Pembroke College philosophers in the news

Peter J. King is in trouble for his comments on stereotypically obnoxious behavior from rugby players here. It looks as though there was some plan, or a "funny" pretend plan, by one or more members of the Pembroke rugby club to spike women's drinks or at least get them drunk in order to have sex with them. The latter used to be considered acceptable behavior in some circles but is now generally regarded as rape. King's reference to the idea as a "bit of unpleasant undergraduate stupidity" is not going down well. It is unpleasant and stupid, so I wouldn't be too hard on him over this. If it was a real conspiracy to rape then of course it's far worse than stupid, but it's not clear to me that it was ever anything more than a poorly executed attempt at a bad (both offensive and unfunny) joke. And perhaps dismissive condescension is more likely to discourage this kind of thing in future than more earnest criticism. I don't know.

King also says: 

I consider the notion of epistemic injustice a pseudo-philosophical concept designed to enable people to publish more empty articles and organise more empty conferences for the purposes of career advancement.    

No one seems to have pointed out (although the article has been edited and perhaps some comments have been removed) that it was a Pembroke alumna (before King's time there) who wrote the book on the subject. Well, it's been pointed out now.  

The invisible boot

Adam Smith has been something of a hero of mine ever since I read Samuel Fleischacker's book on distributive justice. Not because of his famous idea that selfish actions by the rich result in a beneficial trickling down of wealth to the poor but because he was among the first people in the West to recognize and promote the fact that poor people are human and deserve help. (I suppose Jesus and others had similar ideas, but they do not seem to have caught on as much as one might have hoped. In Fleischacker's story Smith is a key player.)

But what about that invisible hand? As I understand it, the idea is roughly this. If I buy a laptop, for instance, then although I am only interested in myself I accidentally pass on some of my wealth to the employees of the laptop shop, some shipping company, people who manufacture laptops, people who make or mine laptop components, and so on. Mostly this is a good thing. But some of those components come from mines run by gangsters and warlords. The same invisible hand that helps some workers also encourages rape and slavery (or at least forced labor and extortion, which sounds like the same thing to me). I don't deny Smith's insight, but the fact that the invisible hand gives the finger to so many should not be ignored either.

And I always link this in my mind with George Orwell's essay on politics and language. Orwell writes that:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

This is questionable, of course, but the idea that honesty and clarity are related to concreteness seems important and true. When someone is suspected of speaking bull it can be very useful to try to trace their words to some concrete particular to which they refer. This is a lesson from Hume, I suppose, and it's one I think of when I think about Frege and Wittgenstein, even if Orwell, Hume, Frege, and Wittgenstein don't exactly say the same thing. They all favor clarity of meaning in their various ways, and connect this with distinguishing what only superficially appears to have meaning from the genuinely meaningful, as revealed by deeper investigation. It's hard to make Wittgenstein sound as though he belongs in the same camp as Hume and Orwell on this, but morally he does, even if his philosophy of language is very different. In a word what they all oppose is bullshit.

In the cases of both words and objects one can, and should, dig a bit, or think a bit, or do whatever it takes, to see their true meaning, their place in the workings of human life. Like language, bullshit is things we do. And when we see these workings clearly, when we achieve an overview of the whole machine, as it were, there are some things we will not say. And some things we will not buy or perhaps even use. The point seems obvious to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been made before and often, but I don't remember coming across it. Not the point that consumption should be ethical, that is, but the point that exposing and avoiding bullshit involves not only analysis of language but analysis of economics, politics, and, in short, behavior. I should probably read Gavin Kitching's and Nigel Pleasants' book (actually there's no 'probably' about it), but if anyone in that collection makes the point I haven't heard about it. And it seems like the kind of thing that ought to be huge: that what (good, Wittgensteinian) philosophy aims to do with/for language (clarification through analysis of use, roughly speaking) could and should be done for economics. This isn't what I understand economists or sociologists or political theorists to do, but maybe outside what I know as the mainstream there are great things being done.  

It's (perhaps not really) surprisingly hard to find information about what our purchasing choices mean on the ground. Occasionally you hear that buying drugs helps fund terrorists or that there are sweat shops in Asia or that animals are badly treated on factory farms, but it seems to me that all this information and more ought to be gathered together and publicized widely. Perhaps even studied in schools and colleges. Is anyone doing this? Are there books or websites I should know about? I hope so. There are organizations and publications like Ethical Consumer, but their work seems a little haphazard to me. A quick look at their website shows that they don't like corrupt banks and they do like badgers, but I don't see anything that would help prioritize these matters. Where is the most harm being done? If I have limited outrage or limited patience for researching the ethics of consumption, where should I focus my energy?
     
Let me say in more concrete terms what I have in mind. I'm looking for the following kinds of information:

• in what industries (the biggest ten or twenty, for instance) is most money made and are most people employed?
• what are the benefits and harms, the pros and the cons, of these industries?
• what can we do to reduce or remove the worst harms?

That's really about it. A lot of effort has been put into identifying the most worthwhile charitable organizations to give to. I'm looking for something similar as far as politics and economics goes. What are the most important companies to boycott and, at least as importantly, to support? That all sounds very utilitarian, but a question that seems related to me is: why aren't there more papers like Cora Diamond's "Eating Meat and Eating People"? This is a defence of vegetarianism at least in part on the basis of pointing out "a kind of inconsistency, or confusion mixed with hypocrisy [...] in our ordinary ways of thinking about animals..." There is, I think, a lot of inconsistency like this. Maybe not of the kind that takes sophisticated thinking to bring out, but inconsistency that could do with being brought out all the same. So I might be asking for better journalism, not more Cora Diamonds. Is it too clunkingly practical to want a list of the worst inconsistencies, and to want this list made very prominent along with practical advice about what one can do about it? I'm sure these things can get very complicated, but that's not an excuse for doing nothing.     

