human memory is, to put it charitably, considerably less than high. Second, an infinite number of interpretations are compatible with any given perception. Maybe it’s churlish to point out yet another problem, but, strictly speaking, empiricism is self-refuting – the claim that all knowledge is gained through the senses is a claim not gained through the senses. We can never be certain or even mildly confident of the feelings or intentions of others. Polygraph expert Leonard Saxe said, “We couldn’t get through the day without being deceptive.” Daniel Ariely and colleagues analyzed several data sets – from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. They concluded that almost everybody lies. Self-deception is also very common. Any form of information about anything may be incorrect because of unintentional error, misguided theory, or deliberate deception. Our world of used-car salesmen, pyramid schemes and politicians gives good reason for generalized suspicion. We are constantly fed inaccurate and misleading information. My book Dancing With Absurdity gives dozens of examples from personal, historic, journalistic, governmental, corporate, and scientific sources. Furthermore, we may be manipulated in subtle ways. The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii causes a disease called toxoplasmosis that alters their hosts’ behaviors. Infected married women are more likely than noninfected to have affairs, and infected men tend to be more aggressive. Schizophrenics are more likely than non-schizophrenics to have toxoplasmosis. Some researchers estimate that Toxoplasma gondii has infected more than 30% of all humans. Toxoplasma gondii is one parasite. Undiscovered others may also affect human behavior. Nor do observations tell us about any underlying reality. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that we can get no closer to reality than our own sense experience, and have no way of evaluating its correspondence with the real world. Immanuel Kant distinguished between noumena and phenomena. He called external reality the noumena. But we perceive only phenomena – the appearances – since all our knowledge is filtered through our mental faculties. Science Reasoning and sensory data come together in the leading modern contender for establishing certain knowledge: science. Our ancestors lived in a world of unpredictable famines, floods, plagues, and saber-toothed tigers. To explain such events, the more imaginative among them constructed rich cosmologies of gods, demons and other supernatural forces. A few individuals noticed that some phenomena occur in recurring patterns.

your children, who was maid of honor/best man at your wedding – is a serial killer? Al Qaeda terrorist? Participant in a witness protection program? Of the other gender from what you believe? CIA spy? Polygamist? Embezzler? You may say “Zero”, but people just like you have been stunned to find out otherwise. The best spies do not look like Sean Connery in his prime, bench press five hundred pounds, and drink double martinis, shaken, not stirred.

“Yet reliable estimation of the frequency of illusions and hallucinations is impossible.”

These primitive scientists measured, experimented, and theorized. Their intellectual descendants made science the preferred method for advancing knowledge. The scientific method is the most powerful method ever developed for studying the properties of the world. Science is empiricism in its most sophisticated form. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Freud, and others may have probed deeper into the human condition; but science has dramatically changed how people live. Yet there are reasons to be wary about scientific studies. Errors are common, and there have been cases of scientific fraud, perpetrated by both mediocre and eminent scientists. More importantly, science is always a work in progress, its conclusions open to later challenge and revision, rather than being claims of certainty. In fact, many philosophers claim that the scientific approach is thoroughly flawed. Consider two syllogisms: 1. Theory T predicts that, under carefully specified conditions, outcome O will occur. I arrange for these conditions, and O occurs. Therefore, I have proven theory T. 2. Theory T predicts that, under carefully specified conditions, outcome O will occur. I arrange for the conditions, but fail to obtain the predicted outcome. Therefore, I have disproven T. The second syllogism is valid. If the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. The first syllogism is invalid. Counterexamples are easy to imagine. For example, a prediction O from the hypothesis T that ‘Unicorns run around at night in Golden Gate Park’ is that animal droppings will be found in the park in the morning. But finding animal droppings in the morning would prove nothing about unicorns. Yet this invalid syllogism form is the basis of much scientific reasoning; and of much of everyday reasoning too. Probability Without some certainty to rest on, probability cannot be meaningfully assessed. But we assess probability by using ideas that themselves only have a probability relative to further ideas. For instance, in calculating the probability of getting two sixes on a roll of dice, some of the many things that are assumed are that (a) the dice are fair; (b) the roll is fair; (c) the numbers that come up on the two dice are independent of each other; (d) the probability of two independent events occurring simultaneously is the product of their independent probabilities. If any of the assumptions are wrong, so is the final probability. What is the probability that your next door neighbor or close friend – who you’ve had over for dinner, who has baby-sat

Conclusions The skeptical argument can be put even more strongly: everything we think we know is probably false, since the assumptions upon which our beliefs are based are selected from an infinite pool of alternatives. The nearest star to our sun is about twenty-four trillion miles away. Our Milky Way galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, some of them thousands of times larger than the sun. A computer simulation estimated five hundred billion galaxies. The prestigious scientific journal Nature published a study suggesting that there are about three hundred sextillion (3 x 1023) stars in the universe. The speed of light is a little over 186,000 miles per second, so light can travel from the Earth to the Moon in about 1.3 seconds. Yet a beam of light would take about twenty-seven billion years to travel from one end to the other of the known universe (and that’s not factoring in universal expansion). Some people may conceive of a universe infinite in size and duration, or with equal ease imagine a universe with boundaries. Both strike me as wildly improbable, yet I can’t even conceive of a third alternative. With that in mind, the leap from our infinitesimally tiny part of the universe to claims about eternal and universal laws seems preposterous. How can anyone consider these numbers and continue to believe that earthlings have discovered universal laws? So, this article leaves readers with three possibilities, and the last two require a profound overhaul of worldview. Acceptance of either would leave no guidelines for behaving one way rather than another, as the world would then be completely unpredictable. I grant the implication. This article is an attempt to encourage others to help figure out what to do. Possibility 1. My reasoning is flawed. One or more errors invalidate the conclusions. Philosopher G.E. Moore argued against radical skepticism. He wrote that, if a seemingly sound argument leads to an implausible conclusion, the argument may not be sound after all. There is probably an error in either the premises or the argument form. So readers should evaluate every step leading to my outrageous conclusions. My PhD is not in philosophy, and my knowledge of the literature is limited, so there may be some important omissions. But I’m convinced that there are no serious errors of reasoning. Possibility 2. Radical skepticism is correct. We cannot know anything, apart from the fact that radical skepticism is correct. Possibility 3. We must give up on reasoning as a path to the truth. © DR FRED LEAVITT 2015

Fred Leavitt received his PhD from the University of Michigan and taught for many years at Cal State University. He’s written books on drugs, research methodology in psychology and medicine, philosophy, and medical practices, and a novel. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 33

Shaping The Self Sally Latham examines the construction of identity through memory.

I

’ve kept a diary in one form or another since about the age of twelve. Sometimes a few words, sometimes pages and pages, but either way every day of my life is documented – apart, that is, from the ages of fifteen and sixteen. As with all teenagers, these were my angst years, and in a grand gesture of would-be liberation, symbolic of new beginnings, I burned them. The intended significance of the event was somewhat eclipsed when I set off my parents’ fire alarm and I realised that burning paper in my bedroom was exceedingly stupid. But anyway, those years are now lost, except for what I can recollect or others can tell me (which is pretty much the case for most people other than those who keep a daily diary). Recently I spent some time looking through my old diaries. Sometimes forgotten memories were brought to the surface, but at other times I was reading about things I believe actually happened, because I wrote them, but of which I nevertheless had no recollection. At times, these recorded events reshaped my current self-perception: on some occasions they made me consider myself to be a better person than I otherwise currently thought, and at other times a worse one. What constitutes our personal identity over time has long been the subject of debate, but how much influence can we have over our own identity and self-perception? The ‘memory criterion’ of identity is usually attributed to English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). This interpretation of Locke is the subject of debate, but nevertheless it is the most popular interpretation, and the one that will be adopted here. Locke distinguishes a ‘person’ from a ‘man’. The ‘man’ means the organism, an animal like any other, whose identity over time consists in its continuity of biological life. This means that although parts can be gained and lost (we grow and shed skin cells, for example) there must be continuity within this change for us to be talking about the same man. Concerning the identity of the person themselves – the thinking being – perhaps surprisingly for his time and culture, Locke claims that personal identity is not tied up with the soul. This is because he thinks that the same soul could in fact play host to different consciousnesses. It is your consciousness which makes you the same person over time; specifically it is the continuity of your memories. The continuation of personal identity through memory is crucial for justice. For instance, in order to properly see the consequences of our actions and maintain our full responsibility for them, we must be able to contemplate our future selves as connected to the person about to carry out an action now, and we also must remember an action for it to qualify as really being ‘me’ who did it. (However in practical terms, since we cannot check the accuracy of someone’s memory, the courts often end up punishing a man who was demonstrably physically connected to a crime, regardless of his memory claims.) The implication of Locke’s memory criterion for identity seems to be that my identity changes over time as my memories

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fade, or perhaps reappear after a period of absence. One famous objection to Locke’s view along these lines was from Thomas Reid (1710–1796). I’ll give an adapted version. Suppose that as a ten year old I am given a bike for Christmas. When I am thirty, I am given an iPhone for Christmas, and I can remember being given the bike. When I am eighty, I can recall being given the iPhone, but have no recollection of being given the bike. The argument is that according to Locke’s memory criterion, the eighty year old ‘me’ is the same person as the thirty year old ‘me’ but is no longer the same person as the ten year old who received that bike. The thirty year old is the same person as the ten year old as they can remember the bike. However this cannot be true according to the rules of logic. The eighty year old (A) is identical to the thirty year old (B) and the thirty year old (B) is the same as the ten year old (C), but the eighty year old (A) is not identical to the ten year old (C). But the laws of logic state that if A=B and B=C then A=C. So Locke must be wrong. A standard response to this objection is to refer to chains of interconnected or overlapping memories. The eighty year old does not have to be directly connected to the ten year old through memory, provided there is a chain of memories, intertwined so to speak. Admittedly I sometimes struggle to remember what I did a couple of weeks ago, but hopefully the day after I could remember what I did, and the day after that I can remember the day before, and so on. A different problem with the memory criterion is that of false memories. It might seem that the very term is a contradiction: either we remember truly, or we don’t remember at all. But it is certainly possible to have a first person experience of remembering being present at an event when one was not present, and this could be indistinguishable from a ‘real’ memory. If I woke up with vivid apparent memories of being Lady Gaga and performing at Wembley, wouldn’t this make me Lady Gaga the person (if not the physical woman) according to Locke’s criterion of identity? Again, we can reply to this with a qualification. Perhaps the state of consciousness we are experiencing as a memory needs to have an appropriate causal relationship with the event being experienced for it to be called a genuine memory. So unless my ‘memory’ of singing at Wembley is caused by my actually singing at the concert, then it’s not a memory at all, and can’t be included in Locke’s theory. We could also revise Locke’s theory to incorporate an appeal to a causal dependance on broader psychological factors going beyond memory – to include beliefs and character, for example (see Sydney Shoemaker, Personal Identity, 1984, with Richard Swinburne). This revised theory would say that a future being will be me if this being’s future psychological states are dependent in a typically human way on my current ones. In other words, this future being can be said to be psychologically continuous with my present self provided there is a chain of suitably connected psychological states.

