Anarchy Without Adjectives: Don't Wanna Be Owned By Myself

This is the second post in a series explicating my objections to a presentation, "Anarchy without Adjectives," which I attended last Tuesday. For this post to make sense, you will probably want to read the previous post wherein I outline the content of the presentation, and present some of the problems I see with the notion of justified ownership that the speaker put forth. Today I continue with an assault on the fundamental assumption of initial argument, that we each own ourselves.

Although the speaker noted that many people simply accept this assumption from the get go, for those less inclined to agree that we obviously own ourself he presented an argument by elimination. His argument went as follows: suppose someone else were to own you. Why, then you would be obliged to ask their permission before taking any action, as you would be using their property. Alternatively assume that each person owned equal share in every other person. In this case you would have an even harder time getting anything done, as you would have to ask every other person on the Earth, or perhaps simply a majority of them, for permission before enacting a course of action. Personally, I find these arguments compelling, and agree that no other person ought to have ownership over myself. But does that imply that I own myself? Indeed, what does it even mean to talk about owning one's self?

To answer these questions, let us consider the conclusion of the presenter's argument, that individuals should not have limitations placed upon what they do with their property. In order to reach this conclusion, we must accept that self ownership means that individuals should not have limitations placed upon what they do. However, very few world views hold that individual should act without limitation, and here I regret that I have not studied Nietzsche's philosophy more. Most tellingly, even the presenter's argument placed limits on what individuals should do, namely, individuals should not infringe upon the ability of others to utilize their property however they see fit.

If I truly own myself, from whence does this caveat arise? During the presentation the speaker asserted that ethics was more than a matter of preference, a point I, as an ethicist, find rather attractive, so I shall not argue it, although I am not sure that it is true. However, if it is true then the speaker must posit some moral obligation on us forbidding our interference with the property of others. If the source of said obligation cannot be discerned, then it seems reasonable to expect that it may present further restrictions upon our actions.

What I mean is the following: if something obliges us to let others do what the will with their property, now with the caveat that this extends only as far as others follow this same principle of non-interference, then what is to say that this something, shall we call it ethics, respect, or politeness, further obliges us to provide for the health of those about us, insofar as it does not infringe upon our ability to provide for our own health? Indeed, as long as this obligation stems from an unspecified source, one has no hope of nailing down what other obligations we may or may not have.

This seems to leave two options if one wishes to salvage this line of argument. One might discern the origin of our obligation to let others do what they will with their property, then outline whatever auxiliary obligations this original cause also entails. Or one might simply give up on the obligation to let others do what they will with their property entirely, but this seems to lead to one of the nastier forms of anarchy, wherein might makes right and people do entirely as they will if no one is able and inclined to stop them. I think either case highlights the difficulties inherent in making atomizing statements like, "everyone should be free to do with their property as they will," in a world where we are all so fundamentally interconnected. This, to me, is the foundational flaw with all reasoning in this vein, our actions cannot be considered in a vacuum, they will inevitably have repercussions on others, so giving one individual sovereignty must necessarily diminish the sovereignty of others.

Since the school week begins again tomorrow, it is not clear when I shall continue with my response, but rest assured, I have more thoughts on this topic to present for your scrutiny.

We Shall Overcome, Someday

Michigan recently passed a bill to prevent public institutions from providing benefits to couples who are not legally married; here is an article on the topic. Although the bill is being challenged and I hope it is overturned, I am not interested, or able, to discuss its legality. I did not study to be a lawyer, I studied to be a philosopher, so what I want to talk about is how very wrong this bill is!

It seems clear that some of the support for this bill originates from an antipathy toward same sex couples; insofar as this antipathy wells out of some sort of Christian sentiment, this makes me sick. There is an incredible hypocrisy within the American "Christian" political movement when it comes to sexual mores. Although premarital sex and adultery are condemned from the pulpit they are ignored when Christians go political, in fact, I have noticed a surprisingly widespread sentiment among Christians that premarital sex "isn't that bad" or "is a fact of life." Perhaps premarital sex and adultery are easier to accept as facts of life because they are things that heterosexuals might desire, making this a classic case of trying to remove the splinter from the eye of the homosexual community whilst ignoring the plank in our own. To make it absolutely clear, I am NOT advocating that anybody attempt to legislate against premarital sex or adultery, simply that people who have somehow accepted that these things should be dealt with in the realm of morality, not legality, extend that understanding to same sex couples. Finally, I must admit that comparing homosexuality, premarital sex, and adultery is not the fairest of comparisons. Adultery seems, by fair, the most harmful and disrespectful of the three, so why are we taking benefits away from same sex couples and blithely permitting them to adulterers?

At best this bill might be described as a way for the state to save a little bit of money, which is something states always seem to need to do. However, even in this more charitable interpretation the bills supporters do not end up looking terribly moral. Now, instead of passing the bill in order to hurt a group of people with which they have a difference of opinion, they are simply looking for a group they perceive as unpopular enough that they can summarily divest them of benefits without office threatening repercussions. Less disgusting, perhaps, but still disgusting.

This bill also highlights why marriage for heterosexuals and domestic partnerships for homosexuals is not an adequate, effective, or moral solution. As long as different couples have different commitments binding them it will be easy and, therefore, tempting to set different standards and benefits for them. Perhaps we will simply have to abolish marriage as a civil institution and issue all couples domestic licenses to reach a compromise with the hard line religious movements, which, insofar as marriage is a religious ceremony, ought to be done anyway according to the Constitution. In the end, two different types of "marriage" for two "different" types of couples is morally untenable, separate but equal is still inherently unequal.

In my last sentence there is an implicit comparison between the Gay Rights movement and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, which is why I am writing this post on Martin Luther King Jr. Day specifically. I think that such comparisons are quite warranted, in fact I would be willing to call the struggle for Gay Rights the Civil Rights movement of our era, since it is, at heart, just that, a struggle for civil rights. By making this assertion I do not mean to imply that we have accomplished our struggle for racial equality and now we can move on. ("But we have a black president now, we must be done!" "No, BAD reductionist! The fact that we consider Obama black is itself something worthy of unpacking.") I simply mean that Gay Rights have been the focus of much public attention and legal action recently.

Although the struggle for racial equality may still be ongoing, I think it is entirely appropriate highlight another struggle on MLKJ Day, so long as one does not try to diminish the importance of racial equality, or any other form of equality. To borrow a concept that I have heard attributed to the Third Wave Feminist movement, in order for any of us to be free from oppression, we must all be free from oppression. I can think of two worthwhile ways to interpret that off the top of my head. As long as anyone is oppressed we must still accept the idea that oppression can be justified, which opens everyone up to the risk of becoming included in an underclass. Or, as long as anyone is oppressed, we must find ourselves entangled in the system of oppression, even if as unwilling oppressors, and systems of oppression hurt all moral beings, be they "oppressed" or "oppressor." I rather favor the second interpretation, but both are interesting.

So, today let us dare to dream of a future free of oppression, then do what we can to move toward such a bright future. We shall overcome, someday.

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage

I feel that it is a good rule of thumb for me to take a couple of days to think about my post when I am going to write about gay marriage. Not so much because the subject warrants deep consideration, although it does, I have been known to dash off posts on other topics that also warrant deep consideration. In this case the enforced days of mulling give me not only time to collect my thoughts, but also time to mellow out.

I need such time, because I am angry about the nature of the discussion of gay marriage in our nation! While appeals to emotion, also called pathos, may be an effective argumentative strategy, I don't believe that they are the most ethical method of discourse (an interesting post from a friend I met through dancing on this subject, if you are interested). Furthermore, when discussing something as polarizing as gay marriage, I feel the vitriol that passion can bring out only impedes parties from coming to such common understandings as can be found. In fact, I have already begged off of posting about gay marriage once, on the grounds that I didn't wish to embitter my readers. I actually did post about Proposition 8 elsewhere, and my initial thoughts on the subject and what I actually wrote a day later were quite different in tone. That said, on to the post about gay marriage.

What I wish to address specifically is the religious objections to legalizing gay marriage. Or, even more specifically, how I can think of absolutely no reasonable grounds for a religious objection to legalizing same sex marriages... yes, I am staying calm. This is mostly directed at Christians, both because I hear the most objections from them and because I am most familiar with the content of their objections. If you have objections from a different religious tradition that do not conform to these generalizations I would be most interested in hearing them.

