Court jesters, deviants, and advocates of the devil
June 9th 2009 00:03
Wikipedia writes, about mediaeval comedians:
J Richard Hackman in an interview with Diane Coutu (Harvard Business Review, May 2009, pp 99-105), talks about how to make teams (in any context) work most efficiently -- and part of his thinking revolves around the deviant.
John Stuart Mill, at the end of the second chapter of On Liberty, gives four reasons for freedom of speech.
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That does seem to be a common idea. People say, "At least it was an experience", they value novel experience, and they wax lyrical about the lows as well as the highs. Sometimes it's as if sheer accumulation of variety of experience is a good.
I think this would come under the catch-all label "objective list" theory. That is, it's one item among many that one might suggest is a component of the good life.
Well, you're implicitly raising the question of one's reasons for thinking that this or that is "the good life". How does anyone know what the good life is...?
Can we talk about the good life as reflections on life... Well, possibly. But I'd want to suggest that this would be an unpopular theory. Among other things, why should everything hang on one's deathbed attitude (if this is what you're suggesting)? Shouldn't life be viewed as a whole? Why should those final reflections outweigh all that went before?
One note to add is that you may be talking about when it's better to have lived than not to have lived at all.
Such a life might be a minimally good life (with "good" meaning "better than nothing"), but it's a different thing from "the good life", which is a sort of ideal, best possible life.
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| In societies where freedom of speech was not recognized as a right, the court jester -- precisely because anything he said was by definition "a jest" and "the uttering of a fool" -- could speak frankly on controversial issues in a way in which anyone else would have been severely punished for. Monarchs understood the usefulness of having such a person at their side...
The Royal Shakespeare Company provides historical context for the role of the fool: "In ancient times courts employed fools and by the Middle Ages the jester was a familiar figure. In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters... Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests. Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603) is said to have rebuked one of her fools for being insufficiently severe with her." |
***
J Richard Hackman in an interview with Diane Coutu (Harvard Business Review, May 2009, pp 99-105), talks about how to make teams (in any context) work most efficiently -- and part of his thinking revolves around the deviant.
| Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning. Deviants are the ones who stand back and say, "Well, wait a minute, why are we even doing this at all? What if we looked at the thing backwards or turned it inside out?"... In our research, we've looked carefully at both teams that produced something original and those that were merely average, where nothing sparkled. It turned out that the teams with deviants outperformed teams without them. |
The article goes on to include a piece by Michael Beschloss on Obama's choice of officials, noting the appointments of Hilary Clinton (a former opponent) as secretary of state, and Robert Gates (a Republican) as defense secretary. Beschloss writes:
| Of course, Obama is taking a risk by hiring so many strong and contentious personalities. He will inevitably have to spend a lot of time and energy serving as referee. This is what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who also brought strong-minded figures into his government... FDR temperamentally loved the infighting. He liked to pit people against one another, believing that competition evoked the best performance from everyone. |
***
John Stuart Mill, at the end of the second chapter of On Liberty, gives four reasons for freedom of speech.
- Dissenting opinions might well be true, and we shouldn't assume our own infallibility.
- Dissenting opinions that are false might still contain a portion of the truth. Mainstream opinions are rarely the entire truth, and it's only by the collision of dissenting with mainstream that the whole truth has any chance of emerging.
- Even if a mainstream opinion is the entire truth, it will amount to an irrational prejudice unless it's vigorously contested. People won't know the reasons for it.
- Dissenting opinions can make a true mainstream opinion more vital. In the process of arguing for the mainstream opinion, you become aware of what's at stake, what the meaning of that opinion is, etc.
Mill writes, for instance:
| If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labour for ourselves. |
And:
| The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonisation of a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a "devil's advocate." The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honours, until all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed... The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of... This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it. |
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Add Comments Philosophy bites: September 2007 (part 1) -- Philosophy as art, etc
April 27th 2009 22:15
Some of the points I found interesting in the September 2007 podcasts.
Tim Crane on Mind and Body
Crane is skeptical of searching for a neural correlate of consciousness, on the grounds that we don't know for sure whether consciousness is a unified thing. We don't know what we're trying to explain. The questions we're asking might be a matter of confusion rather than ignorance. The sort of consciousness we have while dreaming might be difference from the consciousness we have while day-dreaming, which might be different from our consciousness when fully awake.
Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism
What mainly interested me was Warburton asking Warnock about Sartrean ethics. Is it a selfish ethics? What does she think of the way, in the lecture/essay "Existentialism is a humanism", Sartre builds in social responsibility?
I'll make a few notes about this in the next post.
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism
* Everyday moral intuitions about right and wrong are sometimes contradictory, and often leave you unsure as to what choice, in any given situation, is the "right" one. So a lot of people have tried to systematize these intuitions -- to create a code with clear instructions, to find what principles, if any, lie behind our intuitions, and to work out a way to satisfy as many intuitions as possible. Perhaps our intuitions are coherent as they are; or perhaps some need to be modified or even thrown away to get a best overall fit. (This understanding of what's going on is often described as Rawlsian.)
There are plenty of candidate ethical systems, but one way to categorize them is: deontological, duty-based ethics, which basically believe in rules, rights, obligations (for instance, Christianity is a form of deontological ethics); virtue ethics, which place emphasis on developing virtuous people -- perhaps any question about rules can be sidestepped; and consequentialist ethics (like utilitarianism), which believe you should weigh up consequences when deciding what to do.
* But at what level should consequentialism make decisions -- should it stop and calculate the good and bad at the level of each action, at the level of rules and general guidelines, or at the level of social institutions?
Hooker believes in some form of rule consequentialism -- what we should do, morally, is follow rules; but the ultimate justification for those rules is that they lead to the best consequences; such consequences, on Hooker's approach, would include happiness, but there are also other goods.
* How do you figure out which rules to follow? Hooker accepts that it's difficult to calculate. So he would "back off to a modest, incrementalist position" -- just stick with established social rules, unless you can identify an improvement.
* Hooker remarks that we have moral intutions about how demanding morality should be. This is also a factor in working out any moral system.
* He goes on to note that, for consequentialism in particular, there are also costs, difficulties in getting people to internalize a new rule -- emotional costs, teaching costs, impacts on relationships... At some point, the costs of getting people to accept a more demanding rule would outweigh the benefits of possessing that rule.