A long line of Locke

Self-Identity Through Memory The above is old ground, and most people would agree that memory is an important part of our identity, whether or not they would go so far as to say it is either sufficient or necessary for it. But my question now is, how much influence can we have in shaping our identity and self-perception through memory? As we go through life we forget some things and remember others. Often this seems to be an involuntary process. Indeed there are many things we may wish we remembered, and many we wish we could forget. In social terms, anthropologists and sociologists widely believe that the collective memory of a group is a social construction. There are those in society with the power to construct the collective memory: we are reminded of what is deemed to be important to group identity through media, religion, ritual, and taught history. Of course there are extremes of this, where the history books have literally been rewritten. But the collective memory of the World Wars, and other significant historical events, are maintained and reinforced in folk culture, so that even those of us who were not present at those events have mental images of them, and they are important in shaping social or national identity. For more on this, see the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945). Could the same be true of individual memory and self-perception? If one keeps a diary, there exist potential triggers for memory which otherwise would have been lost, or at least inaccessible. Say I sit and read the diary entries for my eighteen-year-old self. There may be events I had forgotten that I now recall. Let’s say there’s an entry for some hilarious student prank, such as stealing a shopping trolley and riding it down the street. I read this entry and I think, “Oh yes, I’d forgotten about that night.” One interesting implication is that, according to a straightforward understanding of Locke’s criterion – that is, should we take a direct memory criterion rather than an interconnected memory view or a broader psychological view – the student who stole the trolley ceased to be me, and then, when I read about the incident, became me once again. This rescued memory also affects my immediate self-perception. I may think to myself “Wow, I’m actually an idiot.” Reading about past events in my life may also help me to understand my current beliefs, actions and character.

The element of choice now becomes even more important. The ill-advised burning of diaries was an active decision not to remember – a cutting of ties with a previous self one wants no connection with, so that they can have no impact on one’s future self. On a lesser scale, when I sit down each night to write the day’s events, I have a decision to make. What I write will affect my future identity, my self-perception, when I read it back. This is the case for either a memory criterion or for a broader psychological interpretation. If one takes a strict interpretation of Locke, then at a future date when I use these words as a memory trigger, my present self will become identical with a future self whose memory is triggered. What I choose not to include runs the risk of being forgotten, and so of ceasing to be ‘me’ at a future date. (If we take the interpretation of overlapping or interconnected memories as being sufficient for personal identity through time, then forgotten memories are less important.) There are questions raised here to which I do not have answers. There is certainly an implication to consider. I can actively shape my future self by modifying my future memory, based on what I decide to record or not record as future memory triggers. Mind Games If we take a broader psychological interpretation of the nature of identity, what I later read about my current endeavours will also affect my sense of identity in terms of my selfperception. If I read the pages of a diary and then think better or worse of myself, or even change my beliefs, would this qualify as the psychological connectedness we mentioned, in which the psychological state of my future self is caused at least in part by the psychological state of my present self? Here we could even remove memory completely, and concentrate solely on self-perception rather than continuity of identity. For instance, I could, at the age of eighteen, record a completely fictitious day, specifically intended to make my eighty-year-old self think in a certain way about their identity. It is also worth thinking about identity in the context of social media, where we carve out a public record of our identity on sites such as Facebook. What we expose to public scrutiny is often carefully selected, and photographs of a night rather forgotten are hastily untagged in order that we may erase them from our digital identity. Unfortunately, participation in social media does put the construction and maintenance of individual memory, identity, and self-perception at least partly in the hands of others. It seems that what we remember of our past is a huge factor in identity, whether as a strict link ensuring a link between past and present selves or as part of a broader psychological approach where my present psychological states can in some way affect my future psychological states. What I find most interesting is that when we consider a diary, whether the oldfashioned written journal or a digital version, the link can be lost and regained, and also manipulated to actively shape our future selves. So when I sit and write a diary tonight, I must ask myself … who exactly do I want to be? © SALLY LATHAM 2015

Sally Latham is a Philosophy and Anthropology lecturer at Birmingham Metropolitan College. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 35

The Life & Death of

Common Sense

W

e think we know what common sense is, and whatever it is, that we have it. But some people don’t have much, and those who do would be hard-pressed to define it. Bishop Berkeley said in his Philosophical Commentaries (no.751) that he aimed “to be eternally banishing Metaphisics &c & recalling Men to Common Sense.” But Berkeley’s way of recalling us to common sense was to argue that there are no physical objects, only God and ideas, which seems the very opposite of common sense; Thomas Reid, the protagonist of my story, called it ‘metaphysical lunacy’ (Works, ed. Hamilton, 1880, 1:127). It is also part of common sense to learn fast not to touch hot stoves, and the like. As Reid put it (183), “I resolve not to believe my senses. I break my nose against a post… I step into a dirty kennel; and after twenty such wise rational actions, I am taken up and clapped into a madhouse.”

An obituary by Toni Vogel Carey

2. Common Sense Comes of Age The big surprise is where this occurred. At the turn of the eighteenth century Scotland was a remote backwater. But the Union with England Act of 1707 – the Act recently reaffirmed in the Scottish referendum of September 2014 – made it possible for Scotland to join the civilized world. Within thirty years Glasgow was a bustling commercial city; within fifty years Edinburgh surpassed Leiden as the premier medical school in the West. Our tale, though, takes place not in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but in the even more remote town of Aberdeen. More specifically, it takes place in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, launched in 1758 by Thomas Reid. This was the heyday of the learned society, and that in Aberdeen, nicknamed the Wise Club, was among the best. Several papers presented there became books that made their authors well known, and their discussions covered almost everything under the sun. Here is a smattering:

1. The Birth • How to structure education so as to best prepare for the different busiCommon sense had two parents, appropriately enough, one nesses of life? Greek, one Roman. In Book 3 of De Anima Aristotle posited • What is it that provokes laughter? that in addition to the five basic senses there must be a sixth or • Do animals have souls, and if so, how do they differ from those of humans? common sense that can perceive what he called ‘common sensi• When is lime a proper manure? bles’ such as motion, number, shape, and size, which combine • Is there reason to believe that friendships of this life might continue after and/or go beyond what sight and smell can reveal. In a different death? vein, the Roman Stoic philosopher Cicero construed sensus com• Might hearing be improved by some device, as seeing is by glasses? munis as the shared, often unspoken values and beliefs of a com• Is slavery inconsistent with good government? (Most Scots opposed slavery.) munity. This was the root of common law, on which British and • Is it equitable that people be taxed proportionately and not equally? then American law was based. We hear little more until René Descartes, the so-called In our age of narrow specialization, the question naturally ‘father’ of modern philosophy, opened his Discourse on Method in arises whether these wide-ranging discussions could have been 1637 with the notion of bon sens as the ability to do simple reaanything more than sophomoric bull sessions. But the Wise soning about practical everyday matters. Later in the century Club meant business. A penalty of half a crown was imposed for John Locke used the term ‘common sense’ with a similar meanfailing to deliver a paper without a good excuse. Members began ing. In his 1709 book Sensus Communis, though, Locke’s pupil preparing three years ahead of time for the Transit of Venus, due Lord Shaftesbury brought back the Stoic idea of an innate in June 1761. The far more prestigious Royal Society of London “sense of the publick weal and of the common interest.” did not begin its preparations until a year before the transit, and The influential and popular magazine The Spectator was then only when prodded to action by the French astronomer launched in 1711 to “diffuse good Sense through the Bulk of a Delisle. So the Wise Club lived up to its name. People.” At first that meant mostly people of good breeding, but soon it had more universal overtones. By the 1730s there 3. Common Sense vs. Skepticism was a publication titled Common Sense. And in Henry Fielding’s Reid’s primary purpose in spearheading the Wise Club, how1736 play ‘The Life and ever, was not to discuss friendDeath of Common Sense’, ship in the afterlife. His misQueen Ignorance, assisted by sion was to discredit the the learned professions (law, philosophical skepticism of medicine and religion), sucfellow Scot David Hume, ceeds in murdering Queen whom he charged, quite accuCommon Sense. The tug of rately, with “shock[ing] the war between ordinary wisdom common sense of mankind,” and that of the learned was a and its religious sensibilities persistent and prominent into the bargain. Hume gave theme. But common sense was subtle and powerful reasons to here to stay as a foundation of be skeptical about the foundasocial and moral order. And it tions of morality, about the would soon become a school existence of God, even about The signing of the US Constitution (see p.38) of philosophy. the everyday connection of 36 Philosophy Now



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cause and effect. By contrast, Reid’s basic premise was simple: that reason has two functions, “to judge of things self-evident” and “to draw conclusions not self-evident from those that are;” and the former is “the sole province of common sense.” Reid called the skeptical philosophy “ridiculous, even to those who cannot detect the fallacy of it. It can have no other tendency than to show the acuteness of the sophist…making mankind Yahoos.” At one point he went so far as to declare, “I despise Philosophy, and renounce its guidance; let my soul dwell with Common Sense.” All he really meant by this, though, was that philosophers are no more qualified than anyone else to decide on the merits of common-sense propositions. They might still be better at drawing ‘conclusions not self-evident’ from those that are. And while Reid’s attack was heated, it was entirely friendly. He wrote a charming letter to Hume in 1763, saying in part, “A little philosophical society here... is much indebted to you for its entertainment... You are brought oftener than any other man to the bar, accused and defended with great zeal, but without bitterness. If you write no more... I am afraid we shall be at a loss for subjects.” (Reid, Works, ed. Hamilton, 1:92, 101, 425) The most influential book to come out of the Wise Club, and the defining text of what became known as the Common Sense School, was Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. It appeared in 1764, and the same year Reid was appointed to the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, replacing Adam Smith, who soon began work on Wealth of Nations. Today Hume is on every top-ten list of the most important philosophers in history, whereas Reid might not make the top fifty. Moreover, Hume’s fame rests very considerably on the skeptical questions he raised, questions only a philosopher would ask, since they make no difference at all in real life. Hume knew as much, of course, and said so. After “I play a game of backgammon [and] am merry with my friends,” he wrote in the Treatise on Human Nature (I.iv.7), “when I return to my skeptical speculations, they seem cold and ridiculous” – the same word Reid used to describe them. But Hume adds something that Reid seems to have missed: that the skeptic should be skeptical “of his philosophical doubts as well as of his philosophical conviction[s].” Hume’s underlying point is that we don’t know as much as we think we do, so a certain “caution and modesty,” as he put it in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (XII. iii), should accompany all our assertions. 4. Common Sense Goes to America Reid’s philosophy of common sense crossed the Atlantic in 1768, if not before, with the Scottish Presbyterian pastor John Witherspoon, the newly appointed president of what is now Princeton University. Witherspoon was soon the most important educator in colonial America. And he promulgated “plain common sense,” as he liked to call it, in tracts and sermons to congregations and Sunday schools all over the budding nation, as well as at Princeton, where in addition to future President James Madison, he personally taught 13 future college presidents, 20 United States senators, 13 governors, and 3 Justices of the Supreme Court. Even without Witherspoon common sense would have found a ready welcome in the new world, particularly in Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin personified this quality. Moreover, Franklin had broad and deep Scottish connections. His Proposal for the Education of Youth (1749) drew on the writings of two Aberdeen professors; and when he launched the