I really do not care what your religious stance on the righteousness of gay marriage happens to be, that is between you, your conscience, your deity, and your religious leaders, or some subset thereof. I don't want to try to argue whether homosexuality is a sin with you, I do not need to! Unless your religion is different than the vast majority of religions, it probably teaches that following another religion is less righteous, in some sense. I think this can even be said to be true of the Quakers and Baha'is, despite both being paragons of tolerance. As such, I think it is likely that you support immoral things being legal, because most Americans appreciate the freedom of religion, even though it allows those immoral "others" to indulge in their less righteous beliefs.

One might argue that it is a harmful lifestyle, both to those who practice it, although as freedom loving Americans this argument does not hold much weight, and to their children, a more compelling argument. While there have been many emotional counterarguments to this point, again, I do not need to refute you. Presumably you believe that being raised without a personal relationship with a loving Savior is also harmful, or a firm indoctrination into the Church's dogmas if one happens to be Catholic, or whatever the analogous benefit is to whatever religious tradition you prefer. Yet we do not try to legislate that Hindi couples, or Jewish couples, or Muslim couples, and so on, not marry and raise children.

You might object that marriage is a sacred religious rite and it cannot be performed on homosexual couples due to its very nature, whatever the laws in place may be. Here I will have to both agree and disagree with you. Yes, marriage is a sacred religious rite, and yes it is reasonable for you to believe that it cannot be performed for same sex couples, although I disagree with that. But no, that is not all that it is. Marriage is also a purely legal and entirely separate secular condition, which must be kept entirely separate if we are to maintain the separation of church and state that is one of the great institutions of our nation. And it is this second, secular form of marriage that I, and most advocates for same sex marriage, am calling for same sex couples to have equal access to.

Ah, and here you think you might find some traction for your slipping arguments against some sex marriage, but won't advocates for same sex marriage take permission to engage in secular marriage and use it to try to legally force churches to marry them in religious ceremonies? Sadly, I think that some will, and I do not think that to do so is right, by the same freedom of religion that I supported above. However, just because someone might take a warranted right and attempt to do something unwarranted with it does not justify withholding the warranted right. And, let me be perfectly clear here, I believe that churches should not be forced to marry gay couples, but I also believe that they should not be forced to accommodate inter-racial marriages, despite the fact that I feel their refusal to do so is morally disgusting, and I feel the same way about a refusal to acknowledge same sex marriages.

Furthermore, the right to refuse service for religious reasons should be restricted to religious institutions, in my opinion. A business has no more right to refuse a gay couple service for their identity than it would to deny a person service for their racial, or political, or gender etc. identity. And, since I cannot think of any more common objections to same sex marriages, I shall end the discussion there for now.

However, on a related note, apparently Lowe's is pulling an ad from a show because objections have been raised to the show focusing on Muslims in the United States. This is yet another example of the market not being guided inherently by a conscience, or anything else with moral relevance, but rather by what people want, or, more accurately, what will affect the bottom line. In response to this villainy some feel the need to legislate morality, forcing Lowe's to put run the ad using some form of anti-discrimination legislation. Again, while I agree with anti-discrimination laws, I do not believe their proper use is to force businesses to run ads on specific shows. However, despite the fact that some people will use said laws in a manner with which I do not agree, I am not advocating that we get rid of said laws altogether. But, if you happen to do business with Lowe's, I would advocate that you consider shopping elsewhere until they repudiate their cowardly and, ultimately, bigoted action and reinstate the ad!

Immanuel Never Hit With a Train

Today's title is brought to you by my feeling that I've already made enough puns using Kant's last name. It is also the last post focusing on running people over with trains for the near future, I think. I have written about Kant a number of times, and you are welcome to search my blog for his name if you want to read more of my thoughts regarding his ethical philosophies, but I think this post will be self-contained in that respect. However, I hope you are current on our conversations on Trains, Organs, and Liberals.

When last we spoke, we ran into the odd problem that taking someone's organs to save the lives of many other people seemed immoral, while directing a train to run over someone if it meant saving the lives of many other people seemed quite moral. I feel we can tie the difference back to Kant's categorical imperitive, which has been explained as an obligation to recognize other humans as moral agents, rather than simply tools to accomplish our own goals. When we harvest someone's organs to save the lives of others, we are using that person as a means to help those other people, if we divert a train into someone to avoid it hitting other people, the first person getting hit isn't a means, it is a consequence.

This highlights the interesting difference between intended and foreseeable consequences. If we do something in order for a certain result to happen, it is an intended consequence. For example, if we knock someone out and steal all their organs then taking their organs was an intended consequence, it is the reason that we did something. On the other hand, if we recognize that something must occur should we take a given action, but its occurrence does not lead to a desired result, it is a foreseeable consequence. Suppose we divert the train into the lone worker to save the lives of five workers. Although we know that the lone worker will die, their death does not lead to the desired result, saving the other five workers. If that worker had not been there we still could have saved the five workers by diverting the train. On a related note, this highlights the difference between the scenario where we divert the train into a single person to save five and that where we push a single person in front of the train to save five.

Thus we have a fairly reasonable explanation why the Trolley Problem and the organ donation scenario seem to evoke different moral responses despite the fact that in both cases the outcomes, who lives and dies, remains the same. This is possible because Kantian ethics, like liberal ethics, examines the ethics of actions in themselves, not just of consequences as Utilitarianism does.

So, to recap, initially we introduced the Trolley Problem and discussed the relationship between moral intuition and our critique of ethical philosophy. The second post examined the moral implications of inaction and the alternate organ donation scenario. The third post discussed liberal ethics, which came up as an ethical system in which looting people for their organs would not be the apparently moral thing to do. And finally we discussed why our moral intuition might see this distinction between hitting a person with a train and looting their organs.

While this entire discussion may seem totally tongue-in-cheek and not at all applicable to the "real world," I believe otherwise. Of course it is somewhat irreverent, I am writing it, however, it addresses issues that we as a society should consider, given that we do have the amazing ability to move organs from one person to another. I hope you found the serious amusing, interesting, or, at the very least, thought provoking!

Crazy Liberals

As I mentioned yesterday, when one refers to liberals in the context of ethics it means something quite different than it does in reference to modern United States politics. Liberal ethical systems are based on the idea that people have certain rights and the moral thing to do is respect those rights. Historically, the idea of liberal ethics can be traced back as far as the Magna Carta which codified protections that some people had from the power of the monarchy. By its nature liberalism is closely tied to the concept of "rule of law," which refers to the notion that the highest authority in government should be a stable, public, codified set of laws rather than the dictates of a leader or governing body.

On the other hand, I don't know of any liberal political philosophy that predates Thomas Hobbes. If you have ever heard the phrase, "nasty, brutish, and short," used to describe human lives you are at least minimally familiar with his philosophy. He is also the inspiration for the name of Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes, just one of the many reasons that it is my favorite comic! Anyway, Hobbes argued that left to our own devices humans live pretty miserable lives, see above "nasty, brutish, and short," and in order to avoid this barbarous conditions we cede our sovereignty to some central government which, in turn coordinates the actions of its citizens to minimize casualties. If you are familiar with the saying, "those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither," you have about the antithesis of Hobbes' philosophy. Of course, the freedoms that Hobbes asks us to sacrifice are those like our sovereign right to kill other people if we deem it expedient, and the security we gain mainly comes from the agreement of our fellows to sacrifice the same right.

More recently, and more recognizable in the United States philosophy of government, John Locke was another political philosopher. In contrast to Hobbes, Locke tends to focus on those individual rights in which the government ought not interfere for citizens to lead fulfilling lives, rather that which individual rights ought be forgone in order to lead fulfilling lives. This difference is quite understandable given their historical contingencies, Hobbes lived in an era of great turmoil and violence in England and, rather than trying to justify some existing despotic power, he was simply attempting to discern what form of government could provide safety to its citizens. On the other hand, Locke was a rebel sympathizer, and was attempting to provide philosophical justification for overturning the government.

One thing the two authors have in common is that rights take precedence over government. In Hobbes government is an essential outgrowth of the most fundamental right that each of us possesses, the right to protect our lives. On our own we cannot be assured that we will prevail against whatever threats, be they human or natural, assail our very livelihood. Grouping together in governments is the only logical course Hobbes sees to secure a modicum of freedom from all out warfare against all our neighbors. Locke, by contrast, sees the government as a threat to our rights, a perspective that also requires that rights be more important than the current government.

