Is everyone equal?

It's a fundamental tenant of modern liberal societies that all humanity is equal in some major sense of the word. Perhaps this means that their lives are of equal worth etc. Obviously people are different when it comes to things like intellectual ability, physical ability, physical morphology, and psychological profile and disposition. These are clearly not up for debate. But the law and traditional morality has always considered one life as equal to another in some set of moral senses.

However, in this post I'd like to question this assumption. What can these qualities be? Some ineffable sense of humanity which everyone has in mere virtue of their humanity? This is not plausible for aliens or artificially created conscious beings may lack humanity yet their lives have all the value of humans lives. So that suggestion of some nebulous "humanity" which all humans have and makes it so that all of us are equal seems dubious. For whatever quality one may have, it may vary between people. With regard to virtues and vices, people are different like anything else. Think about animals. Must liberal egalitarians maintain that animals are not equal to humans in basic worth; that a human's life is worth more, that it is a bigger tragedy for a human to die or to suffer than an animal. I suspect that even most animal rights activists believe this. Given the choice to between an arbitrary human being and an arbitrary cat or lobster to avoid some great harm but not both, most animal rights activist will choose the human to avoid the harm. Human lives are simply worth more they will say which isn't to say that non human animal lives are worth nothing. Now people probably think this because humans have more capabilities more potential or have richer mental lives than other creatures. Thus they reason, human rights are more important. Human lives are more important. Human suffering etc. Of course this is not always the case; some intelligent animals such as great apes and dolphins and elephants probably have more capabilities and richer inner mental lives than severely retarded people.

However, if the value of a life is dependent on these factors (capabilities, richness of mental lives, etc) and not some intangible "humanity" then human beings individually vary in these qualities from one person to the next just as humanity vary from other species though in smaller degrees. So it seems that at least somewhat plausibly that human lives can vary in their basic value with some lives worth more. This seems more plausible to me given certain examples. Surely the lives of moral saints are worth more than Nazis? Gandhi's life, his suffering, his basic well-being is of more concern than Hitlers is it not?

However, though this may be all well and true, it doesn't mean that the law ought to respect it for practical concerns. Because it is too difficult to judge the worth of lives, the law may nbot be the right place to adjudicate and all lives ought by the law to weigh all human lives equally. Things like organ donation, allocation of health, economic and other resources ought to follow the egalitarian basic rule of thumb despite acknowledging that it is morally false.

Online civility, the democratic process and why sometimes calling a moron a "moron" is just the right thing to do

I've always maintained that civility in deliberation is overrated and may even be detrimental to reasoned deliberation and thus the democratic process. There is a recent study which by some accounts purports to show otherwise. I really like studies like this and I think X-phi philosophers ought to be carrying out studies like this. However, the study does not actually show what it explicitly claims to, viz, that the lack of "civility" (i.e., name calling or other rude, boorish behavior in online comments of a science related article) erodes reasoned, democratic deliberation. In fact, I will argue that the spread of this study's message and especially how it has been framed in the mass media might erode such a process.

The study used a sample of 1,183 people. They read an article about nanotechnology. A control group read a version of the article with comments that were uncivil and included insults such as "If you don't believe that nanotechnology is harmful, you're an idiot!" Others read the same article with comments that did not include rude, insulting and otherwise uncivil comments. The study's authors claim that the rude and uncivil comments made readers of the comments more "polarized," that is, made them "double down" in their views.

A quick terminological note: The media has reported this study as about online trolling (see here, here, here and here, e.g.). However, online trolling as it is commonly defined, isn't simply about using such rude and uncivil language. It is about gaining attention through insincere posts purporting to express some viewpoint but in fact, is meant to instigate an emotional reaction. You can use uncivil language without trolling. To the study's author's credit, they did not use the term "trolling." Science journalists, being what they are, reporting on this story are the one's guilty of such sloppy use of language.

Anyway, back to the substantive portion of the study. The study concluded with:

Online communication and discussion of new topics such as emerging technologies has the potential to enrich public deliberation. Nevertheless, this study’s findings show that online incivility may impede this democratic goal.

This is to stretch their findings to an area that is not supported by their own data. What they actually found was that readers of those comments had stronger views than they did before after reading uncivil comments. That "polarization" (in the context of this study, polarization of subjective risk associated with nanotech) in itself does not show that it is bad for deliberation never mind the democratic process. There is nothing wrong with having strong opinions on some topic. In fact, having them, all else being equal, is a sign of a strong democracy. So they reasoned from the fact that readers' opinions were made stronger to the non sequitur that this may "impede" the "democratic goal."

Instead, what does impede the democratic goal is not strong opinions per se but intractability, i.e., stubborn, persistent opinions despite the presentation of overwhelming counter evidence. Now it may be the case that having strong opinions will make one less likely to change one's opinions in light of such counter evidence but that wasn't what was studied in this study. Furthermore, there are decided counter examples. Scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians and some layman for example have very strong opinions yet to do science, philosophy, mathematics and many things competently means changing one's opinion's in accord with the evidence. So there are people out there who though have strong opinions are far more likely than most to update their views in so far as the evidence warrants it. So it's not at least contradictory that you can both have a strong view yet not be resistant to rational updating of belief. This is obviously not to say all scientists, philosophers, etc are this way. Many stubbornly hold on to outdated views but they are in general far better at conforming their views to the evidence than most.

But even assuming that most people will become more obstinate when their opinions are strengthened in just such a way (unlike scientists, et al), it doesn't follow that this is generally detrimental to public deliberation in all incidents. In fact, it may even be harmful in many cases not to be uncivil.

Why is this? Take the example that there is an issue, say, global warming. There are global warming denialists and those who affirm the existence of anthropocentric global warming. If both sides have strong but obstinate opinions, it is far better for both truth and the world than the alternative that only the denialists have strong opinions. This is because the denialists are wrong and furthermore wrong about something that gravely affect our and our children's well-being. Incendiary language may be the motivating factor to strengthen the views of both sides so that there is more balance. When those who do know better don't have as strong as an opinion as those who don't know better, this creates an imbalance that harms deliberation for those who don't know better will be more obstinate (again, assuming that it will make them obstinate to view change) and may dominate a discussion.

