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Bioethics & Medical Ethics
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Te Fire and the ale Giorgio Agamben
Te Mystery of Evil Benedict XVI and the End of Days Giorgio Agamben Translated by Adam Kotsko
Te Off-Screen An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame Eyal Peretz
Sonic Intimacy Voice, Species, echnics (or, How o Listen to the World) Dominic Pettman
Love As Human Freedom Paul A. Kottman
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BIOETHICS & MEDICAL ETHICS 6 Are Designer Designer Babies Our Future? Future?
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Bio/Medical Ethics
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At the the bounda boundaries ries of life life pages pages 6-18 6-18
GENERAL ARTICLES 20 Children, Intuitive Knowledge and Philosophy
Maria daVenza daVenza Tillmanns Tillmanns on the development development of knowledge knowledge 24 Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife? Rui Vieira ponders ponders if cosmology can save you from from entropy 26 The Sound of Philosophy Philosophy James Tartaglia Tartaglia asks what philosophy philosophy has to do with music 30 Singing in Choirs: An Existential View Sara Clethero says singing is about Being, not achieving
Contributing Editors
Alexander Alexander Razin (Moscow (Moscow State State Univ.) Univ.) Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) David Boersema (Pacific University) UK Editorial Advisors
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Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Vogel Vogel Carey, Carey, Prof. Walter Walter SinnottSinnott Armstrong, Armstrong, Prof. Prof. Harvey Siegel Siegel Cover Image David Hume portrait by Allan Ramsay Ramsay,, 1766. Printed by The Manson Group Ltd 8 Porters Wood, Valley Road Industrial Estate, St Albans AL3 6PZ UK newstrade distribution through: Comag Specialist Division, Tavistock Tavistock Works, Tavistock Rd, West West Drayton, Drayton, Middlesex Middlesex UB7 7QX 7QX Tel. Tel. 01895 01895 433800 433800
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Alistair Alistair MacFarl MacFarlane ane isn’t isn’t sceptic sceptical al about about Hume’s Hume’s plac placee in history history 39 How I Solved Hume’s Problem.... Eugene Earnshaw Earnshaw wants to know know why nobody will believe believe him
REVIEWS 46 Book: Collected Essays On Philosophers by Colin Wilson
reviewed by Vaughan Rapatahana 48 Book: Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy ed. Eric Schliesser reviewed by Mark Dunbar 49 Book: Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi reviewed by Neil Richardson 50 Film: Revolver Dharmender Dhillon on a Buddhist Nietzschean action movie
REGULARS 15 Philosophical Haiku: Onora O’Neill by Terence Green 32 Question of the Month: What is the Future of Humanity?
Read our our readers’ readers’ philosophical philosophical predicti predictions, ons, optimistic optimistic or not not 43 Letters to the Editor 52 Tallis Tallis in Wonderland: Wonderland: The Elusiveness of Memory Raymond Tallis reminds us of the philosophy of memory
The opinions opinions expressed expressed in this this magazine magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Philosophy Now . Philosophy Now is published by Anja Publication Publicationss Ltd
Keith Tidman overhears overhears a prophetic conversation conversation Eating Stupid Pigs Marco Kaisth asks if it would be be better than eating eating clever pigs pigs Informing People About Their Genetic Risks Jan Deckers & Dominic Hall consider four principles Can We Trust Medical Science? Simon Kolstoe on the moral murkiness of marketing medicines Doctor-Patient Relationships Paul Walker models how you and your doctor should interact Henrietta’s Henrietta’s Story Vincent Lotz explores the morality of the unauthorised use of cells
FICTION
David Hume
A Sceptic Sceptic & His His Probl Problem em pages pages 36-42 36-42
58 Sympathy: A Dream Dialogue
Robert R. Clewis watches watches sympathy conquer conquer its enemies April/May April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 3
Editorial
Club Bio-Med
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his issue of Philosophy Now deals with the very stuff of life, namely bioethics and medical ethics. Bioethics is the analysis of ethical problems arising out of advances in biotechnology, especially genetic engineering. Medical ethics deals specifically with the problems and dilemmas that arise from treating patients, so the two terms overlap. Given that doctors and scientists are striving to save lives, ease suffering and make the world a better place, and are constantly discovering new ways of doing so, you might think that the only ethical problems here would concern which medals and honours we should heap on their heads and in what order. I concur with the sentiment, but have to inform you that some of the problems are a little more serious and intractable than that. Medical knowledge is now advancing at an astounding pace, so this is ethics in a fast-changing environment. Our first three articles concern three ethical conundrums that couldn’t even have been imagined a few decades ago, let alone wrinkled the brows of moral philosophers, namely: designer babies, genetic engineering of animals and testing for genetic diseases. As it is rare for philosophical problems to ever be definitively solved, the appearance of so many brand new ones must raise the concern that we are falling behind. So, philosophize faster, everyone! To what extent can the main theories in moral philosophy be applied in these particular areas of medical ethics and bioethics? The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham probably works pretty well if you are, say, a hospital administrator, trying to use limited resources fairly and effectively for the benefit of all your patients. On the other hand, utilitarianism might be a tough philosophy to have around if you ever happen to be a patient with five healthy organs in a ward full of people awaiting transplants. What about virtue ethics? That sounds better! From your point of view as a patient you’d better hope that the nurses and doctors looking after you are inspired by an ‘ethic of care’. This is a notion taken from feminist philosophy and is a type of virtue ethics. It fits in well with the Hippocratic Oath, that has guided the medical profession since ancient times. The idea is that then you make decisions in the right spirit, the spirit of caring. Does virtue ethics have other applications here too? Maybe it could include artificially improving your own character and capabilities, or those of your children, through genetic engineering, by taking drugs or through surgery? Perhaps we can engineer future humans to be wiser, less self-centred and less prone to violence. What do you mean that’s not what Aristotle had in mind? He didn’t live in the 21st Century. Why should Aristotle have objected to us using the knowledge we have gained to make us wiser and kinder? You might protest 4
Philosophy Now April/May 2017
that taking a pill to make us better people is too easy – that it is the struggle to improve that is needed, because it builds strength of character. But why? What if instead I could take an extra pill to improve my strength of character too? How about Immanuel Kant’s famous categorical imperative? Is his type of duty ethics irrelevant here? No, maybe it just has found a new field on which to battle its old adversary, consequentialism. Read for example Vincent Lotz’s article on HeLa cells. Utilitarians would say, use what you need to use to save millions of lives. But a Kantian looking at the HeLa case might say, never treat a powerless patient like Henrietta Lacks merely as a means to your end – however noble that end might be. The articles in this issue deal with just a handful of the many questions faced by bioethics and medical ethics. Another concerns the possibility that we’ll one day learn how to beat the ageing process to achieve human immortality, something we’ve discussed in previous issues. The inevitability of death has been one of the major motivations for philosophical reflection since the dawn of human civilization. It has given birth to entire religions and inspired Socrates to say that doing philosophy is ‘practicing for death’. But what if death ceased to be inevitable and became optional, its timing entirely a matter of personal choice? That would raise towering difficulties for society and the individual on every level – philosophical, psychological, sociological, political, economic. But at least we’d have time to think about those difficulties and try to solve them. After all, while there is life, there is hope! You can find a different and less technological approach to the question of death in Rui Vieira’s article on cosmology and personal identity, which asks the beguiling question: Can the ‘multiverse’ give you an afterlife? Cosmological speculations and medical miracles aside we could do worse than to try to emulate the cheerfulness of this month’s cover model, David Hume – even on his deathbed, he cheerfully cracked jokes and chatted about ideas, which unsettled his old friend Boswell the biographer, who had dropped by to see how an atheist like Hume would cope with the imminent prospect of extinction. Hume is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher ever to write in the English language, and philosophers are still wrestling with his legacy. Alistair MacFarlane writes here about his life and ideas, while Eugene Earnshaw tries to permanently defuse one of Hume’s most troublesome legacies, a ticking bomb in the foundations of Western philosophy known as Hume’s Problem. As this is a difficulty with the inductive method that underpins so much of modern science, it makes Hume a particularly appropriate philosopher to feature in an issue on ethical problems generated by scientific advances.
• Tom Regan, who made case for animal rights, dead at 78 • App developer says Everything is Philosophy • Bright kids “no more moral” • News reports by Anja Steinbauer. Tom Regan Dies The prominent American moral philosopher Tom Regan died on 17 February, aged 78. He taught for thirty years at North Carolina State University and was an expert on the philosophy of G.E. Moore, but he is best known for his contributions to applied ethics, notably his book The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Regan argued that animals can be rights holders because an animal is a ‘subject-ofa-life’. Consequently, Regan, himself a vegan, strongly advocated abandoning all form of animal exploitation. In a speech he once said: “We are not merely trying to change a few old habits about what people eat and wear. Billions of people will embrace animal rights only if billions of people change in a deeper, more fundamental, a more revolutionary way… They must embrace and, in their lives, they must express a new understanding of what it means to be a human being.” The Right to Die On 2 March the German Federal Court decided that terminally ill individuals will now be entitled to lethal medication. The argument it accepted is that the general right of personality entails the right to self-determination. This means that persons are entitled make salient decisions about their future. This includes the decision over the time and manner of one’s own death. Patients will from now on – under exceptional and well-defined circumstances – be given the opportunity to decide in favour of a pain free death and to commit suicide. United Nations Ethics Warning The new Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres has ambitious plans for the UN: He wants nothing less than its reform with the aim of combatting the increasing weariness of politics among people. His idea is to facilitate a digital discourse between governments and citizens, with real effects on political decisions. However, he warns that digital
technologies along with AI and genetics involve serious ethical risks and that governments are woefully behind with respect to developing appropriate norms. The View From Everywhere? “In Everything , every single thing is a playable character,” writes artist and game designer David O’Reilly in an announcement post on PlayStation Blog for his new game Everything . “If you can see it, you can be it.” He thinks of the game as a work of philosophy. “ Everything lets you be anything you want,” O’Reilly writes. “Your main power in the game is Being.” O’Reilly says that philosophy is ‘extremely important’ to his life, and that he hopes to fashion the perfect game-based medium for philosophising. He has also turned shots of the game into a 10-minute video, a simulation of the world from the perspective of everything from atoms, plants and animals to planets and galaxies, accompanied by the comments of philosopher of religion Alan Watts. Sadly, the technical limitations of current gaming platforms probably do not allow players to fully experience what it is like to have a bat’s sonar sense or even the emotions and values that constitute so much of another human’s perspective.
Screenshot from Everything
Climate Change Calculations Stanford University doctoral candidate Blake Francis is working to create a practical framework that governments could use to evaluate their policies concerning
News
climate change. It is meant to help decide when it’s morally justified for society or parts thereof to generate greenhouse gases. Stanford philosopher Debra Satz comments: “We often have debates in climate change about how to trade off benefits and burdens without adequately considering what constitutes benefits and burdens – and whether all burdens are of the same kind. Blake’s approach introduces an important dimension – not all burdens to people count as harms.” Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, believes philosophical approaches to the problem to be vital for finding efficient solutions: “As natural scientists, we know a lot about what controls the climate and what kind of impacts we’re likely to see in the future. But increasingly the important questions are human ones. What will people decide is important regarding climate change? Natural science can’t speak to those issues and philosophy can.” Intelligence & Moral Development Does intelligence help us to make better moral decisions? Psychologists Hanna Beissert and Marcus Hasselhorn at the German Institute for International Educational Research in Frankfurt set out to study how closely children’s intelligence correlated with their moral development. So they took six to nine year olds, tested their IQs and then asked their views about four stories involving moral transgressions. Beissert says that the choice of age group was due to the fact that this is a phase in children’s lives when they have a fairly well developed moral sense and can distinguish between different moral principles, yet their moral intuitions still develop and change. The results demonstrated, she said, that at this stage of childhood there is no connection between intelligence and morality. Beissert explained that among the children in this study neither moral reasoning, nor moral emotions, nor judgements could be correlated with intelligence. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 5
Bioethics &
Are Designer
Babies Our Future?
Keith Tidman overhears a prophetic dialogue about the pluses and minuses of genetically engineering children. Sally: I’ve decided to have a baby! I’m sure that won’t surprise you, Pat. But the real news is, I have no intention of rolling the dice over the health and characteristics of my baby. The old–fashioned way was to choose your mate wisely. Instead, I want to leave nothing to chance. I want to decide my baby’s traits. Genetic engineering is making that possible. Pat: That sounds ambitious, Sally. Maybe too ambitious. I immediately picture ‘mistakes’ – mistakes that get ‘sidelined’, or are handed a disadvantaged life. But before we get ahead of the game, just how do you anticipate pulling it off? Sally: The buzzphrase is ‘gene editing’. The tool goes by the name ‘CRISPR’ [pronounced ‘crisper’]. It stands for a mouthful: ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats’. The name is ugly; but what it does is a thing of beauty.
might even get passed on to my grandchildren and great grandchildren, and so on. I believe I should have that right as a soon– to–be parent. Pat: Frankly, I find the prospects scary. It’s pushing the edge of what science should be allowed to meddle with. To my mind, this is all the more reason to take our time to get the technology right. But let’s take the conversation one step further. I’m curious. Which of your baby’s traits would you like to pick? Sally: You name it: intelligence, athletic ability, immunity to disease, hair and eye color, creativity, height, physical type, gender, memory, personality, longer life... The options are growin g as the technology matures. Pat: Well, that might be great if you can afford the treatment.
Pat: You’re right, the name doesn’t tell me much – although I can already hear alarm bells! But to be fair and not prejudge, let’s go to the heart of the matter. What does CRISPR do? And how will you use it in planning your family?
Sally: It’s no different than what parents do already. Mums and dads give their kids an edge by forking over money for training, in music lessons, or gymnastics classes, or math tutoring. Just so the kids can be accomplished and competitive, right?
Sally: I’m grossly oversimplifying, but CRISPR repairs or replaces genes, which it can do faster and cheaper than earlier tools for manipulating genes. CRISPR was first used to fix gene mutations that cause inherited disorders such as multiple sclerosis. You might have seen the term ‘precision medicine’. CRISPR falls under that.
Pat: Yeah, except training doesn’t come with the risks, I imagine, of CRISPR. I agree that the technology sounds intriguing, maybe even transformative. It also makes me shudder – a lot. I fear people getting swept up in hyped promises and forgetting how seriously messed up things might get.
Pat: Hold on right there! What right do we have to willy–nilly judge whether certain conditions are or are not okay? For example, I’ve seen people with Down’s Syndrome living happy, productive lives. Are you saying there will no longer be a place for them in your future world order?
Sally: Sure, I understand. But gene therapy for humans to improve on Mother Nature has been going on for decades. Not everyone is aware of that, and it often gets left out of the discussion, as if gene editing is an entirely new frontier. The main difference today is the big leap in capabilities, and in affordability, that CRISPR offers.
Sally: Not at all; different parents can always make their own choices for genetic intervention or not, for sure. But to claim that harmful inherited disorders must forever be part of, let’s say, human variation, strikes me as too single–minded. I disagree with you when you say we should leave well enough alone, when we have the tools to head off illnesses and disabilities in newborns.
Pat: Well what makes me most uncomfortable is – how shall I put it? – the vanity of parents getting in the way of their making wise decisions. Foolishly competing to have kids who are genetically better than their neighbors’ kids. Ultimately, the question is, what gives you, or society generally, the right to tinker with nature? To my mind, it cuts a bit too close to playing God.
Pat: What I’m really getting at is that future generations might lose something important, such as being different from one another, as a result of us messing with our genes when we’re all chasing the same qualities. Variety is good.
Sally: Humans have ‘tinkered’ for millennia – like domesticating animals and plants through selective breeding. That’s choosing the genetic heritage of animals too. Changing the gene-lines of animals and crops has simply become easier, cheaper, and more commonplace, as the technology evolved. Now, the same possibility of choice is increasingly entering the realm of reality for human beings.
Sally: I seriously doubt we’ll all become cookie–cutter copies of each other! All I’m saying is that I want to increase the odds of my baby having the traits I , not anybody else, would prefer my baby to have – especially given that the traits I choose for my kids 6 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
Pat: I’m still wary of the prospect for overreach. Let’s not gloss
Medical Ethics knowledge. That’s not about to stop. Pat: You downplay the pitfalls. In fact, you’re describing what looks to me like a dark world of unequal classes, depressingly like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the film Gattaca. Manipulating genes may end up deepening society’s division into the haves and have–nots even more than at present. Once more, those with money and influence win life’s lottery.
Cover art for Brave New World
over the fact that things have gone seriously wrong with medicine, even in the recent past. The horrors of thalidomide are just one example. It hasn’t all been rosy, despite the assurances by scientists that scientists know best. Sally: It’s true that scientists get things wrong. But as for ‘playing God’, that phrase is itself an overreach for what we’re talking about. Transplanting human organs was once labeled ‘playing God’. The same goes for other medical interventions, like vaccinating children. What was once unnerving became almost ho– hum. With all these things there are risks, sure; but in the long haul, the benefits to our welfare outweigh them. Pat: Well, it’s one thing to change wheat, or rice, or corn, to make them hardier against pests, disease, and unfriendly weather. Or to make farm animals more productive in their meat or milk. These are all good things, putting food in the mouths of more and more people around the world, especially in regions where the poverty is stark. But it’s another thing to design human babies . I see red flags. Sally: I was wondering when you’d get around to mentioning ‘designer babies’. The term’s unhelpful. It makes the procedure sound threatening – as well as implying that people like me approach altering their kids’ genes cavalierly and selfishly. Pat: Well, it is dangerously early, I feel, to start choosing a child’s traits – to try to design a baby to your specifications, like it’s some kind of science project. I’m not convinced that the science is ready. I don’t see how you can avoid the nasty unintended consequences – precisely the kinds of mistakes I mentioned. With genetic manipulation scientists are interfering with how nature planned life, and they’re rushing headlong into what it took nature millions of years to perfect. Sally: But think of CRISPR’s upsides, its potential to impr ove people’s well-being. You’ve told me before that you believe in God – but if God is good, I doubt he, or she, would mean for us not to improve the cards Mother Nature’s dealt us. In fact, the opposite must be true. And much of science, and all the rest of the stuff that informed society engages in, is intended to do precisely that: make for a better quality of life for us. And as history shows, pe ople have always been curious, exploring beyond the boundaries of current
Sally: Well, all societies have class systems. That’s not going to disappear overnight – if ever. I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna, but I think that if more parents end up being able to afford these procedures because the technology becomes more widespread and cheaper, it’ll actually level society’s playing field, making society more democratic, not less. That aside, I remain convinced it’s my right – even my obligation – to give my kids advantages. Isn’t that what every mum and dad wants? Pat: What also leaps uncomfortably but readily to my mind here, is the history of eugenics. The victims on the wrong end of the geneline were treated cruelly, with extermination, forced sterilization, or alternatively, in breeding experiments – all thanks to someone’s arbitrary definition of ‘inferior’ people. Sally: Eugenics absolutely deserves its sordid reputation! But no one proposes returning to those outrageous abuses. The world has moved on, thank goodness. With CRISPR, and whatever future procedures are developed, parents will voluntarily decide whether or not to pick their babies’ traits. That’s a crucial distinction. It’s all healthy, ethical, and open. Pat: One other thing. Speaking of ‘open’, will regulations make sure everything’s above board? A wild west of gene editing would be absolutely disastrous. And many people will be needed to help figure all this out, to avoid the loudest voices from bullying others’ opinions or from dictating outcomes. Sally: Absolutely! Strict controls will be needed, for safety. And the savvy folks in science, medicine, ethics, and politics – as well as the general public, like you and me and our neighbors – will share in having a say in the dos and don’ts – in drawing up the roadmap. Pat: I’m still not entirely onboard. Lots of concerns are still swirling round my head. But where do you see CRISPR – and especially your own family planning – heading? Sally: I believe it’s just a matter of time. Eventually people will iron out the scientific, ethical, and social wrinkles, and be selecting their babies’ preferred traits. What’s seen as acceptable will change dramatically over the next twenty or thirty years , and gene editing can’t be uninvented! Personally, I intend to embrace it as far as the means are available. I think not only do I have a right to give birth to a healthy, smart, capable, competitive child if I can, I have an obligation to do so. © KEITH TIDMAN 2017
Keith Tidman has had a career managing publishing operations. He has written about both philosophy and science, and is also the author of a book on the history of naval operations analysis. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 7
Bioethics &
Eating Stupid Pigs Marco Kaisth asks, could radical genetic engineering create ethical factory farms?
P
igs are exceptionally intelligent animals. They’re able to solve odor quizzes, recognize themselves in mirrors, and even play rudimentary video games. One Cambridge University Professor, Dr Donald Bloom, has even claimed that pigs “have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly [more so than] three year-olds” (‘New Slant on Chump Chops’, Cambridge Daily News , 29 March, 2002). Despite their intellectual powers, 110 million pigs are slaughtered for food every year in the US alone, the vast majority of them after short, miserable lives on factory farms. The abuses on these farms are well documented, and the conditions in which such pigs are placed are widely acknowledged to be deplorable and unethical. Sows are forced into ‘gestation crates’ too small for them to even turn around, and male piglets are castrated, their tails cut off and their teeth broken at the ends with pliers, without painkillers. One’s moral reaction to this mistreatment of pigs is only intensified by recognising the pigs’ intelligence and self-awareness. This intensification stems from the assumption that the capacity of a creature to suffer is proportional to its level of intelligence, to the depth of its feelings, and the complexity of awareness. Killing a dolphin is more immoral than squashing a spider, even disregarding the fact that both species are not equally endangered, simply because the dolphin is a more conscious creature. This is also why animal farmers have a greater ethical responsibility to their animals than crop farmers to their crops. Given all this, I want to raise a tricky question: Would it be more okay to slaughter and eat a pig if it were significantly less intelligent? Suppose that through genetic modification pigs were able to give birth to ‘pygs’ – animals identical to pigs in every way, except being much less bright. Wouldn’t eating a pyg be more ethical than eating a pig? Plants show a certain very limited level of
8 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
intelligence, by stretching towards the sun and reacting to their leaves being plucked. If a pyg were to be created to have the level of intelligence of a plant, wouldn’t eating it be no more unethical than eating a salad? Well, the first question here is whether the actual genetic manipulation involved would be unethical. Some would argue that any type of genetic manipulation is unethical, and is basically ‘playing God’. However, man’s history of manipulating nature’s mechanisms to his advantage is long and varied. Selective breeding has been used by farmers for millennia, simply by picking the best organism to breed, thereby increasing the prevalence of certain traits in the gene pool. Cattle were originally smaller and yielded a lot less milk. Tomatoes were originally the size of blueberries, but were bred into the modern variants. These are all forms of artificial genetic manipulation, even if past methods were slower and less direct than the laboratory-based manipulation possible today. Moreover, in the modern age, man has altered the environment so drastically that the changes are at a near-irreversible level. The only way to combat an anthropogenic apocalypse seems now to be innovation rather than conservation; genetically modified foliage could absorb significantly more carbon dioxide than its natural equivalents, while genetically modified bacteria could help terraform presently unviable soil into arable land. Genetic modification seems therefore just a modification and continuation of longestablished practices with new technology. If so, then the actual process of the creation of a pyg would either not be unethical, at least not for these reasons, or else only be as unethical as other actions humans have already committed. However, creating a tomato that bruises less easily is one thing, but artificially lowering a species’ intelligence seems quite another. Would doing so be an unethical action precisely because it alters the potential of the animal to think? A pyg would suffer less than a pig, because it cannot be aware of or understand its situation even to the degree that a pig can, but at the cost of its intelligence. This quickly brings us to a fundamental philosophical question: is an extremely painful but intelligent existence preferable to enduring the same pain but without having the consciousness to recognize it? An animal with the intelligence of the pyg would forever live in the eternal present, without grasping the implications of the stream of any con-
Medical Ethics sciousness that forms its mind. It could feel pain at any instant, but never know the accumulative pain of something that was more cognizant of its plight. A more intelligent animal, however, might thereby more intensively feel the smothering burden of its condition. Peter Weissel Zapffe, the pessimistic Norwegian existentialist, argued in his classic 1933 essay The Last Messiah that anxiety and depression are necessary results of humanity’s evolved awareness. This follows logically from the assumption that a species with a higher level of consciousness also has a higher potential for suffering. Utility or goodness, however, is not limited to not suffering. There are things in life which yield tremendous positive benefit, despite not being simply the lack or suffering. These include the satisfaction of accruing knowledge and the ability to question. It is conceivable to imagine two factory farms, identical except for the fact that one raises and slaughters pigs, and the other pygs. The one producing pygs would create less suffering, at the cost of the conscious potential of the animals. Is that too high a cost? However, consider that the thought-potential of each animal has an inverse relationship with the utility of their lives in the factory, as the more thoughtful animal would be able only to grasp the terror and futility of its existence to a greater degree. If it is assumed that a ‘thinking’ pig would be aware of only its strife, the existence and slaughter of a pyg seems therefore to be preferable to that of a pig. A possible objection could be that there’s a very heavy weighting to the value of thought, so that an animal that can think to any degree is always inherently better off in some way than one that cannot. However, this objection utilises the tricky assumption that those who think more thereby benefit more. This assumption is nullified by the fact that the inevitable consequence of intelligent consciousness in a factory farm environment is a form of Zapffe’s ‘cosmic panic’, where one is seized by the tremendous futility of existence in an uncaring cosmos. Insofar as it feels anything, the pig is doomed to feel that their world – in this case, their world being exclusively the slaughterhouse – is unjust and without goodness. This causes pigs to react in ways evidencing extreme emotional suffering similar to the behavior of humans after long periods of solitary confinement, and usually indicating extreme depression, such as biting their cell bars. It seems then that the creation of pygs could help to develop more ethical factory farms which produce significantly less negative utility in terms of suffering. In this case, radical genetic modification could reduce the ethical problems posed by factory farming. Indeed, genetic modification holds the potential for a future where all meat production involves the same level of suffering as is widely accepted in crop harvesting. If so, the growing need for meat in the developing world, and the status of meat as a staple in the developed world, could both be addressed with a minimum of animal suffering. In a world that has repeatedly shown itself unwilling to reform the factory farm, the most benign solution could be to reform the animal. © MARCO KAISTH 2017
Marco Kaisth is a student based in West Windsor, New Jersey, and in Chicago. He is interested in environmental ethics and the holistic study of development. Writing this article converted him to veganism.
by Melissa Felder
SIMON + FINN CARTOON © MELISSA FELDER 2017
PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN .COM
April/May 2017 Philosophy Now
9
Bioethics &
Informing People About Their
Genetic Risks
Jan Deckers and Dominic Hall ask whether relatives of patients with a genetic disease should be told that they themselves are at an increased risk.