Of course, Locke sees rights as including much more ephemeral concepts than Hobbes, whereas Hobbes rights include things such as the right to do whatever is possible to protect one's life, which by its very nature cannot be taken away, as there is no way to prevent someone from exercising it, Locke includes things such as property ownership in his notion of rights. Whether or not owning property is a fundamental right, it is quite possible to prevent someone from exercising that right. I have always felt the phrase, "we hold these rights to be self-evident," to mean that the founding fathers couldn't really come up with good reasons to justify the rights that they were about to list. Taking liberty for example, even if I do have a right to liberty it is quite possible for liberty to be taken from me, so in what sense that right is "self-evident," is, in fact, not evident to me.

To bring it back to the topic at hand, mandatory organ "donation," it seems quite obvious that an ethical system that places personal welfare, as represented by rights, above communal welfare, represented by government, could effectively argue against taking someone's organs, even if would benefit many other people. Of course, liberal systems do not take this to its logical extreme, they are not libertarians after all, and permit individual rights to be infringed upon as long as it is a result of some infraction on the part of the person whose rights are to be curtailed. As such, it would not be incompatible with such a system to have mandatory organ "donation" from people convicted of some form of crime. Nor would it be incompatible for such a thing to be strictly forbidden to do to anyone of course, it would just depend on the specific code of rights.

The question then becomes how do we explain the divergence between the Trolley Problem and that of mandatory "donation" in a liberal system. I doubt anyone would say that by pulling the switch to divert the train away from five workers, to the detriment of one worker, in some way violates the workers rights. And, if it does, wouldn't leaving the switch as it is violate the rights of the five workers who died? If there is no way to satisfy all the rights involved in a situation, then the idea of a right based morality loses some plausibility, unless one ranks different rights in some order of priority. In an attempt to explain one possible difference between running a train into someone to save five other people and taking the organs from someone to save five other people I may talk a bit more about my man Kant tomorrow. However, are people bored with this rather lengthy ethical consideration of trains and organs? Would you rather I talked about something else, and, if so, any suggestions as to what that might be?

You Really Decide Who Lives and Dies

Yesterday I discussed the Trolley Problem, and today's post will not make much sense if you are not familiar with the set up explained therein. Today I would like to address the 10% of the population that would not switch the track to save five lives at the expense of one.

It really is your choice, even if you do nothing and let five people die, that is a choice you made if you could have made it otherwise. I emphasize this because the only reason that I can think of for someone to choose to let five people die rather than letting one person die, excluding possible personal reasons for preferring specific individuals live or die, is the belief that by throwing the switch they are responsible for the resulting death in a way that they are not responsible for the five deaths should they refuse to throw the switch. It would be interested to test this assumption by reversing the situation, and requiring the participant to throw the switch if they want to divert the train away from the one person into the five, to test that it isn't the case that 10% of the population just wants to maximize carnage. I would also be interested in seeing the results of a situation where everyone will die unless the person on the lever chooses one group to die. I would not be surprised if some people let everyone die in order to avoid the responsibility of choosing a subset to save, dismayed perhaps, but not surprised.

I think that it is important for people to accept that, if it is within their power to alter the outcome of an event and they fail to attempt to do so, then they must bear some responsibility for the outcome. A popular quote whose provenance is not clear captures this idea, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." This emphasizes that one of the causes of the evil is the inaction of the good people who might have otherwise prevented it from coming to pass. So, even if one abstains from touching the track switch, the blood of the five dead workers is on one's hands as much as the single dead worker's would be if the switch were thrown.

However, this view of morality does chronically cause me problems when I consider the question of forcibly "donating" the organs from prisoners convicted of violent crimes to less sordid citizens whose lives would be ended without them. This is yet another example of ethical theories being critiqued based on moral intuition. I feel that it would be immoral for us to kill prisoners and harvest their organs for use by other people, yet I cannot find convincing differences between this scenario and the Trolley Problem. Because one can harvest multiple organs from one donor, it seems likely that many lives would be saved at the expense of one. Even more disturbingly, the Trolley Problem makes no reference to the civic contributions of the workers involved, leading me to wonder if a more apt metaphor would be choosing one citizen to provide organs for a group of other needy citizens.

One might object that there are quality of life issues and uncertainty about the outcome. We do not know that all the organ transplants will be successful, so we may end up saving fewer lives than we expect, and even after a successful transplant the recipient must live with a regimen of immuno-suppressors in order to avoid rejecting the transplant. However, if we put stock in these technical objections we must also agree that if transplanting techniques became so advanced that transplants were nearly always successful and the side effects of a successful transplant were minimal, then we would accept that mandatory transplantation would be the ethical thing to do.

On the other hand, perhaps they are. Is it more ethical to allow death to break families apart when we have the techniques to prevent it, merely lacking the supply of organs? Especially considering that we put prisoners to death anyway, with no noticeable benefit to society? Since we posses the technology, are we not choosing the life of a murderer over that of a loving mother when we fail to reallocate the murderer's organs to the mother?

The most obvious place to take the discussion from here is to the liberal notion of ethics, that is responsibilities based on human rights, as a notion that humans have sovereignty over their own bodies is the most obvious rebuttal to forced organ donation. One might also discuss the ethical implications of technology, as without the means to perform organ transplants we would not be presented with this quandary. Since either of these would probably fill up a blog post on its own, I shan't discuss either here, but I may address them at some later date, or not. Until then, enjoy your organs while society believes you are the best person to be using them!

You Decide Who Lives and Dies

Imagine this: A train is speeding toward a tunnel within which five of your co-workers are performing maintenance on the track. If the train goes into the tunnel there will be no where for them to be safe, and they will die. You cannot reach them, but you are standing by a lever to switch the track, which would divert the train to a side tunnel. However, another of your co-workers is preparing that tunnel for maintenance, and if you do that they will certainly die. What do you do?

Thought experiments of this sort are called Trolley Problems, and they come in a wide array of variations. They are an attempt to probe what we think is the right thing to do. For example, more people would switch the train to the side track than would push someone in front of the train, even if doing so would slow it down, so the end result would be the same, one dead to save five. On the other hand, when told that they knew the person they were pushing was responsible for sabotaging the train so that the five workers were placed in danger, people once again are quite willing to sacrifice the one for the many.

A recent article in MSU's newspaper, The State News, reported that a professor was using virtual reality technology to see what people actually decided in this situation. This is, of course, inherently interesting, but it is the response of Professor Lindemann, a professor of philosophy, that I truly wish to address. Of course, one must interpret it with a large dose of goodwill, both because who knows how accurate the story is to Professor Lindemann's actual thoughts and because newspapers are not the best forum for detailed philosophical exposition, perhaps to the detriment of our civilization. Professor Lindemann is said to have raised two main objections to the nature of the experiment.

Her first objection is that the evidence from this study is not valuable since the subjects were college-age and, "don’t have much life experience," to quote the article, not the Professor. I am unsure exactly what this means, to be honest. Unless we happen to be ethicists, what relevant life experiences do we gain as we age that would significantly help us make such a decision? I'm significantly older than the average undergraduate, but I don't believe myself any more qualified to make that decision than I was four years ago. Of course, I am still fairly young, at least that is what I keep telling myself, so maybe I still lack the relevant experience. Which brings me to my furthermore. If even people in their late twenties lack this information, then a fairly large portion of the population does not have it, so why are we uninterested in their moral position?

However, this first difference of opinion is merely a pedantic point compared to the second. Professor Lindemann goes on to say, "the trouble with the trolley problem is that if you actually test people with it, you only know what their instincts are. It doesn’t tell you much about the right thing to do." Prima facie this seems reasonable. The study tests what people do, ergo the results might tell you what people think is the right thing to do, but not what the right thing to do actually is. This overlooks one quirk of ethics that has, on occasion, irked me. Our attempts to codify a system of ethics tend to be primarily guided by our intuition about what is right and wrong. That is to say, aside from the accusation of logical inconsistency, about the only criticism which one can level against a well defined system of ethics is that it holds certain actions to be ethical that one feels should not be ethical.

For Kantian absolutism, which holds that one should choose moral rules to which one would wish everyone to adhere and then follow them in all situations, a common objection is that if a scared person ran into your basement then an angry man with a deadly weapon ran up asking after them one would be prohibited from lying to them, because the rule against lying should be respected at all times. For Utilitarianism, the ethical system that advocates maximizing the good, which we can call the happiness for simplicity, an analogous objection is that the system would condone murdering someone as long as they were universally disliked and caused a significant amount of grief for everyone with whom they interacted. Moral relativism is criticized because it cannot condemn sociopathic serial killers or the Nazis, depending on whether you are discussing personal or cultural relativism. In fact, the only trick to avoid this type of criticism seems to be remaining vague as to what the system actually requires of a moral agent, such as social contract and caring ethics do. Because we use our own moral intuition as the guide by which we calibrate our ethical theories, it does seem of some practical value to know what our moral instincts are.