* Main issue that interests me is moral intuitions. If you're going to claim that the point of the game is to systematize intuitions, and this is what the various systems are fighting over, the obvious question is why anyone should care about intuitions at all, particularly if you don't believe in "moral sense" theory, where intuitions are supposed to be perceptions of moral realities. Thus Peter Singer remarks on trolley problems and the gap between rationality and evolutionary instinct, and Michael Devitt attacks intuitions about language on the basis that people aren't necessarily the best judges of what they're doing, a good tennis player isn't necessarily a good tennis coach, corpus evidence, empirical data, count for more than feeling.
So why care about intutions? Well, one answer I've suggested goes like this.
There are different theories of the good life, including various objective list theories (a good life contains x, y, z -- friendship, aesthetic enjoyment, God, whatever...), and various theories that are basically objective lists with one main item -- hedonisms (a good life is one where good states of mind are maximized), desire fulfilment theories (a good life maximizes satisfaction of desire), narrative theories (a good life is one whose overall shape forms some sort of unity).
Intuition-based ethics are arguably dependent on one of these theories.
-- You could say that satisfying common sense moral intuitions is an item on an objective list (one can put anything on an objective list).
-- You could talk about the conscious satisfaction, the happiness, from behaving morally -- and this seems to be the route that Peter Singer goes down. -- Why behave morally at all? Because, says Singer, it's an element, for many people, of living a meaningful life.
-- You could treat each moral intuition as itself a desire wanting fulfilment; or you could postulate a "metadesire" to be a moral person, or to maximally satisfy or systematize all of one's intuitions.
-- You could treat behaving morally as open to aesthetic evaluation -- perhaps a moral life is a beautiful life, or is an important part of one.
Jonathan Ree on Philosophy as an Art
* One theme of this interview is that philosophy is a "vast tradition" -- it extends over a long time, and across cultures -- but in the 20th century it's confined in the little glass houses that are philosophy departments, produced for a very small number of people, and the role of philosopher has been narrowed to "bullshit detector".
* Ree thinks the proper response shouldn't be "What you're saying is nonsense; stop talking", but "That's interesting. You're trying to say something. Let's work out what it is". Philosophy shouldn't be an exercise in closing your ears.
* Against the idea of philosophy as transmission of truth, Ree remarks on:
-- Kierkegaard's books not as statements of doctrine but as experiments -- what if you thought about this like this, what if you told the story like this;
-- teaching with a sense of dialogue between teacher and student (Socrates, Kierkegaard). What painters learn from Cezanne is anxiety, said Picasso -- not technique as such. What one should instil is the practice of slowing down a bit; one needs to teach not only the ideas, but also the space around the ideas. Wittgenstein is said to instil an anxiety.
* In what sense is philosophy art? The main factor Ree points to is not stylistic beauty sentence by sentence, but "symphonic architecture". It's a fault of academic philosophy, says Ree, that it focuses on small-scale arguments. After Ree became obsessed with Wagner and grasped the idea that you're meant to sit for four or five days to take in the whole meaning of a musical work, then he better understood Spinoza's Ethics, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Hegel's Phenomenology, Descartes' Meditations.
The two claims here might be:
-- There is "beauty, magnificence, truth" that can arise on a larger scale.
-- There is an journey that you're being invited to go on as you read through these works. (Just as reading this blog is the journey of becoming very tired, then falling asleep.)
* A few things I want to write in response.
Firstly, an anecdote that seems to me connected with "symphonic architecture". I think it was Wilfrid Sellars who required that his thesis students, when writing about a philosopher, read all the writings of that philosopher. I don't know the reason he gave, but there's lots of holism sense that could be supplied. If you think that beliefs and arguments travel in groups, supporting each other, then to appreciate the impact of a claim, and the reasoning behind it, you can't look at the claim in isolation.
Another way to approach this is via the idea of context. People complain about being quoted "out of context". But if one is searching for wider context to better grasp meaning, then the circles expand and expand -- the sentence conditions the meaning of the word; the paragraph conditions the sentence; the chapter conditions the paragraph; the book conditions the chapter; the opus conditions the book; the intellectual environment conditions the opus...
Secondly, here's a list (probably fairly obvious and certainly non-exhaustive) of ways in which I think philosophy might be arty (or art might be philosophical):
-- Aesthetic qualities. Philosophy is open to aesthetic evaluation, to being described in aesthetic terms, to evoking aesthetic responses. Thus one can speak of a "beautiful proof" in mathematics. Or Lolita speaks of Clare Quilty as having a "beautiful Eastern philosophy of life".
-- Form and style. The expression can be self-consciously literary, from pleasing stylistics and rhetorical devices, to overall form -- dialogues (eg Hume, Plato), aphorisms (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer), essays (Montaigne), poetry (Lucretius), novels (Sartre, Camus), etc.
-- Human content. Much of philosophy has a human focus in a way that mathematics or exploration of the natural world don't. I think not just of ethics, or philosophies concerned with human phenomena -- mind, knowledge, beauty... -- but also of the way that a lot of philosophy operates on natural language and concepts, requiring a sensitivity to words, meanings, ideas, sensations.
-- Self-expression. As with Sellars, one could understand a philosophy as embodying a perspective on the world, as having the mark of its author's life and personality, including his or her prejudices and fears and obsessions. More broadly, historians frequently understand philosophies as cultural artifacts expressive of an epoch.
This expressive dimension is probably particularly obvious in some types of phenomenological philosophy, where you're trying to describe an experience and say something about the structure of it. The difference between such philosophy and literature might be that you're attempting this in a systematic way, or that you're relating your findings to particular theories.
-- Skill. "Art" in origin means "skill", and we often speak of highly proficient people in this way -- Roger Federer has refined tennis to the level of an art. There's any number of possible qualities people have in mind, including more traditional aesthetic qualities (what it means for cooking to be an art is partly for food to be prepared with attention to its perceptual dimensions). But a common idea in art-as-skill is the ability to do difficult things whilst making them look easy -- so one might talk about grace, control, precision, economy; surprising moves, or feats with a very low probability of success; and innovation, and mastery of the fundamentals to such an extent that the person is operating in a different airspace from everyone else, is now grappling with different problems.
Well, there's lots of skills involved in philosophy, from mastery of the tradition of philosophy, to language skills (comprehension, interpretation, expression -- navigating within the vagaries of words), to analysis, reasoning, argumentation skills (there's plenty of "familiar moves" in arguments; Alan Hajek speaks of heuristics in philosophy, particularly in terms of finding counterarguments, and compares them to heuristics in chess).
There are also skills in teaching philosophy -- knowing how to press your students' buttons, encouraging them to be inquisitive, rational and open, making them appreciate the force of a problem, etc.