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poradic Alzheimer’s Disease is the commonest cause of dementia, and one of the most prevalent diseases in those over 65. It must be distinguished from familial (early onset) Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for less than 5% of Alzheimer’s, and which manifests itself earlier in life. Clinicians in relatively affluent countries can now take blood from patients suspected to be at risk of Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease and send it over to the lab for genetic analysis. The gene most commonly associated with SAD is APOE. APOE provides instructions to make a protein that transports fats within the brain. Everyone has 2 copies of the APOE gene, of which there are 3 main variants (alleles), known as ε2, ε3, and ε4. Since APOE is a susceptibility gene, spotting it does not mean that the patient will necessarily develop the disease. However, the presence of the ε4 variant does significantly increase an individual’s chance of developing it. Genes are paired at a particular place (locus) on a chromosome, and they are homozygous if the two genes at a given locus are identical, or heterozygous if they differ. Relative to someone with ε3/ ε3, who might be said to have an average risk, being heterozygous for ε4 – having only one ε4 – increases one’s chance of developing Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease by 2.6 or 3.2 times, depending on the genotype (ε2/ ε4 and ε3/ ε4, respectively). However, being homozygous for ε4 – that is, having two ε4 genotypes – increases an individual’s risk of developing the disease by 14.9 times (‘Effects of Age, Sex, and Ethnicity on the Association Between Apolipoprotein E Genotype and Alzheimer Disease, A Meta-Analysis’, L. Farrer et al , JAMA 16, 1997). A risk 14.9 times higher than the standard risk makes it highly likely that one will suffer from Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease by the age of 80. Here we won’t address the question whether clinicians should help patients who seek information about their APOE gene status, but the more complex question of what the duties of clinicians might be in relation to their patient’s relatives who may carry the same genetic risks. Four Ethical Principles When analysing cases in health care, it is useful to apply the four ethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice. Firstly, clinicians are obliged to respect individuals’ autonomous wishes to make decisions about their own care. It is frequently assumed that this demands that patients are fully informed about any conditions that affect them when they ask for a genetic test. The problem in the situation we’re considering is when clinicians don’t know what the patient’s relatives want to know. They might either wish to receive some information, or they might prefer not to know their genetic risks, to safeguard their desire for an open future. How can clinicians know whether relatives may wish to know about the risk factors? Some clinicians may think that knowledge is power, as it might help one to plan for the future. Others, however, may think that ignorance is bliss. 10 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
So how might clinicians decide which relatives to inform, if any? Relatives can vary greatly from one another in terms of which genotypes they possess. However, consider estranged (genetically) identical twins where one is found to carry the ε4/ ε4 pair. How is the clinician to know whether the twin sibling might like to know he has this too? The suggestion that the doctor should ‘just ask them’ is fraught withproblems. Imagine a doctor contacting someone out of the blue to ask them whether they might like to know whether or not they carry a genetic condition. Most would suspect that the sheer fact that they’re being approached in this way implies that they ought to know something and that they must be afflicted with some condition, thus compromising the voluntary nature of their decision. The principle of non-maleficence – ‘do no harm’ – must also be considered here, as the duty to not cause harm is integral to the health care profession. Although being told about one’s genetic risk may cause no direct physical harm, knowledge of one’s genotype may cause psychological stress. How Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease operates isn’t fully understood. However, a popular theory claims that an increase in reactive oxygen damages cells, leading to neurodegeneration. This oxygen release can be exacerbated by both physical and mental stress. Since knowledge of one’s genotype may induce stress, it therefore might not be prudent to inform patients of their genotype, as this could result in the prognosis of Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same applies to being contacted out of the blue with the question whether one might like to know something about one’s genes. One study which involved disclosing their APOE genotype to participants, showed that those who were ε4 negative (which indicates a decreased chance of the disease developing) showed reduced levels of distress compared to those who were ε4 positive; but even the increased distress found in the latter group was of a mild and transient nature. The authors concluded that “these data support the psychological safety of disclosing data ... to screened adult children of patients with Alzheimer's disease who request such information” (‘Disclosure of APOE Genotype for Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease’, R. Green, J. Roberts, L. Cupples, et al, New England Journal of Medicine, 361, 2009, p.251.) But there is no reason to believe that this implies that those who do not solicit such information would also be likely to experience ‘little distress’ upon being told out of the blue that they might be susceptible to a disease that can neither be prevented nor cured. The third principle, beneficence – ‘do good’ – demands that medical procedures should be performed with the intention of pro viding a beneficial result, when balanced against the risks. It might be argued that knowledge of possessing an ε4 genotype would be beneficial, since the individual would have time (and be motivated) to make lifestyle changes to reduce their risk of developing Spo-
Medical Ethics
radic Alzheimer’s Disease: they might take regular cardiovascular exercise, abstain from smoking, try to sleep well, keep their brain active, and eat healthily – all of which reduce the risk of cogitative decline. This argument appears to be borne out by one study, which reported that those “who learned they were ε4 positive were significantly more likely than ε4 negative participants to report Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease-specific health behaviour change 1 year after disclosure” (‘Health Behavior Changes After Genetic Risk Assessment For Alzheimer Disease: The REVEAL Study’, S. Chao, J. Roberts, T. Marteau, et al, Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders , 22, 2008). One problem with this study is that we do not know if this effect will last, which is particularly relevant with a disease that may not manifest itself for a very long time. Another is that reported behaviour may not coincide with actual behaviour, particularly when people may experience social pressure to adopt particular lifestyle changes. The relevance of knowing one’s genetic profile may also be questioned in light of the fact that doctors should advocate healthy behaviours to everyone anyway, since this reduces the risk of developing countless other diseases. People may not need genetic incentives to live more healthily. The final ethical principle is justice, which focuses on fairness in health care. Knowledge of one’s APOE genotype could definitely impact a person’s right to health care. In countries without universal health care where insurance is purchased from a non-governmental company, an ε4 genotype could have detrimental effects on one’s long-term insurance policy, increasing one’s premium and leaving one in a state of discrimination. However, in the USA specifically, Congress passed the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act in 2008. This stops health insurers discriminating based on genetics. One problem with this law is that it does not cover all insurance, exempting for example life and long-term care insurance. Another problem is that genetic information allows insurees who are in the knowledge of their genetic status to make strategic decisions that favour their interests, perhaps to the detriment of those who do not know their status, and perhaps also increasing pressure on them to be tested. A study in the USA has already found that people who had at least one ε4 gene were more likely to buy long-term care insurance compared to others (‘Genetic Testing For Alzheimer’s And Long-Term Care Insurance’, D. Taylor, R. Cook-Deegan, S. Hiraki, et al, Health Affairs 29, 2010). Whereas knowledge of their status may have reduced their financial worries concerning their lon- term care, it also triggered them into paying for insurance schemes that are likely to become more expensive as increasing numbers of people act on newly acquired genetic knowledge. Moreover, whereas many other countries have taken similar steps to the USA to try to limit genetic discrimination, the protective shield provided by regulations is unlikely to be free from attack in a globalised world where insurance companies compete in the market.
To Inform or Not?
Whether or not it’s fair to inform an unsuspecting person that they might be at a relatively greater risk of contracting Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease will therefore depend on a careful assessment of what the person in question might prefer, as well as of that person’s health and socioeconomic context. Where it is not possible to obtain this knowledge about them without significant intrusion on their private lives and without compromising their voluntary decision-making, clinicians will need to assess carefully whether informing relatives might be more beneficial than not doing so. To do this they will need to ensure that they keep abreast of any changes in the condition’s likelihood, preventability, and treatability, as well as of any anticipated changes in the socioeconomic context, for example in the law on insurance. It is most disconcerting that some scholars have expressed the view that geneticists should turn a blind eye to any personal or contextual features, and instead inform family members of their own genetic risks as a matter of course (‘Genetic Information: A Joint Account?’, M. Parker, A. Lucassen, BMJ 329, 2004). The analogy used is that genetic information would be like the information held on a joint bank account, where all parties are informed by the bank about financial affairs as a matter of course, rather than the information being restricted to some of the account holders. But the analogy is ludicrous, since it supposes that a jointly-consented decision to share financial information can be meaningfully compared with a situation where consent to share genetic information has never been given. What is needed is rather a constant commitment to, so to speak, step into the shoes of relatives. If all patients were routinely asked whether they might wish to be informed about a range of hypothetical genetic risks, it might be easier to approach people about a particular risk. However, problems would remain, including the need to provide adequate, and potentially expensive, genetic counselling, which would allow patients to imagine potential scenarios; as well as the need to be mindful of preferences shifting over time. If relatively little can be done to stave off one’s risk other than to follow behavioural patterns that are generally recommended to maintain good health, it may not be appropriate to be told, without having asked for the information, that one’s risk of Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease may be increased by about 15 times relative to the average person. So although genetic information might help a patient’s relatives to plan for their futures, a disclosure of Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease risks to patients’ relatives should be the exception rather than the rule. © JAN DECKERS, DOMINIC HALL, 2017
Jan Deckers is a Senior Lecturer in Health Care Ethics at Newcastle University, UK. Dominic Hall is in his third year of study reading Biomedical Sciences BSc at Newcastle University. The degree topics include laboratory research techniques, biological theory and bioethics. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 11
Bioethics &
Can We Trust Medical Science? Simon Kolstoe says that all is not well with medicine.
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t is said that philosophy is driven by concerns about mortality. If there is even a small grain of truth in this, then from a purely self-interested perspective the philosopher has good reason to be supportive of the work of doctors and health scientists. After all, it is rather useful to have access to headache pills and other over-the-counter medicines to help clear the mind to think when sitting huddled in an armchair and suffering from a cold; and having paramedics on the end of a phone, and a wellequipped hospital at the end of the ambulance ride are particularly useful when more serious ailments strike. Philosophers are reliant upon modern medicine to stave off their demise at least long enough to have the chance to write about it. We all rely on our doctors remaining up-to-date with new advances and prescribing them when our need arises. To grossly oversimplify, modern medicine is developed in the following way. First, an often state-funded academic working in a laboratory makes a discovery about how some small part of the body or the immune system works. He or she then talks to clinical colleagues, who help develop the discovery into a potential medical application that can be patented. Following the patent, a flurry of papers are published describing the invention to the world, hopefully drawing the interest of a pharmaceutical company, who license the invention for clinical investigation. Next, a ten-year period of silence ensues, whilst the company spends £100 million or so developing the idea into a useable product and proving that it works through clinical trials. Finally, for the one-in-ten discoveries that make it through this process, the new drug or treatment is launched in a torrent of publicity as the company endeavours to
convince doctors to prescribe, and health systems to pay for, the new miracle cure. If everything works as planned, patients benefit, the medical profession gets a new tool, the pharmaceutical company makes a hefty profit, and the original academic gets a pat on the head, and if in the UK, a REF impact case study (if you don’t know what this is, feel pleased that you live in the real world!). The entire process of developing medicine is a triumph of enlightenment philosophy dating back to William Harvey (15781657), who was one of the first people to apply the new mechanical philosophy to the human body, and so give birth to the modern understanding of medicine. However, the entire medical revolution is critically dependent upon one thing – the accurate communication of scientific discoveries to the clinicians who are treating patients. After all, it seems hardly worthwhile finding a cure for cancer if you do not tell any doctors about the discovery. A number of methods have been developed to aid this communication in modern times, starting principally with peer-reviewed scientific literature. This is then translated into educational courses for clinicians, summarised into pharmacopoeias, information bulletins, news articles, and finally popularised on websites, blogs, and tweets. Whilst there are certainly critics of ‘evidence-based medicine’, as this approach is called, and indeed there are quacks and charlatans who try to subvert the system for their own ends, the successes of the system for advancing medicine are fairly obvious, at least in terms of ever-decreasing death rates (that is to say, an increasing average age of death), and improved strategies for people to live more comfortable lives despite their ailments. Doctoring The Evidence
Yet, despite the astonishing success of evidence-based medicine, there are rumblings that all might not be right within the system. Let me tell you about three examples. Paroxetine (trade names Paxil and Seroxat) is a type of antidepressant drug commonly referred to as an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor). It has been used extensively since its introduction in 1992, resulting in tens of billions of dollars in profit for its makers, GSK (GlaxoSmithKline). However, ten years after its introduction, an internal whistleblower triggered an investigation that resulted in GSK having to pay a threebillion dollar fine and answer criminal charges (see ‘GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty and Pay $3 Billion to Resolve Fraud Allegations and Failure to Report Safety Data’, United States Dept of Justice, 2012). The charges concerned illegal marketing of several drugs. In the case of paroxetine, it had been promoted for use by depressed under-eighteens, despite three studies suppressed by the company having shown that the drug was no better and in some cases was notably worse than a placebo. Perhaps most infamously, ‘Study 329’, conducted in North America between 1994 and 1998, not only failed to show any benefit to the 188 teenagers taking the study drug, but recorded five times more serious adverse events in participants on the study drug compared to the placebo arm, including an increase
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Medical Ethics in suicidal behaviour, and seven hospitalisations for that (‘Restoring Study 329: Efficacy and harms of paroxetine and imipramine in treatment of major depression in adolescence’, British Medical Journal 351:h4320, 2015). Given the huge profits being made from this drug, GSK hired a PR company and paid them $17,250 to ghost-write a scientific paper describing Study 329 (‘Adolescent Depression Study 329: Proposal for a Journal Article’, Scientific Therapeutics Information, Inc, 3 April 1998). The PR company played down the findings, not reporting many of the outcomes or the serious adverse events, and concluded: “Paroxetine is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents.” This dishonest report, once published, was used by the drug company in a marketing campaign and provided the evidence base for clinicians to confidently prescribe this drug to their vulnerable young patients millions of times before GSK were finally brought to account (see ‘Drug company experts advised staff to withhold data about SSRI use in children’, Canadian Medical Association Journal , 170(5):783, 2004). Lorcainide was an anti-arrhythmic drug developed to treat abnormal heart rhythms after a heart attack. In 1993 a study was published describing how nine men had died on the drug arm of the original clinical trial, compared to only one on the placebo arm. Unfortunately, this 1993 paper was reporting the results of a study that had actually been conducted way back in 1980. The authors of that study had tried to publish it at the time, but as a negative result of a trial on a drug whose development had, in any case, been halted, it was rejected by the major medical journals. (‘The True Lorcainide Story Revealed’, BMJ , 350:g7717, 2015.) Unfortunately, over the
next decade a number of other drug companies came up with the same idea. The idea of an anti-arrhythmic given after a heart attack apparently seemed quite sound to all involved, and since there were no specific warnings about this approach in the literature, these companies rushed their drugs to market. It has been estimated that about a hundred thousand people in the US alone died unnecessarily (Ben Goldacre, ‘What Doctors Don’t Know About The Drugs They Prescribe’, TED, 2012). By 1993 the dangers of this approach were all too clear, and the authors of the original 1980 clinical trial finally managed to publish their results. In 2009 fear gripped the Western world due to an outbreak of H1N1 – ‘Swine Flu’. As no vaccine was immediately available, governments stockpiled a general anti-viral drug called Tamiflu (Oseltamivir in the US). As of June 2009, the British government estimated it had enough Tamiflu to cover 50% of the population, and it continued buying it until 2013 in order to cover 80% of the population, at a cost to taxpayers of £424 million. It was unfortunate that £74 million of this stock had to be destroyed because of poor record-keeping (‘Access to clinical trial information and t he stockpiling of Tamiflu’, National Audit Office, HC 125, 2013). It was even more unfortunate that a systematic review of the evidence behind the clinical efficacy of Tamiflu found that eight of the ten trials used by the company to show that the drug was useful in preventing complications such as pneumonia had never actually been peer-reviewed or published. Instead clinicians, and eventually governments, were relying on a marketing spiel claiming successful trials of this drug, rather than considering the actual evidence concerning its efficacy. Furthermore, when systematic
The old-school marketing of pharmaceuticals Emili Casals 1882
April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 13
Medical Ethics reviewers wrote a report considering the two published trials alongside actual clinical experience during the Swine Flu outbreak, they reported that Tamiflu showed very few clinical benefits at all (‘Neuraminidase inhibitors for preventing and treating influenza in adults and children’, Cochrane Database Systems Review , 4: CD 008965, 2014). This was somewhat more than unfortunate given the amount of taxpayers’ money that had been spent stockpiling the drug. It would be nice to think that these were three isolated examples of what has rather euphemistically become known as ‘reporting bias’ or ‘publication bias’. These are the names given to the perhaps understandable tendency to report successful drug trials more widely and more fully than unsuccessful ones. However, a recent review by German researchers shows evidence of reporting bias in treatments for “depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, pain, migraine, cardiovascular disease, gastric ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, urinary incontinence, atopic dermatitis, diabetes mellitus type 2, hypercholesterolemia, thyroid disorders, menopausal symptoms, various types of cancer (e.g. ovarian cancer and melanoma), various types of infections (e.g. HIV, influenza and Hepatitis B), and acute trauma” (‘Reporting bias in medical research – a narrative review’, Trials , 11:37, 2010). In terms of drug compounds, as well as the SSRIs, lorcainide and Tamiflu discussed above, reviews of reporting bias have mentioned many others, even including some well-established drugs such as quinine. Not that any of these treatments are necessarily dangerous or ineffective, rather, that trials have been conducted that are either not in the literature at all, or not fully reported. This suggests that there is information about these treatments that is deliberately not available to your doctor when he or she fills out their prescription for you.
have created the CONSORT Statement binding them to stricter standards, and have even started journals specifically in order to publish negative results. Regulators have also begun to act in some countries by changing policy to now require all clinical trials to be registered on publically accessible databases prior to recruiting a single patient (although notably this is only for new trials, not historical ones, on which the rationale for the majority of medicines in present-day use are based). In terms of action on this issue, the Cochrane Library is the real hero, in its support of systematic reviews into drug treatments, gathering much of the evidence that has now exposed the true scale of the problem at the heart of modern medicine. Yet from a philosophical perspective, the righteous anger and outrage felt by many as they discover the issue and the extent of reporting bias is rather interesting. Almost everyone reporting on the issue, including me, immediately considered the problem to be a matter of research ethics, and started to question how or why the system had gone wrong. Indeed, improving the review and monitoring processes by research ethics committees has been suggested as one potential long-term solution to the problem. However, it’s philosophically interesting that most people automatically consider this to be a problem of ethics, because it implies that there’s generally assumed to be something different about the way drugs or medical treatments should be reported and marketed in comparison to other consumer products such as shampoo or computers. But what creates this difference? One explanation might be that since medical products directly affect people’s lives and wellbeing, a higher ethical standard is
Philosophical Issues
When people find out about this huge but relatively unknown problem, the common response is outrage. Indeed, the doctor and journalist Ben Goldacre has become a mini celebrity after his TED talk on this topic and his book Bad Pharma (2012). There is also a growing grass-roots movement spearheaded by the organisation Sense About Science with their ‘Alltrials’ campaign that seems to be making progress in getting research funders, journals, and even pharmaceutical companies, to commit to making all their research findings available. In this regard it is perhaps notable that GSK have gone beyond almost all their peers in both effort and expense to ensure that they are not again culpable. Likewise, stung hard by criticism that they were not handling results appropriately, medical journal editors 14 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
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Philosophical Haiku expected from those who make and sell them. This assumed obligation is perhaps manifest in an expectation that such companies will investigate their products more thoroug hly, communicate their findings more clearly, and perhaps market them more honestly than manufacturers of other types of products. But after reflecting on this issue, I am not sure that such a neat argument is possible. If the moral obligation arises out of the effect on people’s lives and wellbeing in terms of health benefits to a great many people, then surely the manufacturers of cigarettes, alcohol, sugary drinks and pastries have a similar, if not greater, moral responsibility? After all the negative health effects of these products impact far more people than have ever taken, or are likely to need, SSRIs, lorcainide, and Tamiflu. Likewise, the oil industry, car industry, airlines, and shipping companies, create a great deal of atmospheric pollution that both cause and significantly exacerbate life-limiting health problems. What exactly is it then about medicinal products that make them any different, from an ethical perspective? Perhaps, rather than their actual effect on people’s lives, we expect medicinal products to be better investigated and reported on than other products because one has an expectation that medicines will make you better or healthier; and therefore any publication bias or spin goes directly against the ethos of the product itself. But once again, medicines are not unique in this regar d. There are many food or lifestyle products that make exactly the same claims and employ the same sort of spin without this activity receiving the same moral and ethical disapproval. Maybe then it is just back to pure self-interest, in that we would rather not be in the position of being sick and taking a drug that does not work. But again, how many times have we bought important products that promise much and deliver little – for instance, children’s car seats that do not meet safety standards? So, although there’s a significant reporting bias problem in medicine that leads to ethical outrage, it’s not immediately clear why medicines occupy a different ethical sphere to many other consumer products. There certainly does seem to be an instinct that makes us want to hold pharmaceutical companies to higher ethical standards; but I’m not sure a philosophical justification of our fury about reporting bias in medicine is quite as easy as many might think.
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ONORA O’NEILL (1941-) Universal rule: To be free, yet not too free In science we trust(?)
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nora O’Neill has the rare distinction among those who appear in this column of still being alive. She studied in Germany and became a
Kantian philosopher. She has also served as President of the British Philosophical Association, chaired the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, and has found time to become a Baroness. She is particularly interested in trust and autonomy in medicine and bioethics. Our age is one of enormous advances in science and medicine: we are healthier, and live longer. Yet, at the same time, we seemingly don’t really trust those responsible for creating or administering these advances (given that Dr Frankenstein is the archetypal scientist-doctor, is that so surprising?). Here Baroness O’Neill diagnoses a case of too much autonomy held by the practitioner s. How can you trust someone who has the power t o remove your kidneys, when all you want is some powder for your athlete’s foot? What is her prescription to cure this ill? Immanuel Kant , of course! As Kant argued, unlimited autonomy – unfettered, unbound, do-whatever you-want autonomy – the sort of freedom to act that could be a threat to someone’s vital organs – is no recipe for ethical living. What is needed is principled autonomy – the kind that’s limited by the obligations we owe others: I won’t take your kidneys, you don’t take mine. In Kant’s formulation, principled autonomy – which he called ‘the categorical imperative’ – gives rise to actions whose justifying principle ought to be adopted by
A Hard Pill To Swallow
Perhaps the core problem with reporting bias is that we live in a consumerist and relatively free market society where products have to compete against each other, be they fizzy drinks or heart medication. As a result we have a cultural and economic system that encourages marketing spin. If we think that medicines are in a different ethical domain, perhaps then we need to lobby for health research to be taken outside the market environment altogether. But, lest we get carried away, is society really prepared to pay the significant cost of developing new medicines through tax revenues rather than company accounts? Although it is unfortunate, and certainly something to be minimised where possible, perhaps we just have to accept that reporting bias in medicine is an inevitable product of our wider cultural system. © DR SIMON KOLSTOE 2017
Simon Kolstoe is an academic biochemist whose work in drug development has inspired thoughts on ethics.
everyone in equivalent circumstances. But, says the Baroness, that’s not enough. Autonomy also requires information. Much of our information comes to us from the media. But if that information constantly tells us to mistrust scientists and doctors and biotech companies, and the regulators who control them, then we will mistrust them, even if, in truth, there’s every reason to trust them. That is, media misinformation leads to misplaced mistrust . And so the media must also recognise its own obliga tion not to deceive and mislead in a shallow pursuit of profits. It should, in other words, also act on the basis of principled, not unlimited, autonomy. It really is a lot to think about, and anything involving Kant always gives me quite a headache. I need an aspirin. © TERENCE GREEN 2017
Terence is a peripatetic (though not Peripatetic) writer, historian and lecturer. He holds a PhD in the history of political thought from Columbia University, NYC, and lives with his wife and their dog in Wellington, NZ. He blogs at hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.n z April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 15
Bioethics &
Doctor-Patient Relationships Paul Walker ponders the best type of relationship between a doctor and a patient.