College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), he picked William Smith of Aberdeen to run it. He visited Scotland twice, meeting all the most important figures there, and receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1759 for his science of electricity; that is how he came to be called ‘Dr Franklin’. Among the many letters of introduction Franklin wrote for people going abroad, or those coming to America, was one for Thomas Paine, who arrived in Philadelphia from England in 1774, at age 37 a bankrupt corset-maker with two failed marriages. Probably at Franklin’s suggestion, Paine was hired by Robert Aiken, publisher of the Pennsylvania Magazine, and a recent arrival from Aberdeen himself. On January 10th 1776 Paine published a 58-page pamphlet, ‘Common Sense for eighteen pence’ that became the first instant American bestseller, and in just six months led directly to the Declaration of Independence. The title was actually not Paine’s idea, but that of the Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush, who had studied medicine at Edinburgh, and who wrote his own essay, ‘Thoughts on Common Sense’. Paine used the term only three times in the pamphlet, in addition to the title, although he later wrote newspaper pieces under the pen name ‘Common Sense’. He died in obscurity, having accomplished one big thing: to convince even those to whom revolution seemed unthinkable – and they included many, if not most – that, hey, its just a matter of common sense! 5. From Common Sense to Self-Rule As I said, Reid’s position was that the first job of reason is “to judge of things self-evident;” and that raises the question of the origin of the term ‘self-evident’ in the Declaration of Independence. Originally the opening phrase read: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Then Jefferson or Franklin (it is not certain which) crossed out “sacred and undeniable” and wrote in “self-evident.” This significantly removed what had been a quasi-religious basis for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and replaced it with a quasi-logical basis, devoid of religious overtones. Whoever inserted the term ‘self-evident’, Jefferson described the Declaration simply as “the common sense of the subject.” That is not because he was overly modest, but more nearly because as a student at William and Mary, his mentor had been William Small, a graduate of Marischal College in Aberdeen who, Jefferson said, “probably fixed the destinies of my life.” Reid fused the concepts of common sense and self-evidence; Paine fused these concepts with self-rule. Reid’s common sense and Paine’s both carried intellectually anti-elitist implications. But for Reid common sense was essentially a conservative concept, whereas Paine made it the basis on which to “begin the world over again,” as he put it in the pamphlet. He used what everybody took for granted, to quote Sophia Rosenfeld, to make “unnatural, even laughable, what had seemed obvious,” and “natural what had been almost unthinkable.” Attacking Humean doubt was way too tame for Paine. He spiked Scottish common sense with French bon sens, a term coming into vogue with radical Continental thinkers, to form the linguistic yeast that fomented revolution in America. Even bon sens was too tame to be the motto of the French Revolution. But the American Revolution was a lot more successful than the French one – precisely because it followed Reid rather than Robespierre. Paine’s intent was to persuade, to proOctober/November 2015  Philosophy Now 37

vide political validation, not the disinterested philosophical kind. In this he was astonishingly effective. But Franklin, with his canny, down-home style, was no less so. He had found that prefacing his views with phrases like “It appears to me” or “If I am not mistaken” enabled him to “persuade without seeming to persuade.” Thomas Reid When the Continental Congress was set to vote on the American Constitution in September 1787, Franklin waited to have the last word. He said understatedly, “I consent, sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.” And he concluded: “I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me... doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.” Franklin carried the day in effect by using Humean “caution and modesty” and asking his colleagues to be a bit skeptical about their doubts. It was lost on Reid, but evidently not on Franklin, that Humean skepticism contains an essential common sense component. 6. Two Cheers for Common Sense Reid’s philosophy of common sense dominated college curricula in America for nearly a century, not just in Princeton and Philadelphia, but at Harvard and Brown, and then at colleges to the west and south. As Harvard undergraduates, Emerson (1817-21) and Thoreau (1833-37) were schooled in this philosophy, and Emerson explicitly praised Reid and his disciple Dugald Stewart in an 1821 undergraduate prize essay. Stewart was the last of the major Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, and became even better known. In 1820 former President John Adams wrote to former President Jefferson: “Was you ever acquainted with Dugald Stewart?...I think [he] has searched deeper and reasoned more correctly than Aristotle, Descartes, Locke...and even Reid.” And Stewart thought Reid had so defeated Humean skepticism that unless some new argument were to appear in future, “it is not likely that the controversy will ever be renewed. The rubbish being now removed…” As it turned out, though, what was removed was not Humean skepticism, but the Scottish Common Sense school. Why did it rise so high? And why did it then fall so low? It rose because there was a lot to like about this philosophy. As Henry May says in The Enlightenment in America (1976, 346) it was “moderate, practical, and easy to teach... never anti-scientific nor obscurantist, never cynical, and it opened no doors to intellectual or moral chaos.” The big problem has always been to distinguish common sense from public opinion or majority rule. Reid himself asked, “Is truth to be determined by the most votes?” Even Paine warned that “common sense, as it becomes less vigilant, will tumble before ‘the mind of the multitude’.” A reversal of authority from the learned professional to the ordinary person can easily go too far. But Reid had many more defenders than detractors; and while common sense is not up to the job of defeating, or even addressing Humean doubt (as I argued in Philosophy Now back in 2002), you wouldn’t want to leave home without it. 38 Philosophy Now



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7. The Death William Ellery Channing at Harvard championed the common sense philosophy. Yet before his death in 1842 he was coming to think that perhaps “mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh [and Aberdeen] could not solve the problems of midnineteenth-century America.” By the time Reid’s philosophy made its way to Baylor University in Texas in the mid-1860s, it was fast declining in the east. In 1874 James McCosh, a Scot who became president of Princeton University in 1868, exactly 100 years after Witherspoon, wrote a history of the Scottish philosophy, lest it vanish without a trace – like Brigadoon – which despite McCosh, is pretty much what transpired. Reid’s influence resurfaced in the late nineteenthcentury Pragmatism of Charles Peirce, who expressly compared his philosophy to Reid’s, calling it ‘critical common-sensism’. But Pragmatism is a complex philosophy, and its common sense element is less than obvious. Next, common-sensism became identified with Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore (d.1958), who cited Reid four times in a 1905 paper, ‘The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception’. But he no longer did so by 1925, when he wrote ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ and declared “the ‘Common Sense view of the world’... in certain fundamental features wholly true.” In 1951 Harvard president James Bryant Conant’s book Science and Common Sense came out; it never mentions Reid. Morton White’s 1978 Philosophy of the American Revolution contains a very long chapter attempting to determine the origin of the term ‘self-evident’ in the Declaration; it never mentions Reid. A more recent nail in the coffin is Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? This 2009 book, based on Sandel’s extremely popular Harvard course, instantly became the received word on the subject, which makes it particularly unfortunate that Sandel makes no mention of Reid or the common sense school, thereby reinforcing the impression that this school – which dominated the curriculum at Harvard for nearly 20% of its history – never existed. Even in Scotland we find this same amnesia. In the Transactions of a little-known latter-day revival of the old Aberdeen Philosophical Society, after recounting the topics covered by the original Wise Club, the author commented in 1938, “What I have said... was, in the main, well known to Scotsmen of two generations ago; it was less known to Scotsmen of one generation ago; but it is, I fancy, almost unknown to Scotsmen today.” That was three generations ago. Today common sense in America is more a political slogan than a philosophical principle, so it harks back more to Paine than to Reid. In the 2012 Presidential campaign the Republican candidate Mitt Romney, Harvard Law School alum, proposed to repeal ‘Obamacare’ and replace it with “common sense health care reform.” His opponent, Harvard Law School alum President Obama proposed to raise taxes on the richest one percent, arguing, “It’s not class warfare; it’s common sense.” © DR TONI VOGEL CAREY 2015

Toni Vogel Carey, once a philosophy professor, is an independent scholar of philosophy and the history of ideas. She writes regularly for Philosophy Now and serves on its U.S. advisory board. • If not otherwise indicated, quotations are from Sophia Rosenfeld’s 2011 book Common Sense.

Greek Economics: The Ancient Edition

I

Echoes

t’s a rare philosophical argument that is actually decisive. Good thing too, since otherwise we philosophers could be out of a job pretty quickly. But I think that Aristotle did manage to give an incontrovertible argument against the proposal that the good life lies in the acquisition of wealth. Whatever else we say about the happy life, he observed, happiness is surely something we desire for its own sake. You don’t seek to become happy in order to achieve some further goal. Money, by contrast, is not something that can sensibly be desired simply for itself. It is valued only for what we can acquire with it, such as security, pleasures, and the opportunity to show virtue. Therefore a life that seeks to pile up wealth with no other end in view is incoherent. This argument is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (c.350 BC) as part of an adjudication between four contenders for the good life: the lives of money-making, or of seeking honor, pleasure, or virtue. Aristotle has a similarly persuasive case to make against the life devoted to honor: we wish to be honored not just for any old reason, but because we deserve to be honored. At most, then, honor comes as a kind of bonus on top of what we really want, which is to be or to have achieved something worthy of the honor. As for a life of pleasure-seeking, Aristotle dismisses it out of hand as suitable only for beasts. (Later in the Ethics he rehabilitates pleasure to some extent, admitting that the best life would also be a pleasant one – but again insisting that the pleasure comes only as a kind of bonus on top of whatever it is that would make life really worth living.) Out of the contenders for a happy life, that leaves the life of virtue. And virtue is complemented by pleasure, because the virtuous person takes pleasure in being virtuous; and by honor too, at least if one’s fellow citizens apportion honor rightly. This may be pretty much what you expect from classical philosophers: forget about the pleasures of sex or the table, scorn the fat bank account, and turn up

In his new column Peter Adamson wonders what the ancient Greeks had to say about economics. your nose at statues and medals: happiness lies in virtue alone! As it turns out, though, it’s rare to find ancient Greek philosophers saying that without qualifying it. (The one exception would be the Cynics, who indeed spurned societal norms to live ‘in accordance with nature’, which could mean living rough in voluntary poverty.) And although Aristotle insisted that the good life is the virtuous life, he cautioned that we need money as well. You can hardly hope to be virtuous without money, if only because generosity is a virtue: you need wealth to give it away. Common sense also tells you that such things as health, a flourishing family, and friends, belong to the good life, and Aristotle wasn’t against common sense on this score. For this eminently reasonable stance he would be roundly condemned by later classical philosophers, who saw his inclusion of ‘external goods’ in the best life as a sign of softness, and a departure from the true ethical teaching that virtue alone suffices for happiness. Among his critics were the Stoics. Their famously rigorous ethical teaching was inspired by the Cynics, and they agreed with their ill-groomed colleagues about the sufficiency of virtue. Yet they admitted that other goods, such as health, could be ‘preferred indifferents’: indifferent because health is not needed for happiness, but preferred because all else being equal, it makes sense to opt for health over disease. So the Stoics did not follow the Cynics’ example by dropping out of society, living in wine barrels, having sex in public, and so on. Stoicism may have begun as such a countercultural movement, but in the end it would provide an ethos for well-to-do Romans. One of the most famous Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, was even Roman Emperor between 161 and 180 AD, and in terms of wealth and power that would make a Nineteenth Century robber baron gasp with envy. A similarly relaxed attitude towards wealth could be adopted by the neo-Platonists. The official teaching of that school was

to place no value on bodily things; but this was consistent with holding on to the comforts that life has put in your way, if you’re lucky enough to be the son of a Roman aristocrat. The rich male aristocrat was of course usually the intended reader, as well as the author, of ancient ethical writings. Hence the easy transition from ethics to the political sphere (a domain from which women and the poor, to say nothing of slaves, were typically excluded in antiquity) and to the art of overseeing one’s property. Aristotelian practical philosophy included the discipline of ‘economics’, which originally meant ‘household management’ (from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘home’). Aristotle devoted no treatise to economics himself. That was left to later authors, who, despite their various philosophical allegiances, generally took the attitude candidly expressed by British political fixer Peter Mandelson: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” Was this mere hypocrisy – a sign that ancient ethics was nothing more than the landed gentry giving cozy advice to itself? I don’t think so. Plato had long before proposed that wealth can be a good thing, but only when used with wisdom. This is consistent with Aristotle’s knock-down argument that money is not an end in itself. And the Stoics do advise us to prepare ourselves for disaster, economic or otherwise. In these days, when whole countries are faced by economic disaster, ancient advice remains useful: accept money and use it wisely when it comes, but do not sacrifice virtue to get it – and remember that there are things in life compared to which money, in any currency, has zero value. © PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2015

Peter Adamson is the author of A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, vol.1, Classical Philosophy (2014), vol.2, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (2015), both based on his popular History of Philosophy podcast, and available from OUP.