-- Creativity. There are skills and rules of thumb, certainly, as in painting, but the composition of philosophy involves frequent jumps, insights, inspirations, free associations, improvisations; it can't be reduced to method or hack work. You can't use brute force computation to break a problem, but there's rather a sort of tentative exploration, trying different perspectives on a problem, different routes to answering it.
John Searle once spoke as philosophy as a sort of pre-science -- it's what you do when a method hasn't been agreed on. Once a method is generally agreed upon, that question breaks off from philosophy and becomes physics, or psychology, or economics...
***
Tim Crane on Mind and Body
Tim Crane
Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism
What mainly interested me was Warburton asking Warnock about Sartrean ethics. Is it a selfish ethics? What does she think of the way, in the lecture/essay "Existentialism is a humanism", Sartre builds in social responsibility?
I'll make a few notes about this in the next post.
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism
Brad Hooker
There are plenty of candidate ethical systems, but one way to categorize them is: deontological, duty-based ethics, which basically believe in rules, rights, obligations (for instance, Christianity is a form of deontological ethics); virtue ethics, which place emphasis on developing virtuous people -- perhaps any question about rules can be sidestepped; and consequentialist ethics (like utilitarianism), which believe you should weigh up consequences when deciding what to do.
* But at what level should consequentialism make decisions -- should it stop and calculate the good and bad at the level of each action, at the level of rules and general guidelines, or at the level of social institutions?
Hooker believes in some form of rule consequentialism -- what we should do, morally, is follow rules; but the ultimate justification for those rules is that they lead to the best consequences; such consequences, on Hooker's approach, would include happiness, but there are also other goods.
* How do you figure out which rules to follow? Hooker accepts that it's difficult to calculate. So he would "back off to a modest, incrementalist position" -- just stick with established social rules, unless you can identify an improvement.
* Hooker remarks that we have moral intutions about how demanding morality should be. This is also a factor in working out any moral system.
* He goes on to note that, for consequentialism in particular, there are also costs, difficulties in getting people to internalize a new rule -- emotional costs, teaching costs, impacts on relationships... At some point, the costs of getting people to accept a more demanding rule would outweigh the benefits of possessing that rule.
* Main issue that interests me is moral intuitions. If you're going to claim that the point of the game is to systematize intuitions, and this is what the various systems are fighting over, the obvious question is why anyone should care about intuitions at all, particularly if you don't believe in "moral sense" theory, where intuitions are supposed to be perceptions of moral realities. Thus Peter Singer remarks on trolley problems and the gap between rationality and evolutionary instinct, and Michael Devitt attacks intuitions about language on the basis that people aren't necessarily the best judges of what they're doing, a good tennis player isn't necessarily a good tennis coach, corpus evidence, empirical data, count for more than feeling.
So why care about intutions? Well, one answer I've suggested goes like this.
There are different theories of the good life, including various objective list theories (a good life contains x, y, z -- friendship, aesthetic enjoyment, God, whatever...), and various theories that are basically objective lists with one main item -- hedonisms (a good life is one where good states of mind are maximized), desire fulfilment theories (a good life maximizes satisfaction of desire), narrative theories (a good life is one whose overall shape forms some sort of unity).
Intuition-based ethics are arguably dependent on one of these theories.
-- You could say that satisfying common sense moral intuitions is an item on an objective list (one can put anything on an objective list).
-- You could talk about the conscious satisfaction, the happiness, from behaving morally -- and this seems to be the route that Peter Singer goes down. -- Why behave morally at all? Because, says Singer, it's an element, for many people, of living a meaningful life.
-- You could treat each moral intuition as itself a desire wanting fulfilment; or you could postulate a "metadesire" to be a moral person, or to maximally satisfy or systematize all of one's intuitions.
-- You could treat behaving morally as open to aesthetic evaluation -- perhaps a moral life is a beautiful life, or is an important part of one.
Jonathan Ree on Philosophy as an Art
Jonathan Ree
* Ree thinks the proper response shouldn't be "What you're saying is nonsense; stop talking", but "That's interesting. You're trying to say something. Let's work out what it is". Philosophy shouldn't be an exercise in closing your ears.
* Against the idea of philosophy as transmission of truth, Ree remarks on:
-- Kierkegaard's books not as statements of doctrine but as experiments -- what if you thought about this like this, what if you told the story like this;
-- teaching with a sense of dialogue between teacher and student (Socrates, Kierkegaard). What painters learn from Cezanne is anxiety, said Picasso -- not technique as such. What one should instil is the practice of slowing down a bit; one needs to teach not only the ideas, but also the space around the ideas. Wittgenstein is said to instil an anxiety.
* In what sense is philosophy art? The main factor Ree points to is not stylistic beauty sentence by sentence, but "symphonic architecture". It's a fault of academic philosophy, says Ree, that it focuses on small-scale arguments. After Ree became obsessed with Wagner and grasped the idea that you're meant to sit for four or five days to take in the whole meaning of a musical work, then he better understood Spinoza's Ethics, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Hegel's Phenomenology, Descartes' Meditations.
The two claims here might be:
-- There is "beauty, magnificence, truth" that can arise on a larger scale.
-- There is an journey that you're being invited to go on as you read through these works. (Just as reading this blog is the journey of becoming very tired, then falling asleep.)
* A few things I want to write in response.
Firstly, an anecdote that seems to me connected with "symphonic architecture". I think it was Wilfrid Sellars who required that his thesis students, when writing about a philosopher, read all the writings of that philosopher. I don't know the reason he gave, but there's lots of holism sense that could be supplied. If you think that beliefs and arguments travel in groups, supporting each other, then to appreciate the impact of a claim, and the reasoning behind it, you can't look at the claim in isolation.
Another way to approach this is via the idea of context. People complain about being quoted "out of context". But if one is searching for wider context to better grasp meaning, then the circles expand and expand -- the sentence conditions the meaning of the word; the paragraph conditions the sentence; the chapter conditions the paragraph; the book conditions the chapter; the opus conditions the book; the intellectual environment conditions the opus...
Secondly, here's a list (probably fairly obvious and certainly non-exhaustive) of ways in which I think philosophy might be arty (or art might be philosophical):
-- Aesthetic qualities. Philosophy is open to aesthetic evaluation, to being described in aesthetic terms, to evoking aesthetic responses. Thus one can speak of a "beautiful proof" in mathematics. Or Lolita speaks of Clare Quilty as having a "beautiful Eastern philosophy of life".