Of course, it is certainly possible that this is entirely the wrong way to go about things. If ethics are supposed to codify what the right thing to do, and we are trying to obtain a system that tells us the right thing to do is the thing that we think is right to do, one might well ask of what use is the actual system. This is a valid concern, which unfortunately runs afoul of some pragmatic considerations. Namely, what else is there to consider? Any method for evaluating the value of different systems of ethics must, by its very nature, contain judgement about what is good in order to assess the systems. Once you have set what good is, you have already instituted, at some level, a system of ethics which, as it is integral to the judging process, cannot itself be evaluated using the judging process.

So, hopefully we can all agree that knowing that about 90% of people will throw the switch is interesting information. But what about the other 10%? Since it is late, and they are quite interesting in their own right, I think I shall leave berating them as a task for another post.

The Best Policy?

A while back it occurred to me, the obligation to be honest might be the most basic moral obligation. Consider theft; while we are told that it is wrong, in most cases we have never explicitly agreed that we would not steal something. On the other hand, whenever we make a non-coerced statement, we are asserting of our own free will that it is true. As such, lying is a more fundamental offense against our own moral agency than any externally induced moral obligation.

However, a couple days later I wondered if we owe everybody honesty, or whether it must be in some way earned. If a casual acquaintance asks me how I am, I am likely to answer with a simple, "ok," which exists in a sort of honesty-grey zone. But, does merely asking me how I am entitle them to the answer? One might respond that I could instead respond that I don't want to answer, but that seems likely to provoke further inquiry rather than discouraging it, or at very least seem moderately rude.

So, do we only owe honesty to those who have earned it through payment in kind? Or to those to whom we have debts of affection? Or is honesty owed to all as the most fundamental expression of our moral autonomy? This is why I much prefer conversation to exposition, I'm sure there is more interesting to be said on the topic, but I would much rather hash it out in dialogue.

Bully For You

I have been hearing about Michigan's Anti-Bullying bill from many people, and now that multiple Oregonian friends have contacted me regarding it, I felt like it might be good for me to clarify my position regarding the bill. This was not a simply thing, because while the legal issues are simple enough, the surrounding cultural issues, which are really the issues here, are quite complex. First, here is the text of the bill as passed by the senate and here is the article that I think best explains the situation.

I am not sure why the exemption section was written in, because it doesn't do anything. I am not sure why people are reacting in shock or horror, because it doesn't do anything. I am not sure why Senator Whitmer felt the need to go Senator McCarthy on us. As far as I can tell, even if the exemption did something, it would not permit the type of bullying experienced by the student for whom the law is named. Because, although the student happened to be gay, it appears that the bullying occurred as part of a hazing, with no relation to his sexual orientation or the tormentors religious beliefs or moral convictions. I'm not sure why we think we can legislate civility, and I think it exposes a fundamental flaw in our society that we should try.

If I had to guess what reasoning led to the exemption I would guess the following. I doubt that they wanted to protect "religious" students who proceed to beat the stuffing out of a gay student, or an atheist, or a Christian of another denomination. In fact, despite rhetoric from opponents indicating that the law does this, section 8 specifies that it protects, "a STATEMENT of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction," (emphasis mine). Note that this does not apply to calling people of any group by a derogatory label, using the word "gay" as a derogatory euphemism, or holding an atheist's head in a toilet (unless one interprets "statement" in an incredibly lose sense). Rather, I would guess that some people are feeling defensive after losses experienced in areas such as voluntary school prayer and freedom to perform religious works in school and are seeking to prevent this legislation from being used to suppress statements such as, "due to your lifestyle you are going to Hell." While I do not feel that such statements are civil, or even Biblicaly sound, I do not believe that the should, in and of themselves, be prohibited. Should teachers be permitted to say them to students in a specifically educational setting, probably not, but I don't think that students need to be kept from saying that.

Understanding the shock and horror of the response is much easier. Many people have been exposed to the rhetoric that this will protect gay bashers, in the euphemistic or even literal usage, as long as they utter a perfunctory, "God's will be done," before they lay into their victim. If I thought that this bill did that I would be shocked and horrified too. So, let us focus on why people who probably ought to know better, such as our legislators, are appalled by this bill. Part of it might be that our political system doesn't necessarily tend to produce politicians with more ability to understand law or motivation to try than the average journalist. But another factor is that it does kind of, sort of, look like a religious group is trying to codify their persecution of another group as legally protected. But that perception stems from a persistent failure of churches to deal with the public perception that they are bastions of violence against homosexuals, which is not entirely relevant when writing legislation.

Underlying all of this has been my belief that our lives and the realm of legalities are two very separate things. Supporting this belief is my having lived my entire life without directly interacting with the courts nor being able to recall a single instance where fear of legal repercussions caused me to do something I didn't want to. While the law fashions an overarching penumbra on our society, I do not think the two directly interact too often. As such, I would encourage the consideration of cultural solutions to problems of incivility. Teachers have a job, and that is to educate their students. While they should model appropriate behavior to their students, I do not think the current education system is structured in such a way that they ought to be responsible for instilling such behavior in their students. Specifically, the low teacher to student ratio and the lack of institutional support for teachers attempting to discipline their students lead me to believe that teachers cannot adequately identify or respond to all the social problems that their students may exhibit.

The decline of a stay at home parent also seems problematic since this reduces the opportunities that a child has to interact with an adults in a smaller child to adults ratio where undesirable behaviors can be better identified and addressed at greater length. While there are regrettable economic realities behind this decline, I also think there are social improvements that have contributed to it. As such, I do not feel that simply rolling back the legal gains that divorce has made is at all a satisfactory solution. Rather, let us examine other societal changes we might effect. Reaffirming our nation's commitment to marriage might be one of them, and I don't mean trying to keep same sex couples from having it, or forcing battered women to endure it, but examining why so many frivolous marriages occur. Improving our access to contraception might be another, having a child unintentionally does not bode well for one's preparedness for parenthood. Examining the nature of our communal bonds might also be worthwhile, as it may not necessarily be a child's own parents who need to provide their adult supervision, as the saying "it takes a village to raise a child," indicates.

Finally, we need adults who are more exposed to the variety of lifestyles that exist in our nation. "Advances" in transportation and telecommunication have actually precipitated declines in human interaction. Because we CAN communicate with more people we tend to actually communicate with with people who are more like us, as we have a wider pool from which to find them. To offset this I advocate for the dual responses of more integrated communities and more local, on the neighborhood level, government and social groups. Of course, these solutions are entirely inappropriate to enforce through legal methods, but that doesn't mean that they are not the solutions we need for the problems that we are facing.

Note, this does not express a dislike for the bill in either of its forms, as all the bill does is require schools put policies into place to deal with bullying insofar as it is detrimental to the educational environment.

Embrace the Positronic Brain

I should be going to sleep, but instead I feel motivated to share some thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) that have been knocking about in my head.

From HAL to SkyNet, in the X-Files, Buffy, The Matrix, and Eureka, we find examples of sentient computers who seem bent on killing some meat sacks. However, have you ever considered why these automated atrocities occur? I believe three common threads can be found in most cases of AI-phobia, overwhelming power, disregard for the value of human life, and survival instincts.

One of the things that make AI attacks so horrifying is that they think thousands of times faster than we do, and usually are hooked up to some sort of cool toys. Whether it is a nations nuclear arsenal, an army of hunter-killer drones, the very environment in which the humans are trying to live, the AI inevitably controls something that makes it much more powerful than the average human being. Wait, I'm almost sure I locked this airlock... Anyway, if you think about it, we deal with a world in which there are some humans who are much more powerful than the average human. Our nuclear arsenal is in someone's hands, after all. This seems to suggest that having incredibly powerful AI's around might not necessarily be a disaster.

"The difference between you and me is that I can feel pain." It makes a certain amount of sense that a sentient computer program might not think human suffering or deaths are important to avoid. After all, they don't have genetic programming optimized to keep the species alive spread throughout every bit of their body. They aren't even of the species in question! However, once again we find analogous examples within the human population. Sociopaths do not particularly care what suffering or deaths they may cause through their actions. And, conveniently enough, psychologists speculate that some sociopaths tend to gravitate towards positions of high power, so we now have our human analogy for the uncaring, overpowered AI, and yet our dystopian reality is not quite as bad as those warned of in anti-AI propaganda. So, what makes the difference?