Apparently it's very hard to say what the biggest industries are because "biggest" can refer to profits or turnover or number of employees, and doubtless other things too, and there are questions like whether a gas station is part of the retail industry or the oil industry, and so on. But we surely could agree on some reasonable if imperfect standard if we wanted to. And people often do want to make claims about what the biggest industry in the world is, or what the top ten are (especially if they want to claim that some illegal industry is one of the top ten, for instance). So why not agree on some standard and go from there? At the moment people seem to choose arbitrarily to get worked up about, say, the environment or Wall Street or drugs or the sex industry, or try vainly to battle every evil in the world simultaneously. No doubt there is some vague feeling that it's arbitrary which causes one chooses to champion, but we ought to (and do really, I think) care about which causes are more important than others, which affect more people more seriously.

As silly and superficial as my desire for rankings might seem, or be, another way to say what I mean is to talk about depth or thinking things through. We might know about blood diamonds and avoid buying them, but many people don't. And does anyone (including me) seriously consider going without electronic devices because of the conflict minerals most of them include? It's easy to avoid blood diamonds if gemstones don't regularly feature on your shopping list, but give up my iPod? No way. And yet we claim to care about human rights a lot, as if nothing matters more. Why isn't our hypocrisy pointed out more loudly? Because it's boring, I suppose. What does that say about us?

I could go on. People disagree about whether drugs, or which drugs, should be legal, but why so many people take drugs in the first place seems to be largely ignored. Is it just because it's hard to answer the question? Or do we not want to think about despair? It's not so much the digging that I think we're reluctant to do. It's the hardness of the reality we would find if we dug deep enough. But aren't we ashamed of this cowardice/dishonesty?

We have a market for news and opinion, and bad news doesn't sell. What I'm asking for is basically a more nagging kind of NPR or PBS. It's no mystery why we don't have that. But it still seems symptomatic of something bad that we don't have it, and I think there really would be a market for practical advice about the biggest problems facing the world and what consumers can do to help. Maybe I should start up a website called "Degrees of Obscenity" that would rank the worst evils encouraged by our way of life and suggest practical steps we could take to reduce them.

I feel as though this is all half-baked but I haven't posted anything for a week so maybe it's time to hit 'publish' and see what happens.     

Nice things are nicer than nasty ones

Two striking examples of the terrible (I would say chilling, but that's too weak) effects that incivility can have, one in connection with climate change and one in philosophy. I've said nothing about the McGinn case because I have nothing to say that hasn't been said before, but his threat to write a book about the case makes me wonder whether everybody shouldn't say something, so that there is a chorus of opposition that makes any such manuscript unpublishable. Sadly it would just as likely have the opposite effect. Anyway, the New York Times has a story about it (not the possible book, but the case and sexism in philosophy generally), which quotes Jennifer Saul:

In an essay on implicit bias in the forthcoming book “What Needs to Change: Women in Philosophy,” Ms. Saul recalled the terror of overhearing faculty members at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D., casually sort graduate students into “smart” versus merely hard-working — or worse, “stupid.”

Women, she said, are more likely to be categorized as “stupid,” to the detriment of the field as a whole.

Fear of being labeled not smart “is bad for philosophy,” Ms. Saul said. “It makes you not want to take risks.”

Of course in a free country people can express such views as that this or that student is stupid. But they ought not to do so, especially when there is a chance they might be overheard. And one reason why they ought not is that, as Saul says, it is bad for philosophy. (There are words people can use other than 'stupid,' I mean, and a Princeton graduate student is unlikely to be stupid in fact.)

The second example is from a Financial Times article on climate science. The whole thing is well worth reading, but this part stood out to me:

In the wake of the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies four years ago, a raft of inquiries eventually found no evidence of serious wrongdoing, let alone anything to raise doubts about the IPCC’s conclusions. But the scientists remain the target of a vigorous group of critics sceptical about their work. They have been branded “criminals” (Britain’s Lord Monckton) guilty of “massive international scientific fraud” (US senator James Sensenbrenner) who should commit “hara-kiri” (US pundit Glenn Beck) for duping the world with “snake oil” (former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin).

This has had an impact on the people doing this latest IPCC assessment, according to several of the scientists interviewed for this article. “I see it in the tension in the author team,” as they check, recheck, then check again all their work, said David Vaughan. “I think there is a point at which that kind of stress can become difficult to manage,” he added, explaining it has made IPCC work “a very cumbersome, slow process”.

Free speech is one thing, but the free market in opinions has an ugly downside (although I don't know that Beck's and Palin's positions can even be called opinions, i.e. things they actually believe). It might be the least bad way to do things, but there is a lot to be said for rational and civil debate (and for good old-fashioned shutting up) rather than the (conscious or otherwise) manipulation of opinion through rhetoric and the abuse of access to a large audience.

In praise of journalism

I find a lot of journalism genuinely shocking in its sloppiness and inaccuracy, so maybe I should speak up in favor of journalists who do a good job. Before I went to Cambodia I re-watched The Killing Fields and decided I should subscribe to the New York Times instead of just reading whatever news I could find free online. I don't love the macho stereotype of the journalist in that film, but I do like commitment to truth and truth-telling.

The best example of this that I know is Thet Sambath, a Cambodian film-maker whose Enemies of the People is at least as good as The Killing Fields (it's about who was responsible for the Khmer Rouge atrocities). Apparently he's making another film, despite repeated attempts on his life. Hopefully after the elections things will improve. It doesn't seem hugely likely, but perhaps progress is being made.