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ow well do you get on with your doctor? Every clinical consultation involves two people interacting, so should be seen as a relationship, and a moral encounter. The Hippocratic Oath, to do the best for the patient, and similar commitments grounded in a classical virtue ethics framework have been professed at graduation ceremonies of young doctors over centuries. Individual clinicians, however, can relate to individual patients and their families in different ways. Here I will simplify the various models of the doctor-patient relationship to three: the paternalistic model; the radical individualism model; and the shared decision-making model. The Paternalistic Model
The ‘paternalistic model’ emphasises that the doctor’s caring is based upon long medical training and expert, specialised, and often technical knowledge. This model may be summarised as ‘doctor knows best’. Here the values important to the patient are accorded less importance than what the doctor believes is in the patient’s best interest. This model is based predominantly upon the ethical principle of beneficence (meaning, ‘to do good to’), with patients receiving that intervention which, in the doctor’s assessment, is best suited to the patient in order to help restore them to health or to relieve their suffering. This principle requires that the doctor place the benefit of the patient above their own; and that they not make decisions for financial or other gain, and they also seek assistance from other clinicians when that is in the patient’s best interests. However, in non-emergency (‘elective’) situations, the paternalistic model brings the principle of beneficence into conflict with the principle of patient autonomy. The paradigm shift over the past quarter century from paternalistic doctor-centred decision-making to autonomous patientcentred decision-making is arguably the most significant recent change in the Western medical landscape. It is a consequence of a variety of factors: contemporary society’s drive towards the rights of self; an increasing value pluralism, and hence moral heterogeneity; forays into health education by the media, directly and through medical docudramas; the weakening of most forms of authority; as well as the greater technical success of medicine in restoring function and prolonging life. Interestingly, Edmund Pellegrino also credits the entry of the professional philosopher into medical ethics as an impetus towards patient autonomy as the dominant approach (see ‘The Four-Principles and the Doctor-Patient Relationship: The Need for a Better Linkage’ in Principles of Health Care Ethics , R. Gillon (Ed), 1994). The increasing preeminence of the principle of patient autonomy has led to the widespread abandoning of the paternalistic model in elective medical consultations. The paternalistic model is most readily accepted in emergency settings, where immediate life-saving action, often driven by medical protocol, is vital. Ideally, medical paternalism is restricted to value-neutral decisions, such as the size of endotracheal tube to be placed in a child of a 16 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
given age and weight. But the decision to resuscitate or not, for example, is extremely value-laden. The fact that, despite the doctor’s best intentions, there is always uncertainty in clinical medicine about diagnosis and the individual patient’s response to treatment, is also of concern in the paternalistic model. The Radical Individualism Model
At the opposite extreme to the paternalistic model is what could be termed the ‘radical individualism model’. This model is founded upon a recognition that patients have absolute autonomy, and absolute rights over their own bodies. The model assumes that each patient is capable of identifying therapeutic alternatives, and also that doctors are obligated to carry out patients’ requests, regardless of whether the doctors agree with them (and logically, regardless of their cost or futility). In this model, while patients may choose to take advice from doctors, they are required to make the decisions themselves, as best they can. A similar model has been termed the consumer model. Here health care is a commodity to be obtained by the consumer (the patient) with due diligence, seeking information but not value judgement from the potential market supplier (the doctor). The moral responsibilities of clinicians are to inform patients of their diagnoses and the range of treatment options available, and pro vide the requested service with competence. Relabelling doctors in commercial terms, as ‘health care providers’, and patients as ‘consumers’, underlines the patient’s control of the health care interaction. This is reflected in charters of patient’s rights and legally-enforced duties of informed consent, aimed specifically at empowering consumers to make their own decisions. A danger of this model is that it could undermine the ethos of caring that motivates doctors, who may well emotionally disengage from the process after explaining the options, since the decisions are now entirely up to the patient. It is challenging from the patient’s perspective too, in that it requires them to grasp a vast amount of technical information, while ill, and then re-evaluate it as treatment proceeds. Moreover, the model is impoverished in that it does not recognise the nature of the patient’s being-in-the world, and thus necessarily in relationship with other individuals: their family, community, other patients who may be competing for limited resources, or clinicians who are aware of the limits of medical technology in terms of what’s feasible and what may not be. Seeking medical help is not the same as going to a supermarket for groceries. Medicine is not morally neutral; it is aimed at actively, compassionately caring for and helping people. Put another way, rather than focusing medical ethics upon decisionmaking in identifiable moments of ethical dilemmas, we should concentrate on maximising the several goods of the patient. These include the techno-medical good (the technically correct treatment; for example, the correct drug in the correct dose); the human good (the good of the patient as a person); the perceptual good (the good as the patient perceives it); and the summum bonum (the greatest good, however defined) (see Edmund Pelle-
Medical Ethics
grino, ‘Moral Choice, the Good of the Patient, and the Patient’s Good’, in John C. Moskop & L. Kopelman (Eds.), Ethics and Critical Care Medicine , 1985). The Shared Decision-Making Model Awarene Awareness ss of of these these four four very different different goods of the patient patient allows allows us to look at a model midway between these two extremes – the ‘shared decision-making model’, also known as the ‘reciprocal model’, or the ‘negotiated contract model’. This model involves a joint joint approac approach, h, where health health profes profession sionals als are allied with patients patients and their family, family, the aim being to help each other identify the best course of action for the patient. It is based upon recognising the shared humanity of doctors and patients as well as the importance of ownership by the patient of their own body. In this model, information is offered freely by patients, and advice about likely diagnoses and treatment options is provided by the doctor, doctor, communicated in such a way that a joint decision can be made about what the patient might allow. Within this model, the ‘doctor-patient’ ‘doctor-patient’ relationship is distinguished from the ‘doctor-disease’ relationship. This model is that of a ‘bilateral ‘bilateral covenant’, implying mutual respect, truthfulness, dignity, and justice. For example, the doctor offers informed percentages for five-year survival following radical mastectomy, versus that for lumpectomy plus radiotherapy. The patient decides whether sacrificing her breast is worth that statistical improvement in her prospects. In this model the values of the patient and of the doctor with regard to both health healt h care and morality are discussed by the two autonomous parties. The shared decision-making model also allows that the patient may not clearly recognise their own values, so the virtuous clinician should guide them towards understanding and making coherent their value structure, in order to help them to make their own decisions. Education about how to engage in a moral discourse, and how to avoid prioritising health-care values over other values, is often necessary for this to be within the skill-set of the doctor. Clinician empathy and wisdom are important here; as is
patient reevaluation after reflection. The caring clinician should properly attempt to show the patient which path is likely to maximise their well-being, without coercing them. In other words, while patients patient s are (generally) (general ly) best at knowing wha t maximises their own good, doctors are (generally) best-placed to know what options are available to bring this about (see M.A. Kekewich, ‘Market Liberalism in Health Care: A Dysfunctional View of Respecting “Consumer” Autonomy’, Journal of Bioethical Bioethical Inquiry, 11(1), 2014, p.25). Put another way, the shared decision-making model depends upon exploring and respecting what matters most to the individual patient. It aims to develop informed patient preferences, and it respects autonomy autonomy in a way that is aware of the necessary interdependence between the doctor and the patient (and their family) in the decision-making process. This involves a conversation which is inclusive, non-coercive, and reflective, seeking unforced consensual agreement about which treatment path to follow foll ow (see P. P. Walker & T. T. Lovat, ‘Dialogic ‘D ialogic Consensus Con sensus in Clinical Decision Making’, Journal of Bioethical Bioethical Inquiry, 2016). It requires mutual understanding understanding of the values held by the patient, those who care for them, and doctors, in order to maximise the good of the patient in their actual situation. Factors that may confound this process include poor health literacy, cultural disinclinations to make autonomous decisions, and time-constraints during a consultation, amongst others. Conclusion Putting the shared decision-making model into clinical practice requires empathy, compassion, and a dialogue to determine what matters most to the patient. Therefore developing skills in how to have a real dialogue with patients, despite different socio-cultural backgrounds, should be a key part of medical training. © DR PAUL WALKER 2017
Paul Walker Walker is a surgeon surgeon in Newcast Newcastle, le, New South Wales, Wales, and and Conjoint Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health, University University of Newcastle. Newcastle. He received his PhD in in 2015. 2015. April/May April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 17
Medical Ethics
Henrietta’ Henriett a’s s Story Story asks who should should have the the decisive power over over someone’s someone’s cells after their death: their death: their the ir family famil y, o orr the medical medical community?
Vincent Vincen t Lotz
H
eLa cells are an immortal line of human cervical cancer clearer, researchers still made no effort to contact Henrietta’s Henrietta’s family. cells used in medical research. They are called ‘HeLa’ At this point, point, when there was still comparati comparatively vely little little responsibi responsibility lity cells from their initial host’s name, Henrietta Lacks. linked with HeLa cell use, it would surely have been right to inform Lacks was an African American woman with little formal eduher family and explain to them what this discovery meant to cation, raised on a tobacco farm in rural Virginia. Born medicine and the pharmaceutical industry industry.. This would in 1920, she experienced the full impact of racial have allowed enough time for at least one family discrimination left over from the years of slavmember to properly understand the issues and ery in the United States. In 1951, shortly after make informed decisions. The HeLa cells were the birth of her fifth child, Lacks fell seristill in a legally controllable area, since they ously ill with cervical cancer. The doctors were only in the United States and not yet who treated her took a sample of her cancer used throughout the world in hundreds of cells. After her death, without the knowldifferent laboratories; so if the situation had edge or permission of her family, the hosbeen handled right early on, any such decipital’s pital’s laboratory used it in a routine expere xpersion would have actually had an impact. A iment they had been performing on every suspicion often voiced is that the handling of cell sample they received. Henrietta’s cancer the situation then was distorted by race, cells unexpectedly did not die after a few because at that point in history the US establishHeLa cells under hours – more the opposite: it was was found that if ment considered black citizens’ rights less obliging the microscope © Dr Josef Reischig nourished sufficiently they would survive and could than white people’s rights. So years passed, and the be reproduced indefinitely. indefinitely. The remarkably resilient cells Lacks family remained completely unaware that these cells became the first human cells to be cultured continuously for existed. Meanwhile, the cells had become the centre of an extremely experiments. Different strains of HeLa cells, all descended desce nded from lucrative trade, being sold all over the world. When Henrietta’s husthat original sample, have been invaluable in a wide range of medband was first informed of the situation, twenty five years had passed ical research ever since. But is the continued use of HeLa cells since her death. Reports suggest that the initial impact of this dis just? Who should have the power to give consent for it, and why? covery was emotional and highly distressing; in some sense, it sudIf this question is approached from a utilitarian point of view, denly seemed, Henrietta lived on in a laboratory, the subject of innuone might argue that one offence against one person’s right conmerable mysterious experiments. cerning their body, or parts of it, stands very weakly against the Should the law have given give n control of the cell line to Henrietta’ Henriett a’ss rights to life of perhaps many thousand people who would benefit family? One could give an analogy at this point: If you find a gun from their use. From this perspective, it seems sensible to choose rightfully belonging to someone who lives in a peaceful country, the greater benefit for the larger number of people, especially once has never seen a gun in their entire life, and is unaware that he/she the person originally owning the cells has passed away. But how do even owned a gun, and if you know there is a person in a war zone you weigh one right against against another? another? Perhaps Perhaps our right to our own who could protect innocent civilians with it, which person should body parts is absolute. If so, perhaps a policy should be adopted you give the gun to? The answer answer is intuitively, intuitively, give it to the one fairly similar to that concerning the treatment of patients in a who knows how to use it for good. However, However, one could argue that vegetative state, state, where where the authority to decide decide future future treatment treatment this thought experiment is not decisive, since it again leaves out the is conferred on the next-of-kin. Thus as soon as the donor of any issues of privacy and your right righ t to your own body, body, which ethically cell sample passes away, authority concerning the cells’ use might be the more important issues. should pass immediately to her closest family member; and if Personally, I think that family membership can be a reason to none is available, they should fall under the same conditions as shift the responsibility for decisions from the medical community hair or other body parts removed after death, whose use is largely if and only if enough context is provided to enable the family memprohibited. Logically, the authority should be passed on to sibbers concerned to fully judge the situation and the choices availlings or children if there are no parents, since they are genetically able. Even then, they may of course choose to pass the decisionthe nearest instances. However, However, it could have been argued that making responsibility back to the medical professionals. Henrietta’ Henrietta ’s children lacked the medical knowledge to accurately After decades decade s of obscurity the na me Henrietta Henriett a Lacks is now assess the best thing to do. Is it right to hand over a medical deci widely known, partly thanks to educational educational efforts by her descendescension to someone who arguably does not adequately comprehend dents. A high school was recently named after her, and she has a the issues? permanent, though macabre, place in medical textbooks. © VINCENT LOTZ 2017 When HeLa HeLa cells cells were were first first cultured, cultured, no one one really really knew the potential they had, not even the researchers. A few years later, Vincent Lotz is a student at Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, when the possibility of their use in medical medic al research rese arch became bec ame West Sussex. 18 Philosophy Now Now April/May April/May 2017
How to Rise Above Political Turmoil Does a combative left-brain bias now dominate our country? Look to the polarization
so evident today. Underlying these social divisions is a corresponding division in our brain. Decades of research has shown that some of us tend toward a holistic rightbrain bias that sees the value of unity, whereas those in power think in terms of self and separation. James Olson explains how conscious mind management can tap the power of both hemispheres, liberate us from polarized perspectives, and lead to more harmonious relationships.
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Children,
Intuitive Knowledge, & Philosophy Maria daVenza Tillmanns argues that teaching children to think must involve more than simply teaching them cognitive skills. “Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.” – Richard Rorty “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein
I
t is my contention that the form of young children’s knowledge of the world is based on intuitive thinking. Let me begin with how I came to this idea in the first place. I attended a moral education conference at Harvard University in 1983. There Lawrence Kohlberg, who developed a theory of moral education based on Piaget’s ‘stage’ theory of cognitive development in children, and Matthew Lipman, the founder and Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, posed the interesting question of whether young children had the ability to enter into philosophical dialogue. The general assumption was that children who have not yet progressed to Piaget’s cognitive stage of abstract reasoning (that is, children younger than about nine or ten) would not be able to do philosophy. Lipman’s work, however, seemed instead to show that children are natural philosophers (see especially Matthew Lipman et al , Philosophy in the Classroom, 2nd edition, p.31-40, 1980). His work demonstrates that in school after school, young children greatly enjoy sharing their thoughts and ideas, listening to others, changing their minds and pondering the questions discussed. Children are also interested in the purpose behind everything, not just the cause. The disagreement between Kohlberg and Lipman over whether or not young children are capable of having serious philosophical discussions led me to think that there may be two different kinds of thinking in this regard. It occurred to me that whereas children may not yet have achieved the highest stage of abstract reasoning which enables them to have what academics would recognise as philosophical discussions, they may use a different form of thinking that nevertheless allows them to entertain serious questions about reality, fairness, justice, etc. These questions arise in them naturally, based on their curiosity about the world. They may not be at the stage where they can give wellreasoned arguments for their thoughts and ideas, but this does not imply that they do not have an intuitive understanding of ideas. Doing philosophy with children gives them the opportunity to give voice to those ideas while teaching them to clearly articulate their thoughts and give reasons for them. I would argue that without first thoroughly appreciating children’s deep intuitive understanding of the world in which they live, we have nothing to build their cognitive skills on. That is to say, teachers need to develop children’s cognitive thinking skills based 20 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
on the thinking and knowledge they already have, and we are too quick to underestimate the knowledge. We have failed young children for decades here, because although we often find their thoughts and ideas amusing , we rarely appreciate that they have a form of thinking we somehow cannot grasp or understand anymore. However, those who teach philosophy to young children do acknowledge their ability to dialogue about issues of fairness and justice, beauty and morality. Children may not have the developed structures of abstract thought to apply to such topics, but that doesn’t imply that they lack a fundamental grasp of what these issues entail. In fact, it is my experience, that children often have a ‘purer’ sense of these concepts, because their thinking has not yet been contaminated by societal biases and cultural norms. Intuitive Knowledge & Cognitive Skills Whence does childrens’ intuitive knowledge originate? In I and Thou(1923), existentialist philosopher and scholar Martin Buber wrote, “It is simply not the case that the child first perceives an object, then, as it were, puts himself in relation to it. But the effort to establish relation comes first… In the beginning is relation – as category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the a priori of relation, the inborn Thou. The inborn Thou is realized in the lived relations with that which meets it” (p.27). This a priori (that is, existing prior to learnt experience) relation to the world forms the basis for the intuitive knowledge we have of the world. Intuitive thought then emergesfrom one’s total engagement with the world, through one’s whole being. Children aren’t the only ones who have a total engagement with the world. Artists, for example, rely on the knowledge that originates from a total engagement and openness, to which they give expression through their art. But for many people, intuitive knowledge is gradually replaced by the structures of thinking we are taught. Logic then comes to replace immediate experience, although experience is infinitely more complex than reason can behold. And where reason fails us, many turn to religion. We always have the capacity to retain some form of an intuitive understanding of the world, yet too often it is replaced by the cognitive skills we develop in school. As a result, our cognitive skills are often developed as it were in a vacuum, disassociated from our being. This disassociation creates a dependency on others with authority, or on status, or on following trends and fads. If we cannot self-regulate our thinking, we depend on others who will do it for us. This dependency robs people of their ability to enter into interdependent relationships, where their inborn relationship with the world and with themselves is intact. In his article, ‘The Impact of Philosophy for Children in a High School English Class’ (available at inter-disciplinary.net ), Chad Miller says, “The continued irrele vance and disregard of the students’ experiences, questions and
Wassily Kandinsky, Autumn Landscape With Boats, 1908
ideas by schools, has too often left them with the inability to think responsibly for themselves; the school has told them what to think and why to think it.” Philosophy for children on the contrary honors the inborn relationship children have with the world around them. It helps them to cultivate their inner authority, be self-critical, to self-regulate, and indeed truly be in charge of their own thinking and decisions. Because young children have not yet developed the cognitive skills to express themselves, they use imagination, and they rely on it to convey their understanding of the world. Imagination is the language of intuitive knowledge, borne out of our unlearnt relationship with the world. If we rob children of their intuitive knowledge and imagination in order to develop their cognitive skills as rapidly as possible, we essentially rob them of this inborn relationship with the world. Thus we try to reestablish their relationship with the world and with themselves through developing their cognitive skills at the expense of that very relationship! We can train people to be very smart and knowledgeable, but at the expense of their inborn intelligence, which is rooted in a natural relationship with the world. They thus become disconnected from the world, from other people, and from themselves. And all the therapy in the world cannot make up for the inborn relationship we had at the beginning of life and have now lost. The loss also leads to dangerous consequences. Disassociated logic can allow us to do the most horrible things to the environment, other life forms, and other people, and provide justifications for it. Integrity and character may also become empty concepts, because,
as Buber would say, we have replaced the ‘inborn Thou’ with the ‘It’. The I-It relationship is strictly instrumental in nature and serves the individual’s needs at the expense of the relationship they have with the world ( I and Thou, p.23). As an example, David Brooks says in his article ‘The Power of Altruism’, “When you introduce a financial incentive you prompt people to see their situation through an economic lens. Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’… the institutions that arouse the moral lens have withered away while the institutions that manipulate incentives – the market and the state – have expanded. Now economic, utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world” ( New York Times , July 8, 2016). And Chad Miller found that when he administered a survey on the first day of class to examine his students’ reasoning skills, they answered that they “believed school was boring, but necessary to go to college and ‘make a lot of money’” (p.2). Essentially, we have replaced a life rich in meaning for a meaningless life of riches. In the name of progress, we end up working against our own interests, increasing distrust and hostility. Buber describes the world as one in which there is a “constant swinging back and forth” of the I-It and I-Thou relationships. Yet if we are disconnected from our I-Thou relationship and only the I–It relationship determines our interactions and relations with the world and other people, no amount of ‘religion’ can make up for that loss. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 21
Thinking Imaginatively We need to foster and nourish the ‘inborn Thou’ by strengthening children’s relations to the world around them and other people. The only way to restore the inborn Thou to our society is to allow children to develop their intuitive knowledge by allowing them full reign to their imaginations in the arts and sciences and in doing philosophy with them. The ‘inborn Thou’ signifies our direct relationship with the world, relatively unmediated through socially-conferred abstract structures of thought. If you will, it finds its expression in a form of parrhesia; speaking freely or frankly. Diogenes the Cynic practiced parrhesia when he asked Alexander the Great, conqueror of the known world, to move out of the way because he was blocking the sun (Plutarch, Alexander, 14). Diogenes bluntly informs Alexander the Great that he’s not the center of the universe. It is this ‘Diogenesian’ voice that we should appeal to when philosophising with children. Doing philosophy with children provides just the context for speaking freely. What expertise do philosophers have? Philosophers are experts in not knowing. In practicing the art of philosophy, the art of not knowing, we engage each other to think together to explore concepts we only vaguely understand. Thinking together not only binds us, but also allows us to explore unknown and perhaps unknowable territory with joy, curiosity and confidence. Through asking children what they already know through their intuitive knowledge, and putting thinking itself into question, we can help them become aware of themselves as thinking beings. In this way children develop what David Bohm calls the ‘proprioception of thought’ – an ability to “observe thought” which is the “self-perception of thought” (On Dialogue, pp.73-83, 1996). This is the ability to become self-critical in the sense of self-aware through questioning what we already know. In ‘Childhood, Education and Philosophy: Notes on Deterritorialisation’, Walter Kohan says, “We are not interested in this or that information or knowledge, in any specific truth; we do not teach techniques in order that students practice intellectual skills, learn how to answer this or that kind of question, or recognise this or that type of fallacy. Rather, we are primarily interested in students and teachers entering a zone of interrogation – in putting themselves, their lives, their passions and beliefs into question through the experience of thinking together” ( Philosophy for Children in Transition, eds. Nancy Vansieleghem and David Kennedy, 2012, pp.178-179). Once children experience themselves as thinking beings, we can then proceed with teaching them the cognitive thinking skills they need, because only when cognitive knowledge grows out of
“
We are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive
”
Albert Einstein 22 Philosophy Now
April/May 2017
our intuitive knowledge, steeped in our natural relationship with the world, can we become full human beings, not just talking heads disassociated from our own bodies and relationship with the world. We are not disembodied creatures. It is through our concrete being that we stand in relationship with the world. This relationship keeps us grounded and keeps us human. Otherwise, we become inhuman to the environment, life, other people, and ourselves; we become abusive beings; smart and knowledgeable maybe, but abusive as we disconnect from the world. In ‘Childhood, Philosophy and Play’, Barbara Weber states that “Philosophy for Children is often reduced to teaching children ‘thinking skills’ instead of teaching other modes of being in the world, such as feeling and perceiving. And although ‘creative thinking’ and ‘caring thinking’ were subsequently introduced into the programme, these are classified as ‘modes of thinking.’ However, if we only te ach thinking skills based on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ application of logical operations, the content of children’s statements remains secondary or even irrelevant. Consequently, Philosophy for Children would then implicitly reduce childhood to a deficiency (since children are not yet capable of reasoning, although they are able to learn to reason) and also reduce humanity to a ‘disembodied head’ that is able to speak and apply reason, but is disconnected from any emotional or sensuous aspects” ( Philosophy for Children in Transition, p.69). In ‘The Other Half of the Child’, Kieran Egan makes a similar point: “We tend to abstract knowledge from the context of its making or discovery and put it into logical structures. One result of this is to dehumanize knowledge” (Thinking Children and Education, ed. Matthew Lipman, pp.301-305, 1993). I believe we need to be aware of the need not to reduce philosophy for children to just developing ‘thinking skills’ of whatever form, and to truly pay attention to the content of children’s statements. We need to respect their relationship with the world, and not just replace it with how we, as adults, commonly relate to the world. This means we should stay true to the language of their intuitive knowledge, which is the language of play and imagination. Imagination and play is also the language of artists. Artists paint the way for us to stay in touch with the complex world we are a part of and cannot fully comprehend cognitively. Through art we tap into our intuitive selves. The arts educate us to better understand our world when it surpasses our ability to know it cognitively. The arts educate; yet we have largely reduced them to an often-banal form of entertainment. Imagining Philosophically I maintain that with age I have actually come to know less and less, but have come to understand more and more. That is, I have developed a greater and broader conceptual knowledge. Conceptual knowledge undergirds factual knowledge and serves to give insight to it. Factual knowledge by itself can appear contradictory: is light composed of particles or waves? Or is it composed of a wave-particle duality? Are humans moral or immoral? And so on. To understand apparent contradictions, we often have to dive deeper and enter murkier waters. And, I believe, every discipline eventually moves beyond the raw facts, to develop insight and understanding. To move beyond the facts does not make them irrelevant. On the contrary, we must ask, how do we ‘hold the ten-
Wassily Kandinsky, Black & Violet , 1923
sion’ of apparently contradictory facts, and how can this lead us to a deeper conceptual understanding? This is where philosophy comes in. Imagination is the language of intuitive thinking and can be ‘educated’ in the same way that artists learn to express themselves in their art form in ever more disciplined and nuanced ways. This is something philosophy for and with children does. It honors our inborn Thou – our natural relationship to the world and to other people. It honors the content of children’s statements; and honors the need to develop and sharpen intuitive knowledge and develop that knowledge into well-thought-out cognitive knowledge. Philosophy for children builds the conceptual groundwork for the cognitive knowledge they learn in school, and develops a deeper and broader understanding of our complex world. So, yes, for the purpose of our need to live up to our human potential, we need to engage in doing philosophy, and for this purpose philosophy needs to become more imaginative, as Richard Rorty suggested. Where better to start than with highly imaginative young children? Children wrestle with ideas about how to understand the world, which is where philosophy began as well. Miller addresses this point, saying, “to allow the students to think for themselves resulted in the students doing philosophy. The students’ thoughts and questions often pushed the community’s inquiries and discussions to that of the ‘philosophical’. The students examined issues and paralleled arguments professional philosophers have been writing about for over two thousand years.” Moreover, the students’ “interpreta-
tions were grounded in personal connections supported by reasons indicating they were no longer passively subservient to authority, but willing to challenge from their own personal point of view.” (p.7). Discovery leads to learning , not just to having answers. We do not want to just provide children with packets of preprocessed knowledge which rumble down the educational conveyor belt in the form of teacher-proof lesson plans, text books, teaching-tothe-test exercises... How can we then be surprised when children decide computer games are more interesting than life itself? We have essentially robbed them of the desire to ‘get dirty’ while playing outside and discovering what this place is about – I mean, engaging with this world and all its complexity, filled with wonder. We have created a world too boring for children, and act surprised when they are bored. But the world isn’t boring, and in doing philosophy with children we can keep the fascination alive. Whereas the university focuses on the history of philosophy much in the same way that the university teaches art history, we should consider creating a Philosophy Academy which teaches the art of thinking, similar to how an Art Academy teaches art. © DR MARIA DAVENZA TILLMANNS 2017
Maria daVenza Tillmanns is a former President of the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy (ASPCP), and is currently seeking funding for a project in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, about doing philosophy with children in underserved schools in San Diego. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 23
Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife? Rui Vieira
says yes it can, of sorts.
T
he idea of an afterlife is central to many of the world’s religions, and understandably so, since the thought that eternal oblivion might await us after death can be terrifying. But to many skeptics the notion of an afterlife as put forth by most religions seems implausible, leaving eternal oblivion as the only possibility. However, they need not be so pessimistic. Maybe science itself could provide us with a coherent, even plausible, account of a kind of cosmological afterlife, especially if we throw some philosophy of mind into the mix. How might science help assuage our fear of death? Modern physics has provided us with theories which claim that we may be living in a multiverse , in which our universe is only one among a potentially infinite number of universes. A mind-bending consequence of this is that there would be universes similar or even physically identical to ours containing duplicates of you and me. As some have wondered, if there are copies of you and me in these other universes, could we not view their continued existence as an afterlife of sorts, once our current life in this universe has ceased? But would such a copy of me be me? Perhaps; but the idea can be made more plausible if it’s combined with a particular philosophy of mind and of the corresponding self in which neither is reducible to matter. So before addressing the cosmology, we must first address the problem of consciousness as it relates to matter.
it were. The same is true of each individual human consciousness, which is equally inaccessible to others. This inaccessible subjectivity is a defining feature of consciousness. But, as Nagel pointed out, science can only provide accounts of natural phenomena from an objective or third-person point of view. Thus, any proposed scientific, materialistically reductive account of mind will automatically leave out the subjective, first-person point of view of consciousness – the very thing we’re trying to explain! Still, we needn’t go as far as René Descartes (1596-1650), and conclude that mind is a separate substance from the material brain – a view called substance dualism. We could instead subscribe to the perhaps more plausible property dualism, which says that there is only one substance, namely matter, but there are however distinct physical and mental properties. According to an ‘emergent’ version of this theory, when matter comes together in a certain complex arrangement, like a brain, mental properties of consciousness emerge from the active arrangement. On this view, the subjective contents of the mind – thoughts, sensations, feelings – although dependent on the material brain, are seemingly irreducible emergent nonphysical properties of the brain. We will shortly use just such a property dualism for our cosmological account of an afterlife, but let’s first look at the possibility of a multiverse as proposed by some current c osmological theories.