Now where the findings are relevant in the ways the authors suggest is when there is no definitive evidence on some controversial topic (such as nanotech perhaps). Notice that the example I used above of global warming is rather black and white when it comes to the evidence. There is overwhelming evidence for not only anthrocentric global warming that this very well will lead to disastrous consequences (in fact, it already has for large parts of the world) and little evidence contrary. But in some cases, we don't know too much either way. For example, in many unsettled scientific, philosophical, political, issues there are tentative evidence for many different but conflicting views. It would be prudent as the study suggest to be civil in discussions about the veracity of these issues so as to prevent intractability of viewpoints. That much is clearly true. But in much of public discourse, one side is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong. Evolution is true. The earth is not 5,000-6,000 years old. Iraq does not have WMD. Vaccines do not cause autism. Smoking is dangerous to your health. Etc, etc. So in cases where a person's view is so strongly at odds with reality, it may be good for others engaged in deliberation to call a spade a spade; polarization may be what is called for especially when the obstinate, irrational side is overconfident while the side of reason is acting like a (to put it in mildly PC terms) wussy but in less definitive matters and among more reasonable people, it may be far more prudent to remain open minded, skeptical etc and to facilitate this kind of atmosphere, it may, as the study suggests, mean refraining from uncivil behavior.

Furthermore, the study did not study if "uncivil" behavior made the interlocutors more likely to change/update their views in light of new evidence. That would have been far more interesting because it is directly related to reasoned deliberation, the kind of deliberation necessary for a healthy democracy. Instead, the study focused on non participants of the discussion (3rd party "lurkers"). Being called out a fool may or may not make one more tractable to rational debate. Here's what I suspect. I think being insulted online will not make one more or less likely to change one's viewpoint if only one person does the name calling but if there are more than two people doing the name calling at the interlocutor, he or she will be far more likely than not to change their viewpoints. Sometimes it takes a little community effort to get ignorant and intractable people to be more reasonable. Just listening or being more open minded often requires a little peer push which may involve a little incivility to be truly effective. This suspicion is subject of course to empirical evidence and I hope it will be tested someday (maybe it already has but I don't know where the study(ies) is to be found).

I worry that the spread of this message may even have a net detrimental effect on reasoned deliberation. Here's my reasoning. Who likely reads articles about this study? It is more likely that those who are interested in this study are the more educated and a little more reasonable than the average person who tend to have opinions that tend to be stronger than the available evidence warrants. But if those who are more reasonable are made to think that this kind of behavior is detrimental, they are the ones that will curb their future behavior by being more "civil" online while those who are not so reasonable (likely less educated and those not likely to read these kinds of articles) will remain their obstinate and uncivil selves. This creates in imbalance that doesn't seem very beneficial to reasoned deliberation. Sadly, it seems that some the study has already influenced some actions detrimental to public discourse. For example on the respected Popular Science online magazine's comments section, the comment function has been shut off (looks like permanently) and the moderator's reasoning is partly based on the results of this study. It is sad to see that you'd throw the baby out with the bath water. Despite the fact that many comments are low quality, there are sometimes informative posts and they are worth having despite the bad apples. Bad apples often do not spoil the whole bunch. You deal with poor quality comments by doing your job as a moderator, not by complete censorship.

Syrian intervention? (Hell no)

My post on another blog about the ethical considerations of possible Syrian military intervention below.

It looks like the US might go to war or at least militarily intervene with Syria (also see here). I am usually against military interventions and I believe that the situation in Syria does not so far warrant justification for intervention. I will talk both about wars and other kinds of mass state sponsored killings (aerial bombings, drone strikes, etc) as military intervention (for the sake of brevity) but I think the same principles apply in both cases. Most military interventions of humanitarian a nature has been unjust in hindsight and from this history alone we ought to be cautious of any proposal for future wars. I usually tend to think in terms of the five criteria I will lay down below for justification in foreign military intervention on behalf of humanitarian reasons. I think the principles are common sense and conjunctive (meaning that all five must be satisfied to justify foreign military intervention). I also believe that there might be additional principles that warrant inclusion as further conjuncts or disjuncts and will modify my 5 accordingly if they are presented to me convincingly. I might simply have not thought about this issue as hard as I could have or haven’t been exposed to the issue to know of alternative thinking. Here are my five 1. Consent. What I mean by consent is that some degree of agreement or endorsement ought to be secured from the population in which we are going to war on behalf for the intervention (in this case, the Syrian population) and that a majority of the population ought to consent to reasonably fair and neutrally worded opinion surveys. Some reservations and qualifications: First several surveys might have to be taken (with different wording or across different times and sample places) to insure more stable results. But consent on behalf of those we claim to fight for seems like a no-brainer. Two: what a “majority” means ought to be left for debate in some public space but I think it’s reasonable that it should be a “large” majority, perhaps more than 80%. This ought to be stable over all samples so as to reduce the chance of regional and temporal volatility. A military intervention probably impacts the whole country in profound ways so care and rigor in the ways I have just outlines seems reasonable to me in surveying public opinion. Granted it is often hard to ascertain public opinion through polls due to the political situation in many countries (the Assad regime might not want foreigners meddling with polls) but secret polls are often effective and have been used by international community such as the UN. Finally, this should be informed consent. Meaning that the questions on the surveys ought to reflect reality and the grim possibilities of war. Just because a population may want to overthrow their regime doesn’t mean that they will accept just anyone and anyway to do it. Syrians may agree, for example, that Assad must forcibly go by overwhelming majority but they may not agree that the US or its allies should be the ones doing the over-throwing. They may also fear and reject allowing foreign military or non military help of rebels to overthrow their government for (reasonable) fear that the rebels are Islamic militants, for example. The survey must also make it know that wars of intervention often turn out really bad (especially for the civilians due to collateral damage or the subsequent military occupation to insure stability during the post-war rebuilding process). The common people often become worse off as a result (take a look at Iraq as just one example of a case where the population almost universally agree in poll after poll that after the US led invasion that they are substantially worse than they were under Saddam Hussein). We don’t know what the Syrian people think at this moment. Worse still, no attempt has even been seriously made to ascertain their opinions as far as I know about foreign US led military intervention. 2. Proportionality. This along with 1 is commonly used by just war theorists to evaluate the justness of any humanitarian war proposal. This is the cure-not-being-worse-than-the-disease criteria. There must be reasonable guarantees that the war will not result in even worse humanitarian crisis than it aims to solve. Wars rarely solve humanitarian problems. We know this from history. The ones that do solve humanitarian problems are of massive proportions (such as Nazi extermination camps and Japanese imperial aggression in Asia). Is the Syrian crisis approaching this level of humanitarian crisis? I’m not aware of any studies that accurately show that it is. 100,000 people have died in Syria from the crisis according to UN’s numbers but we don’t know who is primarily responsible (Assad’s regime, his supporters, or the rebels). I suspect that all have roughly equal roles in the crisis but I’m not sure and I don’t know of any accurate and certain information that currently exists that decisively shows that the Assad regime is mostly responsible. Keep in mind that according to some of the most reliable data we have on the Iraq casualties, about 1.5 million people (mostly civilians) have died because of the latest Iraq war and countless survivors are injured. The infrastructure destroyed and the whole country in deep fear of fundamentalist and fractional terror. There are now far more birth defects in Iraq from the radioactive munitions used by the US than Hiroshima after the nuke. As we see from this and many other examples, war can snowball out of control into internecine violence even when they are waged on behalf of humanitarian reasons (or at least ostensible ones). What guarantees have been offered by military powers that Syria will not become another Iraq? What proof is there that the many rebel factions will be better safeguards for human rights and democracy than the Assad regime? How reasonable are these claims? 3. Legitimacy. With this and the two further criteria below, I suspect that they are a bit more controversial than the first two. But I think international law is important and its thus important that wars conducted must surpass some kind of legitimizing hurdle such as UN agreement. The international committee and its opinion matters in international affairs such as foreign wars. Unilateral declarations of wars are problematic partially because they don’t seek the consultation of the rest of the world in a democratizing and process and respects the rule of law. 4. Exhaustion. Diplomacy and other overtly non violent means must be exhausted before violent military actions taken. Sanctions may also be an option on this list. 5. Accuracy. The reasons given by the invading/attacking power must be accurate. Why have this criterion? The reason is basically the same as why you’d want the Constitution to protect you from unlawful searches. If the police thinks you have child porn on your computer but it doesn’t have any evidence, they don’t have the right to search your house even if the search yields, say, some drug paraphernalia. Ex post facto justifications are illegitimate for a reason: to discourage the authorities from indiscriminate searches by the authorities. In the case of Syria, the prevailing narrative by those wanting to attack is that Assad is the primary perpetrator of the human rights abuses in his country. If it is shown that this is not true (even if other factors may justify an attack is subsequently found). Those are the five criteria I think are reasonable. Furthermore, because killing is a serious business and modern military interventions which often involves killing on a massive scale and with significant civilian casualty are thus a fortiori serious and standards of proof must also reflect that seriousness. A relatively high standard of proof for each of these criteria ought to be satisfied; mild and merely plausible evidence ought not suffice. In criminal cases, the standard of proof is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Perhaps such a standard or higher ought to be considered for military intervention. There will be some who think that the five criteria I have set out are too stringent making the chances of just wars of humanitarian nature unnecessarily restrained/conservative and increasing the chances of gross humanitarian crisis. They may have more lax criteria or standards of proof for example. But the onus is on them to show what their criteria are. If they have none they are basically holding that war ought to be subject to the whims of those in power. There will be some who accept some but not all of the criteria I have set out but still believe that intervention is advisable. In that case, the onus is on them to show that the criteria they accept have been met. I believe that not only has all of the criteria I set out above not been met (satisfying conjunctivity requirement) but that none have been met to even a minimally sufficient degree of proof and thus even if you only accept some but not all, the justification for military intervention will be unjust. Many of the western media claims are incredibly suspect such as the claims that Assad used chemical weapons on civilians. Not only is there little evidence of this but the evidence presented seems to implicate the rebels as the culprits who use them. For example, Assad refused entry to UN inspectors for months and only three days after granting them unlimited access to inspect weapons (what appears to be) a chemical attack occurred only 15 minutes drives outside of the UN inspection team. The US seems adamant not to investigate further stating that further investigation would be useless (one senior White House official stating that the evidence would be “corrupted” by Assad’s shelling of the sites) that and making clear that they have already reached a decisive conclusion (Cameron’s UK government also seemed to be just as headstrong about intervention, irrespective of pending UN findings). See the quote at the end in this article from Cameron).