In favor of charity

Brian Leiter links to this piece in the New York Times and encourages "philosophers who seem to think charitable giving is an ethical imperative" to contemplate it. The author, Peter Buffett, makes some odd complaints about charity. Here's one:

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex.

How is this bad? If unprotected sex with prostitutes costs more than it used to then, other things being equal, there will be less of it than before. That's a good thing. The problem, or problems (the spread of AIDS and the existence of prostitution), isn't completely solved, but progress has been made. I suppose raising the price of unprotected sex incentivizes it for prostitutes, but if the price is raised by distributing condoms (thereby making unprotected sex rarer) then this distribution is not going to lead to more unprotected sex than before. At worst it will make no difference at all, but that isn't what Buffett describes happening.

But that isn't his main point. Here is something closer to that:

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

The first sentence of this paragraph has a paradoxical sound to it. Too much commercialism? Let's spend money on fixing that! Maybe that would produce good results, but I doubt we'll find a better alternative to those currently available any time soon. There are already ideas other than neoliberalism and universal commodification out there. They need more political support, and I'm sure their supporters would welcome money from people like Buffett to spend on promoting them. (This is what Leiter seems to want, and I agree with him.) Buffett's next two sentences are false. Wi-Fi on every street corner (again, other things equal) is progress. I agree that the forced prostitution of children is worse than a lack of Wi-Fi. So would everyone. That's why we need to get our priorities straight. But progress in a relatively unimportant area is still progress. Increasing access to technology, education, or safer living conditions is not going to cause people to have worse lives (as measured by such things as how many of them are forced into prostitution).

In short, charitable giving done intelligently is far more likely to do good than harm, and almost certainly is an ethical imperative for most of the people who read Leiter's blog.

More (and better) from Neil Sinhababu at NewAPPS.

Philosophical journalism

If you saw Brian Leiter's take on it then you might have avoided Freeman Dyson's review of Why Does the World Exist?, as I did. But then you would have missed some gems. Dyson tells us that he read the Tractatus when he was in high school, and that:

Wittgenstein, unlike Heidegger, did not establish an ism. He wrote very little, and everything that he wrote was simple and clear.

Books don't get much simpler than the Tractatus!

He also tells this story:

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

I hope that's true.

(Incidentally, searching for Wittgenstein on philosophical journalism led me to this essay by Esa Saarinen and T. P. Uschanov, which I don't remember seeing before. Looks interesting.)

Stretching concepts

In "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell seems to imply that we should only use nouns that refer to some concrete particular. "The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness," he complains. He also offers this interesting advice:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.

Getting one's meaning clear without using words sounds problematic to me, but the general idea here seems right. To speak the truth, or to speak honestly, or to speak realistically, or to avoid humbug, bullshit, and sheer thoughtlessness, it is important to focus attention on objects and experiences, not on preformed phrases and expressions.

One danger of this approach is that it might seem to rule out talk of non-concrete things: God, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics could be read as a kind of reductio of this way of thinking, or rather, one could try to read it that way as an exercise that (I think) might have some value. In other words, it is worth thinking about whether Wittgenstein contradicts Orwell.

I don't think he really does, although of course he might not agree with every point or with Orwell's way of making certain points. (Orwell himself thinks it likely that some of his essay is badly put.) After all, one of Orwell's rules is "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." So if following his advice seems to lead to barbarism--and I take it that amoralism and philistinism are forms of barbarism--then  his advice has been misunderstood. But talk to do with values should be conducted carefully, precisely because of the values involved, and so perhaps should be carried on with a sense that one is, if not transgressing, on dangerous ground. Orwell says at the end of his essay:

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.

He doesn't say (at least not here) what the literary use of language is, but he makes it clear that he is concerned with expressing thought. Talk of abstractions is not necessarily meaningless, but should be engaged in only as something like a last resort. Wittgenstein might agree, although his main point is not this so much as that if we "talk ethics" then we will not be dealing in facts that add to anyone's knowledge. A different use of language is involved.

Does this use of language perhaps show something about the world even if it cannot say it? Yes and no, according to Wittgenstein. He says:

I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language.

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. [My emphasis]

He implies that there is such a thing as what ethics says, even though what it says does not add to our knowledge. And what it says, whatever that might be, shows something. Not something about the non-human world, though, but about us: it is a document (a Schein?) of a human tendency. Does it also say something about this tendency? No. Wittgenstein rejects the idea that by such words we don't mean nonsense. The inference seems to be invited that what we mean is nonsense. But then we surely don't mean anything. It's as if Wittgenstein is playing with us or making fun, but it's about as clear as it could be that he isn't joking. What he wants to convey above all, apparently, is that ethical talk and writing is not descriptive of facts. It is, in short, precisely the kind of language that Orwell thinks we should be extra careful with, and perhaps avoid if possible. (Which is not to say that it is always possible to avoid it.) If we do feel the need to use it, we should proceed with caution. 

I've probably said all of this before, but in the last couple of days I've come across two examples of what seem like misuses of ethical talk, and I want to try to comment on them in a kind of Orwellian-Wittgensteinian spirit. (Or is the idea that there is a spirit or idea that they have in common itself an example of stretching meanings carelessly?) One is the accusation of racism leveled against Rio Ferdinand for calling Ashley Cole a choc ice. The other is the suggestion by Susan Elkin that teaching creationism is a form of child abuse. [Warning: I have made a point of not censoring swear words and racist language in what follows.]  