-- Form and style. The expression can be self-consciously literary, from pleasing stylistics and rhetorical devices, to overall form -- dialogues (eg Hume, Plato), aphorisms (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer), essays (Montaigne), poetry (Lucretius), novels (Sartre, Camus), etc.
-- Human content. Much of philosophy has a human focus in a way that mathematics or exploration of the natural world don't. I think not just of ethics, or philosophies concerned with human phenomena -- mind, knowledge, beauty... -- but also of the way that a lot of philosophy operates on natural language and concepts, requiring a sensitivity to words, meanings, ideas, sensations.
-- Self-expression. As with Sellars, one could understand a philosophy as embodying a perspective on the world, as having the mark of its author's life and personality, including his or her prejudices and fears and obsessions. More broadly, historians frequently understand philosophies as cultural artifacts expressive of an epoch.
This expressive dimension is probably particularly obvious in some types of phenomenological philosophy, where you're trying to describe an experience and say something about the structure of it. The difference between such philosophy and literature might be that you're attempting this in a systematic way, or that you're relating your findings to particular theories.
-- Skill. "Art" in origin means "skill", and we often speak of highly proficient people in this way -- Roger Federer has refined tennis to the level of an art. There's any number of possible qualities people have in mind, including more traditional aesthetic qualities (what it means for cooking to be an art is partly for food to be prepared with attention to its perceptual dimensions). But a common idea in art-as-skill is the ability to do difficult things whilst making them look easy -- so one might talk about grace, control, precision, economy; surprising moves, or feats with a very low probability of success; and innovation, and mastery of the fundamentals to such an extent that the person is operating in a different airspace from everyone else, is now grappling with different problems.
Well, there's lots of skills involved in philosophy, from mastery of the tradition of philosophy, to language skills (comprehension, interpretation, expression -- navigating within the vagaries of words), to analysis, reasoning, argumentation skills (there's plenty of "familiar moves" in arguments; Alan Hajek speaks of heuristics in philosophy, particularly in terms of finding counterarguments, and compares them to heuristics in chess).
There are also skills in teaching philosophy -- knowing how to press your students' buttons, encouraging them to be inquisitive, rational and open, making them appreciate the force of a problem, etc.
-- Creativity. There are skills and rules of thumb, certainly, as in painting, but the composition of philosophy involves frequent jumps, insights, inspirations, free associations, improvisations; it can't be reduced to method or hack work. You can't use brute force computation to break a problem, but there's rather a sort of tentative exploration, trying different perspectives on a problem, different routes to answering it.
John Searle once spoke as philosophy as a sort of pre-science -- it's what you do when a method hasn't been agreed on. Once a method is generally agreed upon, that question breaks off from philosophy and becomes physics, or psychology, or economics...
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Good sense of humour
April 25th 2009 08:01
We have five basic senses, but people speak also of a "sense of humour", "sense of self", etc -- there's countless "senses" really.
When you say that so-and-so has a good sense of humour, what you probably mean is "Their sense of humour agrees with mine -- they laugh at the things I find funny" (cf good judgement, good taste...). So in this respect a GSOH isn't so different from good eyesight -- it's a question of perceiving aright.
But it isn't just perceiving. "GSOH" could have plenty of other implications -- that the person can tell jokes as well as recognize them, that they have an appreciation of quality jokes, that they laugh frequently, that they're optimistic, that they don't take themselves or life too seriously, that they can be the butt of a joke without raging, and so forth.
What you have is a nexus of qualities, abilities, skills related to perceiving. "GSOH" comments on personality in a way that "good eyesight" doesn't.
The word "sense" here is closer to "sensibility", "mentality". To say that someone has a "Victorian sensibility" means that they view the world a certain way, they have certain (moral) beliefs, aesthetic values, prejudices, they're inclined to react in certain ways...
When you say that so-and-so has a good sense of humour, what you probably mean is "Their sense of humour agrees with mine -- they laugh at the things I find funny" (cf good judgement, good taste...). So in this respect a GSOH isn't so different from good eyesight -- it's a question of perceiving aright.
But it isn't just perceiving. "GSOH" could have plenty of other implications -- that the person can tell jokes as well as recognize them, that they have an appreciation of quality jokes, that they laugh frequently, that they're optimistic, that they don't take themselves or life too seriously, that they can be the butt of a joke without raging, and so forth.
What you have is a nexus of qualities, abilities, skills related to perceiving. "GSOH" comments on personality in a way that "good eyesight" doesn't.
The word "sense" here is closer to "sensibility", "mentality". To say that someone has a "Victorian sensibility" means that they view the world a certain way, they have certain (moral) beliefs, aesthetic values, prejudices, they're inclined to react in certain ways...
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Types of belief
April 21st 2009 23:20
I've written about this in the past, but here it is again.
Catholics have a verbal formula called the Apostles' Creed. It's used at baptisms, and, depending on your church, sometimes as part of masses and other ceremonies[ Click here to read more ]
Catholics have a verbal formula called the Apostles' Creed. It's used at baptisms, and, depending on your church, sometimes as part of masses and other ceremonies
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Read More Should Darren have won?
April 21st 2009 04:46
Darren is working his butt off training for a race. And not only does he work his butt off, but he's an amazing person -- he's kind, generous, and likes babies and small animals. And not only is he an amazing person, but winning the race would mean a lot to him. He could get an athletics scholarship, the girl he likes would finally notice him, his mother dying of cancer would see her dreams fulfilled, etc.
So Darren enters the race -- and he loses -- to the school bully, who not only is an asshole, but also didn't put an ounce of sweat into training -- he was just born with good genes. The victory means nothing to him, except another opportunity to laugh at Darren[ Click here to read more ]
So Darren enters the race -- and he loses -- to the school bully, who not only is an asshole, but also didn't put an ounce of sweat into training -- he was just born with good genes. The victory means nothing to him, except another opportunity to laugh at Darren
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Relativism
April 20th 2009 06:26
The relativism I'm thinking about goes:
"The truth or falsity of all moral assertions (apart from this one) is relative to the moral codes of particular groups or persons[ Click here to read more ]
"The truth or falsity of all moral assertions (apart from this one) is relative to the moral codes of particular groups or persons
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Wrong expectations
April 19th 2009 05:34
Two examples.