My reply to a podcast about gun control

The podcats is here and it interviews Jeff McMahan.

Thank you for this excellent discussion and McMahan is probably my favorite contemporary ethicist but even though I do not consider myself a libertarian, I am skeptical of McMahan's anti-gun arguments.

Two considerations. 1. a pragmatic one. It is going to be down right impossible or very difficult to prohibit all guns. Let's keep in mind that the two shootings in the US that set off the debate recently are both due to someone stealing a gun from another person (in Sandyhook, the man stole the weapons from his mother who was the legal owner). Gun control would not have prevented these two mass shootings unless that involved taking guns from legally registered owners. Our constitution and our public and our political system will not allow it. So we are left with the option of limited gun control, not outright prohibition which would involve the taking away of guns from people who have legally bought them. But the overall empirical evidence here so far shows that gun control measures are not effective at reducing violent crime. In fact, when you look at large studies there is not even a correlation never mind a causal relationship between gun ownership and gun crimes. Even if it were show show some effect, it would have to be more than a little as this is a constitutional issue and thus the burden of proof is on the gun control advocates and that burden is set high.

2nd, the issue with many countries with substantially lower gun related crimes but also high gun ownership shows that the problem is likely deeper. I fully accept that US culture is far more violent than those other countries though I am an American and that this is the deeper reason and ought to be the target of violence reduction. It seems more practical (for the 1st consideration above) and more morally relevant to focus on this. It seems defeatist to say that we should focus on gun control as opposed to focusing on the deeper causes of gun violence, namely a violent culture that sees using guns as a way to solve problems.

Back with the thought of the day

Been having trouble with blogger and the censors so haven't been posting but still thinking. But a recurring thought has been occurring to me that the type of society one lives in may affect what kind of ethics one chooses in this way and this has implications for meta-ethics. Perhaps living in less violent societies where people are more considerate to each other in daily contact will have people who are more utilitarian in their outlook on life. My reasoning for this prediction is that people will be more utilitarian in their moral reasoning in these types of societies is that they will expect the same from others such that when they sacrifice benefits to their own or their loved ones for the better of the group, they may expect that favors will be returned. There is thus both reasonable expectation and demand for more selfless behavior benefiting the whole but perhaps harming some individual. These considerations seem to favor more utilitarian ethics for that society but not for others.

In less considerate societies, people may be more deontological or virtue centered because the expectation and demand for reciprocity in moral decision making is less pronounced and a moral system that protects the just from being patsies is more preferable. But now we make morality socially relative and real moral dilemmas thus become relativized (think trolley problems or other classics such as involuntary organ donation). How can we decide these cases objectively and do real moral debates today hinge on such contingent factors? It seems that at least sometimes objectivity can be seriously undermined for morality though I still am not buying a complete anti-realist case for morality.    

Alva Noe and the naturalistic cyborg fallacy

The philosopher of mind has a blog at NPR. In one post he talked about Lance Armstrong and performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Noe seems to say in the blog that doing these drugs and thus cheating is not wrong or at least blameworthy. Surely he can't be that nutty? Granted philosophers in the past have said some incredibly crazy things but they often have at least some coherent justification for their claims.