Here's what I take to be the gist of the Ferdinand story. His brother was allegedly racially abused during a football/soccer match by John Terry. There is video (but no audio) of Terry appearing to say the words "black cunt" to Anton Ferdinand. Apparently his (successful) defence was to insist that these words were preceded by something along the lines of "No, I did not call you a..." There is no video evidence for or against this claim, it seems. (Actually, the video here appears to show Terry saying very little more than "Hey! Hey! You fucking black cunt," which I would have thought was pretty conclusive. But he has been found not guilty.) Ashley Cole, also black, defended Terry, which was followed by someone tweeting that Cole is a "choc ice," i.e. brown on the outside but white inside. Rio Ferdinand responded with: “I hear you fella! Choc ice is classic hahahahahahahha!” This is being taken by some people as a claim that Cole is a "race traitor" and therefore an act of racism on Ferdinand's part.

If Terry said what he was alleged to have said, then that was racism. But it seems ludicrous, or worse, to me to apply the same label to Ferdinand's tweet. Why? Both are race-related insults after all. Partly I don't want to give a reason. It seems to me that one case is obviously racist (if it happened) and the other would only ever seem racist after a bit of thought or persuasion. If it is racist at all it is not obviously so. And this difference in obviousness does not need explaining. Indeed, as with jokes, explanations might do more harm than good, making an obvious difference appear un-obvious.

But there is an explanation that can be given. What Terry is alleged to have said treats 'black' as an insult. It is straightforwardly racist. What Ferdinand says treats being black as conferring some special obligation, a duty to oppose white racism. The idea that black people have a special obligation in this regard, one not shared by all people equally, is certainly open to debate. It might even harm black people in some way, by suggesting that racism is more their problem than it is other people's, or by suggesting that one can have special moral burdens just because of the colour of one's skin. But even if such harm is real, it is clearly not intended. Ferdinand's comment was aimed at Ashley Cole, not black people generally. Terry's alleged remark was aimed at Anton Ferdinand, but by its nature it could have been aimed at any black person. This is an obvious and serious difference that is obscured by calling them both racist. Which is a good reason not to call them both racist. And I think anyone trying to speak plainly would not use the same term to describe both remarks, which is a reason to favor plain speaking. 

The same kind of thing could be said about the idea that religious indoctrination and religiously-inspired puritanism in education (e.g. not mentioning sex at all when teaching literature, leading to a 15-year old girl's not understanding what danger soldiers might pose to women whom they were not likely to kill) is a form of child abuse. This kind of thing might be bad for children, and it might be dishonest and therefore willful. But it's a far cry from violent or sexual abuse, or extreme neglect, which is surely what comes to mind when people talk about child abuse normally. 

In each of these cases a case could be made that 'racism' and 'child abuse' are appropriate terms to use, but a case would have to be made. It isn't obvious. And when concepts are stretched to cover a wider array of cases they get thinner and weaker. If we take racism and child abuse seriously, then we ought to be very careful about diluting the relevant concepts. Which is one reason why in matters of value we should stick to the concrete as much as possible. There is more to what Orwell and Wittgenstein say than this, but these strike me as good examples of how language matters to ethics. The Terry case in particular is at the heart of a national debate about racism. His not guilty verdict was bad enough, but if Ferdinand is tried and found guilty of racism it will be even worse.

UPDATE: a Football Association panel has now found Terry guilty.

A study of reading habits

In Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein, p. 62, Malcolm quotes a letter in which Wittgenstein says that:

reading aloud well, i.e. carefully, teaches one a lot! E.g. how rotten & slapdash most people, & the newspapers, write; & they write as they think.  

I thought of this when I read Timothy Garton Ash's obituary of Václav Havel in the Guardian. Speaking of "the European project" he writes there that:

Looking at the mess that project is in today, one can only cry: "Havel! Europe hath need of thee."

Really? That's the only thing one can do? More charitably: Really? That's the only thing one can cry?

Jean Kazez and Matthew Pianalto read slowly, as do I. I wonder whether this is common among philosophers. It seems possible that slow readers are more careful about uses of language, and perhaps less likely to produce (a certain kind of) thoughtless claptrap. I hope we are.

Irrelevant video to explain the title and provide an opportunity to hear Larkin say "dude":

The way of the world

Computer problems at home (now partly fixed) have meant I was unable to waste spend nearly as much time online as I normally would. And that means I missed my email and the good blogs I like to read, but it also means I spent less time aimlessly surfing and reading trivia. One morning I actually read bits of a real magazine over breakfast, including a short article by Marshall Poe in The Atlantic about how someone with an idea might go about turning that idea into a best-selling book:

I could get a book deal with a big New York trade publisher.

This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publishing, a platform is the same, but it’s a prestigious brand. I had two: from a trade editor’s point of view, I had been a “professor” at the big university and a “writer” at the big magazine. Second, I needed a big idea. A big idea is an enthusiastically stated thesis, usually taking the form of “This changes everything and will make you rich, happy, and beautiful.” A big idea must be counterintuitive: the this that changes everything must be something everyone thinks is trivial, but in fact matters a great deal. In my case, the this had to be Wikipedia, so my big idea was “Wikipedia changes everything.” I had done no research to substantiate such a claim. Third, I needed a catchphrase title like The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point, or The Long Tail. The title had to be the kind of thing that becomes a cliché.

I was going to describe this as revealing, but it pretty much just confirms what I already thought. Poe concludes:

I couldn’t write a big-idea book, because, as it turned out, I didn’t believe in big ideas. By my lights, they almost had to be wrong. Years of academic research taught me two things. First, reality is as complicated as it is, not as complicated as we want it to be. Some phenomena have an irreducible complexity that will defeat any big-idea effort at simplification. Detailed research has, not surprisingly, cast doubt on the reality of wise crowds, tipping points, and long tails. Second, most of the easy big questions about the way the world works have been answered. The questions that remain are really hard. Big ideas, then, can only reinvent the wheel or make magical claims.