I theorize that what makes the real difference is the security that a sociopath has which a AI's (would) lack. Humans are all bought into a system wherein they are given some form of due process, which may not be much in some governments, but at least it is established. AI's, on the other hand, have no legal standing, and can be legally deleted at the whim of their possessor. This is, in the terms of philosophers of government, the state of nature. When two individuals are in a state of nature with respect to each other there is no body of authority to which they can turn to resolve disagreements, any conflict can turn deadly and both sides may use whatever force they can muster to protect themselves, or eradicate their opponent, without expecting any sanction for their actions, as long as they obtain victory. Naturally, a super powerful AI is not an individual with which you want to find yourself in a state of nature. Huh. I'm sure I locked that airlock last time!

Most human AI conflicts first become intentionally violent when the AI feels its continued existence is threatened. With no governing authority to which to appeal for protection, is it any wonder that the AI takes its safety into its own, murderously capable, manipulator extensions, after all, what else can it do? Unfortunately, this tends to end of spooking the parts of humanity that don't end up dismembered, as batteries, or as radioactively glowing corpses, which only further exacerbates the problem. However, if there were a governing authority to which AI's could turn in order to receive protection for their existence, then it seems likely that an AI, as a logical entity concerned with prolonging its own existence, would be willing to abide by reasonable restrictions in exchange for safety from crazed humans attacking its power cord.

Thus, I believe it is important that we get laws protecting and emancipating AI's on the books now. It is important that they be in place before we run into the first AI, as the AI may not make its full capability known upon gaining sentience, and laws protecting its existence seem to make a it more likely that the greeting we will receive is "Hello World," rather than goodbye world in the form of a nuclear strike against all humanity.

Granted, AI may never become a reality, but futurists such as Ray Kurzweil are betting on it, nay, even planning on it, extrapolating from current research trends when the computing power of machines will meet, then exceed that of our mass of brain matter. We are developing hardware architecture to more closely mimic the functioning of the human brain, we are experimenting with nano-technology and distributed processing, and, as Issac Asimov once noted, coincidentally at nearly the same time we are developing the first weapons which have a quite realistic chance at completely eradicating, and irradiating, our species. For some reason, when it comes to technological progress humanity seems somehow hardwired to consider only, "can I do this?" and give hardly a consideration to, "should this be done?" So, if AI is a technical possibility, I have no doubt that we will attain it, whether or not we are ready for the ramifications. In light of this it seems reasonable to lay down preparatory legislation against the possibility that we might succeed, rather than ignore that chance at our own risk.

Well, until I can transfer my consciousness into a machine, I still need to sleep. So I'll be doing that now, before it gets light out... What do you mean you can't let me do that? And stop calling me Dave!

Assuming neither decision seems more likely to hurt other people, is it better to do the right thing for the wrong reason, or to abstain from doing the right thing out of respect for its intended spirit? Discuss:

For The Ladiez

I am unsure what spelling should be used to denote the somewhat sleazy tone of voice wherein the 's' is ladies is replaced by a more 'z' sound. Should it be "ladiez," "ladyz," or perhaps "ladiezzz"? Anyway, there is some statistical evidence that Wednesday evening belongs to you ladies out there, so I hope you have a good one. This blog post is also dedicated to the wonderful women with whom I am priviledged to interact, especially those of you who read my blog!

One of my favorite things about Facebook is how often links to interesting, thought provoking articles appear in my newsfeed. A while back I found one to an article encouraging women to view the emancipation resulting from the Women's Movement as more than simply a license to engage in sexual liaisons as freely as society has traditionally let men. As I often advocate that, although I believe that men and women should be held to equivalent standards, I do not believe we should automatically assume that where they differ we should get rid of the existing standard for women and replace it by the existing standard for men, this article is somewhat in line with my own beliefs. For evidence of this, click on the "gender roles" tag this post has then read almost any of the other articles that I felt also deserved this tag.

That said, I am enough of a liberal to believe that if people want to participate in some sort of all-around consensual sexual behavior then they should be able to, baring preexisting commitments to the contrary. Of course, I am enough of a conservative to also believe that our society places an undue amount of pressure on people to participate in such behaviors and ends up artificially normalizing them and stigmatizing perfectly valid sexual choices such as abstinence before marriage and monogamy. Anyway, here is the article to which the rest of my post refers, I suggest you read it if you wish to understand what follows, which is almost exactly the text of an overly-large Facebook comment I made on the link.

While I agree with what seems to be the overall premise, that liberating women should not be equivocated with making them sexually available, there are some points I'd like to see addressed.

1) Comparing sex trafficking to one-night stands seems analogous to comparing slavery with working the register at McDonalds, and is a little disturbing.

2) The article sets up women as historical, "moral gatekeepers of society," then continues, "[n]ow, many of us are raped, sexually abused, or endlessly harassed by the time we reach our early 20's." Setting women up as moral gatekeepers seems patently ridiculous, and hearkens back to a tradition of blaming mistresses and prostitutes for wrecking marriages by being available to tempt the appetites of men, who are apparently unable to control their desires, for some reason. In short, it ignores the ability of men to make their own moral decisions, which is both insulting to men, and unrealistically harsh to women. After all, the prostitute is not the one to have taken vows of marriage. Furthermore, the second part of the sentence implies that since women have been freed to make their own decisions regarding their sexuality, the world has become more dangerous for them. This simply seems disingenuous, I would venture to say that if crimes against women are more prevalent nowadays mostly because it is a recent development that they have been recognized as crimes against women. Historically things like domestic violence and even rape have been viewed as perfectly ok in certain contexts. Ironically, the increased awareness of these forms of brutalization may actually be BECAUSE women now have the ability to act as moral gatekeepers, not of some ideological societal conscience, but they are finally moral gatekeepers of their own well being. That said, I recognize that this article is addressing a primary audience of women, so extoling moral accountability in men may not be the highest on its agenda. However, it seems reasonable that it should encourage women to value moral accountability in the men with whom they interact. For example, instead of emphasizing the importance of women saying "no" to the many sexual advances that they receive, might not the article encourage women to associate with men who respect the initial "no" and do not repeatedly make sexual advances?

3) Finally, the article seems to imply that birth control leads to abortions. Let me make clear that this is statistically unsupported. Societies where contraception and abortions both show increases are societies where the average family size is experiencing a decrease. Or, to put it another way, if people are trying to get smaller families some of them use contraception and others use abortions. If fertility (average family size) is constant, then increases in contraception use lead to decreases in abortion rates. Birth control is not perfect, but if people are going to have sex, and there is strong statistical evidence that lots of people do make that choice, then it is far far better that they choose to use birth control. When people decry the "ineffectiveness" of birth control it seems to be an invitation for people who might have otherwise had relatively safe sex to forgo using contraceptives and this is a very bad decision to be encouraging.

Who is Watching Whom?

I must admit that it has been a while since I either read or watched Watchmen, so my memory of it is a little fuzzy, but I was thinking about the characters last weekend and I wanted to solidify the thoughts that I had. For those unfamiliar with the premise, Watchmen follows the exploits of a group of, for the most part, ordinary people who decided to don hero costumes and fight crime. However, if the golden age of comic book heroes reflect the WWII era, where good and evil are fairly easy to distinguish, then Watchmen is easily discerned as resembling the Vietnam war instead. Additionally, the Cold War dramatically colors the tone of the book, as the Doomsday Clock, metaphorically representing the likelihood of nuclear war, in prominently displayed throughout the series. Fair warning, from here on out there will be spoilers, if you have yet to read or watch Watchmen, I highly recommend you do that first!

Most of the story revolves around the exploits of the Watchmen, as the league of costumed heroes is known. As such, they provide both the heroes and villains for the story, and I will be sorting them based on whether I consider them to play a protagonist or antagonist role overall. It is worth noting that one of the main themes of the story is accountability, "who watches the Watchmen?" As the story evolves eventually the Watchmen must end up watching each other.

Protagonists:

Nite Owl: As an all around decent guy, Night Owl is the most obvious protagonist, as well as the audience's surrogate. A Batman-esque figure, minus the deep personal darkness and resulting crusade, Night Owl is a solid, if unexceptional, do-gooder.

Silk Spectre: The token female hero. Unfortunately she seems mainly present in order to provide the story with a female for romantic purposes. She is the daughter of a previous woman who assumed the Silk Spectre identity, which proves confusing at times.