His argument that Armstrong shouldn't be blamed for cheating (granting that the mountain of evidence against him is accurate, as it appears to be) because humans have always used artificial advantages. This seems like a textbook case of the naturalistic fallacy combined with a case of false comparison.

Of course humans always have used artificial modifications (a trend Noe calls a fact about our cyborg nature).

Here I liberally quote from his original article.

For millions of years, our ancestors survived with only the crudest implements. Some 35,000 to 75,000 years ago, a technological revolution took place on an extraordinary scale. Innovation now abounds in the archeological record. Whereas before, generation after generation used the same blunt pounding tools, now we find highly refined instruments for cutting. And we find tools for making tools. We find an increased diversity of building materials and evidence of real specialization in tool use and tool making. 

... 

The point is not just that we couldn't do what we do without tools. The point is that we couldn't think what we think or see what we see without tools. We wouldn't be what we are without tools. Making tools, changing tools, is a way of making new ways of being. Technologies are evolving patterns of human organization. 

... 

So let us turn now to the case of Lance Armstrong. He is a trailblazer. One of the greats. He didn't win races on his own. No, like each of us in our social embeddings, he created an organization, one drawing on other people, and the creative and effective use of technology, the mastery of biochemistry, to go places and do things that most of us never will, and that no one ever had, before him.That we now attack him, and tear him down, and try to minimize his achievements.... what does this tell us about ourselves?

I was pretty surprised that a professional philosopher would make such an incredibly crude and silly argument. Even though Noe is a philosopher of mind, it's no excuse. There has to be more convincing points he made to support his argument right? Check for yourself and read the whole thing. It really seems as stupid as it appears.

Someone in the comments section pointed out that Noe seems to justify using a cannon for the shotput with this "argument" he seems to put forward. It's not that Armstrong received help from tools, "cybernetic" or otherwise that makes people (justifiably) angry and the fact that he deserves punishment, it's that he received help that is banned that is the issue. I can't understand how anyone, a philosopher no less, could have missed this vital point.

But he later posts another blog responding to all the criticisms he received in the comments section. Surely he made the clear, well-supported points in this blog that controverts the common sense intuition that cheating in sports by taking PEDs is wrong which he should have in the first blog doesn't he?

It doesn't appear that way. His second blog seems to be obdurate obfuscation. He claims he was justified because

1. the anti-doping rules are too vague to matter

2. breaking a doping rule is not blameworthy because it is a rule not "within" the game or sport itself but cheating "outside" the sport's "internal" rules.

The first justification is simply ridiculous and I will not even address it other than to say that positive drug tests (or equivalent positives) is about as clear cut as it gets. It's not that vague. So Noe's point seem to stumble and fall right out of the gates. I can't even imagine a charitable interpretation of it.

As to the second justification, how he came to see it as non trivial and not a hairsplitting distinction (and more relevantly, why it matters even if there is an interesting distinction to be made) is puzzling. Here's a quote:

Doping doesn't put you outside the game any more than sacrificing your marriage or getting up at 3:30 every morning so that you can get time at the ice rink puts you outside the game. Athletes are in it for the achievement. Athletes will not say No.

Of course, there is no rule within the all sports of cycling that says you cannot dope. Anti-doping rules are more a property of the organizing bodies that govern world cycling venues. But that just shifts the problem to that arena. Surely you can and be justifiably blamed for cheating there? And in some sense, that would also count as cheating in cycling because it would be taking an unfair advantage over non cheaters within the sport. So this "distinction" seems like hairsplitting and purposeful obfuscation.

The distinction collapses because the point of the rule against cheating is to enforce unfair advantages within the game which breaks the boundary between "outside" rules and "inside" rules. The outside rules are there for a good reason. They are not arbitrary. PEDs such as EPO and many others (and blood transfusions which the USADA also accuses Armstrong of committing) have been found to potentially be deadly. Obviously you don't want people to be encouraged to take these drugs.

On a charitable interpretation, the only point that Noe seem to be somewhat justified in arguing in defense of doping cheaters as far as I can tell is the "everyone is doing it" argument but I'm not sure Noe is making such an argument (in fact, his own words in the second blog suggests otherwise).

I suppose you can make the somewhat weakly plausible argument that other cyclists at the level Armstrong performs against are doping as well. Thus if we define "cheating" as doing something against the rules (in the sport or in the system by the governing body authorized to oversee the sport) and giving one an advantage, Armstrong didn't actually cheat because he had no artificial advantage over the other cheaters but prevailed over them with natural ability, hard work and skill.

But notice that this argument only works if everyone else he competed against were likewise cheating. But that is implausible. Surely there are a few he has competed throughout the years who weren't on PEDs? And notice that Armstrong must have competed against others at the lower levels of competition and surely there are even more of those competitors who weren't on anything at all but used hard work, determination and the rest of what supposedly makes a great American sportsman?

But in doping Armstrong took an unfair advantage over the others who choose not to use PEDs (or couldn't use them because of limited resources, etc). That's why he deserves blame (not to mention the years of public deception and monetary advantages that comes with that cheating). That's why it's cheating. That's why it's wrong.

Why is death bad?

This question seems like it would have an obvious answer and yet philosophers have struggled to provide an adequate answer. This is because many of the answers that common sense and from traditional philosophy has supplied gives incoherent or very problematic answers.

Shelly Kagan works in this little studied area of ethics. See here for an interesting article by him published in the the Chronicle which tries to general outline the problems for the different accounts of why death is bad. He supplies and defends a deprivation account of death in his latest book but does not offer significant defense of his own views in the Chronicle article.

The deprivation account is a comparative account. It basically says that what is bad about death is all the goods that one would not get to enjoy when dead (similar to the opportunity cost of the economists).

Kagan says that unlike pain which is intrinsically bad, death is a comparative or relative bad. He then provides some challenges to this view which I think are quite damaging to that view and I am not sure how Kagan is able to surmount them in his book since he does defend it. I also think that if you are to gives such an account, you may have to also supply a calculus which includes the bads and goods of life instead of just adding up all the good one misses in death. I haven't seen anyone do that so far in talking about the badness of death which is odd. The negatives may outweigh the positives for many people in the world but it is hard to say that death is not bad for these people. The death seems to be bad even if the accounting of the positives versus the negatives in their lives would have came out in the net negative unless that net negative is so unusually bad that they themselves wish they had not gone on living. Some philosophers have argued that for almost all human lives, the bad far outweighs any good of living. So not being born is preferable but on a deprivation view, this may imply (with some additional supporting arguments of course) that death is preferable to life.