My first reaction was to feel contempt for the people who sell these big ideas, but maybe the people who buy them are more of a problem. These, after all, are in some sense the intellectuals of our society. Not the leading intellectuals, mostly, of course, but the people who buy books and take an interest in ideas. If what goes over best with them is ideas that are almost guaranteed to be false then there is a problem with our intellectual life, with our culture. (This problem, of course, might be no worse now than ever before.) Perhaps that goes without saying, but it makes me wonder about the value of democracy. Perhaps that kind of questioning is also just obviously called for, or already too late. But then what?

One thing that might help would be a reduction in the power of individuals like Rupert Murdoch to wield so much influence over how people think. But it's not hard to imagine the media being dominated by multiple people who all think along the same lines as Murdoch. There aren't that many people rich enough to be media moguls who are politically neutral or who think the rich have too much power. Strengthening disinterested news sources, e.g. PBS and NPR, might help, but I don't know how likely this is to happen, and it will never be a solution in itself.

Two other things that occur to me I associate with Martha Nussbaum, no doubt partly because I'm currently reading her Creating Capabilities. The first would be to guarantee the provision of certain basic capabilities or rights, so that these would be protected no matter what crazy people got elected. This would limit the damage that could be done by rule of the stupid by the stupid.

The other is Nussbaum's idea (which, of course, she shares with others) of educating people for citizenship by teaching them things like philosophy and thus developing their critical thinking skills (among much else, no doubt). This seems idealistic in both the good and the bad sense. It's worthy and admirably optimistic, but it also seems unlikely to work. Partly because some very powerful people would surely not want it to work. If an educated electorate started electing people other than those who are currently paid for by the power elite then this elite would do something, surely, to stop them.

I feel as though, in thinking all this (or thinking there is a need for the capabilities part of it, at least), I'm being elitist and anti-democratic, neither of which sounds or feels good. So it would be nice to see some alternative. But I'm not sure I do right now.

Blaming the bad guys

I feel as though I've talked about this before, perhaps more than once, but here it is again. Christopher Hitchens, talking about the "simply evil" attacks of 9/11, writes:

That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist "targets," was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some "intellectual," however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the "root cause" of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.

So here's what I've said before and am going to say again: responsibility can (and in this case certainly does) lie squarely with the perpetrators of a crime without this meaning that there is no point in looking elsewhere for any root cause. This root cause is unlikely to be anything so simple as the policy of this or that government, but only careful investigation will show whether it is or not. The point I want to make is that to identify a root cause of some class of actions is not to deny that agents are wholly responsible for their own actions. The same kind of point applies, I think, to unemployment and rioting (or looting). That is, the unemployed are likely to be on average lazier (not necessarily by much) than the employed, and when rioting or looting is going on you can expect it to attract a bad crowd. Similarly, as far as I know, the people who ran the Nazi death camps tended to be sadists and psychopaths.

But no one would blame the Holocaust on a few bad apples. Not everyone directly involved was unusually sadistic or psychopathic before they got involved. And why people like this were ever put in a position to commit their crimes with the acceptance of (most of) the rest of their society surely calls for explanation. The same kind of thing goes for unemployment, I would think. In a world with no unemployment everyone will work, except the very lazy. In a world with some unemployment those very lazy people will still not work and some others won't either. These others will include some (maybe very many) people who are just unlucky, but they will probably also include some people who are a bit lazier than average. When being a Nazi in power is an option, this option will be popular with sadists. When being unemployed is one of the paths facing people, this will be popular with relatively lazy people. And when rioting and looting are going on, thieves are likely to want to join in more than other people. So the popular, conservative view that rioters are thieves, the unemployed are lazy, and so on, is likely to have a grain of truth in it. (I should stress in the case of unemployment that it might well be no more than a grain. In the 1980s in Britain whole factories, mines, etc. were closed own, leaving their workers unemployed. Of course these people were not lazy. And the same kind of thing is happening now in the U.S.) But this does not explain why being a Nazi in power, or being unemployed, or joining a riot is even an option in the first place. Factories don't close down because their workers choose not to work, preferring leisure over income as I'm pretty sure one of my old economics textbooks implied.

And so with Al Qaeda. I accept Hitchens' characterization of them as:

a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.  

But this does not explain why the group has ever got as far as it has toward achieving its aims. Saying, however truly, that it and its actions are simply evil does not explain all that needs to be explained. For that we need a more sophisticated analysis, of the kind offered here by Peter Bergen. And given this, assertions like Hitchens', implying that to identify root causes is to let the terrorists off the hook, are either propaganda for the popular, conservative view that we have been involved since 9/11 in a simple war of good against evil, and that it is not only unnecessary but morally wrong to consider the possibility that things might be more complicated than this, or else simply mistaken.

Secularism and David Brooks

You've probably already seen these, but just in case: this review essay on secularism is very good, and is quoted at this excellent (though sometimes obscure) blog.

Be yourself

What it means to be one's real self is an interesting, if not important, question in itself. It might also shed some light on the meaning of reality more generally. Three quotations come to mind.

The first is from Hawkwind's "Be Yourself" (not a good song, by the way, but simple and repetitive enough to be hard to forget):

Be yourself
See yourself
Try and find
Peace of mind

The lyrics are banal, but, perhaps partly for that very reason, get across a common idea of what it means to be yourself. It means achieving peace of mind.

The second is from The Specials' "Do Nothing" (a better song)

People say to me "just be yourself,
It makes no sense to follow fashion."
How could I be anybody else?