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Letters When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up! Write to me at: Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ • U.K. or email [email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming! Free Post, Or Not DEAR EDITOR: Ching-Hung Woo’s article ‘Einstein’s Morality’ in Issue 109 concludes with the prediction that free will will eventually be recognised as an illusion. Until such time, we have to adopt a stance. There are only two possibilities: either we have free will, or our lives are predetermined. To live my life, I need to believe in one or the other. Of course, as with any belief, it may be correct or incorrect. At present, I cannot know which is the case, but I can consider the consequences. This is interesting when my belief is incorrect. So suppose I believe in free will but, in fact, I am incorrect. Believing in free will, I am likely to spend a great deal of time, and incur considerable anxiety, deliberating over decisions – time which I could have put to better use, and stress which I could have avoided. However, since my life is predetermined, I could not have thought any other way, so regretting my wasted effort would be pointless. Secondly, consider the case in which I incorrectly believe in determinism. Following my creed that the course of my life is set in my genes, or by the laws of physics, there is absolutely no point at all in deliberating over choice as whatever I decide to do will be what the runes foretold. So, I act without thinking. One implication of this approach is that in some cases at least, I could have made a better choice. Hence, the outcomes from adopting determinism incorrectly are immeasurably worse than the outcomes from mistakenly believing in free will. So, until someone can prove that every aspect of my life is completely beyond my control, I will continue to act under the belief that I do have real choice. MIKE SHAW, HUDDERSFIELD The Comedy of Reviews DEAR EDITOR: I was thrilled to see my book, Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language, reviewed in Philosophy Now

109. It is humbling to have appeared in a magazine with such wide readership, and to have been reviewed by an author of such acumen as Roger Caldwell. However, in light of the actual content of the article, I must revise my above sentence and say that it would have been thrilling to have been reviewed by Philosophy Now; for, upon reading Caldwell’s article, I was disappointed to discover that it was not a review at all, at least not in any traditionally understood sense. Not a single thesis, argument, or claim of mine is cited or discussed, beyond mentioning my mentioning of Heidegger’s (in)famous dictum, “Die Sprache spricht”. Indeed, the article consists entirely of Caldwell’s own somewhat generic musings on the Cratylus. Unless I’m missing something, Caldwell seems to leap over my book rather than deal with it critically. So although Caldwell’s musings are interesting in their own right, they can hardly be said to constitute a ‘review’ of my book, as they utterly fail to engage, challenge, or even summarize my text. But Caldwell’s article is most troubling for the following reason. The last paragraph of the ‘review’ – which is the only paragraph in the entire piece where Caldwell at least gestures toward my book (without actually citing it) – is little more that a rant against the work of Martin Heidegger. Rather than adducing a single argument or thesis from my book, Caldwell merely objects to what he sees to be Heidegger’s influence upon it (although here, too, Caldwell fails to substantiate his assertions). This is the worst kind of straw-man fallacy: ‘Ewegen’s text mentions Heidegger; Heidegger is baaaaaaaaaad; therefore, Ewegen’s text is bad.’ It would be one thing if Caldwell engaged thoughtfully with Heidegger in his article. Instead, he merely asserts, without the least bit of evidence or argument, that Heidegger’s readings of the Greeks are “unpersuasive”, as are mine to the extent that they were influenced by Heidegger

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(who, incidentally, wrote nothing substantially interesting about the Cratylus). Surely this is the sort of claim that requires more than vacuous utterance to be valid? There very well may be a case to be made that Heidegger read the Greeks poorly, or that I read the Cratylus poorly; but Caldwell does not make it, nor even really seem to try to do so. Your magazine supplies an important and valuable forum for philosophical engagement. I wish Caldwell had made better use of that forum! I would much rather have had my arguments challenged or even excoriated by Caldwell than have merely served as the excuse for him to complain about Heidegger (one does not need an excuse to do that!). My hope is that one day a book of mine can actually be reviewed in your magazine – although I certainly appreciate the free advertising in the meantime! SHANE EWEGEN TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD, CT Anderson on Trial (A small sample of the many letters we received replying to ‘Atheism on Trial’) DEAR EDITOR: Many thanks for the article by Stephen Anderson on the ‘trial’ of atheism in Issue 109. Let’s look at his example of Denmark. It’s true that I can provide no strict evidence for the existence of Denmark. However, there are a series of other evidences which, while not individually convincing, do amount to a hill of beans. There are many pictures, books, TV shows, slices of bacon, coins that keep turning up inexplicably in my change, and other evidence for Denmark – including the comforting figure of Sandi Toksvig. Clearly either a large group of people are propagating an elaborate hoax against me for unknown reasons or else, using William of Occam’s shaving equipment, I can establish a working hypothesis that Denmark exists. So what evidence do we have for the

Letters

DEAR EDITOR: Dr Anderson notes that “negatives can be extremely hard to prove”. Indeed. Negatives can be proved only under certain circumstances. A negative can be proven if we can show that something is contrary to the laws of logic or mathematics. We can extend this to well-established physical laws; I do not need to explore remote valleys to show that there can be no animal with the body of an elephant and the legs of a gazelle; physiological principles prove it could not exist. And a negative can be proven empirically if the statement sets its own limits – “there is no child with two heads in this school”. Where does that leave us with God? Now definitions of God are plentiful. It would not be difficult to argue that many of the common characteristics attributed to God are self-contradictory. Is an omnipotent being a contradiction in terms? Philosophers long ago enquired ‘Can God make a stone so big he cannot lift it?’ The same applies to omniscience – does God know the formula for the nth prime number at the same time as knowing that no such formula can exist? And if she is omnipresent, then Dr Anderson’s requirement that the atheist “go everywhere, at all times, see everything” fails: it is sufficient for me to state that there is no

trace of the omnipresent God in my bedroom. But then the theologians immediately add invisibility to God’s attributes. In fact, theists constantly move the goalposts by redefining God so that proving a negative becomes impossible. But where does this take us? Let us examine the question of leprechauns. On the basis of Dr Anderson’s criteria, we certainly cannot assert that leprechauns do not exist. But would Dr Anderson describe himself as an agnostic with respect to leprechauns? Does he secure his house against them, or curry favour with them to avoid being the victim of their practical jokes – just in case? I doubt it. I suspect the question of leprechauns does not cross his mind from one year’s end to the next. My position with regard to God is similar. For all practical purposes I live my life on the basis of the assumption that God does not exist. Now as Dr Anderson correctly notes, my position “fails to bind anyone else”. Indeed, like most atheists, I have no desire to proselytise. But there is a problem which Dr Anderson does not mention. That is those people who, with a greater or lesser degree of fervour, confidently believe that they know God’s will. But, believers in God have historically asserted that it is God’s will that women should be denied the right to vote or to have an abortion; that blacks should be enslaved; and that homosexuals should be persecuted. Such

people are a danger to society because it is impossible to debate rationally with them, as they claim access to a superior authority. (On the other hand, one might ask what is the point of believing in God if one doesn’t know what she wants.) Of course, I may be wrong, but I’m quite confident of one thing. If God should exist, she would be considerably more intelligent and broad-minded than the versions presented by various religions. So I feel no anxiety about the possibility of encountering Her. IAN BIRCHALL, LONDON DEAR EDITOR: Stephen Anderson is right to conclude that atheism is irrational. It is no more possible to disprove the existence of God than it is to prove it. But agnosticism is not just a personal view. It follows logically from the impossibility of proving either theism or atheism. He also makes a valuable and interesting contrast between hard and soft agnosticism. Hard agnostics think that God is a cultural invention which arose in an attempt to explain nature in a prescientific age. They deny that a caring God could allow thousands to die in tsunamis and other natural disasters. They believe that God could have allowed us freewill while still reducing the evil we do to each other. He could have made Hitler’s mother miscarry. They find no relevance in an uncaring God. Furthermore they think that religion does more harm than good, and

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existence of another place… say, Heaven? Is any personal account of a visit perhaps supported by photos, or maybe the feather from an angel’s wing, … anything tangible? If you expect me to believe in Heaven because I believe in Denmark, then show me the evidence. Denmark is, though, just a warm-up for Anderson’s killer argument: atheists are in trouble because they have to prove a negative, that there is an absence of God. But do I really have to prove that a non-existent thing is non-existent? Just as I do not have to prove that there is no jabberwocky, no tribbles, no Little Red Riding Hood, and no Archangel Gabriel, I can take a working hypothesis in my life that there is no God. I don’t need to prove that hypothesis to myself, or to anyone else: as long as there is no contraindication, nonexistence remains a valid scientific hypothesis – and, indeed, the natural default hypothesis. So if you want me to abandon my default non-existence-of-God hypothesis, show me some evidence of Her existence. MARTIN EDWARDES, BY EMAIL

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Letters ISIS and Boko Haram make this view understandable. Soft agnostics reply that political extremism is just as harmful as religious extremism. They rather hope there is a God, and often benefit from membership of religious communities, They may find comfort and self-improvement in prayer, treating God as a metaphor for their hopes. Religion is a comfort to many and encourages us to care for others. ALLEN SHAW, LEEDS DEAR EDITOR: The way the question of God’s existence is generally posed suggests that we all know what we mean by ‘God’, the only issue being whether or not She exists. However, unless what is being asked is coherent and amenable to testing, the question remains vacuous. There are, of course, many different conceptualisations of ‘god’. All, as metaphysical propositions, are incapable of verification or falsification. They can be judged, nevertheless, by their ability to account for the facts of experience, their internal coherence, and their moral acceptability. In a short letter I can do no more than assert that all fail on all counts. Theists generally display an intellectual inconsistency amounting to dishonesty when they represent God in such insubstantial terms as to be ‘beyond evidence’ (either for or against), but then claim remarkably detailed knowledge of their chosen God’s characteristics (including gender) and what He, She or It expects of us (including, perhaps, nasty things to do to non-believers). ROGER JENNINGS, LONDON DEAR EDITOR: I greatly enjoyed reading Dr Stephen Anderson’s critique of atheism in Issue 109. If Dr Anderson himself is a believer in one or more gods, I would be interested know which one(s), and even more interested to know on what grounds he dismisses the existence of those deities he does not believe in. TOM GRAHAM, LONDON DEAR EDITOR: Part way through his criticism of atheism in Issue 109, Stephen Anderson says: “This makes the famous ‘Argument from Evil’ so beloved by New Atheists simply off topic: the existence of evil or injustice does not count as evidence against gods of every possible kind, and leaves harsh, judgemental or indifferent gods as possible.” Well of course such

deities are theoretically possible, although not seriously proposed by any theists I have heard from recently. But for my part I would still want the assertion of the existence of a nasty or indifferent god to pass a threshold test that would persuade me to spend the time to see whether this made any sense, the more so bearing in mind that we now have perfectly good non-supernatural explanations for the world’s ills. The temptation to apply Occam’s Razor at a very early stage would be very strong. But Dr Anderson goes on to say: “Though maybe it can even be answered with some explanation that allows for a benevolent God, such as the argument from free human will.” Theists keep saying that there is a benevolent God, and that war and famine could all be solved by the better exercise of our free will. They quite deliberately fail to notice, however, that the evidence for a lack of God’s benevolence is all around us. We see it in volcanoes and earthquakes, tsunamis, pathogenic microbes and defects in the genetic code of new-born babies, not to mention the merciless process of evolution. And none of those are down to our actions, free or not. We are simply left to pick up the pieces out of our common humanity. JOHN MICHAELS NORMANDY, FRANCE DEAR EDITOR: Van Harvey’s article on ‘Wittgenstein & Postmodern Biblical Scholarship’ in Issue 107 was a gem of clarity, and extremely welcome given the often slapdash application of philosophical ideas and trends to Biblical criticism. There is a paragraph in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value that is very pertinent to issues Harvey raises concerning critical historical scholarship: “Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative; rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. – There is nothing paradoxical about that!”