I have my own rough views on this topic which I'd like now to sketch out. It is a very tentative view and I'm not sure if people have advanced similar views before as I'm not familiar with the literature.

I will call my view the fractured-self view (I wish I was a better poet because the name sounds clumsy to me). It is similar to the deprivation view in that it is also a comparative conception of death but it does not focus on the goods that are deprived from death.

Rather it focuses on what the death does to the self. I believe that much of our conception of ourselves are grounded in our core principles and values and our most valued projects. In fact, I believe that our major life projects fundamentally encapsulate our principles and values and thus are expressions of the self.

Our major life projects are to fulfill certain roles, professional, familial, moral, artistic, spiritual, etc. When we die, these projects which reflect our principles, our values and thus expressions of our most fundamental self go unfulfilled. We have no prospects of completing them; indeed, not even the opportunity to attempt to.

That is what is tragic about death. It fractures us in a most fundamental way. Had we lived we would have sought to complete these life projects. So the reason death is bad is because it is bad compared to a counterfactual (the life had the dead individual survived). I believe this view avoids some of the major problems Kagan says have outlined and that of his own views. For example, if non existence is bad because it deprives us of the goods of living, why do we not view the nonexistence before death as just as bad as the nonexistence after? On my view, because the nature of life projects are always future oriented, non existence in the past does not matter because for the simple fact that we cannot complete a project in the past (backward causation notwithstanding) but we can for future projects if we are alive. It is not the time of our birth that prevents us from completing "projects" before we are born; it is the fundamental causal and nomological structure of the world that does that. There's no tragedy in not being able to do the impossible. That's what accounts for the temporal asymmetry. However, on Kagan's view, this objection is problematic because goods in the past are as good as goods in the future (at least ontologically there doesn't seem to be any reason to view them as different from a value perspective).

My view explains why it is often believed that death for a 90 year old is not as worse as death for a 20 year old. The 20 year old is likely to have many more life projects unfulfilled. The 90 year old, on the other hand, likely would have fulfilled many major life projects and would have very few remaining. She is nearly whole upon her death at 90 whereas the 20 year old's death fractures him in a way that leaves him less than whole. Of course, the 90 year old may still have some projects that go unfulfilled and thus that would explain why it is still somewhat tragic for that nonagenarian to die but just not as tragic as the 20 year old. In short, death prevents us from developing our full selves, being a whole.

But what about newborn babies? Isn't it tragic for them to die even though they are too young to have any projects in mind? Maybe it is the potential life projects that matters most in evaluating the tragedy of a newborn baby's life. A baby has no life projects but they do have the potential or propensity for developing lots of life-projects and the extinguishing of that potential or propensity by death is what is tragic about death for it.

There may be lots of problematic issues for this account of life but prima facie, it seems very plausible to me. I need to think more and harder about what the potential problems are and if they can be overcome. This is a very tentative view for me now. One objection may go on to ask the further question why being less than "whole" or developing into "our full selves" is really that bad? I can only think of responding with what was basically hinted at above; that it is bad because our most fundamental values cannot be realized and that is certainly bad. There's no more explaining that needs to be done to explain why things going contrary to our basic values and principles is bad (for us). We've hit philosophical rock bottom. But this may seem circular or question begging but I can't think of any further justification for my view.

Shame

While reading a very interesting and insightful paper on the topic by J. David Velleman, I realized that the paper's insights are deeply related to the recent case of a young Rutger's student, Tyler Clementi, who had committed suicide when a roomate had spied on and live-streamed video of Clementi in a romantic tryst with another man.

Clementi was so humiliated that he committed suicide. Yet Clementi was apparently an openly gay person. The video was also not viewed many people (I believe only the roomate and some of his friends) and did not involve very explicit sexual acts. So some may wonder why he became so distraught.

Velleman's account of shame is complicated and builds on a classical account of shame first ingeniously formulated by Augustine (who used the Genesis story of Adam and Eve for support) and is also similar to the account of shame given by Sartre. The paper is densely argued and there are parts that are opaque but definitely worth reading and it is remarkably relevant, I think, to the Clementi case so if interested I suggest reading both the paper and the Clementi case since I don't want to do the paper any injustice by synopsizing the analysis.

Psychopaths and Confucian moral psychology

I have little respect for the New York Times. Their quality of journalism is poor but unfortunately standard fare for much of the world's press. However, occasionally one can find gems such as this well researched article on psychopathy by Jennifer Kahn.

Psychopathy is a philosophically rich topic with clear relevance for moral psychology and meta-ethical debates on the nature of moral reasons and moral motivation. 

What has always interested me about psychopaths is not that they have little regard for other people's welfare which is obvious but that they often display very little regard for their own. They are known to be extremely brazen and do things that jeopardize their own well-being. Punishments often do not sway them from harming others (as the article nicely illustrates). Violent psychopaths have very high recidivism rates. They seem to have little to no fear and show little to no anxiety and stress.

I remember reading or hearing of a famous experiment involving psychopaths. A control group and a psychopathic group were wired up and told they were about to receive painful shocks. The control groups displayed profound stress (measured in physiological makers such as heart rate, galvanic skin response, cortisol levels, etc) between the shocks. In other words, they were anticipating the shocks and felt understandable stressed at the future prospects of the pain. But the psychopathic groups felt almost no stress.

psychopaths have often do not recognize fear in others (probably because they don't feel the emotion themselves). In one incident, a psychopath was asked to identify a collection of pics of facial expressions representing various emotions. She identified all of them correctly except the photo of a face displaying fear. She said that she didn't know what that face was expressing but she had seen such an emotion before right before she stabs her victims.

As the article illustrates, psychopaths often are carelessness and recklessness. But I am also reminded of a passage in the Analects that says roughly that one tell-tale mark of someone to be feared in a position of power or state rule is someone that have little regard for their own safety. Presumably, this is saying that if they have a history of little regard for their own well-being, they are the type that will have little regard for the well-being of others and ought not be trusted with ensuring the well-being of others. I can't remember the passage so if Carl knows which one this is, I'd really appreciate his help.

What is the problem of letting die?

I'll quote in full this famous moral dilemma from the wiki

Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence ISBN 0-19-510859-0 is a philosophical book by Peter K. Unger, published in 1996. Inspired by Peter Singer's 1971 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Unger argues that for people in the developed world to live morally, they are morally obliged to make sacrifices to help mitigate human suffering and premature death in the third world, and further that it is acceptable (and morally right) to lie, cheat, and steal to mitigate suffering. 