This is a sort of joke, but with some truth in it. Even if you're a stereotype then that is what you are. A phony person is phony. On the other hand, the claim that such a person "doesn't really exist" (a line from the song "Stereotype") has a point too. Someone who just does what everyone else does, mindlessly, lacks something that might be called real existence or a self. Such vacuity might seem like peace of mind, but it is (surely?) closer to despair than the kind of mindlessness that one might aim to achieve through meditation. It is a desperate attempt to fit in, to get along, to conform. (Kelly Dean Jolley's fine distinction between transitive and intransitive silence might be helpful here. Transitive silence involves silencing something, while intransitive silence is simple silence. I hope I'm not cheapening his point by referring to it in this context.)

The third quote is Stephen Colbert's line that reality has a liberal bias. Unless you're attacking "the reality-based community," to call something part of reality is to pay it a certain kind of tribute, to recognize it as having a particular kind of importance. Not everything real is good, and not everything real is non-trivial, but what is real ought not to be denied or contradicted. So most of us believe. To say that something is real is not only to make a normative claim, but it is partly that. And since we don't have an agreed upon method for identifying anyone's real self, claims about such selves are always likely to be (potentially) controversial.

People who focus on the normative aspect of the concept of reality tend, in a crudely relativistic way, to treat such things as empirical facts as belonging to one side of the debate. So a stereotypical journalist will say something like this: "Scientists report that..., but a spokesman for the Republican Party responded that..." Colbert is parodying this kind of relativism along with the neglect of the fact that 'reality' is not a purely normative idea. Not just anything can intelligibly be claimed as part of reality, and not just anything can be denied to be part of reality. (Is that proper English? I hope you know what I mean.) Although what is intelligible does depend on what is sane, what is ridiculous, what is remotely plausible, and so on. And our once-seemingly-shared sense of all this is being attacked by propagandists. Perhaps it always has been. But perhaps it is worse now than before, and perhaps the contrast between the reality-based community and the faith-based community is part of what makes some atheists so angry.

So, what if you only feel like yourself when you've had a couple of drinks, or have taken some drug (legal or illegal, prescribed or self-medicated)? Within limits I see nothing wrong with this, but it seems that this kind of action could only lead to peace of mind by silencing something or other. It isn't the kind that comes from self-understanding or self-acceptance. What if the thing silenced is itself a silencer? For instance, a drug might reduce your inhibitions. Then you might be closer to being your real self with the drug than without it. But I don't see how any chemically-induced state can reasonably be called the real you (even if it is more real than other versions of you). If you have those inhibitions then that is part of who you are, like it or not. And only if you get rid of them with your own internal resources can an uninhibited you be really who you are. But, as I say, I don't think we have agreed standards for such things, so I'm really just expressing my own opinion.

Attention to particulars

Nietzsche seems to think that we should say Yes to everything, even the terrible. And this Yes, I take it, is not equivalent to "OK then," but is more like a "Yes!", an enthusiastic embrace, Larkin's enormous yes that falls as love is supposed to. We should love it all, the whole world. But not dishonestly or distortedly. The terrible is to be loved but still recognized as terrible. It's hard to see how this could be done. As Tal Brewer says of The Gay Science section 341: "The problem is that one's life can be marred by tragic events such as the early death of a child, and it would hardly show one to be living well if one would consent gladly to the precise eternal recurrence even of these elements of one's life" (p. 149). You could only embrace the whole of your life (if something like this had happened) or the whole world (where things just like this have happened), it seems to me, if you abstracted away from these things. It would be dishonest to focus instead on some good thing, so the only thing is to not focus on anything. To look into the middle distance or, as it were, to take off one's glasses. But isn't loving a blur like this sentimentality?

The same kind of thing might be said about Schopenhauer when he suggests a choice between seeing the world as nothing and Nirvana as everything or vice versa. I think this is at least roughly what I was trying to get at when I expressed doubts about a generalized reverence for life. But I don't mean that we can or should just write off Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and, while we're at it, perhaps the whole of Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions too. What I mean (for what it's worth) is that the only honest, non-sentimental way to love the world (or life, or anything else as general as that) is to do so as these things are incarnated in particulars. Without attention to particulars there is no true love. (Can I get away with a grand claim like that?) And I think that this means there are (speaking broadly) two ways to be un-loving: to pay attention to particulars in the wrong way (e.g. callously or sadistically) and to disregard particulars and focus instead on abstractions or generalizations.

Military crimes tend to be of the former sort, as when they show or embody indifference to the innocent people killed along with the target (in a clumsy drone strike, for instance), or when they deliberately aim at inflicting pain (in the use of torture). Terrorism seems to be of the latter sort. Real targets are attacked, but as symbols, not because of what they actually are. The best example I can think of is the attack on time itself in the form of the Greenwich Observatory in Conrad's The Secret Agent, but the 9/11 attacks come to mind also, given their symbolic date and targets. The recent atrocity in Norway is another example, if the children killed were targeted because of what they were considered to 'represent' (i.e. their political views).

Terrorism can seem to be (and perhaps sometimes is) a combination of symbolic thinking (abstracted from the particular people involved) and consequentialism, breaking a few symbolic eggs in order to make some mythical omelet. But there can be also what I hesitate to call an aesthetic aspect to it too. The goal is to create terror, after all, which is roughly the goal of horror movies (and books and music and whatever else can share that general form). Terrorists want to make nightmares reality, even if this is not their ultimate goal. It wouldn't be surprising if Breivik had seen Battle Royale. But I don't mean that it is necessarily bad to enjoy such films, or shock rock, or scary stories. My point is just to recognize that terrorism is more complicated than I might have suggested if I had left out this aspect of it.