The Mind & The Brain
The Multiverse
In the philosophy of mind, materialism (or physicalism) is the view that there exists nothing except the material (or the physical). Physics has been enormously successful in reducing many natural phenomena to ultimately nothing more than the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles. However, the subjective or experiential nature of consciousness continues to be a thorn in the side of any materially reductive explanations of the world. How is it that, in a universe of mostly dead matter, certain clumps of matter, especially humans, are conscious, have minds? That is, we have thoughts, sensations, feelings, desires, beliefs, intentions and self-awareness. How do these subjective experiences arise from matter; and more specifically, from the matter of the brain? This question is called ‘the mind-body problem’. Many materialist philosophers of mind have attempted to reduce mind to matter – consciousness itself to the brain – claiming that mind states and brain states are identical. Other philosophers of mind, however, doubt that these reductive accounts of mind can work. One such is Thomas Nagel, who pointed out some of the problems with reductive accounts of mind in his famous article ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ in The Philosophical Review vol.83, #4 (1974). Nagel argued that even if we possessed all the physical facts about bats, such as the sense mechanisms of echolocation and bat neurophysiology, there would always be something left out of the physical account, namely, what it’s like to experience like a bat . Granted, we could always come up with clever ways to imagine a bat’s subjective experience, but these will always be simulations: we can never really get inside the skin of a bat, as
As current cosmological observations suggest, it’s likely that the matter distributed throughout our universe is governed by the same laws of nature. But there could also be a potentially infinite number of separate volumes of space, or separate universes, beyond the cosmic horizon of our own observable universe. This is the simplest kind of concept of a multiverse. It is what the physicist Max Tegmark has categorized as a ‘level one multiverse’, out of a possible four levels or types of multiverse [his theory is explained in the article by Sam Woolfe in Philosophy Now Issue 113, Ed]. As some physicists claim, if any type of infinitely-extensive multiverse exists, then it must include other universes similar or even identical to our own, with a duplicate Earth and a physical duplicate of you and me, with similar or even identical histories. This possibility can be illustrated by means of an analogy used by the physicist Brian Greene. Imagine a deck of cards. If you deal the cards a great many times, then card sequences will inevitably repeat, since there are only a limited number of possible card sequences. However, if you deal the cards an infinite number of times, then every possible card sequence would be dealt an infinite number of times. Similarly, there are only so many possible arrangements of matter before they too start repeating, or at least start looking indistinguishably similar. So if there are a great many other universes beyond our own – a multiverse – then in some of those universes some arrangements of matter will repeat. And if there is an infinite number of universes then all possible arrangements of matter will inevitably be realized a potentially infinite number of times – including the particular arrangement of mat-
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ter that would make a physical duplicate of you and me in another universe physically identical to our own.
A Cosmological Conclusion But, would a molecule-for-molecule physical duplicate of me in another universe be me? To try to answer this, we should look at what exactly makes me, well, me. In her book Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View (2000), the philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker argues (I think rightly) that the first-person point-of-view or ‘first-person perspective’ that is my consciousness of existing, and the ability to conceive of myself as an individual from this first-person perspective, is what determines me as me, that is, as an individual person. As we’ve seen, this first-person aspect of consciousness was also highlighted by Nagel. Baker, however, combines this view with a kind of non-reductive materialism by claiming that the first-person perspective of a human being is ‘constituted’ by a material body of some kind or other, but is not identical with it. As Baker suggests, a first-person consciousness is not identical to a body – that is, in particular, to a brain – but a first-person consciousness is nevertheless dependent on a particular brain. Thus, under Baker’s specific view it is difficult to see how a physical duplicate of me in another universe could have my consci ousness, since they don’t have my body. So on her account, there is no reason to suggest this copy of me would also be me. However, if emergent property dualism is correct, t hen my first-person consciousness emerges as a property, or rather, as the result of a set of properties, from the particular complex arrangement of molecules that is my brain. It therefore seems conceivable that if in another universe there is a molecule-formolecule physical duplicate of my brain, with an identical history, then the first-person consciousness that is me emerges as a property (or more precisely, as the result of a set of properties)
from this duplicate brain. To use philosopher John Searle’s example for his own form of emergentism in, for instance, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), this would be somewhat analogous to saying that the same property of ‘liquidity’ or ‘solidity’ emerges wherever the same molecular arrangements of H 20 are found in the universe. Would this duplication really constitute a type of afterlife? It might for instance be asked, if there are duplicates of you and me in other universes right now, why do you and I seem to experience from a first-person perspective only in this universe? Why don’t we experience in multiple universes, in multiple duplicates, at the same time? Well, according to Baker’s view, two or more bodies cannot have the same first-person perspective at the same time without this resulting in contradictions. But as Baker also seems to suggest, there is nothing to prevent two or more bodies (or in our case, duplicates) from having the same first-person perspective at different times. So if combined with property dualism, it’s conceivable that perhaps when the first-person consciousness that is me here and now ceases to experience in this universe, my consciousness might afterwards come to experience anew in a duplicate in another universe, if, for instance, I get hit by a bus in this universe, while my doppelganger suffers a near miss. All this is very speculative. But our cosmological theories of the universe, including the possible multiverse, along with the mysteries of consciousness, are too unresolved for anyone to assert with any confidence that death is the end of one’s consciousness. At the very least, this cosmological account of an afterlife could provide religious skeptics with the same glimmer of hope shared by many religious believers, that perhaps death is not the end. © RUI VIEIRA 2017
Rui Vieira is a graphic designer living in Mississauga, Ontario.
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The Sound of Philosophy James Tartaglia asks whether philosophy and music should intersect.
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magine you are seated in a lecture theatre, patiently waiting to hear some philosophy. The philosopher you have come to see then takes the stage and starts to sing: a song about the very topic you were expecting them to talk about. What you were expecting from your next sixty minutes was the usual presentation: namely a long build-up to situate you within the philosophical debate in question; the occasional (more or less) humorous aside to punctuate proceedings; lots of tentative reports of what the philosopher ‘wants to say’ (the nervous tic of the profession); and then some original claims, more often than not saved up until near the end. Then would come the round of questions –which some members of the audience will have been mentally rehearsing throughout the talk, designed as much to demonstrate the questioner’s own philosophical prowess as to elicit an illuminating answer, perhaps by catching the speaker out. This particular philosopher, however, has defied all these expectations by singing. Would you be disappointed and immediately leave? I doubt it. You would certainly be surprised, and might well regard this spectacle as ludicrous beyond belief; but a morbid sense of curiosity would keep you in your seat. But then, suppose the philosopher turned out to be a really good singer, with a really good song which had philosophically illuminating lyrics directly relevant to the issues. Further suppose he or she was accompanied by a first-rate band. Then you might be rather pleased at this turn of events. So delighted, in fact, that you found yourself talking about it for years to come. But, entertaining as such an event might be, real philosophy has nothing to do with entertainment, right? Philosophy lectures may often be boring (and they often are; professional philosophers have techniques to disguise when they’re nodding off in other people’s talks), but that’s irrelevant. All that matters is the content; and surely there is no way one could convey the richness of philosophical content contained within a lecture through a song? (That said, you might have doubts about whether one can effectively convey the rich content of a written research paper through a lecture. You can go back and forth over a paper while studying it, but lectures happen in real time. At a lecture, you do get to ask questions – if the chairperson chooses you. But th en there are very few philosophers who will not respond to an email addressing issues arising from their work). However, even if a carefully crafted song could convey such complex content – Homer did sing the Iliad and the Odyssey, after all – and even if my imaginary singing philosopher would do a good job of it, the idea of mixing philosophy with music still seems a bit silly. And real philosophers would surely not do a good job of it, even if they were that way inclined. This is perfectly illustrated by Professor David Chalmers of ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ fame, and his song ‘Zombie Blues’. The song was named after the ‘philosophical zombies’ Chalmers conceived of, which are physically exactly the same as ordinary humans, but lack consciousness, this purporting to show that consciousness is not physical. But the song itself has no serious points to make, and is just intended as a 26 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
bit of fun for the punters after a hard day of consciousness-conferencing. Chalmers has an excellent stage presence, but a truly rotten singing voice – which all adds to the fun, of course. Nevertheless, there is some real musical talent to be found in philosophy. Arthur Schopenhauer was a good flute player, by all accounts. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote piano compositions, and although musically, as opposed to philosophically, he was no visionary, they are perfectly credible pieces within the romantic idiom. Donald Davidson the analytical philosopher was an accomplished pianist, and he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein in a college production of Aristophanes’ The Birds . On the current scene, Torin Alter, who, like Chalmers, is a consciousness-man, fronts a rock band, ‘The Lying Angels’, which is very much the real deal; while UK philosophy boasts a number of semi-professional jazz musicians, including Andrew Bowie (saxophone), Andy Hamilton (piano)… and me (saxophone). Rather unusually, I was a jazz musician before I discovered philosophy. Not your typical career path. Absurdity & Complexity Still, it is one thing to be both a musician and a philosopher, and another to try to combine them. On the face of it, they do not mix.
With no evident overlap, it seems there can be no good reason to combine music and philosophy. We have already encountered two apparently good reasons not to try, namely that the combination seems silly, and that music is not an appropriate medium to convey the richness and complexity of philosophical content. I do not think the first is a good reason, however, and although the second embodies a good point, it overlooks a crucial aspect of philosophy. So let me address them in turn. Firstly, we must ask why it would seem silly to present philosophy in musical form. The reason, I think, is that philosophy is associated with profundity, but music with levity. Combine profundity with levity and the result is absurdity. If a political leader were to deliver a speech about foreign policy to a disco beat, that would be a paradigmatically absurd juxtaposition. But then again, you could achieve the same effect by hosting a hotdog eating competition to a soundtrack of Beethoven’s Fifth. The reason this switch maintains the absurd effect is that hotdog eating, unlike politics, is not serious; and, more pertinently, that not all music is associated with levity. Some music is just for fun, and can be all the better for it. But to assume that all music is so is to make a seriously philistine assumption, albeit one it is possibly easy to make, until you start to think about it. The assumption explains our immediate reaction (mine too) to the idea of singing philosophy. But human beings also have a long track-record of producing serious music. (As a jazz musician, I can assure you that the first thing that springs to my mind here is not the Western classical tradition.) So if you get the music right, I see absolutely no reason why a musical setting of philosophical ideas should be absurd, so long as there is good reason for it. Setting philosophy to music might put some people off. Richard Rorty, who apparently hated all music, would certainly not have liked it. But others might find that it focused their minds. And if you think that philosophy is so utterly serious that no music could match its gravity, you probably shouldn’t be reading philosophy in a magazine. The second reservation is that philosophy is too complex to be effectively conveyed in musical form. I think this is basically, but not strictly, correct. It is not strictly correct, because there is no logical reason why every single word of a fifty minute research paper presentation could not be set to music. Very little, if any, audience interaction transpires during philosophy lectures, on the whole; but even that could be incorporated if the music had an element of improvisation, as jazz does. Nevertheless, the reservation that philosophy is too complex to effectively convey in musical form is in practice basically correct, because making it happen would require enormous, completely impractical, amounts of effort, for minimal, if any, rewards. Scoring and rehearsing a philosophy lecture would be a mammoth task; so such events could only be occasional one-offs, reserved for the odd star paper. The clear benefit – for those it did not put off – would be a more entertaining, enjoyable and memorable presentation. The ideas would be the same, however, and they are surely the point of the exercise. Reasons To Be Musical
However, conveying content is not the only thing that philosophical talks, or texts, do. This brings us to the reasons why I am taking the idea of combining philosophy and music seriously. For texts and talks also inspire us to think philosophically not just by
conveying ideas and arguments, but also by getting us to empathise with the ideas and arguments: to connect them with our own lives, and thereby to lodge them under our skins, so to speak. And one way they have done this, throughout all the great philosophical traditions, is by utilising what might be called nonargumentative effects; that is, artistic ones. Let me give you a couple of instances to show you what I mean. There is a well-known passage in Schopenhauer ’s The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 (p.354 in the Payne translation), in which he illustrates his despair at the futility and cruelty of life through the kind of case which, he thinks, makes this most evident – the lives of non-human animals. Schopenhauer gives the example of turtles in Java dying in agony as they are ripped apart by wild dogs, who are themselves sometimes ambushed by tigers. It is a scene of horror that is repeated year after year, and for Schopenhauer, who has a thoroughly bleak outlook on reality, it is a microcosm of life in general. But this is evidently not a disinterested exercise in academic reasoning. Rather, it is a vivid illustration designed to induce the pathos in his reader that Schopenhauer himself felt. Schopenhauer was aiming for an artistic effect when he wrote this passage. Of course, he was illustrating a position he had previously argued for; but here he was trying to produce an emotional effect on his reader. It must have worked, given how often this short passage from his massive book is cited. I have no doubt that generations April/May 2017 Philosophy Now
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of readers have pitied those turtles, and drawn parallels between their own lives and the pointless, endlessly recurring horror that transpires on those Java beaches. And I also have no doubt that this non-argumentative, artistic effect has inspired many to take Schopenhauer’s cosmic pessimism seriously; to look into the arguments to see whether the sentiment is well supported. My second example is more recent: one from Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984), where he uses a tele(trans)portation thought experiment to test the idea of personal survival through psychological continuity – the idea of the continuity of the self through continuous memories, thoughts, experiences, personality traits, etc. As is well-known to Star Trek fans, a teleporter is a fantasy machine which scans your body in order to create an exact physical replica at another place, destroying the original body in the process. However, the idea being considered by Parfit is whether psychological continuity is what is required for survival, and since psychological continuity in his sense is preserved in the replica, then teleportation could be a possible form of personal transport. Travelling this way would worry him, Parfit admits, but he dismisses this worry as irrational, like the nerves we might feel when looking through the window at the top of a skyscraper (p.279). Similarly, any concern we might feel for our ‘old’ body is dismissed as no different in kind from the irrational sentiment we might feel for the actual wedding ring we wore at the ceremony, as opposed to a physically identical replica (p.286). People tend to react strongly to Parfit’s teleportation thought experiments, and in diametrically opposed ways. One reaction is that of course teleportation would be perfectly safe, and it’s only a superstitious, anti-scientific belief in something like a soul which 28
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would lead you to think otherwise. The other reaction is that the teleporter’s destruction of your body would bring down the final curtain on you just as effectively as a bullet through your head, and the fact that it would subsequently create a replica that would think it was you is beside the point. But however you react, react you will, since thinking about teleportation has a powerful artistic effect of imagination stimulation which draws you into the metaphysics of personal identity. Parfit has indeed imagined a situation in which your metaphysical views would be a matter of life or death: if your views convinced you that teleportation was safe to use, but they were wrong, th en you would die! (It is a strange quirk of metaphysics that even in a world where everyone agreed that teleportation was, no-one could know you had died.) Parfit did not need to use this thought experiment; his arguments about personal identity stand on their own. But he clearly wanted to engage our imaginations by bringing emotions like fear into the mix. In fact, the word ‘fear’ frequently recurs in Rea sons and Persons , because Parfit thinks his theory can help us conquer fear of death: given that my memories and psychological traits – which on his view is all I amount to – may be passed onto others, at least in their memories of me, this is supposed to make my death seem less absolute and final. Only the illusion of a fixed self makes death seem terrible, Parfit thinks. Thus he embraces the Buddhist view of ‘no-self’ (pp.502-3). [Please see later this issue for an obituary of Derek Parfit, Ed.] Others, however, regard the fear they imagine at the prospect of teleportation as a spur to investigate where Parfit went wrong, on the grounds that their fear of being zapped out of existence with their body must surely be justified. These examples show that philosophical ideas can be framed to affect us in the manner of art: they can arouse intuitions we did not know we had while inducing passion, pathos, wonder, mystery, or fear. This is hardly surprising, given what philosophical ideas typically concern – namely, our lives and our place within reality. Neither is it surprising that philosophers would cultivate artistic effects to inspire their audiences and get them thinking. The ultimate aim of philosophy, once we get into the arguments, may be the determination of truth, but it can often be an artistic effect which draws us into the arguments. Such effects instigate and sustain philosophical thought, and hence do important work; not so much in guiding us to the truth, as in determining the paths we want to tread and the kinds of truths we want to discover, and in motivating and sustaining our search for them. A lecture or text may produce artistic effects in a more or less inspiring way, depending on the skill of the philosopher. Artistic effects are neglected in the quasi-scientific technical work which dominates today’s academic philosophy, but they are a mainstay of the history of philosophy. If our singing philosopher concentrates on producing these effects through music, and keeps the actual philosophy to the minimum required to produce them, then they might well thus be doing valuable philosophical work – the work that lectures and texts do when they aim to produce empathy and engagement in order to inspire reflection. Music moulds, reinforces, and shapes our ideas and feelings – most typically, love, sadness, and passion, and it can do the same kinds of thing with the more conceptually sophisticated and varied palette of philosophy. But a musical rendering also has the advantage that it can aspire to art.
Another advantage to a musical approach is that, given its patently artistic aspiration, our attention is immediately drawn to the non-argumentative nature of these effects, which is something that might pass us by with artistic effects in a purely textual treatment. I mean that with the use of music in philosophy, attention will thereby be drawn to the fact that although we may be moved and inspired, we should not necessarily be persuaded . As such, the musical performance of philosophy has something in common with the aims of experimental philosophy, which, among other things, provides a check on the use philosophers often make of intuitions by empirically investigating a representative sample of a population’s intuitions. The very fact that there is now such a thing as experimental philosophy makes us more wary when we see philosophers appealing to the intuitive high-ground without evidence. And likewise, performance philosophy of whatever medium, by raising our aware ness of the use of nonargumentative effects in philosophy, may remind us to keep a level head whenever these effects are employed, however much we may otherwise welcome them. The Performance of Philosophy Performance philosophy has become a reality in recent years, and is spreading fast (see performancephilosophy.org ). It encompasses not only music, but also dance, theatre, film, and all manner of artistic endeavours which can be inspired by, and inspire, philosophy. I think we should welcome this, because even though some philoso-
phers like to think of their discipline as a branch of science, philosophy has a strong affinity with the arts, and this affinity should be celebrated, not hidden away. This affinity with the arts can immediately be seen from the fact that the history of philosophy is a living part of philosophy, in a way in which the history of science could never be part of contemporary science: philosophy, just like an art form (maybe it even is an art form), has canonical figures whose thoughts have retained their relevance for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Plato and Descartes will not fade from our horizons any more than will Shakespeare, Rembrandt, or Beethoven. Old science, by contrast, is typically obsolete science. Another reason to welcome the development of performance philosophy is that, to be frank, philosophy has an image problem. A ‘toga/pipe and slippers/pointless waffle’ image problem. Science is universally taught at primary schools, and breeds celebrities; it pervades our culture, and is showered with adoration. Philosophy, on the other hand, is viewed with suspicion in many quarters, and remains a niche interest outside the stubbornly insular profession itself. This is despite the fact that philosophy is, in fact, thoroughly ubiquitous: it creeps into blockbuster movies, ground-breaking artworks, and bestselling novels with surprising frequency; if a novel is acclaimed for its intellectual depth, this usually means that it flirted with a little philosophy. But very few apart from us philosophy-nerds seem to notice. So rather than remaining a publicly invisible source for art to draw upon, maybe it is time for philosophy to start drawing upon art. Then it could hardly be missed. It also might start to be appreciated a bit more. In any case, philosophy certainly needs to raise its profile, because we are currently on the verge of technological breakthroughs which, in the words of Edward O. Wilson, “will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham” (The Meaning of Human Existence , p.14). This ethical precipice is most notable in the fields of genetic enhancement and artificial intelligence. If philosophy continues on its current, unassuming track, then we will soon find ourselves with the anomaly of all the seats on the ethics panels being taken up by scientists. Philosophy desperately needs more cultural influence and respect, for which increased public awareness is a good start. Performance philosophy can help. And if you think this will lead it to be taken less seriously, then you are falling back on the unthinking assumption about levity. In any case, when it comes to the big philosophical issues currently facing us, I am not sure it could have much less influence than it currently does. To return to my singing philosopher, then: I myself would willingly sing that song. Unfortunately, to echo the unforgettable words of jazz pianist Erroll Garner, my voice is “worser than Louis Armstrong’s.” That is why, for our album Jazz-Philosophy Fusion, we hired a professional singer; and one of the best, too. Philosophy deserves it. © JAMES TARTAGLIA 2017
James Tartaglia is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Keele Univer sity and the author of Philosophy in a Meaningless Life (Bloomsbury 2016). Before he pursued an academic career in philosophy, James was an award-winning jazz saxophonist. He has now combined his passions with performances with his band Continuum Of Selves, including a recording, Jazz-Philosophy Fusion. Please visit jazzphilosophyfusion.com for more about the band. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 29
Singing In Choirs: An Existential View Sara Clethero says, once more with authenticity
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train singers. Some time ago, I had a call from a very sophisticated local psychotherapist. She had done some voluntary work for a local hospice, and thought she would join the choir there. After some weeks of singing in the choir, someone had taken her aside and explained to her that some people can sing and some can’t: the implication was, she couldn’t. She was devastated, and very articulate about it, as one would expect. She explained to me very eloquently how much singing means to her, and how humiliated she felt by the whole experience. In fact, once we started to work, I found she can sing perfectly well, as most people can. She simply had one or two habits that distorted the sound, but which she could easily address. I have heard other similar stories, just as devastating, from would–be singers, and I think that there is a problem here that stems from a deep philosophical misconception about the nature of music-making, and of singing in particular. Humans have been singing since prehistoric times (see for example, Stephen Mithen’s work on the evolutionary origins of music, The Singing Neanderthals , 2005). Singing is not something we need to learn to do. But what we do need to do is to put aside some assumptions – cultural, psychological, but chiefly philosophical – which undermine our ability to simply give voice, and which make us believe that we have to make some special effort to do something which is in fact integral to our bodies. First, we often talk as though we sing for effect, or to make ourselves and others happy. This implies a utilitarian framework about singing; that it is done to create some sort of benefit. But that way of thinking is, I suggest, simply carelessness. Rather, singing is an expression of who we are – of our authentic humanity. It is not an add-on for the sake of giving pleasure to ourselves or to others – although it may do that as well, of course.
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This deeper significance is obvious in the context of music in a religious setting. One of the people I met who been treated with contempt by a choir he wanted to join, had spent years singing as a monk, and he powerfully explained to me the significance of singing for him. But it is clear that singing is of much profounder significance than a decorative or utilitarian understanding would imply even for people without a specific spiritual reference. Being There The act of singing is fundamentally person- and situation-specific. Every singer, and every body in which the breath flows and th e sound resonates, is different from every other. So, in this sense there can be no absolute rules for singing. Even the notes we sing are a cultural variant: in Persian and Arabic music, scales include quarter tones; in traditional Western music, there is instead usually an arrangement of semi-tones and tones. All the rules and principles dreamed up by those whose identity (and maybe livelihood) is bound up with such things are relative to their tonal landscape. And, sometimes, irrelevant to the philosophical issues. So rather than trying to generalise about the act of singing, let me start from the other end of the telescope, looking first from a global concept of singing towards the specificity of singing. For me singing is an existential matter. That is to say, it is not an expression of musical rules or principles: it is not something we do to make ourselves or others feel better (although it may do that as well – very nice), and it is not something we do to show how clever or marvellous we are (again, very nice if it does that – but it actually doesn’t matter). Rather, singing is an expression of our humanity – a humanity which is shared with others, and which is therefore most powerful when expressed together with others. When we sing to other people, in whatever venue or setting, whether a big auditorium or a small gathering, we are drawing them into our ‘lived experience’, to use phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term. Alternatively, to use Martin Heidegger’s term, ‘being there’ (‘Dasein’), in whatever context, is what matters: being fully aware of and responsive to the present circumstances. However, as Jean-Paul Sartre made very clear in the context of the French Resistance in the Second World War, this is a very demanding frame of action – or of morality. If we allow ourselves to be
diverted from it, we will fall short of what we can, and even should be. In fact, this radical presence in the moment is what distinguishes professional singers from recreational ones, not their adherence or otherwise to a particular way of singing. My singing experience has been mostly in opera houses. But I am continually amazed at the way jazz singers, an d in a more extreme way, pop singers, manage to incorporate this understanding of singing into their work. At its best, singing is for them a way of responding, often with great flexibility and subtlety, to their experience of the world, including to the sound of other instruments. And although classical music is strictly governed by the written score, in vocal classical music the same philosophical simplicity of making sound with the body applies. All we can ask of a singer is that they be who they are for us in that moment in time. There is no time or spare intellectual energy for anything else. Indeed, anything else – being happy, public approval, even vocal science – is a distraction. Of course, we can improve the way our voice reflects who we are – mostly by clearing away the assumptions and hang-ups we have about ourselves and our place in the world. The ‘ bel canto’ tradition, with its insistence on breath-led sound, as reflected in the work of, for example, international opera coach Ingrid Surgenor, but also an inspiration to jazz singers such as Tony Bennett, is a wonderful tool for this. Most of the effective training for opera singers helps them to sing ‘on the breath’ using the available space in their resonating cavities (their mouth, pharynx, diaphragm, etc) and using the breathing muscular structures well. In this way, the sound that’s made has a very direct relationship with the embodied self. If what we breath is what we sing, our singing is fundamenta l to our physical and intellectual space. For Singing’s Sake In the present world, moral categories and technical possibilities are changing so fast we hardly have time to be aware of them, let alone respond to them. Perhaps all we can do is to give voice. This gives an added urgency to the need for a more nuanced and sensitive atmosphere around choirs and singing groups. There needs to be a much more thorough awareness of the personal significance of resonating the body to make sung sound. Organisations often talk about the benefits of singing for conditions such as dementia, and in the words of one ‘arts, health and wellbeing’ website, artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk, the focus is on “the impact that taking part in the arts can have on health and wellbeing.” This is fundamentally a utilitarian argument – reckoning up the total benefit for the greatest number, and promoting it as a public good. But what if what we are talking about is a benefit of a different and more basic kind: something more intrinsic to who we are? Something much more fundamental to our lives and our communal existence than some of the other more ephemeral goods we may covet? This is an age-old problem with utilitarianism – that we may be trying to compare one type of good with something in a different category or of a different kind altogether, such as the value of self-expression for its own sake. The category of ‘good’ often attributed to singing is that of feeling good. But feelings are very often temporary reactions to outside stimuli, and so one person’s feeling may be irrelevant to others. Meditation can be one way of acknowledging this, and of distancing ourselves from our immediate, unconsidered reac-
tions to the world and our surroundings (anger, etc), and taking a more considered and balanced approach. But there is often little understanding of the more radical personal significance of singing which I am discussing here. For example, stories of children being told to keep quiet when they are taking part in singing events in schools are still distressingly common. But singing with freedom, in the breathing and the use of resonance, will, in any case, be much more compelling to listen to. There is nothing more musically boring than a big group of people singing ‘correctly’ and self-consciously, with all the physical and personal inhibitions that implies. In other words, they are not singing with their whole being and wholeheartedly ‘being there’, but rather, going through the motions of what is considered technically correct. They may have the satisfaction of thinking that they’re reproducing the notes on the page; but the composer will almost certainly have hoped for much greater personal commitment from them. It may be very nice to think that you are flying the flag for true art, and that everyone else is too lazy or too imprecise to get on board. But it doesn’t work, socially, psychologically, or philosophically. And it is a betrayal of our deepest existential need to give voice as part of our community and to affirm ourselves and our place on this planet. This is partly to do with a generation gap. Traditional choirs and concert halls are overwhelmingly populated by white middle-class over-65s. Meanwhile pop groups and street rappers are pushing the tonal and vocal boundaries, with no permission needed from you or me, thank you very much. But there is still an area of suffering on the boundaries of the traditional groups, represented by the people I hav e described, and others, who bear the brunt of the philosophical muddle about the purpose of singing. As ever, philosophical clarity in this area would be a wonderful thing. © SARA CLETHERO 2017
Sara Clethero ran the voice department at the London College of Music from 2005-2014. She is the director and founder of Opera Mint, a not-for-profit singing training organisation, and is doing a PhD at Brunel University on existentialism and singing. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 31
Question of the Month
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What Is The Future Of Humanity?