Unger argues that the intuitive moral judgments most people have of several hypothetical moral scenarios, The Shallow Pond, The Vintage Sedan, and The Envelope, are inconsistent.
Unger presents the hypothetical case of The Vintage Sedan: 

Not truly rich, your one luxury in life is a vintage Mercedes sedan that, with much time, attention, and money, you've restored to mint condition... One day, you stop at the intersection of two small country roads, both lightly traveled. Hearing a voice screaming for help, you get out and see a man who's wounded and covered with a lot of his blood. Assuring you that his wound is confined to one of his legs, the man also informs you that he was a medical student for two full years. And, despite his expulsion for cheating on his second year final exams, which explains his indigent status since, he's knowledgeably tied his shirt near the wound as to stop the flow. So, there's no urgent danger of losing his life, you're informed, but there's great danger of losing his limb. This can be prevented, however, if you drive him to a rural hospital fifty miles away. "How did the wound occur?" you ask. An avid bird-watcher, he admits that he trespassed on a nearby field and, in carelessly leaving, cut himself on rusty barbed wire. Now, if you'd aid this trespasser, you must lay him across your fine back seat. But, then, your fine upholstery will be soaked through with blood, and restoring the car will cost over five thousand dollars. So, you drive away. Picked up the next day by another driver, he survives but loses the wounded leg. 

Unger reports that most people respond strongly that abandoning the hitchhiker is abominable behavior, and he contrasts this near-universal harsh judgment with the lenient judgments most people give to The Envelope: 

In your mailbox, there's something from (the U.S. Committee for) UNICEF. After reading it through, you correctly believe that, unless you soon send in a check for $100, then, instead of each living many more years, over thirty more children will die soon. 

Unger argues that the factors that distinguish The Envelope from The Vintage Sedan, in which morality compels us to make a sacrifice, are not morally significant, using thought experiments such as variations on the trolley problem to illustrate his point. Unger contends that psychological factors obscure the moral questions, and that our moral intuitions about problems such as these provide an inconsistent window into our true moral values. 

Unger conspicuously indicates that the author's royalties from the sales of this book go to UNICEF and to Oxfam America.

I wrote a paper once outlining my objections to the basic argument Unger and Singer gives. Here's my basic argument in a nutshell.

My issue with their argument is that they seemed to me to have used a bad analogy between saving the drowning child and donating. These are not analogous cases and the argument seems to rely on an intuition pump that bridges the two cases. That bridging is what gives the bite it has. 

In the case of donating money to, say UNICEF, to save children, I believe that the reason people aren't as likely to criticize or blame others or themselves for not donating is because they understand, consciously or subconsciously, that donating commits one to far more than the case of saving the child. 

In the case of donating, the case commits one to more, because the argument can iterate itself. Say you donate 10 dollars. The argument can be applied again making an additional $10 donation morally obligatory, and so on until all of one's disposable income is gone such that a person is on the brink of destitution. The demanding obligation does not discharge itself after one donation for most people and may not do so until one is in essential poverty. Both Singer and Unger seems to bite the bullet and see that this unforgiving conclusion must be accepted. 

But now notice that there is no more analogy to be made because in the case of the saving of a drowning child, that was just a one-off, incident. The example only asks the reader to save the drowning child once. There is no stipulated or implied further commitments.  

Now a better analogy would be made between donating all one's disposable income and something like a scenario where you'd have to continuously save drowning children, say, once every hour for the rest of your life. 

I suspect that most people would still say that you are morally required to do so (if you physically can) but that we ought not blame someone for choosing to let all those children die. It is simply too harsh a requirement. It's like asking someone to be a moral saint. We cannot blame someone for their all too human weaknesses especially when we know that we may not have the moral resolve and integrity to choose such a harsh life ourselves. So even though it may be morally required to keep saving children and to donate all our disposable income, people ought not be blamed for not doing so because the demand is too harsh.

Evolution of morality and money

What does money have in common with morality? Think about money. The original purpose of money may have been as a tool. It is used symbolically and as a stand-in or proxy for more useful items, items that people desire and need. Its sole purpose was a fungible item. Its utility was instrumental. It provides ways to do things that otherwise would be difficult or impossible.

But we all know that today, many people view money as an end in itself (such as misers). Many greedy people take pleasure or utility in making money, hording it, etc. Even some regular people may value some of this money-is-a-good-in-itself trait. They have no plans to spend it, to buy things they desire but the money itself gives them pleasure and happiness. Likewise, loss of that money may constitute grief even if some people have already got all the material items and services they could ever want. Most of us, though, still primarily view money as a means to an end, that is, as a means to obtain goods and services which we directly desire.

Now consider the evolutionary purpose of morality. It may have also served an evolutionary end; that is, the propagation of our species (more specifically our genes). But we have come (and by we, I mean those of us especially concerned with morality such as philosophers and other morally conscious people) to see morality as an end in itself. In other words, we have categoricalized morality (in the sense that Kant was using "categorical"). In viewing it as such, we may have even altered the structure of morality itself. So instead of seeing morality as instrumental (whether it may be as a tool to propagate the species or to propagate our own utility or the utility of the whole human society, etc) we see it as a good in itself. But some of our intuitions about the instrumental aspects of morality are still in play which is why I suspect gives some of the appeal of consequentialist ethics. That appeal may have some evolutionary roots.

But I also suspect that the categorical appeal, perhaps newer as an evolutionary development, may also have its roots in the same way that appeal for money has for the miser, that is, it is also culturally instilled. It becomes the end in itself, the good will of Kant or his categorical imperative, is good regardless of the consequences because morality shifts its values the same way that society shifts their values for goods so that some people value money in itself instead of the things it could buy. Morality becomes categorical instead of hypothetical in the same way that money becomes a direct source of good for many people (misers) and not a means to other ends. A tension between these two different ways of looking at morality is most clearly seen when the categorical and the hypothetical comes apart in practical deliberation as infamous philosophers' examples have often focused on such as in trolley problems and other thought experiments pitting our categorical values against our hypothetical values. I wonder how much of the rift in ethics can be explained by this analogy with money?

In this way, we may feel the tug in two directions. On one hand, we feel the appeal of consequentialism because we still see the instrumental value of morality (the hypotheical imperatives) but we also see that at the other end is categorical value that some actions/character traits/motives are good in themselves the consequences not even relevant to their goodness (an extreme example of this is the famous dialogue between Kant and his friend, Benjamin Constant regarding the morality of lying to save an innocent person's life).  