1. You want simply to build a shelf, it doesn't matter what type, it's just a temporary, makeshift shelf to hold some equipment, and your friend knows this. So you're nailing planks together, when your friend turns to you and says, "That's the wrong way to do it." You ask why. He answers, "You're nailing in the wrong place. It's more secure if you nail a little to the left[ Click here to read more ]
1. You want simply to build a shelf, it doesn't matter what type, it's just a temporary, makeshift shelf to hold some equipment, and your friend knows this. So you're nailing planks together, when your friend turns to you and says, "That's the wrong way to do it." You ask why. He answers, "You're nailing in the wrong place. It's more secure if you nail a little to the left
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Philosophy bites: August 2007
April 18th 2009 05:24
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Philosophy bites: July 2007
April 14th 2009 12:38
Some of the points I found interesting or thought-provoking from the July 2007 podcasts.
[ Click here to read more ]
***
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Philosophy bites: June 2007
April 5th 2009 02:06
Recently discovered a great series of philosophy podcasts, "Philosophy Bites". So from now until the end of the year, I'll make a few notes each week on what I've been listening to.
Here are some of the shows from June 2007
[ Click here to read more ]
Here are some of the shows from June 2007
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Recent Comments
Comment by Nonymous
on 2009 NRL Player Movements (Updated 18/03 - Eastwood joins Bulldogs)
May 16th 2009 18:59
Random post.
(Forgive this random post. For some reason, I've been receiving literally hundreds of e-mail notifications of replies to this post over the past few months. Just trying to deactivate the "notify me of replies" function.)
(Forgive this random post. For some reason, I've been receiving literally hundreds of e-mail notifications of replies to this post over the past few months. Just trying to deactivate the "notify me of replies" function.)
Comment by Nonymous
on Theories of self-interest (Derek Parfit)
September 25th 2008 13:09
- Can we add to the good life theories 'experience in itself', without mentioning any qualitative attributes?
That does seem to be a common idea. People say, "At least it was an experience", they value novel experience, and they wax lyrical about the lows as well as the highs. Sometimes it's as if sheer accumulation of variety of experience is a good.
I think this would come under the catch-all label "objective list" theory. That is, it's one item among many that one might suggest is a component of the good life.
- Can we ignore experience altogether and just talk about the good life as good reflections on life, whether I had my desires fulfilled or not, whether or not I had more pleasure than pain?
Well, you're implicitly raising the question of one's reasons for thinking that this or that is "the good life". How does anyone know what the good life is...?
Can we talk about the good life as reflections on life... Well, possibly. But I'd want to suggest that this would be an unpopular theory. Among other things, why should everything hang on one's deathbed attitude (if this is what you're suggesting)? Shouldn't life be viewed as a whole? Why should those final reflections outweigh all that went before?
- I might have terrible experiences, but upon reflection, I could still stay my life was good, that I wouldn't exchange it for anything.
- I may experience constant pain all my life, but on reflection II wouldn't want you to kill me and have the 'negative pleasure' of death. (Quite absurd to talk of death as 'negative pleasure', I know).
- I may experience constant pain all my life, but on reflection II wouldn't want you to kill me and have the 'negative pleasure' of death. (Quite absurd to talk of death as 'negative pleasure', I know).
One note to add is that you may be talking about when it's better to have lived than not to have lived at all.
Such a life might be a minimally good life (with "good" meaning "better than nothing"), but it's a different thing from "the good life", which is a sort of ideal, best possible life.
Comment by Nonymous
on Theories of self-interest (Derek Parfit)
September 24th 2008 14:09
Mr Man, that's a very sharp comment.
Not entirely sure; it's an interesting case. But I'd speculate that Parfit would say "No". He'd say you were a desire theorist.
So the definition goes "all pleasures are when experienced wanted". Now, it's not spelled out, but I think the idea is that something internal to the state causes you to want more of it. The "when" in the formula isn't just temporal coincidence, but has some sort of causal force.
It's possible that a hedonist theorist might agree with you -- "No, they're not the only two categories we care about" and still claim "But they're the only two categories relevant for 'the good life'".
Well, the hedonist-desire-objective list category scheme is very broad, this is true. When you start to look at all the theories of the good life posed across the millennia, there's an awful lot of variety.
As to whether it's a possible scheme... There's various ways one could judge this. Does everything one might call a theory of the good life fit into one of the categories? Is the scheme itself conceptually coherent? -- Well, personally, I think it stands up pretty well on both these counts, although I do suggest in another post that "narrative theories" of the good life might be a good addition as a fourth category.
As to whether it's a useful scheme... Well, this just depends on the purpose for which you're using it. Should you have a three-category structure, or one category, or 100 categories...? Maybe it's simply a question of one's taste for the baroque.
What if I desired a state of consciousness in which pleasure and pain were not primary concerns? Am I hedonist or not?
Not entirely sure; it's an interesting case. But I'd speculate that Parfit would say "No". He'd say you were a desire theorist.
So the definition goes "all pleasures are when experienced wanted". Now, it's not spelled out, but I think the idea is that something internal to the state causes you to want more of it. The "when" in the formula isn't just temporal coincidence, but has some sort of causal force.
Or are pleasure and pain always our primary concerns, the only two categories we care about?
It's possible that a hedonist theorist might agree with you -- "No, they're not the only two categories we care about" and still claim "But they're the only two categories relevant for 'the good life'".
You have defined hedonism too broadly to be useful methinks.
Well, the hedonist-desire-objective list category scheme is very broad, this is true. When you start to look at all the theories of the good life posed across the millennia, there's an awful lot of variety.
As to whether it's a possible scheme... There's various ways one could judge this. Does everything one might call a theory of the good life fit into one of the categories? Is the scheme itself conceptually coherent? -- Well, personally, I think it stands up pretty well on both these counts, although I do suggest in another post that "narrative theories" of the good life might be a good addition as a fourth category.
As to whether it's a useful scheme... Well, this just depends on the purpose for which you're using it. Should you have a three-category structure, or one category, or 100 categories...? Maybe it's simply a question of one's taste for the baroque.
Hi Morgan, thanks for the thoughtful comment.
Basically, yes. I suppose this post was supposed to be read in the context of the previous post on slavery.
What if they were distressed, but were not looking for help?
Your way of resolving the situation is probably as fair as any, but I don't think it's an answer that everyone could come to. Without giving you a proper reply, I think there's plenty of situations where people need to be saved from themselves. After all, the choices you form under situations of duress are not always "real" choices. Consider the situation of the "contented slave", or consider battered housewives. People grow accustomed to their chains.
If someone tells you, "My husband beats me up every night. I don't like it, but I don't want you to do anything about it", how would you react? I want to suggest that a lot of people would have difficulty here, and can't simply tell themselves "Well, it's her choice. So my conscience is clear."