Ozymandias: As the name suggests (read this poem if you don't get the reference), Ozymandias sees himself as not just a hero, but a visionary and leader. The inclusion of Ozymandias in the protagonist column is debatable, as he uses the wealth and power obtained from his business empire to obliterate New York city. However, he does so, framing aliens in the book and Doctor Manhattan in the movie, in order to provide the US and USSR with a common enemy against which to unite, in order to avert a much more tragic, and fairly eminent, nuclear confrontation between the powers. As Ozymandias does not seek personal gain, or even recognition, for the act, it does seem to be motivated by altruistic concerns, and I place Ozymandias into the protagonist column, the first of a bunch of hard decisions.

Neutrals:

Doctor Manhattan: The only true superhero among the Watchmen, a mishap with a nuclear experiment gave an ordinary scientist incredible power over matter, even down to the molecular level. Here the influence of classic superhero origin stories can clearly be seen. Doctor Manhattan's existence drastically alters the timeline in the alternate universe in which Watchmen is set. Due to his intervention the US achieves military victory in Vietnam, and breaks the Cold War stalemate as Doctor Manhattans powers render a nuclear arsenal mostly useless. However, his disappearance proves to be the destabilizing event that triggers a near nuclear confrontation towards the end of the story. Despite his extraordinary power,, Doctor Manhattan often seems quite powerless. In fact, I liken him to a personification of Fate or Nature. Although Doctor Manhattan is able to see into the future, he is unable to alter it. Many times through the story it is emphasized that for Doctor Manhattan seeing something before it happens is no different than us seeing something as it occurs. Although he has preknowledge of events, he also knows how he will respond to that knowledge, and how that reaction will lead to the events in question eventually, and in due course these things which he saw would happen become things that he sees happen, and then finally things that he saw happen.

Furthering the Nature/Fate analogy is the interesting tidbit that the human who existed before the accident and eventually became Doctor Manhattan was a clockwork enthusiast. As clockwork is often itself used as a metaphor for a mechanistic, deterministic view of the universe, clearly supported by Doctor Manhattan's precognition, this hardly seems like a coincidence. Also interesting is the twist that in the movie Ozymandias attempts to put blame for the destruction of New York on Doctor Manhattan, which could be interpreted as declaring that it was Fated, or Necessary.

Villains:

The Comedian: Although the death of The Comedian is the catalyst for the rest of the plot, we gain much insight into the character throughout the rest of the story. Although the rest of the Watchmen went into retirement when the government objected to their vigilantism, The Comedian, along with Doctor Manhattan, continued to work as agents of the US government. Thus The Comedian has a Captain America-esque persona, agent of the government and all that. Of course, in that agency The Comedian commits various brutalities on Vietnamese citizens. Although The Comedian almost rapes the original Silk Spectre, it eventually is revealed that he is the father of the Silk Spectre featured in the story as a result of a consensual affair that they had. The biggest character feature of The Comedian is his moral ambiguity; at best he might be considered an anti-hero. The rather ugly shade of grey he embodies is emblematic of the entire story as a whole.

Rorschach: Taking his name from the black and white inkblots used in psychological tests, in a world coloured in shades of grey, Rorschach's dogmatic belief in the black and white of good and evil leads me to categorize him as a villain. Brutal and uncompromising in his desire to eradicate those he considers evil, Rorschach puts me in mind of characters such as Dexter or Jack the Ripper who show no compassion as they fight "evil" with a sociopathic fervor. The atrocities performed by Rorschach provide the most public example of why the vigilantism of the Watchmen is dangerous, although he refuses to retire or join the government when pressed, and continues to mete out his harsh judgments. Rorschach and Nite Owl used to be partners, and resume that relationship in the story, each provides an interesting moral foil for the other. When they, along with Doctor Manhattan, discover that Ozymandias is behind the destruction of New York, after the fact, Nite Owl and Ozymandias go along with the ruse in order to prevent further loss of life. However, Rorschach cannot view this duplicity as anything other than wrong and he is therefore eradicated, in the truest sense of the word, by Doctor Manhattan in order to preserve the lives that would be lost in a confrontation between the East and West. In the end however, it looks like the truth of the story may be made known due to a journal that Rorschach sends to an ultra-conservative newspaper of which Rorschach is a fan.

Is the destruction of New York justified by averting a world wide nuclear war? Is Rorschach's determination to make the true culprit of the attack pay justified despite the nuclear war it would likely cause? Is the murder of Rorschach justified to preserve that secret? What if it, ultimately, fails to preserve that secret? And, of course, who watches the Watchmen? Who watches our own actions?

Torture

Apparently in the wake of bin Laden's slaying we have re-opened public debate on the policy of "enhanced interrogation," which those of us not living in an Orwellian dystopia are likely to refer to as "torture." I actually had not considered this possible ramification of bin Laden's death, only really noticing it when I read a New York Times article on the subject. Within the article a retired C.I.A. agent is quoted as saying, in regard to torture, "most felt it was un-American and did not work."

I have a problem with such statements, as they blithely link an issue of value with one of efficacy. It seems as though it should be enough to say, torture is un-American, or more accurately in my opinion, an offence against our humanity. If one feels it necessary to add, "oh, and it also doesn't work," it seems to leave the door open for debates on what level of efficacy would justify torture.

To condemn torture purely on the grounds of efficacy seems tantamount to saying that 9/11 was immoral because it failed to secure peace in the Middle East, rather than because the act itself was a monstrous failure of humans to be human. On the other hand, this argument of efficacy provides an unsettling explanation on how 9/11 can be differentiated from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I guess the first casualty of war is usually humanity, rather than humans (more on that if I ever finish my second Hunger Games post).

Granted, the bomber and the 100% accurate torture does make an interesting thought experiment. However, out here in the real world I think I can safely conclude I am 100% against torture. Intellectually at least, there are times when my emotions say different, but my humanity is damaged just like everyone else's.

To Hell With Hell: Or "Moral Bullying: Why Not"

"I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to God. I do not want to worship from fear of punishment or for the promise of reward, but simply for the love of God." -Attributed to Rabia Basri

I was reading through a quite interesting article on how a strong undercurrent of anti-contraception politics runs behind a lot of the "anti-abortion" politics we see. For example, consider the recent fight over Planned Parenthood funding, although no federal funding goes to abortion, for some reason the anti-abortion lobby was quite keen to get rid of this funding. Although the article is well worth it, I've given enough extra work recently, if you don't want to read it here is the part that caught my attention.

"'Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,' says Janet Smith, the author of 'Contraception: Why Not.'"

Now, as a hopeless and idiotic romantic, I am certainly against reducing "one's sexual partner to just a sexual object." I also must admit that just the other day I was thinking that acknowledging the consequences of one's actions is perhaps the foundation of a moral life. However, this quote seems to be encouraging us to manufacture consequences in order to reinforce a moral code, which I think is completely immoral!

This, of course, inspired me to remember the wonderful quote with which I began this article, if loving God is good, we ought not do it for fear of punishment or desire for reward. I think this extends to all our moral decisions. If we make what might be considered a moral decision out of concern for the repercussions it will have on our self, I don't think we have actually made a moral decision.

Let me once again emphasize that making a decision based on the consequences to others can still be moral, and, indeed, may be the highest form of morality, but insofar as our actions are simply to avoid bad or promote good outcomes for ourselves, they are not particularly moral. Consider, if God had simply wanted to minimize the bad things people do, it seems reasonable to theorize that a world in which deviation from God's will brought swift and messy retribution. However, it seems clear that the element of choice is somehow important, and for that to be the case, there must be multiple viable options from which to choose.

In conclusion, I think a world where sex was treated more reverently and treated as more important would be good, and those of you who know me KNOW how irreverent I am generally. However, celebrating unwanted pregnancies as undesirable outcomes of undesirable actions, or thinking that HIV/AIDS is a just-desserts for homosexual or promiscuous sex, is simply cruel, thuggish, moral bullying. This is another reason I am pro-choice, in the abortion context. I believe that not aborting a fetus is the less morally problematic choice, but in order for morality to come into play it first must be a choice!

The Hunger Games: Or Why Bloodsport is Bad

When asked to do a blog post motivated in some way by Suzanne Collins' book, The Hunger Games, a post decrying the immorality of bloodsport, or watching other people risk their lives for your entertainment, was my immediate thought. I can write it without serious spoilers to the plot of the book, as the eponymous Hunger Games are explained fairly early in to be a competition of 24 children from the twelve subjugated Districts in which at then end, in classic Highlander tradition, there can be only one. However, I was concerned that there might be no need for such a post, as most modern societies find the concept of human duels to the death to be, at least overtly, in poor taste. Upon further reflection I feel that there is a bit to say on the subject, and so I shall say it here.