The following philosophical forecasts of our fate each win an unforeseeable book.
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rom the onset of the Industrial Revolution, human progress bombs, the devastation from fallout can quickly persuade a ruler has been unprecedented in its sheer speed and scale. Anyone or government to end a war and submit. In violent and warring born before the mid-1980s, remembering the world before the minds that may be reason enough to want to retain them – see internet, will surely appreciate technology’s power to uproot our Theresa May’s and Donald Trump’s cavalier sanctioning of nuclear lives. There is no doubt that advances in technology and automa- strikes. The consequences of such a strike, not to mention an alltion will keep on transforming our lives. Soon the devices we use out war, would be hellish: apart from untold deaths and injuries, will respond to our voices, performing many routine chores as we birth defects and ruined soil and crops for decades. talk with them. The testing of self-drive cars and of drones delivClimate change: The long-term effects of icecaps melting, of ering packages have already reached an advanced state. The virfracking, of beaches being eroded, and air and water pollution, tual world will become ever more developed and sophisticated, are frightening. Equally as frightening are the unspoken effects offering us yet more unimaginable ways to experience reality. animal agriculture is having: for example, the build-up in the Humans will in all probability make it to Mars before the end of oceans of waste from cattle farming (too much for plankton to this century; and afterwards leave our imprint further out in space. break down fast enough) can create dead zones where no life Meanwhile humanity’s dabbling with and control over nature will exists; not to mention the land, water and food which livestock continue to know no bounds in the years to come, thereby helping take in order to feed us a proportionally smaller amount. This societies more effectively combat illness, disease, infertility and creates much more scarcity in an already competitive and diffiageing. But the most terrifying aspect of the future will be when cult-to-get-by-in world. the code of life is altered to suit the vanity and greed of humans, These scenarios, which seem increasingly hard to separate, the ageing process is prolonged or postponed, and human mor- unfortunately indicate a grim future for humanity of scarcity, war, tality is eventually overcome. I think such developments could nuclear fallout and environmental devastation. Although very indeed spell the doom of humanity, as they spark an all-out war bleak, there is always hope; and to recycle another cliché, the between the haves and have nots. It cannot be denied that in all future is not set. Passivity on the part of those appalled by such epochs of history we have continuously resorted to war and vio- potential futures only increases the chances of them coming lence to solve our conflicts, and to the present day humanity has about. Conscientious action is, as seems to be the norm nowadays, failed to organise societies truly capable of addressing the unequal needed. While people may, rightly or otherwise, distrust their distribution of resources. Meanwhile the systematic degradation elected officials and the media, there are other people and groups that has been wrought on the natural environment in the name that they can trust. A lesson taken from the revolutionary left, of progress still cries out for our care and attention. Above all, cli- particularly the libertarian socialists (anarchists), would teach us mate change remains the most pressing problem to be tackled on that coming together and organising into groups to cause change a global scale if the future of humanity is to be safeguarded. Nev- can happen, and can succeed. Educate, agitate, organise! ertheless, I do hold some hope that humanity can be saved if an SHANE MC DONNELL, influential world movement recognises that the availability and N AVAN, CO. MEATH, IRELAND sustainability of natural resources must be foremost in whatever economic philosophy is advocated; that unless the sharp inequalased on fossils and archeological artifacts from around the ities in different regions of the world are truly addressed, the world world, modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years; will remain bedevilled by uncontrollable immigration, hatred and but the roots of civilization only go back 20,000 years, to when terrorism; and that unless humanity becomes consciously aware we first began planting grain and building walls. These dates slide of the futility of war and violence, the path of self-destruction will back and forth on history’s timeline depending on the viewpoint, continually be sought. Alas, the future of humanity can only be but practically all sources agree that up until about sixty years truly safe if humans accept that they are mortal beings and that ago, humanity’s footprint on the sands of time was for the most happiness on this planet can only be achieved if the comfort and part biodegradable. convenience bestowed on us by technological improvements is Today, the footprint of humanity has toxic radioactive waste reconciled with meaningful and uncomplicated lives. all over it. The World Nuclear Association reported in 2016 that I AN R IZZO 450 nuclear reactors were generating electricity in thirty counZ ABBAR , M ALTA tries around the world. Incredibly, sixty new reactors are being built on the heels of Fukushima! oam Chomsky has, on more than one occasion, pointed out It is chilling to think that between 1962 and 1983, the world that the two biggest threats that face humanity are global faced nuclear annihilation more than once, when the only thing warming and nuclear war. Let’s entertain these two ideas briefly. between humanity and devastation was a red button under a Nuclear war: Although some have speculated that nuclear human thumb! An age-old question here begs an answer: Is weapons are impractical compared to the ever-advancing smart humanity an experiment gone badly wrong?
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What Is The Future Of Humanity?
The first mainland Greek philosopher, Anaximander, theorized that all things are generated from, and returned to, an endless creative source that he called ‘the Boundless’. In more recent times Carl Jung fleshed out Anaximander’s idea somewhat with his theory of the Collective Unconscious. Jung believed that this is the collective mostly-forgotten memory of our personal relationship with a higher authority. His philosophy was that in the final anal ysis nothing is as important as the life of the individual, whose hidden resources ultimately transform the world. Jung wrote: “In our most private and subjective lives we are not only the passive witness of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.” Ancient devastations such as a globally-remembered great flood were believed to be acts of God or gods which humanity barely survived. Perhaps humanity’s future has always rested on the shoulders of extraordinary individuals, who manage to keep us afloat during the darkest of times. God willing, such an individual will come along to show future generations how to render radioactive waste inert, or gift them with the formula for cold fusion. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to show Mother Nature a little respect and quit living like there’s no tomorrow. CONNIE K OEHLER A USTIN, TEXAS
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et’s look at our future in terms of two adaptive strategies in the evolutionary process: competition and cooperation. We start with single cell organisms, which become multicelled ones. They develop diffuse nervous systems. These in turn organize into central nervous systems that serve the basic needs of complex organisms. Eventually, these blossom into the frontal cortex that allows the higher cognitive functions that land us here trying to answer the big questions. This trajectory has left us with two often-conflicting modes of negotiating an environment filled with other organisms. The competitive mode involves our baser impulses utilizing our cognitive functions strictly for the sake of our baser impulses. We can see here the brutal world described by Hobbes and Ayn Rand. By contrast, the cooperative mode sees its interest in a trajectory from inward self-interest out to the interest of others. Here, we see the less brutal world of Marx or Rawls. Consequently, we find ourselves at an important evolutionary crossroads. Do we stick with the competitive instinct which has, via capitalism, got us to this point, and risk, at best, subjecting ourselves to a global oligarchy, the dismantling of our democracies, and the depletion of our natural resources: or, worse, our extinction as a species through manmade climate change and war? Or do we turn to the next evolutionary step, and evolve? Do we become better than market economics tells us we are? I’m not optimistic, not only because of the growing influence of the right in America and other advanced nations, but because of the sensibility of the voters perpetrating this. As a progressive in the American Midwest, in last year’s election I enjoyed a front row seat for watching otherwise decent and intelligent people succumb to dogma, sensationalism, and misinformation – a complete lack of critical inquiry supplanted by fancy – as can be seen in political campaigns that resembled some Quentin Tarantino revenge fantasy. But this only makes sense as an evolutionary backlash in which our higher cognitive functions act strictly in behalf of baser impulses and immediate self-interest. Still, we can hope. And sometimes the only way out is through. What Is The Future Of Humanity?
Perhaps the current evolutionary political backlash, by demonstrating in very real terms the actual consequences of competition, is what we’ll need to put it behind us and truly evolve. D. T ARKINGTON BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA
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he future of humanity is speculative, and so I’ll apprehend it more with hope than knowledge. Our first two hopes are that we do not annihilate our species with global biological or nuclear warfare, and that we do not destroy our planet. If we assume that we will avoid those futures, then we can expect that science and technology will advance and provide us with many blessings, and some dangers. But I think the cardinal question about our future is, “What kind of government will we have? This is because we are political animals, as Aristotle famously said. We are part nature and part nurture, and the latter is shaped by the society we happen to be raised in, which in turn is determined by the nature of our government. Thus, our future will be largely a function of our future society and government. About this we can expect increased globalization and commingling of peoples until, perhaps in a few millennia, we are one people with one language and a complex global federal government. Perhaps there will be an end to war, and other benefits. However, in federations, the superior government tends to accumulate power by diminishing that of subordinate governments. Power corrupts proportionately, and this presents us with the specter of a dystopian society. Trends in history strongly indicate two possible primary developments: freedom or slavery. Many see in history an increase in individual freedom; but clearly there also has been an increase in state power. The source of the former lies in the hopes and aspirations of individuals. The source of the latter lies in the fact that the power of the elite naturally enlarges itself. Freedom or slavery: which will it be? That is, what will be the balance of individual freedom and self-determination versus state control and state determination of what humanity is? It depends on the nature of the over-arching supergovernment. Specifically, of who will rule the rulers: the people, or an established elite? A global government may be a Frankenstein we cannot control. But then we are an amazingly adaptable species. There are too many variables to speculate about the future fruitfully. We can only hope it will be a future of liberty. JOHN T ALLEY R UTHERFORDTON, NORTH C AROLINA
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n the future, humanity will still ponder the concept of death and its meaning, but perhaps with an additional clause: the fear of our private digital minds left behind. Digital footprints, the memorial grooves in the wax, the living binary representation of lives typed, clicked, or swished by our physical hands, our handiwork floating in the digital ether forever. It is not hard to imagine with some advances in technology that the digital self, made feasible with the use of holograms, or mediums such as virtual reality could provide representations of our persona after death. A digital likeness filled with the essence of you, the ‘ghost in the machine’. In other words, I think, therefore, I am your entire life’s browser history. A collection of algorithms, from preferred GPS haunts, from online shopping preferences to your late night browsing searches, all composed and collated to represent the embodied holographic you after death. Sartre’s ‘human existence precedes April/May 2017 Philosophy Now
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essence’ made all the more relevant, the digital essence of your earthly existence left behind. In the future, after your funeral, relatives shall be able to buy such a holographic essence. A grieving partner comforted by a more than passable intuitive Turing system finely tuned to represent you. Perhaps, also the curiosities of grandchildren, wishing to know who their grandparents really were, reanimated in the holographic flesh. Indeed, you could even give your own narcissistic eulogy, the voice from beyond the grave. In every instance, a visual binary essence that can speak, listen, gesture, reason, appear to show emotion, and bring meaning to those still in life. Unfortunately, unbeknown to your internet provider, you also shared a flat with Dave, who had a penchant for the darker side of the web. Additionally, on your daily commute, roadwork traffic lights had an uncanny knack of holding you just outside a Ku Klux Klan hall. All information impartially collected and collated, unfairly representing the essence of you. The repercussions aren’t hard to predict; loving relatives shocked to find you had a secret life, one that included nefarious activities and racist tendencies. In such a technological future, every word typed, every destination you travelled would take on an uncontrolled limbo existence. The fear of death may be relegated to second place by the anxiety of judgements passed on an eternal digital future you. JOHN SCOTLAND K ILSYTH, NORTH L ANARKSHIRE
care because the virtual world feels so real and people value the useful, not the true. Philosophers will also present interesting arguments about how human minds could never, in principle, fully grasp higher dimensions, just as two-dimensional minds could never know there’s a bird flying above them because there is no ‘above’ for such minds. Although a two dimensional mind could use math to infer that there is a higher dimension with some sort of entity casting the observable light-and-dark patterns, that mind could never see or even imagine it. Still, others will sometimes believe their world is virtual because they ate a special mushroom, had a mystical experience, or simply because they momentarily trusted their intuition. Most of these people will be virtually locked up. Some geniuses will argue that it is likely that we are living in a virtual world: If the universe is as big as we think, and advanced people create virtual worlds, then there are many virtual worlds and only one reality: therefore, it is more likely that the future world is virtual. But wait, the future is here. P AUL S TEARNS BLINN COLLEGE, TEXAS
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he organic and inorganic will become less distinct. Bioengineers will create living cells capable of performing simple ‘Turing functions’ (programmable tasks), and on this basis, organic computers will transform humanity. Almost certainly, organs will be artificially produced, this extending human life; and with the tweaking of genes we could end up living almost indefin the future corporations and governments will create a variety nitely. Cancer, AIDs and other fatal diseases will be eradicated, as smallpox was in the 1970s. Unfortunately, new and deadlier disof virtual worlds, in which all humans will eventually choose to live. Most will choose to live in simulations of the Twenty First eases (such as Zika) will spring up and become lethal weapons. Century, because life was much better back then. Of course, th ese Disease, famine, war and terrorism will turn cities into savage humans will not remember that their world is virtual. Some ghettoes run by marauding gangs. Humans will be microchipped philosophers and scientists in these virtual worlds will present from birth and monitored by surveillance satellites. ‘Genetically compromised’ individuals will be sterilised, leading to mass sterskeptical arguments about the existence of a real external world, but most people won’t take these arguments seriously. Some of ilisations. Only the healthy super-rich will be able to afford to live the skeptics will argue that empirical observations are consistent in biodomes with pollution-free air and Eden-like forests and gar with their world being a simulation. However, most people won’t dens. The rest will be forced to “defend themselves against the ever-present menace of barbaric, atavistic and reactionary forces.” Churchill in Civilization, Niall Ferguson, p.297, 2012). “This better be (Winston M Fortunately, the philanthropic wealthy will continue to repair O C . a dream or I O the damage wreaked against nature since the start of the Industrial O H A got some real Y Revolution. Humanity’s goal must therefore be to diminish our @ S N ‘inner animal’ in favour of the power of reason, thereby becoming problems” O O T truly human – Homo sapiens victorens ! “The future of humanity S A M O must gaze harder upon… looking within.” (Buddha, in Dogen’s H T T Shobo Genzo, p.47, 2012). A M E A ARON V. A DOSA H T T C S WANSEA A T
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here will only be two types of human beings in the future: the minority having enormous brains and tiny bodies, and the majority with tiny brains and muscular bodies. The size of the average brain will gradually diminish; not because of our innate laziness, but because of our over-concern about our physical appearance. In the old days, most people dreamt of having shelter and a stable food supply. As we no longer struggle for the basic necessities, our dreams focus instead on the search for physical beauty – how to obtain and maintain the ‘ideal body shape’ and healthy life the media promotes. Physical beauty will become the main goal of the majority. They’ll do exercises everyday, taking nutrients to maintain their shape while not noticing that their brains are shrinking.
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Philosophy Now April/May 2017
What Is The Future Of Humanity?
Actually, there is no doubt that they’ll work extremely hard to make their brains smaller. Unfortunately, both the majority and minority will enter states of extreme depression and show hatred towards the other set. Many who cannot categorize themselves into either the majority or the minority will eventually commit suicide as the pressure from both extremes will be overwhelming. Science has caused the separation of intelligence and health. The misinterpretation or over-interpretation of health and evolutionary facts by the public is causing the decay of intelligence and the increase in concern about physical beauty; in fact we are just eliminating ourselves. C YRUS A EGEAN L AMPRECHT HONG K ONG
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hat is the future of humanity? Answer: Extinction within a few thousand years. Mother Nature, God, or the blind forces of evolution (take your pick) has arranged it so that we higher animals reproduce by engaging in sex for pleasure, with babies as a by-product. However, human ingenuity in creating contraceptives has cut the link between the pleasure and the babies, and so in the wealthy parts of the world the replication rate has fallen below the 2.1 per couple necessary to maintain a stable population. And the world is getting steadily wealthier. So it is a fairly modest assumption that in a hundred years from now, the planetary human population will have peaked at ten billion, but most of them will be as wealthy as today’s average in the West. It is also plausible that sexbots will be widely available, be far more beautiful than most real women or men, and be far better at giving pleasure than another human. So, finally, it is plausible that the average reproduction rate will then become 1.5 or less. The rest is arithmetic. Dividing 1.5 by 2 to give the reproduction rate per person of 0.75, and taking this rate to the power of 30, we get a value less than 0.0002. So dividing, thirty generations later, or about a thousand years from now, the world population will be about two million. This will ensure civilizational collapse. But I expect the sexbots will still be there – a few thousand per person. So another few thousand years will see us all gone. The only obstruction to this that I can see is religion imposing a sexbot ban. The Roman Catholic Church has had indifferent success in similar sexual bans; the Muslims might do a little better. But it seems unlikely that a world populated by only a few million religious believers would survive for long; and all the more intelligent and creative people will have experienced a blissful death long ago. JOHN L AWLESS CRAWLEY , W ESTERN A USTRALIA
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n the opening chapter of The Napoleon of Notting Hill , G.K. Chesterton introduced us to the traditional game of ‘Cheat the Prophet’. This is played when, extrapolating from current trends, a wise man ( sic ) predicts how we will live in the future. He’s listened to respectfully; and, once he is dead and buried, humanity does something totally other than he predicted. Towards the end of his life Karl Marx said that he was not a Marxist. I believe that what he meant was that he did not join in with his followers’ confident Marxist predictions. That is, he believed that his philosophy could explain the historical processes which had led to his contemporary situation, explain current trends, even exhort humanity how to respond to them; but his theories could not determine or predict the future. Despite this, Twentieth Century prophets such as Leon Trotsky, H.G. Wells, What Is The Future Of Humanity?
and Francis Fukuyama, have asserted that they know where humanity is going; and humanity has duly responded by going in a different direction entirely, or, when feeling particularly bloodyminded, several different directions. We have difficulty enough in understanding the past: the future is unknowable. The only safe prediction is that every prediction about the future of humanity is almost certain to be wrong (and, to paraphrase Einste in, I’m not sure about the ‘almost’). M ARTIN JENKINS LONDON
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iels Bohr supposedly said that prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Yet a spacecraft’s path is predictable to extraordinary precision, and it must be, because by the time it gets anywhere interesting the right time to correct its tra jectory has long past. Then there’s the long-term cyclic reliability of the Sun, Moon, and the planets. The future of details is difficult to predict, but if the details average out, then barring the odd black swan, the future is predictable to a degree. In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov invented ‘psychohistory’, the statistical extrapolation of future events and the behaviour of significant figures from society’s present state. However, if some unforeseeable details grow to dominate, even the broad shape of the future becomes uncertain. This is likely where many actors and forces interact, as they do in human reality. Self-reinforcing cycles can form. Thus predicting the near future is a little like forecasting the weather. So if we cannot forecast humanity’s ‘weather’, can we at least forecast its ‘climate’? Today the world is more peaceful, better educated (particularly women) and proportionally less affected by extreme poverty than ever before. With these trends, population will level off at around ten billion, and apart from in a few wretched countries, the prospects for a democratic near-future are favourable. However, democracy relies on rising expectations being fulfilled through economic growth; and today there is a collision course between greening technology and population growth, rising emissions, and diminishing resources. A good outcome depends on cutting personal consumption and the conventional industrial employment that leads to the growing gap between richest and poorest. However, denying expectations is unpopular, and confounding them risks the instability of political reaction. The costs are so high that governments may yet seek ways to distribute wealth more evenly, even if they won’t yet admit it. Barring a world epidemic – more likely given ease of travel – or a climate or other catastrophe, population will fall gradually through elective non-replacement rather than as a result of collective action. The environment will improve, but nature may still be diminished unless people build greener cities. Earth is special, and exploration of other planetary systems will yield many wonders, but few habitats. Apart from on Mars, any colonies will be too far away to interact with Earth. Ultimately, human progress can carry life throughout the universe, but as we suppress our evolutionary pressures, this life may not be us. DR NICHOLAS B. T AYLOR LITTLE S ANDHURST The next question is: What Sorts of Things Exist, and How? Please give and justify your ontology in fewer than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 12th June 2017. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address.Thanks. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 35
Hume
David Hume (1711–1776) Alistair MacFarlane treats of the life of a great Scot.