Well, I don't know if this is a fair parallel, but consider a different circumstance. It's 1935, the young man in question is considering joining the Hitler youth, and the 40-year-old is passionately anti-Nazi. One might argue that it's his professional responsibility to present both sides of the choice, but is that his moral responsibility? What ought he do?
firstly, the way you have highlighted the word "debt" makes me feel like there is some question as to whether the "debt" is genuine - was that your intention?
Basically, yes. I suppose this post was supposed to be read in the context of the previous post on slavery.
if the same person looked distressed and asked for help i would assist them
What if they were distressed, but were not looking for help?
my decision would rest entirely on their answer to the question "do you want me to help you?" yes/no
Your way of resolving the situation is probably as fair as any, but I don't think it's an answer that everyone could come to. Without giving you a proper reply, I think there's plenty of situations where people need to be saved from themselves. After all, the choices you form under situations of duress are not always "real" choices. Consider the situation of the "contented slave", or consider battered housewives. People grow accustomed to their chains.
If someone tells you, "My husband beats me up every night. I don't like it, but I don't want you to do anything about it", how would you react? I want to suggest that a lot of people would have difficulty here, and can't simply tell themselves "Well, it's her choice. So my conscience is clear."
then he MUST arrange for the young man to speak with someone who will present the other side of the argument... this is his professional responsibility and he is negligent in his duties if he doesnt comply
Well, I don't know if this is a fair parallel, but consider a different circumstance. It's 1935, the young man in question is considering joining the Hitler youth, and the 40-year-old is passionately anti-Nazi. One might argue that it's his professional responsibility to present both sides of the choice, but is that his moral responsibility? What ought he do?
Hey guys, thanks for reading and commenting!
I've mentioned this before, but there's an episode of the Simpsons where Bart runs for class president, against Martin Prince.
Cue montage of scenes, including:
[Bart standing up on a table, finger pointing at Martin, denouncing him.] "He says: there are no easy answers. I say: he's not looking hard enough!!!" [Class applauds and cheers.]
There are two extremes: on the one hand, masturbatory overcomplication, making mountains out of molehills, perhaps resulting in talk talk talk and academic inaction (and, as Martin found, this is harder to sell to an electorate); on the other hand, unthinking fanaticism, or crude, fascistic, oversimplifying.
I might well tend towards the former... wankers rather than fundamentalists...
I don't think I'm alone though. I think most people have plenty of doubts about many of their moral decisions, and I think this is a good thing. Arendt says something like: in the time of the Reich, doubters were more trustworthy, morally speaking, than people full of cerrtainty.
This post wasn't intentionally comic, but what does intention matter -- entirely up to you to be amused, or bored, or whatever, if you can be bothered to read at all.
Well... I've always thought of this blog more as a diary than anything else; it's more a case of collecting my own thoughts rather than teaching anyone anything.
The main thought I wanted to express is that real life moral problems are much more complex than philosophers sometimes make out... Clearly I haven't convinced you of this
...
Personally, I do find the two example situations difficult to resolve. And they're straight from real life, incidentally -- people I know have faced / are facing them...
What would you do in these situations? And is your choice attended by no doubts or uncertainties?
Well, if I'm reading you right, you're talking about situations where people have two choices ("pick a side"), and ask themselves, "Should I do what I believe is right, or should I do what I believe is wrong?". You suggest that they should act on their convictions of what's right.
I don't think I'm talking about that sort of situation.
Among other things, in the two examples above:
-- what the "sides" are is unclear; there are any number of possible actions the person could take;
-- it's not always a matter of conflicting sides, one right and one wrong, but there can be questions about how far you should go, how much you should do;
-- most importantly, the people here don't have convictions about what to do; they're genuinely unsure what to do; so telling them "Do what you understand is right" doesn't help them.
One more thought...
Aquinas wrote about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Now, to many people today, who don't believe in angels, such a question is a non-question. So whether something is a genuine problem or not depends on what beliefs you hold.
Regarding the two examples in my post, which I've claimed are difficult situations... Well, they're going to be difficult or easy depending on what beliefs you hold, what obligations you feel, etc...
***
I've mentioned this before, but there's an episode of the Simpsons where Bart runs for class president, against Martin Prince.
Cue montage of scenes, including:
[Bart standing up on a table, finger pointing at Martin, denouncing him.] "He says: there are no easy answers. I say: he's not looking hard enough!!!" [Class applauds and cheers.]
There are two extremes: on the one hand, masturbatory overcomplication, making mountains out of molehills, perhaps resulting in talk talk talk and academic inaction (and, as Martin found, this is harder to sell to an electorate); on the other hand, unthinking fanaticism, or crude, fascistic, oversimplifying.
I might well tend towards the former... wankers rather than fundamentalists...
I don't think I'm alone though. I think most people have plenty of doubts about many of their moral decisions, and I think this is a good thing. Arendt says something like: in the time of the Reich, doubters were more trustworthy, morally speaking, than people full of cerrtainty.
***
Is this a comedy blog about simplicity?
This post wasn't intentionally comic, but what does intention matter -- entirely up to you to be amused, or bored, or whatever, if you can be bothered to read at all.
Or do you write so much for some other reason than teaching people the path to simplicity?
Well... I've always thought of this blog more as a diary than anything else; it's more a case of collecting my own thoughts rather than teaching anyone anything.
The main thought I wanted to express is that real life moral problems are much more complex than philosophers sometimes make out... Clearly I haven't convinced you of this
...Personally, I do find the two example situations difficult to resolve. And they're straight from real life, incidentally -- people I know have faced / are facing them...
What would you do in these situations? And is your choice attended by no doubts or uncertainties?
***
You pick a side in the conflict based upon your understand of what is right or wrong
Well, if I'm reading you right, you're talking about situations where people have two choices ("pick a side"), and ask themselves, "Should I do what I believe is right, or should I do what I believe is wrong?". You suggest that they should act on their convictions of what's right.
I don't think I'm talking about that sort of situation.
Among other things, in the two examples above:
-- what the "sides" are is unclear; there are any number of possible actions the person could take;
-- it's not always a matter of conflicting sides, one right and one wrong, but there can be questions about how far you should go, how much you should do;
-- most importantly, the people here don't have convictions about what to do; they're genuinely unsure what to do; so telling them "Do what you understand is right" doesn't help them.
***
One more thought...
Aquinas wrote about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Now, to many people today, who don't believe in angels, such a question is a non-question. So whether something is a genuine problem or not depends on what beliefs you hold.
Regarding the two examples in my post, which I've claimed are difficult situations... Well, they're going to be difficult or easy depending on what beliefs you hold, what obligations you feel, etc...