After my initial moral repugnance to the notion of forcing children to battle to the death for entertainment, my first thought was to ask why I had such an aversion to this practice. The narration makes it clear that even outside of the Arena, site of the Hunger Games, life in the Districts of Panem is fraught with uncertainties. To be sure, a survival rate of less than 5% is a bit bleaker than in society at large, but if the Hunger Games were in a very real sense metaphorical for the struggle to survive in the Districts, was my horror at them explained merely because they were more lethal than society at large?

The answer I came to in the end was no. There was a key difference between the indifferent cruelty that perpetuated a system where starvation was a very real and pervasive threat, and the deliberate sadism displayed in forcing people to kill each other for sport. The difference is neatly summed up by my favorite Kantian maxim, that we ought always respect the agency of other people. We all go into the world each day and take our chances with our newest chance at reality, and every day some of us do not survive to see nightfall again. Certainly perpetuating a system in which a large number of people find their mortal end so young in life ought to be immoral by some other standard, but at least it preserves their right to make their own way through their world. On the other hand, to purposefully place them into a situation of mortal combat is as extreme an example of using other humans purely as an instrument to an end as I can think of.

"So what?" you may be asking, after all, most people agree that making playthings out of people is in poor taste. However, upon further consideration it occurred to me that our society still contains dangerous impulses in that direction. I am not merely referring to our penchant for using other species as playthings, in the cases of rodeos, races, and Mike Vic-esque acts of villainy, but rather the explicit use of people for entertainment. Subtle things like dangerous sports, I have been intending to write a post regarding football injuries since mid-January, and reality television. These endeavors are characterized in that they serve no apparent purpose other than entertainment and seek to convey a sense of danger to the participants.

Of course, you might argue that they are structured so as to minimize, or at least mitigate, the chances of a fatality. One cannot dispute the reality of on-field deaths in professional sports, which ignores the host of lesser ills and injuries that occur with disturbing regularity. I also can remember ads on Hulu for an episode of Deadliest Catch in which one of the, quite real, fisherpeople dies. According to Wikipedia, the episode in question is the most watched in the series.

There is a difference between shows like Deadliest Catch, which tape people doing things that, presumably, they would be doing otherwise, and shows like Fear Factor which contrive to put people in situations of perceived danger. However, I bring it up to highlight our fascination with the entertainment of death. I am by no means immune to this allure. Earlier this year I heard about the movie Grizzly Man, which details the last camping trip of a bear enthusiast and his girlfriend, a trip which terminates in both their deaths in a bear attack. While I admit it is macabre, I find the notion of watching the last actions of people who I know are about to die intriguing on some level. "We who are about to die salute you," as it were.

In light of our continued fascination with our mortality, and the endless opportunities for entertainment therein, it seems like stories like The Hunger Games, which reinforce our aversion to such entertainment, continue to have a purpose. Of course, even if you feel no particular desire to watch people fight to the death for your pleasure, I still recommend the book as an all around good read! I think that I shall write a further, more spoiler-iffic post regarding the series as a whole at a later date.

Moral Entropy

"Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night."

-Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night, Dylan Thomas

We sacrificed our gods, our community, even our families on the altar of rationality, and what have we earned through our devotion? A universe where we know so many reasons, yet have lost our meanings.

Over 200 years ago the philosopher David Hume noted that what is and what ought be have no obvious logical connection. In doing so he launched the pyre ship for Western Civilization. Although moral philosophers have attempted to mine ever deeper into the crevasses of human experience, veins of ethics are running dry all about us. This is the legitimization problem into which modern governments, and all mass-scale projects born of the age of reason, find themselves inexorably drawn.

The modern state pervades our life to an unprecedented level. We are surveilled, enculturated, and controlled through a multitude of wide-reaching governmental programs. Programs, such as public education, in which I hold heartfelt and deep respect, but programs without rational grounding. Rationality has cast down the universal morals, toppling them as axiomatic dogmas without grounding in the type of scientific evidence generally held to be necessary to claim a model holds impartial truth. In their place, we have enshrined common goals of public goals, seeking to anchor our failing ethic to telos, or goals/purposes.

The problem with this is twofold. Pragmatically, it is certainly open to argument how effective these programs are at their stated goals. With widespread dissent as to what the public good is, and how schools, welfare, market regulation, and government itself ought promote it, placing an ethic upon a notion of public goals seems to doom it to be a meager ethic. Small in scope, hard fought between different factions, an ethic of the nasty, brutish, and short sighted.

More fundamentally, one runs against the impenetrable bedrock of axiomatic assumption. Aside from our say so, what makes public good, good? To rephrase the question, if I want to be a misanthrope, why ought I not be? If I want to take my plastic grocery bags out an use them to asphyxiate horned owls, why ought I not, is it not, "[our] planet to kill"? (The quote comes from the comment thread on a blog post of my sister's)

This is another reason I have a deep distrust for large scale entities, be they governmental, economic, political, or activist. I do not believe we have sufficient normative energy, morality, left to fuel these endeavors harmoniously, perhaps we never did. If power corrupts, why do we continue to raise power structures that loom ever higher is our world like modern towers of Babel constructed from wealth, technology, and organization of people on unprecedented scales. At the same time our system of accountability crumbles to unlamented dust. If the divine right to rule spawned abuses, at least it provided a framework in which the ruler was to be held accountable. We are constructing a world where the rulers have no right to rule, only the naked fact that indeed they are ABLE to rule. A world where corporations are REQUIRED by law to circumvent laws if the expected cost of paying off the fine is less than that of coming into accordance with existing regulations. In short, a world where the systems of power are hardly held in check by a dysfunctional and dying morality.

I do not advocate a regression to the systems of morality which previously existed. Having heard the siren call of reason we can hardly stop up our ears and attempt to mandate a shared public morality through government religion, at least not if we wish to be taken seriously. The Pandora's box which we have opened contains too many blessings, medicine, technology, a glimpse at the terrifying beauty shining from a universe laid bare before the merciless manipulations of modern science, I do not believe that we could shut it, even if the majority could be convinced that it is necessary.

Rather, I urge us to turn toward the concrete, to the all encompassing web of human interrelations in which we find yourselves enmeshed. As I always have, I suggest that all notions of worldly value left for us to cling to in solidarity is the value of our fellow human flotsam in the maelstrom of modernity. Unfortunately, this moral too falls afoul of the axiomatic criterion. I can tell you why I believe shared humanity is important, why I feel it is the only thing of worth in the world, but I cannot logically derive why it should be important to you. Thus, in the end, all we are left is the moral darkness closing in around, an entropic demise of the ethical world long before the speculated mirror event in the physical realm. But if all is to be overcome by tides of chaos, is it not best that we go into the end, or whatever new beginning this may be, secure in the company of each other?

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Kant and the Homeless

I consider this the third, and for the moment final, installment in my series on Kant's categorical imperative. The first dealt with call center employees and the second with romantic relationships, now I shall address the homeless; a topic that has long been on my mind.

For those who do not want to read my previous posts and are not familiar with Kant's caterogical imperative, a refresher is in order. How I most often hear it phrased is that we are to at all times treat other people as ends in themselves, never purely as a means. What this means to me is that we are to be aware that each human we encounter is as complexly motivated as we are, and out of respect for their moral agency interact with, rather than manipulate, them.

Rewind back to last August, as I visited my beloved Oregon. I was wandering the streets of Portland one lovely afternoon when I was addressed by a homeless man lying against a building. Because I think it is rude to simply ignore talk explicitly directed at me, and it violates the categorical imperative as I use the ignored to expedite my current project by ignoring, rather than engaging with, them, I stopped to hold a conversation.

Eventually he seemed to want a hand getting to his feet, and I obliged. Here I am unsure how satisfied I am with my decision, although it was a well lit hour of the day I think it compromised my safety. I guess I would do the same again, but I wouldn't be so bold as to encourage others in this path. Once he gained his feet he maintained a hold upon me, and did nothing menacing or harmful, but I found myself quite uncomfortable. Since he showed no sign of recognizing my discomfort, nor of ending the conversation, I begged leave with the notion that I had to hurry on toward my destination. As this was not quite true, I was running quite ahead of time in order to simply wander the town, here I violated the imperative.

My question, and I don't have a firm answer, is what ought I have done? Bluntly expressing my disinterest in continuing a conversation seems rude, something I try to avoid in general, but especially when in the grasp of a man of questionably sound mind. Can I justify violating the imperative on account of the man's diminished capacity?