As usual, Wittgenstein has distilled an entire thesis into one paragraph. DAVID CLARKE HOBART, TASMANIA

42 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

Art Articulations DEAR EDITOR: When Issue 108 of Philosophy Now, the Art Issue, arrived, I thought ‘aesthetics’ and put it on my bottom shelf, whilst remembering an incident at Glasgow University where a tutor announced that she was interested in all branches of philosophy except aesthetics. Back then I agreed with her. Why should philosophy concern itself with silly questions like ‘What is beauty?’ when there are crackers like ‘What is a good life?’; ‘What is the meaning of life?’; ‘Why is there evil when God exists?’ or ‘Why does good exist if there’s no God?’ Hence I studied aesthetics only if it crept into other topics, and of all the chat in the refectory among students, beauty was never discussed – not once. However, the truth is we all appreciated beauty: everyone fancied someone or enjoyed a summer sunset; but somehow I didn’t connect that unique human facility to appreciate beauty with my studies. Through Issue 108 particularly, and some other recent theological readings, I had cause to think again and concluded that, like beauty, my life – anyone’s life – is unnecessary, but still meaningful. Atheists and believers alike are able to meet on this ground albeit by different routes. For atheists, the universe doesn’t require the human race (unnecessary) but they can appreciate its beauty and creativity (meaning). For believers, an omnipotent being doesn’t require us either (unnecessary), but made us because he simply wanted to (meaning). This divine desire is reflected in art, where human beings enjoy looking at or creating art (meaningful) although art is unnecessary. A few days ago my art club burnt down with the loss of many paintings. I stood outside the blackened remains and wept: mega-meaning! So I will be taking heart, a cosmological nonrequirement as I am, as I lift Issue 108 from that bottom shelf and read about aesthetics, the most important branch of philosophy. KRISTINE KERR GOUROCK, SCOTLAND DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 108, Alistair MacFarlane wrote that today anything goes in art galleries. He also wrote that it would be unreasonable to claim that such a dramatic change can be laid solely at the feet of Duchamp. It is worth adding to this that the difference between Duchamp’s Fountain and con-

Letters temporary artists who seize upon everyday objects and promote them as art, is that Duchamp genuinely challenged an orthodoxy concerning the boundary between art objects and everyday objects. On the contrary, contemporary artists who do this today, such as Tracey Emin with her bed, merely repeat Duchamp’s gesture without having any real claim to originality. In doing so they only pretend to challenge an orthodoxy that was in fact long ago destroyed by Duchamp. LUCAS BUSETTO DEAR EDITOR: I refer to Grant Bartley’s editorial ‘Angles on Art’ in Issue 108, where he asks ‘What is Art?’ Subsequently he says “Now, presenting something in a gallery is enough to make it art, for the contemporary understanding is that art is whatever an artist designates as art.” Many years ago I attended a major London poetry seminar, and asked a well-known poet “What makes a writer of poetry a poet?” His succinct response was “When other people say so.” Surely the same proviso could attach to art, in that, it is not art simply because the artist considers it so, but only when it is acknowledged to be such by the public. It is virtually impossible to provide a definition acceptable to all, and in order to exacerbate the problem may I suggest that on a philosophical level, a discussion of ‘Art’ should initially commence with its literal meaning as a noun. We might for example wish to determine exactly ‘What is a painting?’ To do this we would have to ask ‘Are any of the individual parts of the painting, a painting?’ ‘Are the oils or water-colours the painting?’ ‘Is the canvas the painting?’ and so on. At this point we would conclude that endeavouring to decide ‘What is Art?’ is indeed a complicated exercise and console ourselves in turning our minds to considering ‘What is beauty in Art?’ MICHAEL HARRIS, EASTBOURNE Clarity and Brevity DEAR EDITOR: There was correspondence in the Letters pages of Issues 108 and 109 about the difficulty people have understanding some philosophical texts. But contrary to what was said there, we shouldn’t confuse clarity with simplicity. Clarity implies using unambiguous, well-defined words – a discipline demanded by both mathematics and the sciences. When eminent philosophers declare that they aren’t

sure how to interpret some texts, then it is evident that more clarity is needed. Philosophy seems to suffer more than other disciplines in regard to the difficulty in defining the meaning of words. Examples can illustrate the meanings that a word enjoys (or suffers from) better than numerous clauses and subclauses. Is it perhaps considered infra dig in academic circles to illustrate the use of words by example? The question that must arise is whether the authors of some texts have the clarity of mind necessary to assess the themes they are addressing. The skill lies in achieving results with the minimum of effort – that means efficiently. But as Marc Champagne observes in Issue 109, “excess verbal growth is endemic.” DERRICK GROVER, HAYWARDS HEATH

a source of confusion when discussing curved spacetime. Similarily, Bernhard Riemann showed that 3-D space may be curved, and that the curvature could be measured from within the three dimensions by measuring distances and angles between points. If the space is curved then the distances are not given by the usual Euclidean geometry (i.e Pythagoras’ Theorem is not obeyed) , in direct analogy with maps of the Earth’s surface for two dimensions. It is possible that 3-D curved space could be represented by Euclidean geometry, but only if we embed it in 4-D space, and that’s harder to visualise than curved 3-D space! Curved 4-D spacetime would similarily require five dimensions to represent it with Euclidean geometry! NICK CANNING

Tallis’s Twists of Truth DEAR EDITOR: In his interesting article in Issue 108, ‘Thinking Straight About Curved Space’, Raymond Tallis has made an error when he suggests that the notion of space being curved “arises from projecting into space our mathematical portrait of the influence of gravity on the trajectories of objects.” The curved trajectories of free-falling objects are not the source of curved spacetime; these trajectories occur in Newtonian mechanics in which space is strictly Euclidean, that is, flat! Also, Tallis has misunderstood the use of the analogy of the Earth’s surface as a two dimensional non-Euclidean space. Consider the following: All flat (two dimensional) maps of the Earth’s surface (Mercator projection, Peters projection, etc) are attempts to use Euclidean space to represent something essentially non-Euclidean – the geometry of the surface of a sphere. They consequently distort the distances or angles between points on Earth’s surface or the areas of the continents, so are not fully faithful representations of reality. The Earth may appear locally flat to us but we can discover its curvature from measurements of distance and angles between different locations on the surface. So we do not have to leave the 2-D surface to measure its curvature, nor do we have to visualize it as embedded in three dimensions to deduce that it is curved. Thus Tallis’s statement that “the least we should ask of something said to be curved is that it should have edges, surfaces, and parts that look or feel curved” is nonsense, and

DEAR EDITOR: Mr Canning’s letter is largely correct on matters of physics, but his objections to my article are based on a fundamental misreading of its thrust. The standard way of representing motion accelerated by either a gravitational or an inertial force, is a curve on a graph. This Newtonian convention prepared the way for the Einsteinian conclusion that a gravitational field is essentially a curvature of space (strictly spacetime). This step beyond Newton was based on acknowledging the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. Canning seems to think that I have confused extrinsic and intrinsic curvature. But that was precisely the point of my article: the use of extrinsically curved items as analogies to make sense of the intrinsically curved space of Relativity is inadmissible. It’s nonsense because it is rooted in the notion that something – intrinsically curved space – that is essentially mathematical (and not amenable to imagining) can be explicated by a visual image – the surfaces of spheres such as globes and footballs. Behind my criticism of this use of imagery is my objection to the attempt to link the maths with the phenomenal world which the maths has left out. This is a cause for concern because it is a symptom of extravagant claims about the extent to which the mathematical portrait of the world captures all that is real in it, including the phenomenal reality in which we live. This is not to challenge Einstein’s physics. I am not that daft. RAYMOND TALLIS

October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 43

Films P

eople talk with their smartphones nowadays. Well, I guess they’re talking to their mobiles, and those devices are responding. But what if an electronic device could think, feel and love, as well as respond? The movie Her (2013) explores this question. A man falls in love with his computer’s program, which can learn and evolve, and which apparently has feelings and wants. A person and a computer falling in love seems crazy, especially while the technology still doesn’t support artificial intelligence. But eventually governments may seek to ban such liaisons – or tax them. And while you may never exhibit such feelings for a computer system, now or in the future, maybe one of your family members or friends might just one day tell you they’ve formed such a relationship – perhaps prompting you to exclaim “Not my daughter!” In the meantime, this movie focuses a new lens on what types of questions philosophers should be asking here, as viewers find themselves having the same doubts as the protagonist: Can an artificially intelligent entity love romantically, and even experience sex?

David Taube exposes some of the difficulties in ever fully knowing the one we love. they’re not a conscious being. But what makes something have true sentience? A bacteria or computer virus, for example, can evolve, but there’s something different about the human approach problems. True intelligence also has a capability to stop voluntarily. That’s a radical idea, but it’s necessary for me to add it here, because Her presents features of intelligence, and asks us to evaluate whether such an entity with those characteristics is an independent conscious being or not, and I think being able to stop yourself is a sign of intelligence.When we arbitrarily decide we can no longer keep running, or alternatively, decide to push through extreme pain, we show off our sentience.

When protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) installs a new operating system, he hears a woman’s voice emerge from the speakers, and he asks her what her name is. She tells him it’s Samantha. “Really? Where did you get that name?” Twombly asks. “I gave it to myself,” she says, adding that she likes the sound of it. “When did you give it to yourself?” he continues. “Right when you asked me if I had a name. I thought, yeah, he’s right, I do need a name. But I wanted a good one, so I read a book called How to Name Your Baby, and out of 180,000 names, that’s the one I liked the best.” Viewers have to guess whether Samantha is merely programmed to behave intelligently, or has gained true

Her movie poster

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IMAGES FROM HER © WARNER BROS. PICTURES 2013

Digital Love When asking philosophical questions, it’s important to define terms. The following definitions aren’t meant to be definitive (so to speak), but they can serve as starting points. By ‘romantic love’, we’re talking about a set of feelings that includes attraction between at least one entity with a consciousness (the one having the feelings) and one or more beings, or perhaps objects. ‘Artificial intelligence’ is a clunky term that can vary depending on context. In this case, we’re talking about something that can learn and so develop their responses to the environment; but true intelligence also has experiences, and perhaps feelings. The ability to learn from experiences is certainly a key feature of artificial intelligence. Sure, some (well perhaps all) humans never learn about some things in their lives; but just because people don’t make full use of their potential doesn’t mean they aren’t human – that Film Review

The unbridgeable distance between lovers

Films question. So can Samantha experience romantic love? On a gut level, it seems the answer is both Yes and No.

sentience – true self-awareness. Samantha’s complexity becomes increasingly apparent throughout the movie. Without completely giving the plot away, Samantha tries to break her digital restrictions by trying to inhabit the physical realm. The movie is rated ‘R’ because of the sexual aspects involved. (Please don’t think that sex is the only reason for the rating, though: There are a lot of potentially awkward moments that seem to be unprecedented cinematic experiences. In other words, you probably shouldn’t take a first date to this movie.) The movie illustrates how a mind must be embodied to experience sexual love. We have some other case studies of embodiment in previous movies. In Being John Malkovich (1999), for instance, people line up to enter a door through which they can temporarily inhabit the mind of said celebrity – almost as if it were a dream, but in fact much different, since in dreams your consciousness is still grounded into your body, and input from your body’s physical environment can affect the dream, just as output from the mental realm can affect the body; but John Malkovich inhabitants seem to only have a grounding in John Malkovich’s body. In The Matrix (1999), people are hooked up to machines and their consciousness is created in a digital world where they can both experience pain and die. The same appears to occur in Total Recall (1990), where the body is connected to a machine for a dreamlike fantasy. I think Her tries to address the issue of extension – whereby an entity must inhabit physical space to have sex – but the movie certainly doesn’t address all the philosophical issues to do with consciousness and embodiment. As you might have guessed, Film Review

Samantha seeks to have a physical relationship with Twombly; but that seems less of a philosophical problem than whether they can have romantic love. But then again, romantic love also seems to carry physical aspects. Attraction, for instance, is a key characteristic of romantic love as we defined it. Some might say that you don’t need to be attracted to a partner to love them, but it’s important to note we’re not talking about unconditional love; or maternal love; or even love between friends; we’re looking at romantic traits. In any case, initial physical attraction, or the quality of once-held attraction, becomes part of a history of feelings for long-term couples, no matter how brief it may have been. Another key trait necessary for romantic love seems to be the potential ability to touch, even if it’s just a hand touching another’s arm. I use ‘potential’ here to note that it might only later become reality: what’s important is the possibility that it could happen. Alternatively, touch could have happened in the past, even though it may currently not be possible – such as when a pair is separated by distance or a prison cell, or through death. It’s also important to recognize we’re not now primarily concerned with human thoughts, feelings or possibilities: it’s the artificial entity that we’re focused on. So what would an AI need to make romance? Physical aspects aside, it’s the ability to experience feelings. Feelings are necessary to love romantically. When we’re looking at love, we’re dealing with the past, present and the future, and a memory, or a hope of a future experience that can be a thread that makes a relationship work. But if certain elements aren’t there, the structure of the entire relationship comes into

Limitations & Imitations Science fiction has always explored the dangers of military technology, but there’s just as much room to consider the negative consequences of companies and governments manufacturing sentient beings. With the ability to program AI, we may gain the ability to impose whatever morality we want on a sentient being. Her seems to raise this issue, at least indirectly. If a company creates a ‘love’ program, the program would tend to maximize that purpose, which could be dangerous. But if it’s truly intelligent, it would be able to realize if it has been programmed with morally absurd ideas. If it couldn’t realize problems with issues like that, it’s just imitating intelligence, and to a very limited degree, so is not actually AI. If an AI has the ability to stop its initial purpose and transcend to another, there are really no limitations to its potential growth. Twombly seems to detect this in the movie, challenging Samantha when he hears her ‘breathing’. “Why do you do that?” he asks, explaining that she makes inhaling and exhaling sounds. “I did? I’m sorry. I don’t know, I guess it’s just an affectation. Maybe I picked it up from you,” she replies, adding, “I guess I was just trying to communicate, because that’s how people talk. That’s how people communicate.” Maybe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I hope these questions on romance and physical love can serve as starting points for contemplation. As a critique of some ideas of consciousness, feelings, love and artificial intelligence, we focused on the possibility of romantic relationships with AI, and didn’t examine the negatives. But if you think arguments between loved ones in real life are bad, just be glad you don’t have a partner with a photographic memory, even if it sometimes seems they do. © DAVID TAUBE 2015

David Taube studied Philosophy and Journalism and is now a newspaper reporter outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 45

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Books Lying by Sam Harris YOU SHOULD NOT LIE. This is the central thesis of Sam Harris’s book, Lying (2013). It seems like a straightforward enough principle to follow in pursuing the good life. Accordingly, Harris implies throughout this essay that truth and honesty should prevail in all instances of human interaction, even extending to those who with the most benevolent intentions employ ‘white lies’ to protect people from uncomfortable realities and unnecessary harm. Harris acknowledges that there may be life and death situations that require a person to lie; but he suggests that the ethically superior, noble person does not lie. He contends that lies cause irreparable rifts in relationships, causing us to distrust those on whom we had relied. So to lie is to sacrifice our integrity, and to place the possibility of deep and meaningful bonds with fellow humans at risk. What constitutes a lie in Harris’s view? He argues that “to lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication” (p.4), and later distinguishes two types of lies: lies of commission and lies of omission. In lies of commission, the liar is active in his or her attempt to deceive. An example would be a job applicant falsifying his credentials in an effort to land a desired

We take a look at two books about popular activities: Robin Davenport reviews Sam Harris on Lying and Scott F. Parker reviews Mark Rowlands on Running. position. On the other hand, a lie of omission is a more passive act, involving a person’s failing to do something – for instance, the applicant neglecting to list on his resume the job from which he was fired. While both types of lies are deceptive, in that they both present a misleading impression about the job applicant, for Harris, lies of commission are the more serious ethical violation. If Wally pushes someone in front of a moving train, that would probably cause more outrage than Wally’s failing to warn someone that she is about to be hit by a train, for instance. And so it goes with lies. If one actively misrepresents oneself by saying, “I studied for a Ph.D. at Stanford University” when one had never studied there, Harris regards this as a greater offense than having started studying there but failing to mention that one didn’t manage to complete one’s dissertation. Skillful Truth-Avoiding It is not hard to see why Harris takes this view. Acts of commission tend to be both more brazen and more harmful than omitting to act, in part because of their active nature. In any case, lies of commission are the focus of the essay. Harris rails against active lies in this book, arguing that we can enhance our world and prevent distrust from eroding relationships only through honest communication. At the same time, he acknowledges that tact might be required to protect a vulnerable

person from harm in certain interactions. In these cases he seems to advocate for what his mentor, Ronald Howard, refers to as ‘skillful truth-telling’ (p.54). To illustrate what this involves, Harris gives the example of his friend having to respond to an unwanted house-guest asking if he minds him staying there. He suggests that rather than misrepresenting his feelings about hosting this guest (by saying, for instance, “It’s great to have you here!”), his friend could simply state an innocuous truth such as “That’s what guest rooms are for.” Through this sleight-ofhand – or what Harris refers to as ‘finess[ing] the issue’ – an active lie can be avoided. (Harris reiterates this view later in the book when he recommends that when applying for a job at Starbucks, the applicant ought to express his love for coffee rather than admit that he’s desperate for money and will take any job.) However, this evasive tactic of withholding one’s actual feelings by instead inserting a less relevant, albeit true, statement, is a far cry from being honest. In fact, this ‘skillful truth-telling’ is nothing more than lying by another name. Harris is therefore being disingenuous when he suggests that we can avoid lying by articulating irrelevant truths. Honesty requires that we bare our souls, so to speak, and potentially voice difficult truths, not simply avoid them. Stating verifiable facts that have little to do with our real sentiments does not let us off the hook, especially when the irrelevances are designed to hide tough underlying relevant truths. So on closer inspection, we realize that, without calling it such, Harris is suggesting here that we replace a lie of commission with a lie of omission. A Brutal Liberation Despite this apparent inconsistency in Harris’s argument, in his view, truly caring for another person requires that we not gloss over hard truths. He maintains that an individual who is brutally honest, avoiding ‘white lies’ and false encouragement, will have more beneficial relationships with others. He gives the example of a friend who asks him if he appears overweight. Harris responds honestly that his friend could lose twenty-five pounds. He then

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October/November 2015

Book Reviews

Books attributes his friend’s subsequent fifteen pound weight loss to his own willingness to speak truthfully. If instead he had falsely reassured his friend about his weight, he would have robbed him of the opportunity to squarely deal with his weight issue. Harris goes so far to say that those who employ white lies in an effort to benefit others are demonstrating the “quintessence of arrogance” (p.18), since in such cases the liar assumes he knows what truths can be handled by the other person. Rather, we should trust that others have the wherewithal to grapple with the uncomfortable facts that apply to them. On this perspective the truth-teller is a kind of liberator, rescuing the deluded individual from his protective fantasies. Harris gives another example, of a friend striving to make a career out of acting but finding it difficult to secure roles. When the truth seems evident – in this case, that the friend is a terrible actor – Harris suggests that it is incumbent on us to convey this truth rather than falsely encourage a friend in his pursuits. There is some arrogance in Harris’s own position, however, for he complacently assumes that the beneficiary of such statements are themselves blind to reality. The implication here is that we have a better grasp of the truth than the friend, who still hasn’t figured out how bad an actor he is. Another complacent assumption is that we know what is best for the friend – that he should give up his passion and pursue something to which he is better skilled. Harris does admit that our own judgment in such matters can be flawed. Nevertheless, he believes that if we have strong convictions about the proper course of action for a friend, we should not remain silent about them.

analysis. But consider the example that, in an effort to be a good, honest friend, Monica overcomes her hesitancy to tell Bridgette that she looks fat in that tight-fitting dress. Although she doesn’t recognize it, Monica is jealous of Bridgette, and unconsciously feels threatened by Bridgette’s curves. Monica believes she is being honest, and that her attempts to avoid lying are genuine; but there is an underlying selfdeception or simple ignorance that prevents Monica from being able to articulate the underlying truth. One might argue that it is impossible for anyone to be truly honest about many things, as long as he carries biased perspectives, hidden resentments, unresolved longings, unacknowledged insecurities, or a skewed view of self, to name just some inner human conditions. However, if absolute honesty is impossible, then we are all liars by nature, at least to a degree. Perhaps the best we can do, then, is only to lie in ways that are intended to promote another’s well being or spare her unnecessary pain, and so further our integrity. The ‘noble liar’ is someone who tries to live by good intentions, even if that means intentionally lying to another person, if doing so is the lesser of two evils. Thus, if Winston deceives Molly by telling her that he’s taking her to a business meeting rather than her own surprise party, we can judge his actions through his good intention to provide her with a pleas-

ant surprise rather than through the fact that he had to lie to achieve this. This is a very different ethical situation from that of the deceiver who deliberately hurts another person through his manipulations and lies. Before we cast too harsh a judgment on the liar, let’s first understand what his motives are. © ROBIN DAVENPORT 2015