Comment by Nonymous
on Normalization
September 5th 2008 19:07
Mr M, thanks for reading!
I wonder, though, how true my claim about convergent evolution is...
Certainly, there seem to have been a lot of talk lately, in the Australia media, about Labor adopting Liberal policies, and so forth
But among other things, the assessment depends on from what perspective you're looking. I mean, whenever anyone says that two things are "quite different" or "quite similar", what are they comparing to? On what basis are they assessing degree of similarity?
Perhaps Martians would think that humans, apes, pigs, and dolphins are "quite similiar", although we customarily perceive enormous differences even between individual humans.
... dangerous levels of common sense...
I wonder, though, how true my claim about convergent evolution is...
Certainly, there seem to have been a lot of talk lately, in the Australia media, about Labor adopting Liberal policies, and so forth
But among other things, the assessment depends on from what perspective you're looking. I mean, whenever anyone says that two things are "quite different" or "quite similar", what are they comparing to? On what basis are they assessing degree of similarity?
Perhaps Martians would think that humans, apes, pigs, and dolphins are "quite similiar", although we customarily perceive enormous differences even between individual humans.
Comment by Nonymous
on Replies to Sartre
July 5th 2008 03:48
Hi Bill, I've thought a little more about your comment. Is the following a fair representation of what you're saying?
1. There are objective moral truths (like "torture is wrong because torturers get carnal pleasure from it and therefore want to do it again").
2. These truths are self-evident.
3. Post-modernists are an example of people who deny these truths.
4. Therefore post-modernism is mistaken.
1. There are objective moral truths (like "torture is wrong because torturers get carnal pleasure from it and therefore want to do it again").
2. These truths are self-evident.
3. Post-modernists are an example of people who deny these truths.
4. Therefore post-modernism is mistaken.
Comment by Nonymous
on Replies to Sartre
July 4th 2008 21:09
Hey guys, thanks for the comments!
Dear Cibby,
Well, here's some random thoughts...
-- Not everyone has a taste for chess, or for mathematics, or for art, or for sports. My girlfriend doesn't "get" computer games. Che Guevera was notoriously amusical -- couldn't see the point of music at all...
-- Problems only arise from particular ways of thinking. You're only going to worry about how many angels dance on the head of a pin if you believe in angels; you only worry about the existence of God if religion has been important in your life or the lives of people you care about; and the same is true of any problem asked relative to any theory, "scientific" or otherwise.
-- The urgency of questions and their answers is also going to vary from person to person. A person like Russell might care deeply about finding some sort of certainty in life; another person might care about the rightness or wrongness of abortion; another might care about what they should be doing when they're doing art; another might be very curious about explaining consciousness.
Some more random thoughts...
-- John Searle and Zizek have a view of philosophy as an activity people engage in when no method is decided upon. Once you decide on a method, it's no longer a philosophical issue -- it breaks off from philosophy to become experimental science, or logic, or psychology, or economics, or sociology, or whatever... Perhaps frustration is natural to such a discipline.
-- I suppose frustration arises relative to expectations and desires -- if you want or expect something, and don't get it, then you're frustrated... But what beliefs are you holding such that you're able to be frustrated, and are these beliefs true? For instance, do you expect philosophy to deliver something that it can't?
-- Philosophy does give plenty of answers; it's a false stereotype that it doesn't. But it doesn't often arrive at answers that are satisfactory to everyone -- they tend only to be satisfying to people who accept certain premises. Plenty of people have theories of mind, language, ethics, and so forth; and they're able to attract huge numbers of disciples. It's just that they don't attract everyone...
But isn't the same true of "science"?
Dear Damo,
Do you think they ought to worry about such things, though?
When you say that "Trust pulls most people through", is trust a good thing? Or is it something like unthinking habit, or irrationality, or blind obeisance before tradition?
What exactly are they "trusting"? Are the trusting pure luck -- that fortune will happen to make their instinctive actions accord with what is right?
Dear Bill,
I am hesitant to respond to your comment, for a number of reasons.
For instance:
-- I don't quite grasp your point, nor the thread of your argument (but it's 6am as I'm writing this, and I've been up all night -- I'll try to think about your comment more this evening).
-- I think you're erecting something of a strawman. I don't know much about post-modernism, but I don't think it'll be easy for you to find any person who identifies himself as a "post-modernist" asserting "pain does not exist" (although, you may find an "eliminativist" asserting this, on the basis that the word "pain" is somehow insufficient, and our ordinary mental-term language should be superseded by scientific language). I don't think most post-modernism addresses itself to the status of subjective experience... Why is it that you think that "post-modernism" believes this?
-- About whether chairs still exist in a room when you leave them, I don't think this is a concern of post-modernism either. This sort of question seems to me to pertain more to Descartes-style solipsism, to questions about the status of "external objects", and to an old position that goes under the name "idealism".
-- In your last paragraph you seem to draw a connection between skepticism about external objects and nihilism about ethical values. But I don't think there's any logical connection here. For instance, a classic idealist was Bishop Berkeley, who notoriously believed that there are only minds, and no matter. So he was an irrealist about things like chairs -- but he wasalso a traditional Christian bishop -- so he would have believed in objective moral truths.
-- Whom are you thinking of when you speak of the original French post-modernists who collaborated with Nazis, and in which of their writings do they defend Nazism? I'm inclined to think that post-modernism was instead born out of horror at Nazism, and that there's this continuous drive in what gets labelled "post-modernism" towards developing an ethics that will stop another Holocaust. For instance, there is the worry in Lyotard that "modernism" and Enlightenment ideals somehow led to Auschwitz; there is the concern in Derrida with giving voice to the oppressed; and there is the attempt in Levinas to develop sensitivity to the demands another human presence places on you.
Dear Cibby,
... I feel like a lot of philosophy is a 'so what?' proposition.
Well, here's some random thoughts...
-- Not everyone has a taste for chess, or for mathematics, or for art, or for sports. My girlfriend doesn't "get" computer games. Che Guevera was notoriously amusical -- couldn't see the point of music at all...
-- Problems only arise from particular ways of thinking. You're only going to worry about how many angels dance on the head of a pin if you believe in angels; you only worry about the existence of God if religion has been important in your life or the lives of people you care about; and the same is true of any problem asked relative to any theory, "scientific" or otherwise.
-- The urgency of questions and their answers is also going to vary from person to person. A person like Russell might care deeply about finding some sort of certainty in life; another person might care about the rightness or wrongness of abortion; another might care about what they should be doing when they're doing art; another might be very curious about explaining consciousness.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be studied, but that it frustrates me.