I have some sympathy with the views of Chris Bertram and dsquared here, especially the latter's complaint about "failure to own one's own bullshit." But there is, I feel, a tension in Bertram's worrying about people selecting themselves into groups while criticizing a rather vague range of people he disagrees with (albeit rightly) and throwing out the word 'fascist' (which he then neither applies to these people nor really declines to apply: he explicitly rejects throwing this kind of mud as "not particularly useful," but he puts them all in the vicinity of the mud anyway, perhaps hoping they will fall in without his having to get his hands dirty). It is the thinking in terms of groups that is the real problem, I think. But let me immediately qualify that.

If we're talking about the mass murder of children then that is the real problem. But if we're talking about something more intellectual like an "epistemic environment" then the problem is not hatred of terrorism or "honor killings" or war crimes or imperialism. The problem is failing to distinguish between terrorists and Muslims, or between war criminals and Americans. The problem is thinking in terms of large and ill-defined groups. It is true that this tends to be a problem more on the right than anywhere else these days, at least in the USA, but there is nothing necessary about this truth, and it is dangerous for people not on the right to consider themselves thereby immune to it.

Perhaps philosophy can help here. As Frege said:

The logic books contain warnings against logical mistakes arising from the ambiguity of expressions. I regard as no less pertinent a warning against apparent proper names having no reference. The history of mathematics supplies errors which have arisen in this way. This lends itself to demagogic abuse as easily as ambiguity -- perhaps more easily. 'The will of the people' can serve as an example; for it is easy to establish that there is at any rate no generally accepted reference for this expression. It is therefore by no means unimportant to eliminate the source of these mistakes, at least in science, once and for all.

It might be helpful to challenge on similar grounds references to "the liberal elites," "the gay agenda," perhaps even "Islam," but also "fascists" and perhaps also "elite scribblers of this [right-wing] spectrum." At any rate we should be careful about making such generalizations (even if it is sometimes very hard to avoid using them).

But I doubt that philosophy can do very much to change the world. I'm tempted to think that terrorism will become more a feature of life because people despair of the world being a genuinely democratic place. If it is ruled by multinational corporations and people like Rupert Murdoch, or some combination of money and stupidity, then how can anyone hope to achieve any political objective without using wealth (which we don't all have) or violence (which is much more accessible)? Or so, I imagine, some people think. Really, though, democracy is probably about as alive and well as it has ever been. Terrorism will continue because the means to create terror are widely available and there are a lot of crazy people out there.

It can't hurt to try to create a less hate-filled and more nuanced appreciation of reality though. I think we owe it to the victims of these crimes to do so. And in some sense, although this is probably the wrong language to use, we owe it to ourselves and to reality too. .

NPR on Korsgaard on bin Laden

Thanks to Brian Leiter, I found this article about the reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden, which quotes Christine Korsgaard:

Is there moral philosophical justification for rejoicing over the demise of someone like bin Laden?

"Most people believe that the killing we do in war is justified as the only way to disable an enemy whose cause we believe to be unjust," says Christine Korsgaard, a philosophy professor at Harvard University. "And although it is more controversial, many people believe, or at least feel, that those who kill deserve to die as retribution for their crimes.

"But if we confuse the desire to defeat an enemy with the desire for retribution against a criminal, we risk forming attitudes that are unjustified and ugly — the attitude that our enemy's death is not merely a means to disabling him, but is in itself a kind of a victory for us, or perhaps even the attitude that our enemy deserves death because he is our enemy."

It is important, Korsgaard says, "not to confuse the desire for retribution with the desire to defeat an enemy. But because terrorism partakes of both crime and war, it is perfectly natural, and perhaps legitimate, to have both of these attitudes towards Osama bin Laden: to think that we had to disable him, and to think that he deserved to die."

The two sentiments should be kept apart, she says. "If we have any feeling of victory or triumph in the case, it should be because we have succeeded in disabling him — not because he is dead."

I wonder what Korsgaard actually said, though, because it doesn't seem to make much sense to say both that it is perfectly natural and perhaps legitimate to think that bin Laden deserved to die and that if we have any feeling of triumph it should not be because he is dead. If his death was deserved then why not be glad that  justice was done? (I'll return to this below.) Or is the idea that a feeling of victory or triumph is not the same thing as the feeling of satisfaction one legitimately has when justice is done?

Or is Korsgaard's idea that it is OK to have both attitudes as long as they are not mixed together? That seems a bit strange too.

My guess is that either Korsgaard thinks that there is an important difference between a feeling of justice having been done and a feeling of victory, or that part of her thinking has been omitted, in which she actually rejected the "natural and perhaps legitimate" (emphasis added) combination of attitudes that she describes. 

Let's look more closely at what she is quoted as saying. If we feel a sense of triumph, she says, this should be at our having successfully disabled an enemy. Apparently this would be OK. We may also, acceptably, feel that justice has been done. But we may not mix or confuse these sentiments, lest we start to think that our enemies deserve death just because they are our enemies. I wonder how far sentiments work, or can be got to work, like this though. If we mix them will they make each other grow? Maybe. If we are rational and keep them apart, will this prevent us from singing "We Are the Champions" in the streets? Maybe. It's not really clear whether the issues here are empirical/psychological or ethical or conceptual or what, at least to me.

I do agree that a feeling of triumph is out of place here. A chapter (not a book) has ended, but it's not a good chapter. A lot of people get killed in it. Some of the people who killed bin Laden probably lost their lives too. (They didn't, according to the official reports, but I have heard that this might not mean much, since it was a covert operation, and that a helicopter was reported to have made a "hard landing" after receiving heavy gunfire. "Hard landing" (at least sometimes) means crash.)