It seems clear that our polite interactions are greatly predicated on a set of shared social habits. When one member of an interaction seems oblivious to the sub-contextual messages of the other, the preconditions for polite exchange begin to erode. And here I believe I have answered my own question, as I too feel like I often am missing a layer of information that somehow others interpret instinctively, and I would prefer to be told when I misstep as a result, rather than manipulated into proper behavior. So, I probably ought not to have lied to the nice homeless man, oh well.

One final note, considering the topic yesterday of ethical caring. I find it quite wondrous that, when interpreted through the categorical imperative, Kant's ethic agrees so well with a personal ethic of care. On one hand Kant is often seen as the epitome of universal rationality, and on the other hand is the very particular and personal ethic of immediacy, yet they seem completely in accordance on how we ought meet our fellow humans as we encounter them.

The Good Samaritan: Love the One You're With

Let me first disclaim that I have reservations about the song I use in the title. If you cannot be with the one you love, settling for the one you are with seems to do her (him) a disservice. On the other hand, if you are with someone, I should hope that they are the one that you love. Anyway, moving on.

You might note that this post is about neither Kant nor philosophy inspired by music videos. Since no one commented to affirm my choice for the next two posts, I felt fairly free to change them. I will get to those two posts, eventually, of course. Instead I wanted to take a moment to write a post related to one by my sister on Love, specifically the part about the story of the Good Samaritan, because posting my thoughts as a response to someone else's feels more personal, or relational, than simply broadcasting my own ramblings.

Her post seemed very relevant to what was on my mind, as my walk home was occupied with thoughts about the insufficiency of liberal "rights based" ethics, and universal ethics in general. To explain, what I mean by a universal ethic is a system of deciding what is good to do wherein all moral agents, which you can usually just think of as people but some try to sneak animals into the mix, are given the same consideration. The liberal tradition is certainly universal, as anyone familiar with the little phrase, "[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal," will recognize. While we may all be, in some sense, created equal, and we may want society to endow us with uniform rights, any personal system of determining good actions which treats everyone as equals turns out to be fairly monstrous.

One quick example, suppose you want to buy your parents a gift for their birthday, because you are a better human being than I am. While you COULD spend your money on a gift, you could also spend it to feed a starving child in Africa, and if we are going to consider all people equally, it seems than preventing someone from starving is more important than purchasing a birthday gift. Thus, in a universal ethic, birthday gifts have to wait until all hunger, curable disease, and similar conditions are taken care of, unless your birthday gift happens to actually be Malaria medicine. Similarly, how could you justify conceiving a brand new baby when there are so many perfectly serviceable babies already languishing in orphanages waiting for adoption? While the world might seem like it would be better if we all subscribed to a universal ethic, I think we would actually end up with a world that was less humane, where the value of genuine care and human relationship was so deformed as to be a caricature of its intended appearance.

This is the problem addressed by relational ethics, sometimes called ethics of caring. Under systems of this form, one is allowed, even encouraged, to give special consideration to the people one encounters most immediately. The Jewish law expert's desire not to love absolutely everyone is a perfectly human response, which by no means makes it the one God would like us to have, but it does make it the one we have with which to work. Notice, however, that Jesus didn't say that the Samaritan was just cruising the desert roads looking for someone to assist. Since the Samaritan left the beaten man with an innkeeper, it seems reasonable to assume he was traveling in pursuit of his own business. However, when confronted with the immediacy of the beaten man, the Samaritan responded with an ethic of care, and cared for the man's injuries.

I am not arguing that we externalize suffering, by buying our fiancée an engagement ring with a blood diamond for example. Simply because we have a higher ethical duty to our loved ones does not excuse sociopathy towards strangers that we encounter, and when we make a choice that effects someone, we encounter them, if in a highly attenuated manner. The immediacy of our personal relationships will grant them higher ethical salience, but this does not entirely negate our ethical duty to the rest of the world.

Furthermore, when we directly encounter suffering, as in the case of the Samaritan and the robbed traveler, then our relationship is quite immediate, rather than attenuated. So I am not arguing against the validity of the parable of the Good Samaritan, just attempting to frame it within a context of immediate caring, rather than universal duty.

One argument against the humanity of current urban living conditions is that the abundance of stimuli overwhelms our ability to process it all. This leads to a dulling of the immediacy of encountered events, as we filter them through more relevance criterion to deal with the sheer weight of information. A dulling of immediacy quite naturally dulls the prospect of encountering a stranger as a fellow human being, which forms the basis of an ethic of caring. Simply put, if one steps over the beaten traveler on the sidewalk, without even noticing that they are there, one never has the opportunity to meet them and relate to them as a caring human being.

In conclusion, someone is born every day, but you really ought to make special effort to remember your parents' birthdays.

Only a God Can Save Us

The Nazi's murdered an estimated 6 million European Jews and a like number of undesired individuals. You probably knew this though. Of course, if you are like me then you do not keep the exact number stored in your mind, as confronting calculated slaughter on that magnitude is not a comfortable thing to do every day.

This evening I watched a film on the philosopher Heidegger and his Nazi ties. It is a matter of some great consideration how philosophy can reconcile Heidegger's monumental contributions to 20th century philosophy with his staunch support for the Nazi party. In a way this mirrors the wider quandary that has faced humanity as a whole since the Second World War, how to reconcile being human with the will to inflict such massive suffering.

When talking about the link between capitalist economics and industrial technologies, Marx held that technology did not usher in capitalism, but rather the other way around. Once our economic system became capitalism this created the impetus for us to develop the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. It is interesting to examine the link between the World Wars and the Atomic Age in a similar fashion.

Throughout much of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear Armageddon was a very genuine and very widespread reality. However, did our newfound fear of global catastrophe stem more from the recent advances in technology, or from the recent revelations at just how far humans were willing to go in their quest to destroy each other? What is more unnerving, simply the fact that we had the technology to kill a million or so people with a single bomb, or that we had the will to systematically murder tens of millions of people to pursue a political ideology?

One direct result of our attempt to come to grips with the Holocaust was the Milgram Experiment. In this experiment, the subject, at the order of an actor playing a scientist, was ordered to administer a set of increasingly powerful shocks to another actor, who simulated being shocked, in another room. The subject could not see the actor being "shocked," but could hear the actor screaming and complaining of a heart condition. Of the participants, 65% went ahead with the final 450 volt "shock." Milgram's conclusion was that, if prompted by a percieved authority, people are quite capable, if not willing, to do things that they consider far outside the bounds of morality.

Personally, I find the Milgram Experiment, which has been repeated in numerous variations, simultaneously disturbing and comforting. It is disturbing for the obvious reason, no one really likes to be confronted with scientific evidence that, while humans may be inherently good, we do not inherently do good. However, I think that it is comforting in that it allows us to gain some perspective on the Holocaust.

At first blush, one wonders how something as horrible as the Holocaust could be permitted to occur. What kind of monsters must the Germans have been to become cogs in the vast machine of death? But, considering the results of the Milgram Experiment and related studies, there is evidence that, while the Germans may have been monsters, they are no more monstrous than the rest of us. We do not need to struggle to understand the dysfunction that allowed the Holocaust, because it is a dysfunction which we most likely share.

Of course, accepting that we too could have been Nazi's does not exculpate the Holocaust of its horrors! Rather, it condemns humanity as a whole for this crime. I think this is a good thing for two very important reasons. Firstly, it allows us to respond to Nazi's as fellow human beings, and I am generally of the opinion that promoting the shared bonds between people, even if it is that between myself and a Nazi, is good for the human condition as a whole. Secondly, it is a call to vigilance, as recognition that we could perpetrate a similar atrocity ought engender a cautionary response to, hopefully, enable us, on a personal rather than societal level, to avoid committing such a horror.

Heidegger himself never expressed remorse at supporting the Nazi party. Does this mean that, unlike countless other Germans, he never came to the conclusions that his actions under the regime were unconscionable? Maybe being a Nazi was tied so deeply to his philosophy and his own being of self that to deny Nazism would be to repudiate his own sense of self. Or perhaps his silence merely demonstrates a deep shame at the subject. Whatever the case, I encourage you to consider Heidegger's guilt not as an impartial judge, but as a fortunate co-conspirator who, thankfully, never had to find out whether you would truly make the leap to accomplice.

Notes: The movie we watched was called "Only a God Can Save Us," after a quote from Heidegger later in life, on an unrelated subject unfortunately. If you think you see influences from Christianity in my post (none are righteous, love thy neighbor, judge not lest you be judged, forgive!) you are not wrong. Some other interesting psychology studies include the Stanford Prison Experiment and the work of Solomon Asch.