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ume, a Scot, was the greatest philosopher to write in English. At the age of eighteen he had a sudden deep insight, asking himself whether the moral philosophy of human behaviour could be assimilated into the natural philosophy of the physical world developed famously by Isaac Newton (16431727). This is a question still at the cutting edge of philosophy. All Hume’s major contributions to philosophy were made before he reached thirty. After their indifferent reception, he shrugged off his disappointment to become a famous essayist and historian. But his youthful work roused Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and so kick-started modern philosophy. Hume was the supreme asker of awkward questions – someone who flatly refused to accept beliefs on the mere grounds that they were widely and forcibly asserted. He became the greatest of sceptics. There can be no progress without scepticism, since otherwise existing beliefs would never be challenged. Equally, total scepticism – a rejection of all beliefs – would result in intellectual paral ysis. Philosophy thus proceeds in fits and starts: established approaches are challenged, and either survive or are supplanted by new approaches which are thought to give better explanations or guidance. Hume’s sceptical attitude to empiricism marked one of the great turning points in philosophy. Early Life David Hume was born on 26 April 1711 (in the old calendar) in Edinburgh. His father, Joseph Home, was an advocate (a lawyer) and minor aristocrat with a modest estate at Ninewells in Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders. His mother Katherine was the daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the Scottish College of Justice. David was the youngest of three children, having an older brother, John, born in 1709, and a sister, Katherine, born in 1710. (On going to France, Hume changed the spelling of his surname to match its pronunciation.) Joseph Home died in 1713, and the estate passed to John. Their mother, who never re-married, managed the estate until John took it over. Hence David, although born into a moderately wealthy and socially well-connected family, had no significant inheritance, and eventually had to make his own way in the world. Katherine Home decided to have her children educated at home, hoping that David would follow his father’s footsteps into a legal career. She was a devout Calvinist who brought up the children in her faith. David, developing into an inveterate sceptic, soon renounced all religion, but his amiable nature ensured that there was no rupture with his mother, although she complained to a friend that “he was awful stubborn”. In 1723 John went up to Edinburgh University, and Katherine sent David with him. Even for those days, twelve was an unusually early age to attend university. The level of instruction was however fairly elementary, and, as was common at the time, attendance did not necessarily involve taking a degree. After three years, having studied some Greek, Latin, logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy, and in particular gaining some knowledge of Newton’s work, Hume left to head back to Ninewells, planning to 36 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
prepare for the study of law. The next four years proved difficult but crucial for his later development. In his own words, he “found an insurmountable aversion to anything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.” While his family thought he was preparing for the law, Hume had made a momentous decision. He would seek to do for human behaviour what Newton had done for the physical universe. Hume was fully aware of the immensity of the task he was setting himself, and planned a ten year programme of work. But the difficulty of the task, combined with the intensity of his commitment, provoked a psychological and physical crisis, and he had a nervous breakdown. The physical symptoms – notably severe heart palpitations and scurvy on his hands – did not respond to the treatment of his local doctor. But a mixture of clear thinking, determination and common sense saved the day. Hume decided that, come what may, he would pursue his philosophical ideas and publish them. But for this purpose he would have to regain his health and find a way of combining philosophical work with employment which would supplement his meagre income as a younger son. He decided to exercise regularly and eat properly. Over the next two years he became “the most sturdy, robust, healthful-like fellow you have seen” while he sought independent employment. In February 1734, shortly before facing an ecclesiastical court to answer a charge of fathering an illegitimate child, he left for Bristol to work for a firm of sugar merchants. This only lasted for a few months before he travelled to France where he could survive better on his modest income while working on his ideas. Hume found an ideal place at the Jesuit College in La Flèche, where Descartes had been educated. By the autumn of 1737 he had nearly completed his first great book, and he returned to London to seek a publisher. Finding one was not easy, and took nearly a year. A Treatise of Human Nature was published in two parts in January 1739, with a third part ‘On Morals’ delayed until November 1740. Its reception proved a great disappointment. In Hume’s famous description: “Never literary event was more unfortunate than my Treatise. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as to even excite a murmur among the zealots.” The zealots were those who, bitterly opposing his atheism and anti-clericalism, would become the bane of his life. Although he was later to re-write and improve much of the Treatise, at the age of twenty-eight he had produced all the philosophical ideas for which he later became so deservedly famous. Hume now set out to pursue other ways of making a living and securing a reputation, and his fortunes soon began to change. Essayist & Historian After the initial failure of his Treatise, Hume accepted an appointment as a tutor to the young Marquis of Annendale. In 1741 he also published Essays Moral and Political . These were well received, and soon brought in several times the annual income he was receiving as a tutor. Hume lost his job after the Marquis was declared insane, but he now felt confident that he could earn his living as an author. Thus encouraged, he decided to re-write his
David Hume Portrait by Woodrow Cowher, 2017
Treatise in a shortened form, giving a clearer treatment of its material. His Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding appeared in 1748, but was no better received. At this point Hume abandoned philosophy and embarked on another major,
and this time hugely successful, venture, producing a six-volume History of Great Britain, published between 1754 and 1762. It made his reputation in Europe after Voltaire hailed it as “perhaps the best [history] written in any language.” April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 37
Hume Last Days Following the great success of his History, Hume spent the years 1763-1766 in France as the personal secretary to the Earl of Hertford, who was British Ambassador to the French Court. Hume was a huge success among the French intelligentsia, and established a reputation there as a great thinker and writer. When the Earl was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Hume refused an invitation to accompany him. But by the time he returned to Edinburgh in 1769, Hume had become a wealthy man, with an income of over £100,000 a year. He built a house in the New Town, in what became St David’s Street (the inadvertent achievement of secular sainthood would have greatly amused him). Resuming an active social life, he ignored the continuing attacks made on his philosophy by the zealots, and worked on Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, posthumously published in 1779. In early 1775, in his own words, he was “struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable.” After an increasingly severe, yet stoically borne, illness, Hume died on 25 August 1776. In an obituary, his great friend the economist Adam Smith described him as “approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” Hume had asked to be interred in a simple Roman tomb inscribed with only his name and dates of birth and death, but ended up in an imposing mausoleum overlooking Edinburgh. Philosophy Hume is usually represented as completing an ‘empiricist’ movement started by John Locke (1632-1704) and continued by George Berkeley (1685-1753), but their approaches were very different. Locke made a valiant attempt to establish that all knowledge derived from experience. He regarded the mind as a ‘blank slate’ on which experience somehow inscribed knowledge. To articulate this idea, Locke differentiated between the primary qualities of objects, such as their solidity, shape and extension, and their secondary qualities , such as their colour, taste, or other sensations they induce. Berkeley went further, claiming that there was no need to invoke the existence of matter at all, only experiences and the minds that perceived them. Finally Hume, the supreme sceptic, argued that we had no more warrant for believing in minds continuing through time than for believing in the existence of matter. From this intellectual ferment and upheaval, modern philosophy began to emerge via the work of Immanuel Kant. Hume’s most famous contribution to philosophy is perhaps his sceptical scrutiny of the concept that causality was some mysterious form of physical process. He argued that causality was rather a method of reasoning used to explain a variety of physical effects. Imagine an infant in its cot playing with a collection of soft toys and watched over by a grandfather. When the child throws its toys out of the cot they land on the floor with a soft thud, and stay where they landed. The grandfather now gives the child a rubber ball, which it has never seen before. After close inspection this is also thrown out. To the child’s delight it behaves quite differently, bouncing around before finally coming to rest. As the toys and ball are returned to it, they are repeatedly inspected, then ejected. Soon the child grasps that there is a fun-
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damental difference in behaviour between soft toys and rubber balls. Hume would ask a crucial question here: In what way does the grandfather’s knowledge differ from that of the child’s? His answer is that the only difference is that the adult has had prior experience which the child did not have. The adult’s experience had led to his association of the ideas of rubber balls and bouncing. Generally speaking, Hume maintained that causality cannot be distinguished from the constant conjunction of ideas . If one thing happens after another, this does not establish any necessary connection between them. We posit such a connection only when we have repeatedly seen similar conjunctions of events. However, ‘necessary connections’ are our essential means of explaining what’s happening in the world. Causality, a means of arguing from (apparent) cause to (apparent) effect, antedates logic, which argues from premises to conclusions. Our distant ancestors learned to use causal reasoning long before formal logic emerged. Making flint axes, for example, would be impossible to explain and describe without invoking cause and effect: you hit the rock with another rock and the first rock splinters. A modern view is that all explanations and arguments must start from some where, and causality is best regarded as a form of reasoning. Hume’s insight was that we use causal relationships to explain certain forms of constant conjunctions of experiences. An older child might say to a younger one: “If you throw this ball then it bounces. Watch!” The infant then makes an association of the relevant ideas: throwing rubber balls makes them bounce. Causality, Hume maintained, is a way of rationalising and organising experience. Hume brought the same unblinking scepticism to his consideration of human behaviour. He argued that reason, by itself, is concerned only with truth and falsehood, and so “can never be the motive for any action of the will.” This led to his famous dictum: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” For Hume, then, “The rules of our morality are not conclusions of our reason”, and so “the sense of justice, on which both moral and political obligations depend, is derived not from any natural impressions of reflection but from impressions due to artifice and human conventions.” In other words our moral feelings are the result of the education of our sentiments. Hume’s attitudes to causality and human behaviour are consistent. In his view they both arise from dispositions, formed in the one case by experience, and in the other by social convention. Epilogue The more one grasps the way modern philosophy see ms to be developing, the more one’s admiration for Hume increases. And the more one considers how he fought his way back from ill health, rejection and disappointment to fame and success, the more one admires his character. It is pointless, even invidious, to compare philosophers as people. But if asked to select from among them a companion for a long journey or for someone to sit beside at a dinner, Hume would get my vote every time. © SIR ALISTAIR MACFARLANE 2017
Sir Alistair MacFarlane is a former Vice-President of the Royal Society and a retired university Vice-Chancellor.
Hume
How I Solved Hume’s Problem and why nobody will believe me Eugene Earnshaw saves Western philosophy
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t was a few years ago that I solved the biggest problem in philosophy. I was teaching undergraduates, and I wanted to blow their minds a little, tear down their preconceptions. As one does. So I taught them Hume’s Problem, and then solved it for them, which I hadn’t expected. Hume’s problem is probably less well known than Descartes’ skeptical argument (a being with Godlike powers could trick you about everything, so you don’t know anything, because there’s no way you can know you are not being thusly deceived). But despite not having inspired The Matrix, it is probably the more important and influential argument overall, for two reasons. One reason is that Kant devised his whole philosophy as a response to it, and I have it on good authority that Kant is important. The other is that the philosophy community today still treats Hume and Hume’s argument seriously in a way that it just does not treat Descartes.
So although Descartes is probably even more useful for installing intellectual humility in undergrads, he doesn’t pose a huge, looming, unresolved problem that people try to ignore hanging over their head while it makes everything they do and say pointless nonsense. That’s pretty much just Hume. Hume’s problem is that induction is unjustifiable. Induction is (narrowly) whenever we draw conclusions from particular experiences to a general case or to further similar cases. So, for example, I believe that tomorrow I will wake up in my bed with the Sun having risen in the east, based on the fact that this has always happened to me. I believe that if I don’t water my plants, they will die, and that if I hold a lit match to my curtains, I will set fire to my house. Life would be impossible without making inferences of this kind. But Hume argues that these inferences have no rational basis: they’re just a habit of mind and lack any real justification. My long history of successfully setting fire to things with matches is no reason at all to have an opinion about what will happen next time a lit match is applied to the upholstery. Douglas Adams made the ruler of the galaxy in his Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy series someone who reasoned this way – that is, he absolutely refused to draw inferences from past to future events. For those of us forced to navigate a world full of poisons, precipices, and pregnancies it is impractical. Even if Hume were right, we would have to go on acting as if he is wrong – he said so himself. Fortunately for us all, while teaching it to undergrads I discovered the fatal flaw in his argument, thus saving human reason and, I think it is fair to say, all of Western philosophy. Hume’s problem is sometimes called Hume’s Fork, as it literally presents a dilemma: two options neither of which is acceptable. The version of it which is taught in introductory philosophy courses goes like this: There are two types of reasoning: deductive and inductive. Deductive reasoning is certain: it proves things with necessity, and it is self-justifying: we can’t even imagine how a logical contradiction could be true. But our knowledge about the world isn’t certain knowledge like this. It seems to work via inferring necessities from particular instances. So we observe an instance of choking and being unable to breathe when we are submerged in water, and we conclude: hey, I can’t breathe water. From the one, or a few experiences, we draw a general conclusion with universal scope: no humans can breathe water. These sorts of inferences are clearly fallible. If I concluded from my experience that no human can memorize a random deck of cards having looked at it just once then I would be wrong, even
Hume’s Fork?
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Hume though I can’t do it and have never met any one who can. It is possible that any pattern we have seen in the past might be disconfirmed in the future: the Sun might not rise (because the Earth is destroyed by Vogons later today), or a human m ight breathe wat er (artificial gills w ere installed in her neck). Not only are induct ive inferences uncertain, they are also sometimes entirely unjustified. Almost everyone I know speaks English, but it w ould be wrong to infer that almost ev eryone speaks English, because the people I know are a biased sample of people generally. There seems to be a kind of gap in induction between the evidence for the conclusion and the conclusion itself: the conclusion goes beyond what the premises can prove (ot herwise the conclu-
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sion would be certain). Hume said that this gap is filled by an assumption, an assumption that the future will be like the past, or that nature is uniform. If the future will be like the past, I can reasonably use my past experience with fires and with children to infer that I should take a lit candle away from a two year old. But if in the future nature does not proceed along like it used to, any conclusions we draw from past events will be misleading. So how do we know that the future will be like the past? Hume’s problem is that we can’t. We cannot deductively prove that the future will be like the past. It is possible that things will be different than how they have been, and we can’t deductively prove something to be true if it’s possibly false. But inductively proving that the future will be like the past seems promising to unwary undergr aduates. We can come up with lots of examples of how past events have been very useful to us for predicting things. After all, the sky gets cloudy before it rains very consistently, and we predict that it will get cold in Toronto every January, and every January we are distressingly correct. And yes, my poor, dear undergraduate, it is true, I can recall many past instances where the past was used to accurately predict the future. So, should we then conclude, based on our many past experiences of the future being like the past, that the future will be like the past? Well, this inference seems fair, if we may assume that our past experiences of successful inductive prediction will continue to be borne out in the future. We can therefore triumphantly induce that the future will be like the past, but only on the assumption that the future will be like the past. This is the satisfying moment when the trap is sprung and the undergraduates who have actually been paying attention realize they were doomed from the beginning. You can’t use induction to prove something that induction relies on to function. It is, as Hume says, evidently arguing in a circle. So, since a justification of the assumption that the future must be like the past must be either inductive or deductive, and as we have seen it can’t be either of those, there can be no such justification. Therefore we cannot have any good reason to believe the future will be like the past, therefore induction is unjustified, and therefore I have no good reason to think there is anything particularly dangerous about lighting a cigarette while my body is soaked in gasoline. The reader may at this moment be feeling the electric, almost sensual frisson that accompanies superlative philosophical reasoning. Many people mistake this sensation for intense annoyance, and hastily conclude that philosophers merely enjoy making people feel stupid and that philosophy is all about proving things true that are obviously false out of a basically sadistic contrarianism. There is a fair amount of evidence to support this view, but as we just saw, that doesn’t give us any reason to think it is correct. That last point was just a joke, of course, because as I already mentioned, Hume was wrong. That Hume was wrong must be almost the most obvious thing that anybody ever said, because that we may justifiably draw inferences from past events to future predictions is literally more certain than that the Sun will rise in the east and that all humans are mortal. Indeed, the simplest rejoinder to Hume is a version of the simple argument to confound skepticism of any kind:
Hume P1: If Hume’s argument is correct, then inferences from past events to future predictions are unjustified. P2: It is not the case that inferences from past events to future predictions are unjustified. C: It is not the case that Hume’s argument is correct. There you go, as tidy as you please: two true premises forming a deductively valid argument, hence we can be absolutely certain that Hume was wrong. However, as pretty and satisfying as this argument may be, it does have the disadvantage that it begs the question, since one of its premises asserts the very point under dispute. Despite the fact that Hume’s argument is certainly wrong, one would never get that impression from your standard intro philosophy course. So, in service of the possibility of knowledge and the ability of philosophers to solve problems, here’s my explanation of why it is wrong: Hume demands we prove the truth of a statement in order to justify induction: a statement such as “the future will be like the past” or “the course of nature continues always uniform”. But that is not what we actually need to do to justify induction. To justify an argument, we have to show there is a certain sort of relation between the premises and the conclusion. In the case of deductive arguments, the premises have to necessitate the conclusion: for inductive arguments, the premises have to make the conclusion probable – at least, more probable than not. If we argue like Hume wants us to... P1: In the past, holding a lit match to a curtain had the effect that the house caught fire P2: The effects of holding a lit match to a curtain will be the same in the future as in the past. C: In the future, holding a lit match to a curtain will have the effect that the house will catch fire. ... we make our argument into a deductive one. If the future will be like the past, we may draw certain conclusions about the future. But inductive arguments are supposed to be probable, not certain. And by making an inductive argument into a deductive argument with an extra premise, we do nothing to improve or justify the argument. It is actually quite easy to switch back and forth between inductive and deductive arguments that establish the same conclusion. If we are reasoning about the real world, there will always be some uncertainty about our conclusion. By constructing an argument with a deductive pattern, we embed that uncertainty into the premises; whereas an argument with an inductive pattern embeds the uncertainty into the inference from the premises to the conclusion. So, for example: P1: If the Heat fail to win the Championship next year, the author will be very happy. P2: The Heat will fail to win the Championship next year. C: The author will be very happy This is deductive and valid, but it is not conclusive because we may justifiably be dubious about the truth of premise 2. If we replace premise 2 with
P2a: The Heat will probably not win the Championship next year then the argument becomes an inductive one, because it doesn’t follow from the fact that the Heat will probably fail that the author will necessarily be happy. They have to actually fail, but they might not. The two arguments are equally good because they are based on precisely the same informati on about the same set of possible events, but the first argument’s failure to be entirely conclusive resides entirely in our uncertainty about the second premise, whereas the second argument’s uncertainty is primarily in the inference from the premises to the conclusion. So the problem of justifying induction is not the problem of proving that the future will be like the past. The statement “the future will be like the past” is only useful for transforming certain types of inductive arguments into deductive arguments, and doing that doesn’t actually do anything to make our arguments better. It just takes the uncertainty in the inference from P1: In the past, dropping a wineglass on the tile floor has had the effect of breaking it; to C: in the future, dropping a wineglass on the tile floor will have the effect of breaking it. and embeds that uncertainty in a further premise: P2: the future will be like the past with respect to the effects of dropping a wineglass on the tile floor. Justifying induction actually requires us to reason about the connection between the premises and the conclusions of inductive arguments. There is no general justification of inductions, since some inductive arguments are bad ones, but there can potentially be justifications of particular inductive arguments, or even entire kinds of inductive arguments, that is, inductive arguments that have a certain structure to them. These justifications are deductive, and hence the project of justifying induction is not circular; such arguments show that it is necessarily the case that the conclusion of an argument follows with probability from its premises. Here is one such justification. Consider arguments of the form: P1: An individual will be randomly selected from the population. P2: Most members of the population blow the bugle beautifully. C: It is probable that the individual randomly selected from the population will blow the bugle beautifully. Now, we may have our doubts about whether the method we use to select an individual is really as random as all that, or wheth er the population is really full of such great buglers. But those worries are beside the point. That argument is deductively valid. It is necessarily the case that, if those premises are true, the conclusion is true. This means that if we substitute the conclusion: C*: The individual randomly selected from the population will blow the bugle beautifully
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Hume it is necessarily the case that if those premises are true, the conclusion is probably true. Therefore we have justified inductions of that general form. More broadly, any valid deductive argument that has as its conclusion “it is probable that waddle-waddle is the case” justifies the corresponding inductive argument that argues from the same premises to the conclusion “waddle-waddle is the case”. You are welcome, Western philosophy. It is possible that you may have already drawn the conclusion that the author did not in fact save Western philosophy. And I must confess, the evidence would seem to make that conclusion highly probable. You see, in the course of doing the necessary research to prepare his brilliant smackdown of Hume for academic publication, the author came to the realization that he had been beaten to the punch by about sixty years. The substance of his argument can be found in a 1947 book by D.C. Williams, and the subsequent author D.C. Stove ran with it further. There are numerous differences in how the idea is expressed, of course, but the basic view that one can deductively justify various types of inductive arguments and that Hume was demanding in a confused way that inductive arguments be turned into deductive arguments by a supplemental premise is all there. So if Hume’s problem was solved seventy years ago, why doesn’t anybody know or care? Well, one might conclude that there is some flaw with my and Stove and Williams arguments. The case for that can certainly be made (unless Hume was right). But is it really so plausible that an argument with an obviously false conclusion which has been subjected to intense scrutiny and consideration has remained unrefuted by anybody? How likely is it that the community of philosophers might just fail to recognize a proof that was staring them in the face? Pretty likely, I think. I even have an argument. My actual area of expertise is the philosophy of evolution by natural selection. So I will tell you a story about the natural selection of problems. Some problems are harder to solve than others. Many problems require special techniques or apparatus to be solved – mathematical methods, or technologies like the telescope. Problems that are easy to solve stop being problems, and what remains are the most insoluble difficulties. All of the sciences started out as branches of philosophy, and they stopped being philosophy once they developed methods of empirical research that could command widespread agreement. By which I mean, you could show people just how wrong they were by waving the facts in their faces. But that is not an option in philosophy: you have to wave logical arguments in their faces, which is only possible metaphorically. And being convinced by a metaphor (or a logical argument) requires a certain attitude of cooperation. People have to keep an open mind. That is the point of teaching Hume and Descartes in the first place: it pries people’s minds open to the possibility that they might sometimes be wrong, which makes them more willing to judge logical arguments on their merits, rather than by whether they already agree with the conclusion. But judging arguments on their logical merits is not something that human reason is especially well suited to do. And while some of the big problems in philosophy may be difficult to solve, the status of Hume’s problem points to another possibility: it may 42
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be that the big problems in philosophy are the ones that it is dif ficult to convince anyone that you have solved . If some correct philosophical arguments are basically too tricky, complex, or counterintuitive for the philosophical community to be convinced of their correctness, then the problem will simply coexist with its solution, with the true believers trying and failing to convince their sophisticated but mistaken critics. D.C. Williams felt himself to be in this unfortunate position. He writes that a critic of Hume’s problem “may choose what weapons he will ... ordinary language, the arithmetic of large numbers, the logic of probability, the history of science, whatever – the result is still the same. Not only are all actual criticisms of inductive scepticism felt to be hopelessly beside the mark: not one philosopher in a thousand can tell you what possible kind of criticism would prove it false.” (p.87) His book includes a chapter entitled “Why these arguments do not convince”; the reasons he discusses are rhetorical and psychological. The entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Hume’s problem, which is probably as close as we can get to settled philosophical opinion, ignores Williams’ and Stove’s refutation of Hume’s argument, and focuses on the technical difficulties of their attempts to prove that some types of inductive arguments are deductively justified. But justifying induction is just a postscript if Hume’s argument is flawed; without Hume’s argument no-one would feel the need to justify it at all. I think that this situation is exactly what we should expect. The arguments which survive the process of philosophical disputation ought to be the ones whose solution is unconvincing to professional philosophers. And what could philosophers be less disposed to accept than that one of the acknowledged great philosophers’ great arguments is a pretty simple fallacy? Not an obvious fallacy, to be sure, but a simple one. There are a great many ways to be wrong in philosophy, which means there are very many plausible but mistaken arguments that can be marshalled in defence of one’s favourite conclusion. So it is hardly difficult for a motivated philosopher to avoid being convinced by an argument, regardless how correct. And the intellectual community of philosophers is just not set up to solve intellectual problems. It is set up to elaborate and develop disputes. Continuous publication requires an ongoing debate; what is best is a back and forth series of refinements, quibbles, clarifications, and rebuttals. In a quite real sense everyone loses out if the matter gets definitively settled. I do not mean to imply that philosophers do this deliberately, but the pressure to publish means that they gravitate to areas where there is, as they say, a ‘live debate’. And while it may be that some live debates persist because nobody has yet found the truth, or the conclusive argument remains unasserted, it works just as well if one side just can’t be convinced by objectively good arguments. Maybe this means that the progress of philosophy can’t just rely on logic; it must resort to rhetoric. The arguments have to be dressed up prettily, or the objectively confused must be socially shamed and pressured. Or something: I don’t really know. I do think that Hume’s problem won’t be solved by publishing a book or a paper for philosophers, though, and I’ve got some solid evidence to support that induction. © DR EUGENE EARNSHAW 2017
When he is not saving Western philosophy, Eugene Earnshaw teaches at Seneca College in Toronto.