I have always thought of Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization rather than as a genuinely military enemy, so I thought of bin Laden much more as a wanted criminal than as an enemy combatant. Korsgaard is probably right that he is somewhere between the two, or both, but my sense is that he was no longer much of a threat, so his status as a criminal is probably more important than his status as a threat. And so, perhaps, justice has been done. I don't believe in capital punishment, but it may well be that bin Laden was killed in a firefight rather than in an execution, and he could hardly complain that he had done nothing to deserve being killed. None of it makes me feel like singing in the streets though.

[UPDATES:

1. Apparently bin Laden was unarmed when shot, so it sounds as though it could have been an execution.. Of course I don't know what happened though.
2. This is well worth reading too.
3. Rupert Read gives his opinion, and others respond, here.]    

The blame game

Ethical theories can be thought of as ways to tell us who or what to praise and blame. But blaming itself can be a moral issue. That is to say, publicly attributing responsibility for an action sometimes seems to call for moral reflection. There is the question of who to blame, or which acts are blameworthy, and then the further question of whether to make the attribution of blame public. Not to mention other questions of how much blame to attribute and what punishment, if any, should go with the blame.

This Economist blog post rightly says, of Terry Jones' Qur'an burning and the subsequent murders by Afghan mobs, that, "The buck stops in each zealous breast."  That is, Jones is responsible for his irresponsible and offensive actions, and the mobs are responsible for theirs.  Jones is not responsible for the murders just because they would not have happened were it not for his actions.  In some sense he is the cause of these murders (the sense in question is the one I just explained, i.e. that they would not have happened without his action), but this is not, I would argue, to say that he is morally responsible for them. Anscombe uses adultery as an example to make this point, although she leaves the example very undeveloped.  Here is what I think she means.


Imagine a man suspects his wife of having an affair and confronts her about it.  She has done no such thing and refuses to dignify his questions with an answer.  He takes this as a confession and so cheats on his wife to get revenge. The adultery (we can imagine/stipulate) would not have happened if she had responded differently to his accusations (and perhaps also if she had not done whatever it was that made him suspicious in the first place).  So she is part of the causal chain that led to adultery.  But she is not remotely guilty of adultery in this case.  He is.  Being a link in a causal chain is not the same thing as being morally responsible for what comes at the end of that chain. (We might think she should have handled the situation differently, or we might not, but either way this does not affect the question of who is guilty of adultery in this case.) 


The Economist article goes on, though, to say that: "It's imprudent to issue official statements that suggest otherwise—that suggest responsibility rests with those who try to incite and not with those who choose to be incited." This is its criticism of 

General David Petraeus and Mark Sedwill, NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, [who] issued a joint statement condemning the Florida zealot's zealotry and offering "condolences to the families of all those injured and killed in violence which occurred in the wake of the burning of the Holy Qur'an", omitting to note the agency and responsibility of the zealots actually responsible for the deadly mob violence, almost as if zealots in Florida are expected to control themselves while zealots in Afghanistan are not.  

But here is the statement in question:

In view of the events of recent days, we feel it is important on behalf of ISAF and NATO members in Afghanistan to reiterate our condemnation of any disrespect to the Holy Qur'an and the Muslim faith. We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Qur'an.

We also offer condolences to the families of all those injured and killed in violence which occurred in the wake of the burning of the Holy Qur'an.

We further hope the Afghan people understand that the actions of a small number of individuals, who have been extremely disrespectful to the Holy Qur'an, are not representative of any of the countries of the international community who are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people.

As far as I can see, this is the entire statement.  There is no false blaming of the victims here, no suggestion that the mobs are not responsible for what they have done.  It strikes me as very misleading to talk about what the statement almost suggests by what it omits to note.

Nor does the Economist explain why it is "imprudent" to issue such statements.  Is it because the general understanding of responsibility will be nudged closer to consequentialism as a result?  That seems unlikely.  I suspect the objection is not so much to any imprudence as it is to the unfairness of singling out one bigot who has insulted about 1.5 billion people when bigoted mobs have murdered 24 people in a related set of incidents.  There is a kind of unfairness about this.  Murder is much worse than insulting.  But it is the job of diplomats to be prudent, and any intelligent person reading the statement will realize that prudence is the name of the game here.

The ashtray of history

I don't know much about Kripke, I know nothing about Kuhn, and I haven't read more than a little of Errol Morris's series of articles on Kuhn. So I won't say anything much about them. What interests me is how the history of philosophy is done. I mean this in the sense of how what gets told as the history is determined and how this history is told (which is maybe the same thing).  Was it Rorty (or Kuhn?) who said that philosophers don't so much get refuted as they simply come to be ignored?  We all know that continental philosophy is not worth taking seriously.  Some people know the same thing about Wittgenstein.  And now it looks as though Kuhn is getting that treatment too.  Never mind this or this on the unlikeliness of the ashtray-throwing story being true.  Never mind this or this or this on the (alleged) weakness of Morris's account of Kuhn's philosophy.  What bothers me is this kind of comment.  Of course, the reference to Kuhn's defenders as "humorless pedants" is a throwaway joke, but that makes it all the harder for anyone to defend themselves against it.  The very mounting of a defense will surely come across as humorless pedantry.  And surely the joke was made (partly) because of a perception that it would be well received, or at least not offensive to most people who will read it.  So Kuhn is now (at least well on the way to being) a joke.  His difficult work is known to be interpreted by some as massively erroneous (as is Plato's, Kant's, Wittgenstein's, ...).  And his supporters are humorless pedants.  Who will want to read him now?  Who will read him?   

Obviously some people will.  And obviously serious debate about Kuhn's work is not over.  But I can't help wondering whether it isn't this kind of "fun" that does more to seal a philosopher's fate than any serious scholarly work to defend or refute his or her arguments.  

But perhaps I'm being too pessimistic.