In saying the things I just said, I want to make clear that I believe that both our categorical and hypothetical intuitions are a result of both evolution and culture unlike perhaps with money. The miser's value in having money is likely purely a cultivated value. He wasn't born with the disposition to value money though he probably was born with the disposition to value certain things that money could buy (food, status, power, shelter, attention from the opposite sex ,etc). But those who favor the categorical values in morality likely have their intuitions both as a result of dispositions given by evolution and culture. Evolution perhaps helped instill values that favored a categorical outlook to avoid certain kinds of rationalizations of immoral behavior (see The Myth or Morality for a defense of this evolutionary perspective on the categorical). But cultures also can instill categorical values (reading Kant can enforce one's innate dispositions to value them, e.g.). Whereas reading, say, Bentham, may enforce our hypothetical values even though we may have some of these intuitions given us by our natural dispositions from evolution.  

So in this way, we may have intuitions both natural and cultivated that pull in different directions and perhaps this may explain why meta-ethical debates are so difficult to resolve.

A review of The Myth of Morality

Here at amazon.

Is there an obligation to resurrect extinct groups?

I'm raising this question as it pertained to group rights. Some groups have been systematically exterminated such as the Aboriginal Tasmanians through the genocidal policies of the Australians. If groups have rights and one of them is not to be exterminated as many human rights advocates claim, do they also have a right to be resurrected, say, through cloning or some other means? One may obtain enough genetic material from dead people to clone them. I'd imagine that once the technology is made reliable and cost effective, maybe the Australian government and other governments that have engaged in successful genocide of an entire group of people may be obligated to resurrect from extinction some members of the whole group. Groups, unlike individual people, can be resurrected from the dead and perpetrators, institutional or individual of their extinction, (or their ancestors) may be obligated to do so at least prima facie. But there might be significant ethical problems with this. If so what are these problems? One obvious concern is how many individuals must be resurrected? One? A few or the antegenocide population?

Refilling the Liberal vacuum

Another post on my political blog:

In a previous post I talked about the Liberal tradition (that is, the explicit and formal human rights framework, not to be confused with how people often use the term to refer to a political or economic “left” or being “progressive”) as being a byproduct of religious, political and other kinds of oppression in the west. I also talked about the importance of instituting rule of law and rights protection for China in the coming years in the comments section.
However, I always have had serious reservations about the Liberal model on philosophical grounds.

Focusing on rights may actually hamper ethical or moral development in society because it focuses on bare minimum ethical standards of conduct and behavior. It detracts attention and energy from more positive accounts of ethics such as those from virtue cultivation and community-building. There’s some debate whether a Liberal framework can handle more nuanced and more positive accounts of ethics. I happen to doubt that it can. Confucius mention 2500 years ago that even in societies with well established laws, people can still find ways to treat each other like shit and make life hell for each other. That is because even in such a society, people may still not be virtuous and find ways around the law to behave despicably.

I think that the serious development of the rights framework ought only be a temporary in China so that bare minimum standards are set in place for now and into the near future so that basic rights are protected and society will have something to fall back on for protecting people’s rights. But I also think that as China gets richer, as people get more educated, China ought to progress into a more Confucian model which focuses not on what we owe each other in the form of bare minimum duty and other rights but on our virtue and on the quality of our relationships. This is a much more nuanced and robust form of ethical development but it has the drawbacks that it is more difficult to develop requiring extensive education and good, solid, development of welfare for the whole population. As Confucius mentioned, societies become immoral when two major events occur: when either the education system collapse or when the country does not have enough to feed, clothe, or build infrastructure for the whole population.

Now, I believe also that we may never get totally away from having some legal protection for individuals in society from abuses of their rights no matter how we cultivate virtue in the population because there will always be some bad apples making the whole society worse off and law may be the only way to protect people from abuses from these intractable individuals.
But it seems to be a good goal to try and build something more ethically solid. How would we build such a society that moves away from focusing on rights and starts focusing on individual virtue cultivation?

I would start with a secular moral education. I believe that students should start learning philosophy such as ethics and critical thinking as early as possible (maybe as soon as they are in the 4th or 6th grade). I think Confucius would agree to this.

Second, Confucius said that ritual is another important aspect of moral cultivation of virtue and community ties. But what rituals ought we employ to further this end in a secular 21st century China? (Note: Confucius said that rituals can be wholly secular). I think this is a crucial question that Chinese people should look to themselves and their own history for answers.

It struck me that another useful application of experimental philosophy may be to see if rituals can improve moral conduct.

Confucianism and footbinding

Thought I'd give people a heads-up on an interesting discussion at a Chinese philosophy blog of Paul Goldin's new book on Confucianism. The most interesting thing is the comments section where the discussion is on foot binding.

I've always thought it queer that some people blame the practice of foot binding on Confucianism or sometimes even more idiotically on Confucius himself!

Goldin's comments disabuses this notion quite adeptly. I have never read any Confucian text advocating it. Goldin (one of the world's leading scholars on ancient Chinese philosophy) says he has yet to see any Confucian advocating it and notes how strange it is to hear people attributing the practice to Confucianism (his analogy of the arrival of gingerbread cookies and Christianity brings this out humorously). I believe that only two references of foot binding exists in (neo) Confucian texts (both in Chu Hsi's work). Interestingly, in both cases, the Confucian philosopher denounces the practices quite vehemently.

One of the commentors (Manyul Im who is a comparative philosopher) mentioned that what surprises him is the absence of denunciations by Confucian philosophers towards the practice and he wonders whether this silence can be construed as a kind of endorsement for the practice.

I doubt it. There may be many reasons why there are few (except Chu Hsi's of course) philosophical denunciations of some practice. It may be simply because the practice was not conceived at that time to be a moral or political problem. This may be because of several factors. The overall sexism that exists in Chinese society at that time, the fact that it was women's active choices to bind their daughter's feet, or that it simply wasn't in philosophical fashion to talk about foot binding.

I can imagine philosophers in the future asking why ethicists today don't talk about, denounce and use as examples in thought experiments things like eating animals or plastic surgery. These topics may be of significant moral concern for future people. But a lack of discussion on these topics compared to say, trolley examples, does not necessarily mean philosophers today endorse these practices. Many are probably deeply concerned about them even if they don't use them in their philosophical writing as examples, etc.

But silence may also imply disapproval. This may especially be the case when the practice is so widely practiced as it was during the Ming that many people may have felt it no need to explicitly denounce something that was obviously wrong (to a philosopher anyway).

The evolution of Human Rights

I recently posted about this topic at a Chinese political blog. There is a common perception among the western public (and some philosophers such as Jason Brennan as well, see here) that the human rights framework is an extension of Judeo-Christian thought. I argue against this.