Letter s When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up! Write to me at: Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K. or email
[email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming! The Wrongs & Rights of Rights
DEAR EDITOR : Surely the woman who borrowed $5 from Tim Dare in Issue 118 should repay it to him on his request not primarily because she had contracted a duty to do so, but because the $5 is his money? His ownership rests upon a foundational belief in our society that human beings can permanently possess certain material objects (including sums of money) for as long as they wish to do so, providing that no other has a better title to their possession. The fact that Tim and the woman entered into an informal contract for her temporary holding and return of the $5 was based on a recognition of that foundational belief and its social implementation. This may suggest that in any property-owing society (that is, almost all human societies), ownership is an intrinsic, and therefore human, right, which is thus not based on a convention – although it may be listed in a Convention. JOHN K ISSANE LUTON DEAR EDITOR : The whole concept of human rights is a bit of a problem. In the absence of a God laying down the law, we are left trying to decide what to base them on. You may be surprised to learn that Sir Hersch Lauterpacht QC, the eminent British lawyer and a leading figure in the drive to create a post-war charter of human rights, based his reasoning to a very large extent upon ‘natural law’, a somewhat vague concept, as Lauterpacht himself seemed to accept. He said in his 1946 essay ‘The Grotian Tradition in International Law’: “The law of nature has been rightly exposed to the charge of vagueness and arbitrariness. But the uncertainty of the ‘higher’ law is preferable to the arbitrariness and insolence of naked force.” In other words, although natural law has no intrinsic basis, he thought it better than the alternative. Well, he writes elsewhere, “the binding force… of international law... is based on
the law of nature as expressive of the social nature of man.” So human rights law, as a part of international law, reflects how we behave as social beings. Of course this is by no means always and everywhere the same; and yet we are asked by rights promoters to accept that the definition(s) we have of human rights are universally applicable, not contingent; that those who wrote the charters in the late Forties and early Fifties had it right and everyone opposed to them has it wrong. But those who drafted and approved the charters were a relatively small group of lawyers and politicians, and hardly representative of humanity as a whole. So what confidence can we have in their decisions as to how to reflect human ‘social nature’? Perhaps the idea of a basis in natural law is wrong after all. Instead, maybe we need to look at what actually gave rise to the wish to codify human rights. The idea of human rights took off as a result of the heinous actions of the Nazis and the Japanese during World War 2. The Nazi Party had altered German law to enable the horrors of that period to be carried out lawfully. And so, after the war, there was a desire to say that complying with the law of a state could not be used as justification for barbaric acts: the law itself had to be judged against a higher standard – an internationally accepted standard of how we should act. Individuals were therefore to be held to account for their willingness to blindly follow unjust law. ‘Just following orders’ was no longer an excuse. In the light of what had occurred, it was relatively clear what principles might diminish the chance of it happening again. And so we have the creation of the Twentieth Century concept of human rights: actually a pragmatic attempt to impose at least some semblance of control upon would-be dictators, based on the vivid experience of those engaged in the Nuremberg trials of what horrors unchecked power can produce. P AUL BUCKINGHAM FRANCE
DEAR EDITOR : Dr Jesse Tomalty opens a Pandora’s Box on the elusive, not to say ephemeral, subjects of internet access and human rights in Issue 118. Her wellbalanced piece treads a suitably careful pathway. Human rights imply a moral code, and both notions are indefinite. Dr Tomalty queries the ‘fundamental’ nature of access to the internet. In its short history, the internet has evolved from being a toy at which to marvel, to its current status as a must-have in order to engage with Twenty-First Century life. As civilised life advances, technology, exponential population increases and rapid depletion of natural resources are reinforcing the truly fundamental nature of electronic communication in accessing information. It seems that the distinction between natural and legal human rights should evolve overtime. Yet whatever we call moral obligations to our fellow man/woman, be they ‘rights’, ‘compassion’ or ‘empathy’, it is difficult to imagine that deprivation of internet access would not now be a major threat to ‘being human’. But, it depends upon what you mean by ‘human’! When we lived in caves, there may have been no moral consciousness, and, therefore, no notion of ‘natural human rights’. But the average cavedweller would have been eminently justified in claiming a natural human right to carry and use a substantial club, because without it he would not enjoy the right to life nor to liberty and security. Indeed, both his cave and his club would have been natural human rights ‘simply in virtue of his being human’. Without them, he would die. CEDRIC R ICHMOND NOTTINGHAM Now Here This, Man
DEAR NICK INMAN: When I read your article, ‘Nowhere Men’ in Issue 117 I was struck by the phrase, “I have no direct access to what goes on in your mind.” You follow this by arguing that April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 43
Letters you do have direct access to what goes on in your own mind. I do not follow. I’m quite certain that there are things in your mind to which you do not have direct access, for example, the commands to tell your heart to beat or lungs to inhale. And unless you are unique, I doubt you have access to the series of commands you send your arm to reach out for a glass of water. I would posit in response to your concept of ‘direct access’ that you have only ‘indirect’ access: you can ask yourself about what you’re thinking, and it turns out that you can (internally) only express a tiny portion of that which you think about. So to my way of thinking (and by long extension), this concept of querying one’s self is not really distinguishable from querying someone else. At this point, it seems like the hinge of your argument collapses. So, I am asking two questions here: 1) Am I correct in asserting that the ‘direct’ access is, indeed, the hinge of your argument, and 2) Have I at least given you pause to consider that the concept of ‘direct’ access is far less credible than you asserted in your article? Assuming the former but not the latter, suppose that at some point in the future it was possible read someone else’s brain (I don’t care how), would that then remove the obstacle of ‘direct’? We already can read someone else’s brain in terms of what emotions that person is experiencing, and I think that it’s enough to reasonably posit that such a thing is possible. W ILLIAM FISHBURNE DEAR W ILLIAM: First of all, thank you for writing. I wouldn’t want my argument to get away without being challenged. But I’ll tell you how I see things. I can’t find the words you quote, but ‘I’ am my mind-body, so it is misleading to say that ‘I’ have ‘access’ to my mind as if it were separate from the ‘I’. If I wrote that, I stand corrected on a misuse of words. I don’t think it much matters if I do not have ‘access’ to the unconscious processes (ie, that I am unaware of them). I’m not sure they are activities of mind anyway. They are just things that happen within me. I think of the body as a distributed system: the cells of my nervous system in control of my arm have their own assignments to be getting on with while my mind is imagining philosophical arguments. I have learned to be a good manager: I have delegated duties. I don’t remember using the word 44
Philosophy Now April/May 2017
‘access’, so I certainly wouldn’t call that a succeed/fail lynchpin. What I thought I was saying is that the ‘subjective/objective’, or ‘interior-intangible-inexpressible’ vs ‘exterior-tangible-describablecategorisable-verifiable’ are entirely different things, and do not connect in any way that we can study with certainty. I assert that you cannot know what is really going on in my brain-mind and I cannot know what is going on in yours. As for emotions, are you saying that a person with years of medical training using a lot of technology can see what I experience as fear and know that that fear means the same thing to me as it does to him/her? Can the neuroscientist define anger, or confidence or love? (Ye gods: I can’t even define that one myself after decades of practice! How dare anyone else tell me whether I am in love or not and how!) These ‘brain-reading’ experiments depend, of course, on the subjects knowing that they are in love and being honest about it. But is an article in Nature a better description of love than that offered by John Donne? That’s a lot of assumptions being made on the basis of someone wearing a white coat and having a degree on the wall, and a lot of indirect methodology. What he is trying to see may have no connection to the inner experience of love, fear. Isn’t he in fact seeing the traces of emotion, not the emotion itself? Aren’t people who carry out such experiments making the assumption that they already know personally about being a human being? And I find it hard to separate the I from, say, my anger. It is a state that goes intimately with my I. Also, in my experience emotions tend to come as complex lumps: what does anger mixed with love and just a pinch of regret and resentment look like in brain activity? Are we going to see a particular pattern of the brain for such a cocktail, and are you going to be able to correctly identify it (and could you do it if you, the scientist, had never experienced regret?) I don’t even see what use such approaches are to anyone. For me, there is more than a far cry from locating anger to seeing thinking: it is a chasm. I would make no assumptions at all about the future because we may get something else. The history of the future often shows us that we didn’t get where we thought were going. Your hope that we will one day be able to read thoughts is just that, a hope. But here is a test. Do you really believe that one day they will invent an instru-
ment that can be inserted between one human being and another that will allow the observer to know exactly what I mean when I think ‘fish’, given that I may be thinking simultaneously and amorphously of 1) the fish in the pond, with aesthetic delight tinged with a stirring of guilt and worry that I haven’t fed them; and spontaneously a sneaking, irrelevant longing to go and do some gardening; 2) it would be nice to have fish for dinner (taste buds become active so here we have a combination of mental and physiological reaction): have we got any chips or do I need to go the supermarket? (new parallel thought starts shopping list); 3) I found a drawing of a fish I did 20 years ago and it brings mixed feelings that I cannot put into words; 4) an abstract thought of ‘fishness’; Etc? All that is free-form, fleeting. I am also in there: my ‘fish’ is connected to me. Add to which my inner sensations of fishness may be different in the waiting room to those I have in the lab when all the equipment is hooked up. Unless you or Google will somehow be able to monitor me real in time and train an interpreter in exactly how to be me (will he not have had to live all the things that I have lived?)… But now I think you’re getting further and further from credibility. However good the medium you use, won’t its use depend on you being about to interpret my thought of fish in exactly the same way as me, given that the time and conditions will not be the same? Will we even ever agree on the colour of the fish and how to define it? I find that all too much to believe. NICK INMAN L ARREULE, FRANCE DEAR EDITOR : One doesn’t need to argue for a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’ to appreciate that some aspects of Inman’s argument have validity, without religious connotations. In particular, there are two aspects of one’s self: one is subjective and uniquely known only to you; another is objective and known to everyone you interact with. But I think the most pertinent point he makes is that it is only through intelligent conscious entities like us that the Universe has any meaning at all. In answer to the oft-asked question, Why is there something rather than nothing? I say that without consciousness there might as well be nothing. Because consciousness is so ubiquitous and taken-for-granted in our everyday lives we tend not to consider its essen-
Letters tial role in providing reality. When you cease to be conscious, there is certainly nothing for you. We need both an objective world and subjective consciousness for reality to become manifest. P AUL P MEALING MELBOURNE
Interspecies communication, using sign language for example, has led to fascinating insights, and we are certainly moved by the often deep emotional rapport between dogs and their owners. But we think this differs hugely from the ability to philosophise together. Our title ‘Will We Ever Philosophise with ET?’ DEAR EDITOR : Eugene Franklin’s letter was intended to emphasis the issue of in PN 118 accuses the piece by Nick communication at this higher level. Inman of “unjustifiably dismissing the We agree with Martin that “large complexity that material processes are brains do not necessarily imply a capable of, in favour of the preferred philosophising intelligence.” Indeed, this explanation that human beings transcend is a plank in our own argument that even physics.” It’s true that this has never been if aliens have evolved large brains, we are proven but what could such a proof look unlikely to philosophise with them like? And it doesn’t follow from this lack unless they are also Homo sapiens or of proof that complex material processes virtually identical. Dolphins have larger are our inner world. As Mary Midgley brains than humans do. In the Caribbean points out in the same page, the idea of in the 1960s, NASA funded a project matter itself is just as awkward as the idea whose principal researcher was the mediof immateriality. So even more awkward cal practitioner, neuroscientist and is the idea of complex material processes philosopher Dr John C. Lilly (1915creating our inner world. Far more 2001). Experiments recorded that a awkward is the idea of complex material dolphin could mimic English using his processes being able to fool themselves blowhole; but this communication fell that they are immaterial processes that short of philosophizing. With hindsight, transcend physics. A believer in only that presumption of ability to communimaterial processes would have to explain cate using English seems terribly anthrohow a brain can fool itself into believing pocentric. We note Martin’s confident that it transcends physics, and moreover optimism in asserting the basic needs of explain what the purpose is of a brain unknown aliens, and the idea of trading fooling itself in this way. So there is no food for the plans of a warp drive is proof either way. I am of the strong belief attractive. However, our food may be that any proof is, as yet, way beyond us. useless or poisonous to ET, who may But my brain is certainly fooling me! not need food as we know it. The P AMELA W HITE proposed barter does seem anthropoNOTTINGHAM morphic to us. M ALCOLM E. BROWN, BECCLES S TEVE HUBBARD, G REAT Y ARMOUTH Terrestrial Communications DEAR EDITOR : We are grateful for Martin Jenkins’s comments in Issue118 Insider Insight Letters on our article in Issue 116, and DEAR EDITOR : I was arrested for murder seek, if possible, to clarity. when I was eighteen and am now a little We agree with him that the concept over ten years into a forty-five year ‘what is it like to be’ for example, a bat, is sentence. That being said, I greatly problematic. In order to make some admired and appreciated Dahlian Kirby’s progress we did assume that human article, ‘Philosophy For The Brave’, and beings do have at least some sense of her compassion for those of us who are what it is like to be another human suffering in prison. Her understanding and being. Although we do not know what it insights concerning some of the causes of is like to specifically be Martin Jenkins, our psychological distress are well founded. the fact that he was able to read our artiI’ve been studying philosophy and cle and make pertinent comments, and psychology for several years but haven’t that we are able to (hopefully) rationally had the opportunity to explore existenrespond indicates a degree of ‘knowing’ tialism until I received Issue 115 of each other. We suggest our shared Philosophy Now. This happened to correcomprehension at this intellectual level is spond with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search absent between Homo sapiens and any For Meaning coming into my possession. other known species. I was amazed at how pertinent they both
were to my situation and the personal and collective growth I’ve experienced. While I only recently came to realize it, I and others I know have long engaged in an existential dialogue as a means of coping with our circumstances. I haven’t ever been in counseling; my therapy has been philosophical discussion and debate amongst a few close friends with whom I have been able to open up and delve into my life and life in general. We have even gone as far as to develop our own philosophy. When I read the existentialism issue of Philosophy Now I was surprised to find that what we created is essentially an existential philosophy, although there are some core differences, such as a lack of nihilism on our part. [Try Colin Wilson’s existentialism then, Ed]. Similarly, the psychological reactions observed by Frankl in response to concentration camp life, and the phases he describes, namely shock; apathy; and despondency, I found to be identical to those we experience and exhibit in prison. The physical conditions we endure range in severity, but all prisons (at least in the U.S.) are designed to facilitate subtle and overt psychological torture: that is, they are designed to strip us of any sense of freedom or responsibility, to ourselves or others, and to devalue such concepts. Because many of us are serving decadeslong sentences, or our ‘natural life’, dying in prison is a real possibility/fear and creates both conscious and unconscious denial of this fate, and in turn psychological and existential rebellion against it in an attempt to maintain our sanity and humanity. We probably experience the absurd more tangibly than most. My cellmate recently asked me what I thought is the reason so many in prison are drawn to philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. I believe, like Kirby, that for those inclined it enables deep selfexploration, but also a way to explore morality, one’s place in the world, the meaning of life, and ultimately answer the question, ‘Where do I go from here?’ Therein lies the seed of authenticity, for individually and collectively these inquiries can lead to meaningfulness. Unfortunately, there are far too few Dahlian Kirbys in the world, and we receive little or no institutional support in this area. Many thanks to her for writing the article, and thank you for publishing it. CLIFFORD L. POWERS W ESTERN ILLINOIS CORRECTIONAL C TR April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 45
Book s
Vaughan Rapatahana considers what Colin Wilson had to say about other philosophers, Mark Dunbar reflects on what makes a book a classic, and Neil Richardson
laments a surplus of generalities.
As he notes with regard to Spinoza, “any Collected Essays attempt to judge him must start from Spinoza by Colin Wilson, Edited by Colin Stanley the human being” (p.205). His view of Herbert Marcuse is similarly tempered: “I am U P START AUTHOR OF THE less interested in condemning Marcuse than Outsider (1956), the exis- in finding out ‘how he got like he is’” (p.80). tentialist Colin Wilson Similarly, for Wilson it is Foucault’s sexual was a brilliant, combative, contested figure dysfunction which induces the negative ineron the philosophical and literary scene for tia of most of his writing; while Wittgenstein more than fifty years. This collection of his was “a strange, tormented man” (p.233). In essays on a range of British and European fact, Wilson is at his most critical when philosophers, edited and alphabetically dissecting Bertrand Russell in three pieces arranged by Colin Stanley, should cast aside here, again because personality flaws in the once and for all the spurious notion that man dissipated his philosophy: “I am not Wilson was not a philosopher. Here he attacking Russell on grounds of morality, but comes across as a serious thinker about other on his blindness to his own shortcomings. He serious thinkers, analytic or existentialist, liked to think of himself as a philosopher in and spends less time on expostulating his the traditional sense of the word… yet he own agenda, although his prime focus, the failed to see any inconsistency in devoting his expansion of human consciousness via an life to the pursuit of teenage girls, and other examination of our mental states, is never far people’s wives” (p.131). away. However, this book is not meant to be Sartre’s sometime friend Albert Camus a coherent overview of Wilson’s meta- has been treated rather more gently by physics, best depicted in his Introduction to Wilson, partly, one would suppose, because the New Existentialism (1966). This is more the two met in Paris and discussed philosoa potpourri of ideas, a dip-into book, if you phy. Even the logical positivists and linguis will. It ranges from concise magazine arti- tic analysts at Oxford University, namely cles, through book reviews and obituaries, to Ayer, Broad, Strawson, and Warnock, entire books – such as the text of his Anti- receive warm coverage in a 1968 Daily TeleSartre from 1981 – over a period covering graph magazine article reproduced here, 1965 to 2007. I would have preferred that while Karl Popper receives effusive praise: his excellent chapter ‘The Strange Story of “He possesses all the basic qualities of a Modern Philosophy’ from Beyond the philosopher: he is broad, deep, humane, and Outsider (1965) had been included, for it in the last analysis, wise” (p.117). explains what Wilson sees as the deficiencies This is not, then, the raging of a young in the ideas of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Wilson new on the intellectual circuit, but Kant extremely well, and would have slotted a fairly balanced and well-written summary into this collection perfectly. But for Stanley of his views on a panoply of philosophers, to include every iota of Wilson’s writings some of whom, such as Kierkegaard, he first about other philosophers would have consti- made well-known for a British audience. Of tuted a set of volumes. course summarising others does not For the most part in this selection, Colin preclude Wilson casting his own notions Wilson comes across as sensible and rather into the mix, but he does so rather modestly mild mannered in his appraisals, even if he as a countermark to his subject, unless he fundamentally disagrees with the thinkers agrees completely with them. This is espehe’s discussing, such as the French Philoso- cially the case in his essay on Edmund phy team of Marcuse, Derrida, Foucault, and Husserl, for me the best piece in this book, Sartre. Wilson never disassociates a man entitled ‘Husserl and Evolution’. By the from his ideas; a core component of his way, Wilson’s titles often succinctly capture theory of Existential Literary Criticism is what he sees as the most important aspect that a study of the author’s character is an of a given philosopher; thus also in this essential part of interpreting their thought. book, his essay ‘Whitehead as Existentialist’
46 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
from Philosophy Now Issue 64. Indeed, aspects of what Wilson admits can be the rather obtuse ideas of Husserl, such as intentionality and the transcendental ego, permeate most of the longer pieces here: Wilson has Husserl enter the mix when writing about Whitehead, Cassirer, Derrida, Nietzsche, among others. For Wilson, Husserl is the ‘answer’ to the negativity of much (French) existentialism and postmodernism, which in Derrida, Wilson feels amounts to no more than “gobbledegook”. Husserl also provides a way forward from the analytical trivialities of the Oxford school. As Wilson concludes in his final piece on Wittgenstein, “Personally I am out of sympathy with the Oxford philosophers. What they are doing seems to me extremely interesting, but far too narrow … In my own view, philosophy must be as broad as possible … by becoming a science of consciousness … called phenomenology” (p.234). (Phenomenology is the attempt to articulate what it is like to experience.) Two Paths In his overview of what constitutes philosophy, Wilson says he feels that “In a basic sense, there are only two basic attitudes in philosophy. It is like a billiard table with only two pockets, and you have to end up in one or the other” (p.46). Of the eighteen philosophers he writes about here (Kierkegaard slides in unannounced in a 1965 sliver about Nietzsche) only a select few escape falling into what he terms the ‘Humean Pocket’ – that strand of philosophy which has completely ignored or denied the active aspects of human consciousness, and is a haven for negativity, triviality, or at best, in Sartre, a resigned Stoicism. Sartre, for Wilson is a flawed and contradictory thinker who, despite his fiction depicting vistas of human freedom, ultimately conveys mankind to being merely a ‘useless passion’. Indeed, Wilson sees a chain of continuity from Sartre through Derrida, Foucault et al in French philosophy, the latter two, for Wilson, trying to out-Sartre Jean-Paul. Husserl, perhaps Nietzsche, definitely Whitehead – described by Wilson as “a
Book Reviews
Books by Wilson at the tail of his chapter praising Husserl: “We must develop a level of consciousness that is able to unmask everyday consciousness as a liar… We require an instinct – or a habit – which leads us to constantly reject the world presented to us by everyday consciousness… This instinct – or habit – can only be acquired by the constant practice of phenomenological analysis” (p.78).
Colin Wilson portrait by Darren McAndrew 2017
John Shand’s honest summation of Wilson in his Introduction bears noting here: “My view is that Colin Wilson’s fierce claim to have beaten nihilism… was not totally convincing” (p.xviii). So does Wilson’s own candidness about himself: he certainly had no illusions about how others would see his work: “There is certainly not a philosopher in England today who would agree with me” (p.234) are his final words in this excellent collection. Significantly, Shand also accords Wilson the mantle “In some manner a great man” – primarily because Wilson continued unstaunched in his efforts to completely overcome any vestige of existential despair. Whether Wilson is ever accorded more recognition as an original philosopher remains to be seen. A couple of Wilson’s statements in this compilation make me hesitate, such as his 1970 remark, “As to myself, I am frankly more interested in the possibility of a few remarkable men transcending the old limitations, and establishing a new dimension of human freedom, than in social panaceas” (p.89). Despite this, I can only restate what I have already espoused in Philosophy Now (for instance in Issue 112); namely, that Wilson’s philosophical work certainly deserves much more serious attention and reflection. This Collected Essays on Philosophers is an excellent way of entering Colin Wilson’s new existentialist world, for, above everything else, it intersperses his own considered thoughts with his measured estimations of philosophers who have already been accorded such recognition. © DR VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA 2017
Vaughan Rapatahana has a PhD from the University of Auckland, is a published poet, and lives in Hong Kong and New Zealand. His latest collection of poems is Atonement .
respectable philosopher in the British Wilson himself, are playing another game empirical tradition going right to the heart altogether, aiming to sink the ball of thought • Collected Essays on Philosophers, by Colin Wilson, of the matter and declaring that our ‘mean- into the positive pocket of Phenomenology. edited by Colin Stanley, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, inglessness’ is a delusion” (p.230) – and His intellectual ambition is best summarized 2016, 253 pages, £47.99 hb, ISBN: 1443889016
Book Reviews
April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 47
Books Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy Edited by Eric Schliesser
tions. He does, however, at least provide a list of answers to ‘What makes a classic?’ This question is really asking two things: How does a text become a classic? and Why does it become a classic? Reductive, vituperative and flippant responses can of course be given to both these subquestions: “Because those texts best expressed the contemporary ruling class’s moral outlook”; “Because those texts effectively distracted critical intellects from serious political commitments”; “Because something, after all, had to be chosen” etc – but Schliesser ignores these easy comebacks, and instead opts for an ambitious and thoughtful inventory of interrelated possibilities. He gives four reasons why a philosophical text might be made part of a canon of classics: 1) Making them read a selection of canonical
MOST OF THE texts chosen by the contributors to Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (2016), edited and introduced by Eric Schliesser, were picked because their choosers believe they represent or embody a refutation of the current status quo of professional philosophy, which is maledominated, analytical, and (ostensibly) raceneutral. Some of the works chosen, such as Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy (1916), have never been fully appreciated, while others were considered classics in their time but have since fallen from scholarly grace, such as Francois Fenelon’s W.E.B. DuBois in 1918 Adventures of Telemachus (1699). Other works have been remembered, but not on their merits, instead being portrayed as the constructions of philosophical villains who momentarily led the field astray until they were put in their place by legitimate thinkers. For example, Jonathan Bennett’s first book Rationality (1966) has been reprimanded as an early attempt to resurrect behaviorism from its intellectual tomb, and F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) is often recorded as the last manifestation of Hegelian idealism before Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore put such mysticism to rest and began the age of true inquiry – that is, the current age of analytic philosophy. Michael Della Rocca, the chooser of Bradley’s entry, calls that “the founding myth of analytical philosophy” and like all texts has proven a useful way to give new founding myths, it is a falsehood – a product students in philosophy their bearings on a of hindsight. particular topic. Most introductory philosophy courses begin by having students read Classic Criteria famous writers such as Plato, Descartes, and Schliesser’s introductory essay, ‘On Being a Nietzsche, not only because these philosoClassic in Philosophy’ raises many questions phers are easy to read, but because in their about the formation of the philosophical conversations about epistemology, psycholcanon: Why are certain works remembered ogy, and ethics they clearly demonstrate and others forgotten? Should the classics be what’s at stake. so favored against contemporary fads? After 2) By studying a classic text, something all, weren’t all classics at one point merely discriminating can be gained that needs to the result of the fashions of their age? be rediscovered: “Rather than rereinvent What’s the value of philosophers having a wheels, people turn to [classic texts] because “shared textual background” that allows for they provide resources to recover lost “relatively efficient, conceptual and argu- insight” (p.xxii). In this way, a canonical mentative shortcuts or vivid imagery?” work may offer a rejoinder to an ahistorical (p.xxi). Are there possible faults to philoso- trend which claims to have solved some phers having this shared background of major philosophical riddle. ideas? Could it be that these shortcuts in 3) Texts are remembered because of their rhetoric bypass worthwhile alternative significance within a particular philosophiroads in thinking? Schliesser doesn’t cal tradition (American pragmatism, femiattempt to provide answers to all these ques- nism, monism, etc). And a tradition grows 48
Philosophy Now April/May 2017
partly through interacting with its own past – by perpetually studying and questioning its own first principles, as stated in these works. 4) Some philosophers are read simply for the enduring wisdom and enjoyment they provide. Schliesser names Seneca, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir and Thoreau as examples. These writers, who produce wisdom rather than convey analytical subtlety, are what the general reading population thinks of when they think of philosophy – not the useless technical wranglings of many academics. As for how a work becomes perennial, Schliesser borrows his criteria from J.M. Coetzee’s essay, ‘What Is a Classic?’ (1986): the work in question must be studied by specialists, expounded upon by advanced students, be part of an ongoing argument, inspire imitations, and eventually, catch the interest of a wider audience. Schliesser points out that these are necessary conditions for a work becoming a classic, not sufficient ones. That is to say, more may be needed. Classic Paradoxes
Obvious tensions in the book stem from its oxymoronic title, and from the fact that according to Schliesser’s own standards none of the texts included would qualify as classics: it’s a given that none meet Coetzee’s criteria, otherwise they wouldn’t be neglected, and so wouldn’t belong in the compilation. The only case that can be made for most of the entries as ‘classics’ is that they offer rejoinders to mistaken contemporary trends. For instance, Chike Jeffer’s entry on W.E.B. DuBois’ speech ‘Whither Now and Why?’ (1960) challenges the ‘color-blind’ ethos of conventional etiquette toward race. In this speech, DuBois argued against assimilationist methods of ending color discrimination, if it meant destroying African-Americans’ distinctive culture, music and literature along the way. He worried that desegregating schools would lead to an ignorance of African history for black Americans. Above all, he was engaged in the struggle to preserve his race, which he defined not biologically but culturally, as a “vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life” (p.225). Rather than desegregation, then, DuBois’ own solution to freeing the United States from racial prejudice was to organize a “proliferation of African-AmeriBook Reviews
Book s can institutions” (Jeffer, p.224): black colleges, newspapers, banks, businesses, and literary schools of thought. Rather than color-blind politics, then, DuBois wanted a color-saturated morality. Jeffer is perhaps correct that this suggestion has had little support in American universities. On the other hand, outside the universities it seems to have done quite well for itself. Malcolm X preached for black Americans to seek education, plan a family, and start their own business – and today commentators as different as Louis Farrakhan, Jason Whitlock and Thomas Sowell have encouraged similar courses of action for ending racial prejudice while preserving valuable cultural distinctions. In retrospect, DuBois’ endorsement of Soviet Communism sounds ridiculous, although once his solutions to racial strife have been disentangled from his socialism it would be hard for most right-wing intellectuals to assail them. Many of the other entries in Ten Neglected Classics suffer from similar problems to Jeffer’s: first of misidentifying philosophical dilapidation in academia with philosophical dilapidation at large; then, of disregarding (intentionally or not) the professed purpose of the book, and instead selecting a text unworthy of canonization but useful for historically validating the contributor’s own views; and finally, of giving into a complacent urge to knock down barriers of exclusion that don’t exist.
cohort in the anti-logic brigade because their focus is micro-knowledge rather than the big picture; thus they work outside a “web of common meaning”. However, given a regularly emailed torrent of data, I imagine making sense of common webs is a sufficient challenge for most people. The chapter ‘Dumbing Down’ dwells on the current cultural unease over developing subtle ideas. For example, politicians and university scholars have condensed their debating style. In the US, knowledge of Abe Lincoln’s speeches scores higher than Kennedy’s or Nixon’s. Politicians believe the general public can’t cope with complex arguments; and in any case, they’re not interested. Many citizens do appear generally apathetic about political life; we’re more likely to vote for TV celebrities. Neither are we happy when we’re handed serious books, art, or drama. Should lay people encounter the Herculean labour of reading, they need accessible literature delivered in the comfort of libraries furnished with sofas, TVs, coffee machines and background music. Although a thought-provoking read, for me this book fosters two major questions. First, Furedi deals in ill-defined generalities, which probably apply only some of the time, among some folk. Yes, a group of students, teachers or accountants could make themselves marketable and step quietly through their careers without triggering much upset. But aren’t they behaving in ways which seem logical when the need © MARK DUNBAR 2017 for income, pensions and housing beckons? Mark Dunbar is a freelance writer based in Perhaps they find the local ‘big picture’ Indianapolis. He can be reached by email at adequate, and they have no urge for public
[email protected] or on Twitter stirs public opinion. By contrast, according debate. So would it be ethical to criticize to Edward Said in a Reith lecture, if you their lifestyle and push them in a radical new @Mark1Dunbar want to climb the academic ladder, don’t direction? • Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy , ed. by Eric rock the boat, avoid controversy, make Second, do readers need detailed, juicy Schliesser, Oxford University Press 2016, 310 pages, yourself marketable and above all examples of an intellectual’s chosen pathway £18.00/$29.95, ISBN:0199928924 presentable (p.39). – how it started and evolved, with lessons Furedi, a sociologist, acknowledges the learnt along the way – in order to follow the popularity of education, books, and media author’s intriguing theme? Or should we documentaries – even science documen- instead ask for a group of action-oriented Where Have All The taries are in vogue. Yet despite this boom, thinkers to hand more than abstract Intellectuals Gone? we live in an era uncomfortable with chal- buzzwords over to us? We recipients of this Frank Furedi lenges to the status quo, beset by trivial potential transaction are not necessarily PROFESSOR FUREDI’S pocket- pursuits, and suffering a reaction against striving for excellence in thought; but we sized book broadcasts his rationality “far stronger than at any other might be aiming to moderately improve the concern that a commitment to truth and time since the development of capitalism” status quo. excellence in thought – the role of the intel- (p.55). Furedi blames the subjectivity and © NEIL RICHARDSON 2017 lectual – is no longer considered important. intuition favoured by postmodernism. One Neil Richardson is an administrator with Today the demands placed on the general example he gives is how the personal expe- North Kirklees Clinical Commissioning public, tutors, and students, are restrained: rience of children is now treated as an Group. we are not expected to provoke serious important educational pedestal. However, conversation, or read controversial texts. Furedi’s critics might argue that subjective • Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?, Frank Society has been intellectually detuned by outlooks usefully complement the three Rs: Furedi, Continuum, 2004, 198 pages, £18.99 pb, new conservative elites, with knowledge ‘Know thyself’. Specialists also form a ISBN: 1441191186 Book Reviews
turned into a commodity more dependent on technique than on the application of the intellect. Intellectuals happily engaged as employees experience, “an instrumentalist approach to life” (p.42), whereby they have become simply a means to the increase of profits. The early pages discuss the changing status of intellectuals, starting to become unpopular since the Enlightenment, when they apparently attempted to stamp the ideology of reason on society. Paris, Berlin, and Greenwich Village were centres of vehement argument over social causes, which is not to be confused with the busy activity of academics well-established within their university domains. Asking awkward questions outside specialist fields is a defining feature of intellectual life, as doing so
April/May 2017 Philosophy Now
49
Revolver Film s
T
his is the first (and probably last!) time that a film from Jason Statham’s oeuvre has been put under the microscope in Philosophy Now. Statham is best known for action movies reminiscent of those that went straight to VHS in the 1980s. That notwithstanding, under the direction of Guy Ritchie, 2005’s Revolver provides a hearty chunk to philosophically digest. Panned by critics and audiences alike upon cinematic release, it has become something of a cult classic amongst the DVD crowd, and there have been internet forums aplenty discussing it, mainly from psychological and/or Buddhist perspectives. However, following on from my review of Black Swan in Issue 86, and still afflicted by Friedrich Nietzsche’s overbearing intellectual shadow, I have not been able to shake the need to examine Revolver through the powerful lenses of the Nietzschescope.
views this Guy Ritchie film through Buddhist and Nietzschean lenses.