Some more random thoughts...
-- John Searle and Zizek have a view of philosophy as an activity people engage in when no method is decided upon. Once you decide on a method, it's no longer a philosophical issue -- it breaks off from philosophy to become experimental science, or logic, or psychology, or economics, or sociology, or whatever... Perhaps frustration is natural to such a discipline.
-- I suppose frustration arises relative to expectations and desires -- if you want or expect something, and don't get it, then you're frustrated... But what beliefs are you holding such that you're able to be frustrated, and are these beliefs true? For instance, do you expect philosophy to deliver something that it can't?
-- Philosophy does give plenty of answers; it's a false stereotype that it doesn't. But it doesn't often arrive at answers that are satisfactory to everyone -- they tend only to be satisfying to people who accept certain premises. Plenty of people have theories of mind, language, ethics, and so forth; and they're able to attract huge numbers of disciples. It's just that they don't attract everyone...
But isn't the same true of "science"?
***
Dear Damo,
I do however think that few people spend much time milling over the great why of why something is right or wrong.
Do you think they ought to worry about such things, though?
When you say that "Trust pulls most people through", is trust a good thing? Or is it something like unthinking habit, or irrationality, or blind obeisance before tradition?
What exactly are they "trusting"? Are the trusting pure luck -- that fortune will happen to make their instinctive actions accord with what is right?
***
Dear Bill,
I am hesitant to respond to your comment, for a number of reasons.
For instance:
-- I don't quite grasp your point, nor the thread of your argument (but it's 6am as I'm writing this, and I've been up all night -- I'll try to think about your comment more this evening).
-- I think you're erecting something of a strawman. I don't know much about post-modernism, but I don't think it'll be easy for you to find any person who identifies himself as a "post-modernist" asserting "pain does not exist" (although, you may find an "eliminativist" asserting this, on the basis that the word "pain" is somehow insufficient, and our ordinary mental-term language should be superseded by scientific language). I don't think most post-modernism addresses itself to the status of subjective experience... Why is it that you think that "post-modernism" believes this?
-- About whether chairs still exist in a room when you leave them, I don't think this is a concern of post-modernism either. This sort of question seems to me to pertain more to Descartes-style solipsism, to questions about the status of "external objects", and to an old position that goes under the name "idealism".
-- In your last paragraph you seem to draw a connection between skepticism about external objects and nihilism about ethical values. But I don't think there's any logical connection here. For instance, a classic idealist was Bishop Berkeley, who notoriously believed that there are only minds, and no matter. So he was an irrealist about things like chairs -- but he wasalso a traditional Christian bishop -- so he would have believed in objective moral truths.
-- Whom are you thinking of when you speak of the original French post-modernists who collaborated with Nazis, and in which of their writings do they defend Nazism? I'm inclined to think that post-modernism was instead born out of horror at Nazism, and that there's this continuous drive in what gets labelled "post-modernism" towards developing an ethics that will stop another Holocaust. For instance, there is the worry in Lyotard that "modernism" and Enlightenment ideals somehow led to Auschwitz; there is the concern in Derrida with giving voice to the oppressed; and there is the attempt in Levinas to develop sensitivity to the demands another human presence places on you.
Comment by Nonymous
on About legalizing possession of child pornography
July 4th 2008 15:47
Hey Damo,
I think you're basically correct. But here's some funny potential exceptions: what about written child porn; images taken of unaware victims (like upskirt photos); images taken of naked children who aren't involved in sexual acts; animated or computer-generated images; and images of consensual activity. The last category might seem strange, but consider, for instance, that teenagers often make their own porn --
"TEENAGERS are becoming major makers of child pornography in Victoria. Statistics reveal adolescents last year outnumbered middle-aged men two to one as the main offenders in child porn production. Youths 10 to 14 were among the alleged offenders."
-- Carly Crawford and Geoff Wilkinson, "Teens main producers of child porn", 2 July 2008.
I think this is possible, but which of the four arguments are you invoking when you make this claim?
Personally I think that you are unable to obtain Child Porn without a child being subjected to child abuse at some time.
I think you're basically correct. But here's some funny potential exceptions: what about written child porn; images taken of unaware victims (like upskirt photos); images taken of naked children who aren't involved in sexual acts; animated or computer-generated images; and images of consensual activity. The last category might seem strange, but consider, for instance, that teenagers often make their own porn --
"TEENAGERS are becoming major makers of child pornography in Victoria. Statistics reveal adolescents last year outnumbered middle-aged men two to one as the main offenders in child porn production. Youths 10 to 14 were among the alleged offenders."
-- Carly Crawford and Geoff Wilkinson, "Teens main producers of child porn", 2 July 2008.
Possession or otherwise a person is contributing to the exploitation.
I think this is possible, but which of the four arguments are you invoking when you make this claim?
Comment by Nonymous
on Taking a brief break (plus some thoughts on Matthew Johns)
Philosophy Blog
I've been following news on this case as well. The main thing that interests me is the notion of consent.
Three issues: --
1. How do you evaluate consent (legally or morally speaking)? And how black-and-white was this case?
Legally, Johns was cleared.
But in contract law (for instance), if you enter into an agreement while you're drunk, on drugs, or temporarily insane, that might invalidate the contract.
If there was a lot of alcohol involved in the Matt Johns incident, surely this is grey areas, and evaluation of consent is going to be messy?
2. Putting aside legality, is Johns morally in the clear? What counts as "consent" in a moral (rather than legal) sense?
If the moral conception is different from the legal conception, should the legal concept be modified to better reflect the everyday understanding?
Early writers on liberty and freedom talked about situations in which people were not free, and they included not only obvious restrictions on freedom (for instance, when you're a chained slave), but various "seductions" and "coercions of the will". So if someone threatens you or fast talks you, then in a sense you haven't acted freely.
In the Four Corners report, Clare talked about psychological presure. And I think, regardless of whether you believe her or not, everyone can sympathize with being pressured into doing something you didn't really want to do.
3. Even if you haven't committed a crime, and even if there was consent, is what you're doing moral? Is everything that happens between two consenting adults moral?
Many people seem to hold the view that, in general, you're responsible for damage you cause. Take the situation where you're playing cricket in your backyard, and you knock a ball through a neighbour's glass window. It was an accident -- you didn't intend the damage, and it might not even have been foreseeable -- but morally and legally the neighbour still has a claim against you.
So if Clare has suffered damage from the 2002 incident, are the players responsible for that, regardless of consent? Or does consent free them of any responsibility?