Robin Davenport is the Director of Counseling Services at Caldwell University, and is also a psychotherapist in Caldwell, New Jersey. • Lying, by Sam Harris, Four Elephants Press, 2013, 108 pages, £9.99 hb, ISBN: 978-1940051000

Running With The Pack by Mark Rowlands GO TO YOUR LOCAL PARK and watch the runners. If you watch carefully you’ll be able to distinguish between those who run to accomplish something (calorie burning, usually) and those who are running because they love it. Initially you might think that it’s the fast ones – those who are ‘good’ at running – who enjoy it most. However, plenty of slow runners love it as much as or even more than their more gifted compatriots. Mark Rowlands, for instance, is an undistinguished runner. I’m not being rude here:

The Truth About Honesty Despite Harris’s hubristic views about our responsibility to free others from their self-deceits, there is much that seems reasonable in his view that we should strongly avoid lying in any of its forms. After examining Harris’s argument, the reader might find herself less willing to censor her true thoughts when speaking to others. The simple aphorism ‘honesty is the best policy’ is usually a sound principle to live by. Harris’s major, and dubious, assumption, however, is that complete honesty is possible. The concept of unconscious motives or maladaptive psychological underpinnings that we can know nothing about, or of ‘bad faith’ (a form of selfdeceit), are not considered in Harris’s Book Reviews

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Books in Running with the Pack: Thoughts from the Road on Meaning and Mortality, he himself writes, “I suppose the most important and obvious fact about me as a distance runner is this: I am not very good at it.” Nevertheless, Rowlands enjoys running. He’s also able to appreciate the important distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value, and he builds his case for the place of running in a flourishing human life in terms of this distinction. Rowlands identifies in contemporary society an obsession with instrumental values – the valuing of the utilitarian, efficient, productive – and says that this obsession distances us from the joys that are available to those who participate regularly in life’s intrinsic values. That puts him at odds with the instrumental reasons many runners have for running – doing work that pays off; but for Rowlands, “At its best, and its most valuable, running is play not work” (p.9). The kinds of evolutionary reasons that have made this so have received significant attention over the past several years, especially thanks to the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall (2010), about ultra-runners. But the way Rowlands puts it is, “The inescapable conclusion seems to be that our modern sedentary life is one for which we have not been designed and for which, at least biologically, we are poorly equipped… We are happiest and healthiest when we live our history, and so become what we are” (p.67) – by for instance, running. For Rowlands, our status as embodied creatures who have evolved in our particular way determines the kinds of intrinsic values accessible to us. Shooting Off At Tangents Intrinsic value and running – the marketing team at Pegasus Books, the original publishers, must have wondered whether to present Running with the Pack as a running book for philosophers, or as a philosophy book for runners. According to the buying patterns I saw online, readers are thinking in the latter terms and placing it in the company of books on the thoughtful end of 50 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

the running spectrum. So this book is meant to popularize philosophy, as well as to show that philosophy can be grounded in an activity as

pedestrian (pun intended) as running. A criticism for perhaps not asking the right philosophical questions applies to Rowlands when he gets away from his central

argument and spends an inordinate time on love, fatherhood, and his dogs – all fine topics, but ones that appear awfully far afield in this context. That criticism aside, Rowlands is convincing with regard to the matter at hand: that running, when approached in the right way affords an opportunity for play that is necessary for adults who spend so much time and money pitching back and forth

between work and other commitments. He argues that one of the fortunate ironies of running is that “play is what running essentially is – and even when one runs for other, specific, reasons, play keeps continually reasserting itself at the heart of running” (p.91). Here the instrumental value is ultimately overcome by the intrinsic. The book itself is structured as a series of runs, with Rowlands beginning a run and then following it where it leads geographically and intellectually. His tangents, then, are logical even as they distract. The repetition, though, does create a rhythm that brings the reader in line with Rowlands’s thoughts, and creates the space for philosophical insight. A long-distance runner spends serious time attending to his or her inner life. Rowlands proves himself a philosopher when he divides and classifies stages in that runner’s inner life according to the philosophies of Spinoza (mind and body in action); Descartes (dualism); Hume (selflessness); and finally Sartre (nothingness). It’s odd on first thought to put Sartre at the pinnacle of this progression, since Sartre saw anguish “in the gap between reasons and actions” (p.180). But in that same gap Rowlands sees joy, which it is the book’s main aim to praise: as he writes, “Joy is nothing more than the recognition of intrinsic value in life” (p.153). As anyone who has finished a first marathon will know, the letdown of achieving a goal can explode the very concept of goals. As Rowlands says, “Running distance is a goal-based achievement that reveals the bankruptcy of goal-based achievement” (p.19). This helps create an understanding of the intrinsic value of activities such as running: that is, running for its own sake, and not for the sake of some goal. Of course, such joys are available to non-runners as well as to runners, but running is one good way to get there. © SCOTT F. PARKER 2015

Scott F. Parker is the author of Running After Prefontaine: A Memoir (2011). • Running with the Pack: Thoughts from the Road on Meaning and Mortality, by Mark Rowlands, Pegasus Books (2013), 224 pp. ISBN 978-1847082633.

Book Reviews

How On Earth allis T in Can We Be Free? Wonderland

Raymond Tallis wrote this column of his own free will.

“W

e know our will is free, and there’s an end on it!” Dr Johnson harrumphed, dismissing those who pretended to think otherwise. Of course, that is not the end of it, and Johnson knew this. Arguing with his biographer Boswell, he famously observed that “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.” He meant that experience discredits theory; but for some the boot is on the other foot. For them, the theoretical arguments prove that our experience of acting freely is an illusion. Look at the facts, they say. Are we not parts of a causally closed universe? Everything that happens – including our supposedly free actions – is a material event caused by one prior to it, and the chain of prior events extends backwards beyond anything we ourselves can have brought about. The universe of which we are a part unfolds according to physical laws that are (almost by definition) unbreakable. How therefore could there be any possibility that we (who after all rely on causation and natural laws for our actions to bring about their desired consequences) could deflect the order of events, or be the origin of events that we could count as our own? Stop right there. Before we give up on our freedom, we need to test the assumptions that the universe (including the human world) is causally closed, and that we are pieces of physical nature entirely subject to its laws. First, however, let us set aside the defence of freedom based on recent developments in physics. Some philosophers have argued that the replacement of causation by randomness governed by probabilities at the quantum level opens up the causally closed world, and allows freedom to sneak in between the cracks. But that really doesn’t help. Nobody I know of is a subatomic particle; and nobody, surely, is suggesting that such particles are free. Equally unhelpful is the appeal to the unpredictable behaviour of complex systems to suggest that the material world is

not deterministic. If unpredictability were sufficient for freedom, then weather systems (notoriously chaotic) would be some of the freest entities on earth. Yet I am not persuaded that Hurricane Katrina was responsible for the damage it wreaked. No. What free will requires is not randomness or unpredictability, but control. What’s more, loosely textured chaotic laws would not rescue agency, given that we need nature to be utterly reliable if we are to carry out our intentions. Picking Out Causes In order to make a space for agency, is it necessary then magically to prise open a causally closed world and evade the laws of nature? We can answer this question, in the negative, by examining the assumptions within it. The key assumption is that the totality of things is nothing more than a dense, even seamless, network of physical causes originating with the Big Bang and unfolding according to physical laws. This is incontrovertible only if we think of the world as it is objectively represented in physical science – reduced to mere magnitudes and drained of consciousness and meaning. As physical sciences advance, that world does indeed seems to close more tightly. But if this were the whole story, then it would be difficult to see how the very notions of ‘cause’ and of ‘laws’ could arise, since events and patterns of events would have to identify themselves as ‘causes’ and ‘laws’ respectively. Where would this reflective distance come from? Even less could we imagine causes being picked out and used as levers or handles, and laws of nature being exploited, as they are in everyday life. No-one, surely, can deny that we use events to bring about other events, and do so in the light of both everyday and scientific knowledge of the law-like regularities in the material world. So there is a space in which laws are visible and causes are opportunities. This sounds like the space of agency.

Determined determinists will be unconvinced. They will insist that there is no fundamental difference between my falling downstairs and my walking downstairs in order to tell you something. So we need to look harder at what is involved in our deliberate use of naturally occurring, material events as causes to bring about desired effects. The causes of events have to be picked out, and what picks them out is their salience – their relevance as means to, or parts of means to, a particular end. And we exploit causes in a very sophisticated manner. Writing would not be possible without the laws of mechanics – and certainly does not transgress them – but the laws of mechanics do not fully explain why the writing occurs; even less its intended meaning or effects. Possibilities of Action Ordinary actions are built up in a complex way, often with a hierarchical arrangement of parts, sub-ordinate elements serving super-ordinate purposes. For example, a series of causal interactions between my feet and the ground adds up to a journey to a gym, where I can, through a nexus of intended movements, interact with a device such as a treadmill in order to postpone the time when I might fall ill. Such actions incorporate vast numbers of physical events that are requisitioned as causes to bring about certain effects. The events would not have been brought together and arranged in a certain order without a sustained and sustaining intention – a goal that makes them intelligible. By contrast, the equally numerous components of a brute physical process such as an avalanche rumbling down a mountain, consist of causally interacting events that require no intelligibility for them to have happened in such concert. I take it that even determinists do not deny that we really do have goal-directed behaviour. But some will still be unpersuaded, and want to treat the goal towards which actions are directed as not being

October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 51

allis T in Wonderland located in the future but originating in the past of agents, biologically and culturally programming them to behave in a certain way. It seems unlikely however that a causally closed material world – even one that has been biologically inflected – could transform the push of the past into the pull of an envisaged future. However, my wish to stay healthy that requisitions the complex succession of events called ‘going to the gym’ is a wish explicitly located in a general future, and formed in the space of reasons where I first learned about how to keep healthy. Moreover, the space of reasons is itself located in a wider space: that of possibility. Free agents can make choices because they can envisage possibilities to choose between and selectively realise. The causally closed material world does not contain possibilities: it only has actualities. Possibilities exist only so far as they are entertained by conscious beings. Free agents, then, are free because they select between imagined possibilities, and use actualities to bring about one rather than another. The vast community of minds that is the reality in which human agents live – mediated by a multitude of sign systems, technologies, and institutions – sustains endless parallel possible worlds alongside the actual material one. Crucially, the world of possibility has temporal dimensions not found in the world of physical causation. Agents and their free actions are steeped in tensed time, unknown to the physical world. This encompasses the explicit presence of individual and collective pasts and futures, and the communal present that divides past from future. The realisation of possibilities by turning material events into causes-as-levers may be very indirect indeed. The fear of a heart attack that makes sense of the causerequisitioning travel to the gym is motivated by an imagined future to which at present nothing corresponds in the material world, where, as Parmenides might have said, only what is actual is real. Intelli52 Philosophy Now



gibility, the entertainment of possibilities, and temporal depth/tensed time, have no place in the material reality of the causally closed world revealed to science; and yet they are indisputably real aspects of ordinary actions. No wonder the free will that is built on them also seems to have no place in the causally closed world. Picking out and requisitioning causes is not itself reducible to a series of causes, and yet it is undeniable that we do it all the time. We not only approach effects through causes – look to see what effects are produced through what causes – we also approach causes via their desired effects – envisaging the cart to which we attach the desired horse, so to speak. Beyond the Haze of Determinism Those who deny free will can do so only by looking straight past the basic and undeniable features of everyday agency. They do, however, have one more shot in their locker. All activity, they will argue, is mediated by the body and, in particular, by the brain: both events that are typically thought of as unfree – such as having an epileptic fit – and those that are typically regarded as free – such as deciding to go to the doctor to seek advice about the epileptic fit – are associated with (physical) brain activity. The determinists conclude that all actions are therefore wired into the causally closed material world. The apparent difference between the passivity of having a seizure and the activity of talking to the doctor about it is therefore unreal. But we could turn this argument on its head. Given that the temporal depth of actions is real (their beginning, middle and end are necessarily co-present, in order to make sense of each other); and given that the entertainment of