Dharmender Dhillon
repetition of it both explicitly and implicitly. They are: “The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent” (The Fundamentals of Chess , 1875); “There is no avoiding war, it can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy” (Niccolò Machiavelli, 1502); “The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look” (Julius Caesar, 75 BCE); and “The first rule of business, protect your investment” ( Etiquette of the Banker , 1775). These quotes can be grouped under two sub-headings: The Ego and Self-War . First I will focus upon the ego. The Ego
Green’s desire to exact revenge upon Macha is a result of his ego and intertwined notions of self-worth and intelligence. As ‘merchants’ with regard to our own lives, we fight tooth and nail to ‘protect our investment’, meaning our notions of our selfSynopsis importance and what we deserve. Indeed, Revolver centres on Jake Green (Statham). Green remarks en route to exacting his Released after seven years in solitary incar- revenge that Macha “must pay: it’s cause ceration, he gambles his way to a small and effect.” Yet upon exacting his revenge, fortune. He thence seeks to exact revenge his subsequent woes lead him to realize that on Macha (played by a delightfully over- it’s not the conquest of external enemies, stated Ray Liotta) – a power-hungry casino real or imagined, that leads to self-mastery, owner who was the cause of Green’s unjust but understanding that one is playing a imprisonment. Green duly humiliates game with oneself, and that this is the prod Macha, only to subsequently fall foul of a uct of one’s ego. External, transient and mysterious disease that leaves him with only contingent victories and defeats are fleeting three days to live. Meanwhile, Macha orders distractions. Once this is fully grasped, one a hit on Green and executes his entourage. This forces Green to enlist the services of two mysterious loan sharks, Avi and Zack, who promise him safety in exchange for all his money, along with his unquestioning compliance with their demands. We watch Green’s turmoil through the supposed last few days of his life as he loses all control. As director Ritchie remarked in an interview, “there’s nothing quite like death looming on the horizon to precipitate events.” Key Themes
Four key quotations appear during the opening credits of the film, and appear as themes throughout the film, through the explicit presentation of the quote, the paraphrasing of the quote by a character, and the 50 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
The games people play when the chips are down
can choose to work towards the possibility of self-mastery, or what in Buddhist thought is known as liberation (moksha) from the wheel of suffering (s amsara). Thus the only battle truly worth engaging in is with the smartest opponent one can fathom: oneself. Later, having been stripped of his material wealth and his control over his own physical and emotional health, Green reaches a breaking point and enters into a heated exchange with his egotistical self. This is represented in the film’s most striking scene. Green is trapped in an elevator stuck on the thirteenth floor of Macha’s headquarters. Instead of acting upon his egotistical desire to kill Macha, he has apologized to his nemesis and asked for his forgiveness. In the elevator Green observes his own ego retaliate against its lack of influence over his actions. Realizing that conquering his external enemies and accumulating material wealth will not bring him peace, he turns upon himself in an act of desperation, and finds the enemy he had hitherto been avoiding. After this internal battle in the elevator, Green is depicted as having achieved a measure of inner harmony. This is juxtaposed with Macha’s attitude. He’s rattled by his enemy’s new-found serenity, and is depicted as an emotional wreck whose ego needs the fear of others to feel satisfied in its own being.
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Ritchie has remarked that he did not consider the movie to have any overt message other than “there’s no such thing as an external enemy.” He further mused that “this is not a story about morals … this is simply a story about the game, and there is no right or wrong … We’re all players within our own little games.” This echoes Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and leads us nicely onto a discussion of the Nietzschean themes prevalent in the film. As an ethical thinker concerned with what an individual steeped within what he deemed to be a ‘decadent’ contemporary European culture ought to do, Nietzsche advocated self-war for the possibility of selfmastery at the possible expense of any given social or cultural morality. As Nietzsche argued in one of his mature works, the aptly-titled Beyond Good and Evil (1886): “One must subject oneself to one’s own tests … although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge” (Section 41). Green is depicted as having spent his time
Statham as Green
in solitary learning how to become the consummate con-artist, and his skills serve him well in the accumulation of his fortune and in his ability to humiliate Macha. But in spite of demonstrating a mastery of the ‘rules of society’ – of how to get rich and exact revenge – he still suffers immeasurably when he has to forfeit his wealth, which he knows is transient and contingent, and when facing his fear of losing his life, which also he knows is transient. In this confusion he is shown to embody Nietzsche’s dictum in another of his mature works, On The Genealogy of Morals (1887), that “we are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge – and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?” (Section 15). One thing the film does particularly well is to superimpose Green’s descent into inner turmoil upon his realization of the irony that his not-insignificant ability as a confidence trickster has been instrumental in concealing his greatest enemy, namely, his own ego, from himself. Then in the film’s key scene in the elevator, we observe Green working out the adage in Nietzsche’s
notebooks (collected under the title The Will to Power ) that: “To become master of the chaos one is; to compel one’s chaos to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematics, law – that is the grand ambition here” (Section 842, from an entry dated 1888). And so, following his flight of liberation from his egotistical self, Green is depicted as having entered a state of bliss, beyond the cycle of the joys of victory and the agony of defeat. Indeed, in juxtaposition with his remark that “the harder the defeat, the sweeter the victory” upon having successfully exacted his revenge upon Macha earlier on in the film, in the final acts of the movie, Green is arguably a Nietzschean ‘overman’ at least insofar as he has successfully traversed the prevalent morality of his culture (avarice, revenge), and is thus ‘beyond good and evil’. As Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy: “to be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long – that is the sign of strong, full natures, in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mould, to recuperate, and to forget” (First Essay, Section 10). As we watch Green’s liberation unfold, we see a most unHollywood of final acts, insofar as the hero is shown to not be gun-toting and out to exact justice, but rather to be ‘beyond good and evil’ insofar as he can observe his once-nemesis Macha hold a gun to the head of a child – Greene’s niece – with compassion for both, emanating a fearlessness and an understanding that, like Macha, he too was once a mere lapdog of his egotistical self. Having forfeited his wealth and social status, not to mention not knowing how long his health may hold out, Greene has become “more humane” insofar as he can endure injury “without suffering” such that this stoic endurance “becomes the actual measure of his wealth” (On The Genealogy of Morals , Second Essay, Section 10). Green’s ability, or better put, his realisation of his ability to forgive, is emblematic of his victory over his egotistical self and his mastery of the chaos that he is. © DHARMENDER S. DHILLON 2017
Dharmender Dhillon is still a doctoral candidate at Cardiff University. He hopes to one day become a recovering Nietzschean. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now
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eaders with long memories may recall that several years ago I invited them to reflect on ‘the true mystery of memory’ (‘A Smile at Waterloo Station’, Philosophy Now Issue 78, 2010). In the course of writing about ‘The Past’ in my new book Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience (now, after a decade, finished), I came across a fascinating paper on memory whose ideas I want to share with you. But before I do so, some preliminaries are in order. In the vast research literature on memory, psychologists have divided this extraordinary faculty in many ways. For the purposes of philosophical debate, it is sufficient to distinguish what Henri Bergson called ‘habit memory’ (evident in response conditioning, motor learning, skill acquisition, and behavioural modification) from conscious or explicit memory – what we might call ‘memory of’. This latter includes ‘semantic memory’, which is memory of facts, and ‘episodic memory’, which is recollection of personal events and experiences in one’s life. Episodic memories have an autobiographical tinge: I recall witnessing the event that I remember, and, perhaps, something of the self and the world to which the experience was attached. Philosophy Of Memory It is episodic memory that is of especial philosophical interest, for two reasons. Firstly, it seems to be unique to humans, which is hardly surprising since there is scant evident of a sense of self in beasts. (A recent paper claiming to have demonstrated episodic memory in dogs is not to me persuasive, although I owe it to you to give you the reference so you can judge for yourself: ‘Recall of Others’ Action After Incidental Encoding Reveals Episodic-like Memory in Dogs’, C. Fugazza et al , Current Biology 26, 2016.) Secondly, what I have characterised as the (philosophically very significant) ‘double intentionality’ of memory is particularly clear-cut in the case of episodic memory. 52 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
The Elusiveness of Memory Raymond Tallis talks about um... err... Intentionality, it may be recalled, is the ‘aboutness’ of our awareness. It’s a fundamental characteristic of consciousness. A perception, for example, is about something other than itself, and something other than me, the perceiver. When I see you smiling, my seeing sees something that is explicitly separate from me, and also from the act of seeing. This does not fit into a physicalist account of the world. The physical causal chain linking the incident light on your face with activity in my brain – how the light stimulates the visual cortex – is entirely compatible with the physicalist idea of the world as merely a collection of interacting material objects and physical forces. On the other hand, how the gaze looks out – how what is happening in me is ‘about’ what is out there – most certainly is not. And in the case of episodic memory, the difficulties are compounded. Suppose I remember seeing you smiling last week. My memory is of an experience I had at a moment in the past. The experience itself was of the smile. In the memory we therefore have two lots of aboutness: about the smile itself, and about the experience of
That smile
the smile. The second ‘about’, involving the present re-experiencing of a past experience, is even more puzzling than the first. Intentionality clearly is not a straightfor ward (or indeed any kind of) causal relationship. It points in the opposite direction to causes: whereas the smile is the cause of the experience, the experience is about the smile. But this is worrying because a pukka causal relationship between that which was remembered and the act of remembering is often regarded as the guarantor of the validity of the memory. I truly remember an experience (so the standard story goes) if the experience is causally connected with the memory. The usual way this causal path is characterised is to say that the relevant effect of the experience is to have left a memory trace in the brain of the rememberer. However, the idea of memories as traces – central to cognitive science ever since Plato suggested that memories were like wax impressions – is incoherent. It is demolished in a brilliant paper by Stephen Braude, ‘Memory without a Trace’ in Anti Matter (2007). If memories were traces, he asks, how would they deliver what is required of them? What would traces have
Some neurons
to be like to secure remembering? How would we recognise the brain traces – or how would the brain traces recognise themselves – as being about the smile on your face last week? One way could be that they were like your smiling face. But this is not possible, because neural activity does not look like a smiling face. As Braude puts it, “memory traces are never strictly identical either with the things that produce them or the things that [subsequently] activate them.” Nevertheless, the sense that the ‘aboutness’ of the mind, either in memory or direct perception, depends on something like faithful representation, is tenacious. Wolfgang Kohler famously suggested that there’s an inherent structural similarity between the smiling face and the memory of it; between the memory and the remembered (Gestalt Psychology, 1947). The trouble is, the neurological form would not have the singularity of that smiling face and the context in which it is located: your face at that moment. Even if it did, there is a more profound problem. It would be necessary already to remember your smiling face and its context for the rememberer to recognise the neural activity for what it is: a representation of your smiling face at that time. To recognise the trace for what it is, we would, as Braude summarises it, “need to remember to remember.” Representation is not something that material objects or events can do on their own: “representation can’t be an intrinsic relation between the thing represented and the thing that represents it.” This is true for many reasons, including one that Braude highlights: the similarity, or not, of two items that share a structure depends on the respect in which they are compared. A red square may represent a brown square if shape is the salient property, but not if colour is. When it comes to memories of smiling faces, picnics in the country, or historical facts, it is impossible to specify the relevant dimension of similarity independent of the specific occasion itself: there is “no contextindependent parsing into basic elements” that will represent one thing rather than another. This is an expression of a more general truth: “There are no purely structural or context-independent forms of representation.” Thus work would have to be done on the supposed physical memory trace to make it stand for the object or event that caused it and which it is now preserving. We are back to the fundamental problem: we would have to remember the experience to see that the memory trace is a memory of it. There are additional difficulties when we
consider the triggering of memories. All sorts of stray experiences may prompt me to think of your smiling face, or, come to that, the Battle of Hastings. The appeal to ‘associations’ (or ‘associations of ideas’) as triggers makes the identification of the trace as a trace of your smiling face seem even more challenging. Pretty well anything may be associated with pretty well anything else. A mind driven hither and thither by associations would be chaos. Neurological explanations are not much help here. Is the neural trace of the memory a continuing ‘reverberation’ of the circuits that were activated when I encountered your smiling face – so that we have, as it were, a standing wave in the brain corresponding to that experience? The ‘sustained reverberation’ idea requires us to imagine the sum of our remembered past endlessly activated. This would keep an awful lot of circuits rather busy – too busy one might think to register new experiences. There is also the problem of the coherence of the neural activity corresponding to the memory: how does it keep itself together so that it retains its unity and its identity as your smile? An alternative to the sustained reverberation idea, is that experiences are laid down in the brain through long-term changes in the firing thresholds of particular neural circuits, due for example to lasting chemical changes in the synapses connecting the nerves ‘encoding’ the experience. However, this alternative would make the coherence problem even more difficult: a pattern of increased excitability would find it difficult to maintain or assert its unity. It is even more difficult to conceptualise a neurological basis for memories being summoned to order. How could we deliberately recall this or that (particularly facts that have no face to them), that is, rack our brains to retrieve something to order? Sticks In Your Mind
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Given that the idea of memory traces is so problematic, why has it proved so tenacious? The chief reason for wanting to translate memories into traces in the brain is to bring memory into the fold of the materialist world picture: to see memories as the material effects of material causes, and remembering as the reactivation of material effects by triggers that operate through material causes. The mind is seen as a mirror to which neurally-encoded images stick, and memory as the activation of those images. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2017 The stickiness of the remembered images Raymond Tallis’ next book, Of Time and highlights another problem with a material- Lamentation: Reflections on Transience istic account. The effects that are experi- will be published in May.
April/May 2017 Philosophy Now
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April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 55
Derek Parfit 1942-2017 Jeff McMahan says farewell to a friend
D
erek Parfit, who died unexpectedly on the second day of the new year, was one of the most important philosophers of the past half century and, in the view of many, the single best moral philosopher in more than a century. His imaginative but also meticulous and rigorous arguments have transformed the ways in which philosophers, economists, political and legal theorists and others think about many moral issues. He was also an endearingly eccentric and even saintly person. Parfit was born in 1942 in China, where his parents were medical missionaries. When he was still young, they returned to the UK to live in Oxford. He won major scholarships, first to Eton College, where he was nearly always at the top of the regular rankings in every subject except maths, and then to Balliol College, Oxford. His undergraduate degree was in modern history and was the only academic degree he ever received. When he left Eton as a teenager, he traveled to New York to work for The New Yorker , in which he published a poem. When he arrived in the US and presented his passport, the immigration official insisted that he required a visa, as he was Chinese. When Parfit protested that he was British, the official went to consult a superior and on returning announced, in words prefiguring the Trump era: “You’re in luck: you’re the kind of Chinese we like.” After completing his undergraduate degree, Parfit returned to the US on a Harkness fellowship that enabled him to audit graduate classes at a couple of Ivy League universities. Reports of the brilliant comments by the young Englishman with no training in philosophy immediately began to spread throughout the philosophical establishment and have become part of his legend. On his return to the UK he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where he remained until he became 67, when he was required by the university’s mandatory retirement policy to leave both the college and the faculty of philosophy. He was able, however, to retain his appointments as regular Visiting Professor at Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers until his death, much to the benefit of those departments and their students. It was only after he had become too old to be allowed to teach at Oxford that he published the great magnum opus of his later years, the three massive volumes of On What Matters , the third of which appeared only a couple of weeks after he died. In 1971 Parfit published his first article, ‘Personal Identity,’ in which he argued both that our continued existence involves nothing more than certain relations among mental states at different times and that what makes it rational for you to care in a special way about some future person is not that that person will be you but that he or she will be psychologically related to you in certain ways. This paper was immediately recognized as a masterpiece and secured Parfit’s reputation in philosophy. Over the twelve years following the publication of this landmark paper, Parfit worked relentlessly on the manuscripts that were to become Reasons and Persons (1984). This book has often been described as comprising four distinct but closely connected books: one on the ways in which moral theories can be self-defeating, a second on rationality and time, a third that defends his view of personal identity, and a fourth on the ethics of causing people to exist and duties concerning future generations. While each of the 56
Philosophy Now April/May 2017
four parts has been enormously influential, Part Four effectively created a new, difficult, highly important, and now flourishing area of philosophy known as ‘population ethics’. Peter Singer has described Reasons and Persons as the best work of moral philosophy since Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics , which was published in 1874. Beginning in the mid-1970s, material that would, after much rewriting, eventually coalesce into Reasons and Persons began to circulate in photocopies of Parfit’s typescripts. It is perhaps difficult for those who have entered the field of philosophy since that book was published to appreciate how exciting and exhilarating those early formulations of his ideas were. Over the intervening decades, much of moral philosophy has been shaped by the forms of argument, including the imaginative use of hypothetical examples, and even the style of writing that are characteristic of Reasons and Persons . But at the time they were radically different from what philosophers were familiar with. For many of those working in philosophy then, and perhaps especially for graduate students who were able to read some of Parfit’s manuscripts, the novelty, brilliance, and practical significance of his arguments were intoxicating. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, at least for some of us, that era seemed rather as the French Revolution seemed to the young Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” Parfit had a native genius for philosophy. But he also devoted more time and concentrated effort to the development of his ideas than any other philosopher I have known. He once mentioned a passage in a book of economic history that noted that the concept of work had sometimes been understood in such a way that work was necessarily unpleasant. On this understanding, Parfit almost never worked. Yet throughout his adult life he did little other than think about, read, and write philosophy. When I visited Oxford in January and February of 2014, I stayed in his house. During those months, he left the house only a few times. In all but one instance, he left only to walk a few blocks to buy fruits and vegetables for his spartan meals. The other instance was when he walked with me to an appointment I had so that we could continue the philosophical discussion we were having. The one exception to his monomaniacal commitment to his philosophy was his architectural photography, samples of which appear on the covers of his four books. But he gave that up many years ago when he came to fear that he might not live long enough to complete his remaining work in philosophy. There are many anecdotes about the ways in which Parfit simplified his life to take as little time as possible away from his work. He ate only twice a day, with almost no variation in what he had at each meal. He ate cold food only, mostly fruits and vegetables without any preparation. Even when he could have had freshly ground coffee with only a minute’s additional preparation, he drank instant coffee, often with water straight from the tap. He sometimes kept a book open on the chest-of-drawers so that he could read while putting on his socks. His speed in reading was phenomenal, in part because his power of concentration was prodigious. Wanting to preserve his mental and physical capacities, he took an hour every evening during his last decade to get vigorous exercise on a stationary bicycle, but never without read-
Derek Parfit by Gail Campbell, 2017
ing philosophy (or occasionally physics) while furiously pedalling. Parfit’s kindness and generosity, not only to his students and friends but to others as well, are legendary. The comments he gave to people on their manuscripts were sometimes longer than the manuscripts themselves, and the comments were invariably articulated in the gentlest, most tactful, encouraging, and constructive way possible. He frequently wept, not for himself but always from compassion for others. A couple of years ago, when he was teaching at Rutgers, he experienced a confluence of medical problems that urgently required that he be anesthetized and placed on a ventilator. When he was allowed to emerge from the sedation nearly 24 hours later, he groggily gestured for pen and paper. His first scribbled thoughts were concerns about his teaching commitments and a thesis defence in which he was supposed to participate at Harvard. When the ventilator tube was removed and he could again speak, he immediately began to discuss with me the
ideas and arguments on which he had been working when I had to rush him to the emergency room. That he was in the intensive care unit seemed not to interest him, and he was largely incurious about what had happened and about what his diagnosis and prognosis were. Even in those circumstances, it was his ideas that mattered most. The next day, Johann Frick, the graduate student whose thesis Parfit was scheduled to examine, came for a visit, during which Parfit delightedly insisted on discussing the thesis with him for several hours. A nurse, having noticed how many visitors Parfit had had, exclaimed, “Jesus Christ had only 12 disciples – but look at you! You’re clearly a very important man. What do you do?” “I work,” Parfit replied with a smile, “on what matters.” © JEFF MCMAHAN 2017
Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. April/May 2017 Philosophy Now 57
On Sympathy: A Dream Dialogue Robert R. Clewis dreams about sympathy.
I
fell asleep. In my dream, there was an announcer. A pudgy, bald man with a microphone blurted out: “Will the real opponents of Sympathy please stand up?” He called them up one by one: Ignorance; Self-Interest; Apathy; Lack of Imagination; Justice. There is one white sheep in this flock, then, I thought: Justice. “Justice is in conflict with Sympathy?” “Yes,” the announcer answered me. I jumped. I had not realized I had voiced my thoughts. I’d assumed I was just part of the crowd. “We are focusing on the hard cases, which involve suffering,” he continued. “Of course, Sympathy can be more easily felt in happier times.” The announcer turned to the participants, and the philosophical exchange began. First Ignorance attacked: “I don’t know why I should have sympathy,” it said. Sympathy’s response was clear and easy: “Inform yourself. Get the word out. Point out wrongs and injustices. Let others know about it.” The threat from Ignorance was important practically speaking, but not philosophically so. The announcer next introduced Self-Interest. It was not Selfishness, which has a connotation of being unethical or impermissible. Self-Interest is the pursuit of one’s own interests, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se. Self-Interest asked: “Why should I care? What’s in it for me? Your problem is not my problem. I am not going to inform myself about your issue – your illness, unemployment, loss: your situation. It doesn’t affect me.” The announcer also introduced Apathy: “Up next is a very close relative to Self-Interest. In fact, they are twins. We would all rather look after our own affairs; and we’re apathetic because we have better things to do.” Apathy was silent. It didn’t so much argue with Sympathy, as not feel anything at all. The announcer continued, “Still, the twins are not identical. Apathy shows a lack of feeling. Apathy is blind even to the sick child; it turns the other way when facing homelessness and poverty, the pain of others, the injustices suffered. At least Self-Interest feels something – for itself.” But Sympathy had a response for the twins. Sympathy said it could try to motivate by showing how we are all ultimately involved: “You have something at stake,” Sympathy said. “Failure to have sympathy for others’ plights can come back to haunt you. Failure to feel sympathy for the poor can lead to higher crime rates in your backyard. Or, letting states go rogue can make them into training grounds for violent groups,” Sympathy argued. Maintaining that care for others was ultimately good for the person acting was an effective and appealing response. The crowd cheered. It looked convinced. Now it was Lack of Imagination’s turn. While Lack of Imagination might feel something , it could not put itself in the place of a fellow being, and only cried when it was looking directly at an image of suffering. But Sympathy was ready now, well warmed up. It said it would pound Lack of Imagination over and over and over again: with websites, sound bites, videos, shots, tweets, and 58 Philosophy Now April/May 2017
shouts, just to get something going, to move, to motivate. “If you can’t imagine, then I’ll place the image right before you,” Sympathy said, as if threatening. (Sympathy usually played nice.) Sympathy said it would keep showing the video of the malnourished child with flies swarming around her head, or the photo of the three-year-old boy dead on the shoreline:“Whatever it takes to prime the pump.” None of Sympathy’s tactics were very rational . Now it was Justice’s turn. He got the most time. Justice argued that Reason, not Feeling, should underlie one’s acts; especially those said to have moral value. “It sounds like a good and noble principle to help someone move a TV – until you realize that that person you’re helping is wearing a black jumpsuit, navy blue ski cap, and dark leather gloves – that you’re helping him to steal,” Justice declared. “Sympathy, you are blind, and so you can make us do unjust things.” Justice called Reason as a witness. Reason wanted to be in control, for the sake of Justice. Reason claimed that not everyone feels Sympathy, and pointed in the direction of Lack of Imagination, saying, “Sympathy must be cultivated; it is not universal.” Reason then added: “Sympathy comes and goes too. It is not necessary. You are capricious.” Reason was starting to build a pretty solid case: “Sympathy, my good-hearted friend, you are missing the point. You don’t see that we should focus on the notion of justice and rights. You are not unbiased enough. You are too fickle and partial. We can’t love all of humanity. You need a more principlebased approach.” Reason concluded: “You are a good initial guide, but you cannot lead in the end. You cannot help us formulate principles of justice, either in a society or an institution.” Sympathy was shocked, and asked, with a soft, almost hurt tone, “Why not?” “Because, Sympathy, we cannot formulate principles on the basis of feeling. How would we proceed? Would we just see who feels sympathy? In response to what? How much, and in what portion? Not everyone feels sympathy in a given case, and some feel it more than others.” Reason continued: “You are subject to Feeling. You can thus be used unjustly. You can lead to group bias for people who are similar to oneself, excluding those in need. People who do not easily evoke you might be left behind.” Sympathy responded again, “But I can aid morality by helping develop moral sensibility.” Reason answered, “I agree, and to that extent you should be nurtured.” My mind was restless: Could there not be a harmony between Sympathy and Reason? Was a conflict necessary? Couldn’t Sympathy play an important practical role in motivating, without providing any principled solutions? And shouldn’t Sympathy still be refined? At exactly that moment, I woke up. © DR ROBERT R. CLEWIS 2017
Robert R. Clewis is professor of philosophy at Gwynedd Mercy Univer sity, Pennsylvania, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
Professor Daniel Dennett
Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New College of the Humanities
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