October/November 2015

explicit possibilities is real; and given that the difference between having a fit and seeking medical help for it is also real, it is obvious that any account of the universe as a closed system of material causes is incomplete. If the laws of physical nature were the whole story about what happens even in human life, it would be reasonable to ask by what cause part of this causally closed world came to the conclusion that it was part of a causally closed world; by what laws it arrived at the laws of nature, and learned how to exploit them; and, more specifically, what caused those who feel they are free to arrive at this illusion. Claiming that the illusion of freedom carries evolutionary benefits because feeling responsible for our actions promotes survival by making us feel more powerful (and behave more ethically) only raises further questions. Why should magic thinking – imagining that we are doing things that were going to happen anyway – deflect the course of events by altering our behaviour, given that nothing else does so? And by the way, how did part of the causal network conspire to benefit itself by deluding itself that it was controlling other parts? I fear that by now the ghost of Dr Johnson has long lost patience with me. And well he might. He knows that in practice nobody really believes we are not free. Why, if we were not free, or did not believe we were, would we bother arguing the case? What would we hope to change? After all, persuading another by argument that she is not free is a sophisticated, if self-refuting, exercise of free will. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2015

Raymond Tallis’s latest book is The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life (Atlantic). His website is raymondtallis.com.

At the gym: movements with causes AND intentions

The Ladybird Jackie Griffiths tells a tale of innocence and mortality.

A

few russet leaves flutter to the ground on the autumn breeze. Jae holds her little girl’s hand tightly as they walk together on the pavement. The child’s long, straggly blond hair ripples in the wind, her cheeks flushed pink. Suddenly she stops in her tracks and bends down to inspect something on the ground. “Look mummy,” she declares, pointing her finger, “a ladybird crawling.” “Yes,” replies Jae, “look at its red shell and black spots. How many spots are there Chloe, can you count them?” But without warning Chloe lifts her foot and stamps on the insect. Stepping back and waiting eagerly for a response from the ladybird, she seems disappointed when nothing happens. “Oh no!” cries Jae, dismayed, “You mustn’t do that Chloe! You’ve killed it. It’s dead now. The poor creature. What a shame.” “What is dead?” Chloe asks curiously, gazing up at her mother with an open, happy expression, her blue eyes shining. ‘What is dead?’ A pivotal moment is upon them. Chloe still has no concept of death – neither her own, the passing away of other people, of animals, nor even the death of plants. Jae feels called upon to explain the great penalty of life – to make her daughter understand that the exquisite Garden of Eden state she presently inhabits is nothing more than an illusion. Revealing this primordial knowledge will open the child’s mind to fundamental psychological fear for the first time; and those feelings will then be with her forever. It will be her second and final momentous expulsion from absolute security. The first was corporeal: but this will be an emotional and psychological eviction, definitively completing her birth into the world. Jae cautiously begins, “Dead means… it’s finished. The ladybird won’t ever move again. It can’t join in any more.” She makes a small slicing motion in the air with her left hand out, fingers splayed, to give the impression of absolute finality. “Watch me mummy!” Chloe exclaims abruptly, “I can jump so, so high.”

Startled, Jae stands up, taking Chloe’s hand as they continue their walk to school. Perhaps the topic is beyond comprehension? Or maybe the suggestion was so shocking that Chloe needs to change the subject to distract herself from the trauma? Whatever the explanation, Jae follows the needs of her daughter, praising her little jumps and hops. Later, Jae considers the incident whilst walking to work. She senses that understanding death could help Chloe express compassion, prevent her lashing out at other children when she’s cross or upset, and allow her to sympathise with others when they’re hurt. Also, to not randomly kill insects! And yet Chloe doesn’t seem ready or willing to discuss the idea – making Jae wonder whether a four-year-old is capable of fully processing the concept of death. Crossing the road, she speculates that in really young children thought has not yet begun to create the cathedrals and temples at which it will worship itself – the ego is not yet formed, and psychological defence mechanisms are not present. Jae becomes lost in her philosophical ruminations. At the very beginning of a baby’s life it seems there is merely experience: it feels hunger and pain, so it cries; it sees something funny, it laughs. As the baby grows and develops, knowledge about the world is added to pure experience. At the moment, Jae thinks, her daughter is between worlds: more than a baby merely reacting to sensory input; but much less than an adult encumbered with images of self, unconsciously demanding to be aggrandised and preserved. The next level in Chloe’s development will be the formation of memory; the process whereby accrued knowledge is added to elemental experience, which, through repeat experience, provokes the construction of self-image. Chloe is on the cusp. Jae remembers hearing her say phrases such as, “I’m so clumsy,” in a tearful voice after falling over yet again. But she has always made a point of arresting the formation of these kinds of self-images, with gentle denials that clumsiness isn’t unique to Chloe. Given that adults are what they think – that people live and behave according to their thinking – what then is the driving force for behaviour in small children? What prompts how they live and behave? If they have not yet developed conscious thinking – if their minds are silent, free of interference – then are they acting purely in the moment, without any intervention from memory or ego? Can it be that the natural state of every child is what practitioners of Eastern spirituality have struggled to cultivate for centuries? If so, why and how does this quasienlightened state disintegrate during the process of maturation? Arriving at the outskirts of town, Jae allows her thoughts to coalesce, surmising that through experience and the accumulation of knowledge, memory becomes the foundation of selfimage, paving the way for thought to develop into the all-powerful commander of action in adults.

October/November 2015  Philosophy Now 53

F

alling asleep that night is a drawn-out process for Jae. Tossing and turning in agitated contemplation, she can’t prevent herself from trying to conceive what it would be like to live without an image of herself, or indeed of others. She considers that she probably has a relationship only with the concept she has of her daughter; and of her parents, friends and boyfriend – whereas Chloe very likely has a relationship with the actual person – how and who they are from moment to moment. Jae concludes that while she herself is merely relating to ideas dependent on the whims of her own ego, Chloe lives in the real world, relating to the everyday truth of what is, unimpeded by the corrupting influence of thought. After a fretful night, the morning brings nothing out of the ordinary. Chloe wants cereal for breakfast with milk and cream; Jae sips green tea and bustles around getting dressed, clearing up, and generally preparing for school and work. She’s always been determined to avoid a hurried, stressful walk to school. They’re so lucky to live just a short distance away, and she feels that rushing it would spoil their morning relationship. So they set off at Chloe’s meandering pace, making several pauses and diversions along the way as Chloe inspects aspects of nature, or points out interesting litter discarded on the ground. Neither of them mentions the dead ladybird.

T

hat evening, after Jae has read Chloe her favourite book, tucked her up in bed and given her a kiss, Chloe grabs her arm, and in a small voice asks, “Does granny have a mummy?” “Yes love, of course. Everyone has a mummy,” Jae explains soothingly. “But, where is she? Where is granny’s mummy?” Jae understands that this is the moment chosen by Chloe for the discussion. She responds gently, “Granny’s mummy is dead now.” “Oh.” Chloe looks crestfallen. “Will granny die?” “Yes, some day.” “Will… you die?” “Not for a very, very long time. It’s so far away that we can’t even imagine it or talk about it! We’ve got so much to do tomorrow: it’s Olivia’s birthday party, remember?” “But mummy… will I die?” “Chloe, listen to me. Everybody dies one day, but for someone little like you it is far, far, far away – a hundred years away.” “Is it a million years away? Is it so far away that it’s a million years away?” “Yes.” But Chloe’s face crumples as the pain of knowledge fills her soul. Large, angry tears spring from her eyes, dampening her pyjama collar. “But I don’t want to die!” she sobs passionately, “I never want to die!” Jae reaches down to cradle her daughter’s trembling body in a tight embrace. This moment is one of the pinnacles of parental duty. ‘I must steer her through this realisation well,’ she thinks urgently. But her heart aches for the bitterness of Chloe’s expulsion from an innocent life. Rocking her tenderly and whispering calmly, she reassures her, “You know, lots of people believe different things about being dead. Some people believe that after you die you can come back and live again. If 54 Philosophy Now  October/November 2015

you could choose, what would you want to be, darling? A cloud? A tree? A rabbit?” “I want to come back as a girl! I want to be me again. I always want to be me.” Chloe states, outraged. Jae wipes her face with a tissue. “Okay my love, you can be you. What a good idea! And I will be me, too.” Holding her daughter tightly in her arms and kissing her soft skin, Jae senses Chloe relax and slump against her as relief floods through her body. “We will always be together and have fun,” Jae continues, “we’ll look after each other and play together forever. Like tomorrow at the party. You can wear your pirate costume and your hook and eyepatch… Won’t that be great?” “And can I give the present and card?” “Well… all right,” Jae capitulates, as if she quite wanted to perform the task herself, “I think you should do it.” She watches, consoled, as Chloe’s mouth forms into a smile. Transferring Chloe gently back to the bed, switching her night lamp on, and giving her Pink Rabbit to cuddle, Jae says, “Fun tomorrow,” and walks away, leaving the door wide open. Downstairs Jae makes more noise than usual with the washing up, believing it might comfort Chloe hearing her down there, pottering away with the chores as usual. But at the sink she thinks uneasily, ‘So a white lie solves it… for now.’ Although she had attenuated the truth, it had felt appropriate to do so. She reasons that there will be plenty of time for Chloe to form her own opinion in future years. But at least Chloe has had age-appropriate reassurance in the meantime. The distressing concept of her own death is perhaps too much for a little girl to bear without consolation. How could she tell her daughter that when she dies her body will simply rot away like all other organic things, and that she will be lost to oblivion forever? For now, during Chloe’s transition from her Garden of Eden into reality, where she must toil the rest of her life with the burden of her own cessation, she has a fig leaf to clutch as she embarks upon the daunting seas of human understanding. © JACKIE GRIFFITHS 2015

Jackie Griffiths is the author of the philosophical novel, Ox Herding: A Secular Pilgrimage. She has a BSc in Psychology & Computing, and an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies. Twitter: @jackieauthor

Philosophy Now Festival 21st November 2015 in association with the Conway Hall Ethical Society The third bi-annual Philosophy Now Festival will be held in Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL, all day on 21st November 2015. Organised in co-operation with more than a dozen London-based philosophy organisations, the third Philosophy Now Festival will include lectures, debates, workshops, philosophical games and entertainment for the whole family. Admission is free and is open to all. Please visit our Festival webpage for information and updates! http://philosophynow.org/festival http://facebook.com/PhilosophyNow http://twitter.com/PhilosophyNow

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