This blog will be a continuation of the interesting dialogue started by Oli on human rights and China. I agree with Oli that Chinese culture does have considerable resources to take into account concerns raised by many human rights discourse. The value of human rights is universal and ancient. Many such values, though implicitly already there in Chinese culture, may be accounted within a modern Chinese cultural framework.

I also respectfully disagree with Oli about how the more explicit and formal rights framework (the “formalization” of rights in his words) evolved in the west. I believe and will argue that such a framework developed because of the distinct historical forces in the west vis a vis China and not primarily because of technological, educational and communicative advancement. It became an explicit and formal affair in the west because of the historical forces that necessitated it.

Many people in the west and often even in China assume that historical concerns for human rights are strictly a western development and that the explicit rights discourse and formal legal system of the west developed because of western cultural values (such as concerns with autonomy, freedom, individuality, etc).

I believe that this is a self-serving, revisionary rationalization.

The real reason why the west developed explicit and formal framework for human rights is because of its history. China did not develop such a framework because it did not have such a history, and if it had such a history, it would likewise have developed one. The historical trend I am thinking about is the drastically different pasts both major civilizations have had regarding religious, political, social oppression.

Throughout their respective histories, the west has been far more oppressive in regards to religious, political, and social persecution while China has been mostly relatively tolerant. I think that the explicit and formal framework of human rights developed in the west precisely because one was required to protect people from the systematic abuses of their society, their church and their state while no such explicit and formal system was ever required in China because such kinds and degrees of oppression of the many institutions of religion, politics and social practices rarely existed in China. The motivational impetus was simply lacking in the case of China. If necessity is the mother of invention, the explicit and formal framework of protecting human rights was necessitated by a history of systematic oppression that made such a framework inevitable.

That is not to say that the west has always been intolerant towards these institutions nor is it to say that China has always been tolerant towards them. For example, the west during the last 50 years have been the most religiously, politically and socially tolerant in its history while ironically, China, since having adopted a western political system (Marxism) have been its most oppressive regarding those institutions. But the west’s history has intolerance as the norm, not the exception. It was the systematic and brutal oppression of people’s religious and political beliefs and associated social practices that was a causal force. Conversely, however, religious, political and social tolerance has been the norm in China and it was only interspersed with certain periods staining Chinese history with intolerance. For example, the roughly fifteen years of political terror during the Qin Dynasty and in the modern period of the Cultural Revolution.

For most of western history through the last 2000 or so years, one may be burned alive for practicing a religion not sponsored by the state. Indeed, one may even be killed for having thoughts or beliefs not sanctioned by the official state/church doctrine like Socrates and Thomas More were. Hundreds of thousands of people died in brutal religious campaigns all across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance and even the throughout the “Enlightenment” in religious purgings such as the Spanish Inquisition. Millions died in religious wars and religious Crusades.

Thousands of “witches” were tortured, burned or drowned alive for “crimes” of being “spinsters,” or of “gossiping” and of not going to church. Homosexuals were burned alive for what they did in the privacy of their homes. Philosophers and scientists who held views at odds with Biblical interpretation or official church-state doctrines (no separation back then) were also burned alive.

With a sordid history like that the question isn’t Why did an explicit and formal system of rights protection come into existence in the west? but Why didn’t one come into existence much sooner? Much of the rights framework (or Classical Liberal tradition in philosophical jargon) we know today didn’t even come into existence till between 1650-1800 in Europe and the US.

It was not because westerners valued “freedom” or “autonomy” anymore than anyone else. It was because their governments had made people’s lives so intolerable with brutal and intrusive policies that they had to formulate such systems to protect basic freedoms from gross infringement.

There is also a prevailing myth in both the west and in China that Christian values spurred on the Classical Liberal developments. But that is also wrong. One only needs to look at the philosophers who first developed and advocated such a framework. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and the American Founding Fathers were all what we probably would consider either atheists, agnostics or Deists (that is, non religious people who believed in an impersonal Creator). These Fathers of Liberalism lived in a time when almost everyone else was deeply religious. Many of these first Liberals were self-described “Christians” but they only described themselves so to protect themselves against persecution, social ostracization or for political gain. They did not believe in a personal God nor in the divinity of Christ or any number of Biblical claims. Hobbes and Locke had to escape to Holland (which together with Scotland was the only two major European nations that was moderately tolerant regarding religious and political beliefs and certain social practices). They were under threat of death had they stayed in their home country of England. It is no surprise that the creators of the Liberal rights model were the very people that needed such protections from their own societies.

On an interesting note, I have met one philosopher who argued that Locke was inspired to formulate his rights approach because he had read a newly available translation by the Jesuits of Mencius while in Holland. Mencius, being a Confucian, argued against intrusive state power and in favor of the interests of the people more than two thousand years before Locke. In the Confucian tradition, the state’s main responsibility is to provide social welfare (building roads, schools, hospitals, providing security, raising enough food, etc) and not sanctioning religion. The emperor’s basic role is role model and in the performing of rituals, not in the regulation of people’s personal lives.

For most of its history almost all religions, foreign or native were widely tolerated within China. There were no pogroms, no religious wars, no Inquisitions, no Crusades, no witch burnings, etc, etc in Chinese history. Christianity, Islam, Judaism all has had a history in China more than a thousand years old without any coercive state sanctioning or proscription of their practice or belief.

Chinese Christians, Jews and Muslims were made to observe laws other Chinese had to observe. They were never systematically singled out and persecuted like different religious adherents were throughout European history. Even during some periods in the Tang Dynasty when foreigners were expelled from China and foreign religious proselytizing made illegal, no attempt was made to prohibit religious practice by Chinese adherents.

Personal, social practices such as homosexuality was mostly widely tolerated in society. The government rarely if ever intruded in people’s houses or bedrooms. People, especially the Mandarin government officials openly criticized the policies of their government and even the Emperor himself (in fact, it was their jobs to do so).

It is no wonder that China did not develop an explicit and formal conceptual system to protect people’s speech, religious beliefs, and personal/social practices as no need was there to develop one. It is also no wonder that the west did develop one. It’s not that the Chinese don’t value the same things on an intuitive, moral level as westerners; it’s that there was a pressing need to make those basic moral intuitions into a more explicit and formal system so as to better protect people from violations in one society rather than the other.

I will say, however, the Chinese today may emphasize certain rights over others compared to most westerners. Americans, for example, may value the right to freedom of expression highly. While Chinese may value freedom from racism and economic freedoms and rights (access to health care, job security, etc) more than the freedom of expression but Chinese also value the freedom to express their religious and political views as well. The differences is a matter of relative degree in the hierarchy of scheme of values and how society ought to structure the laws so as to take into account those values. Any country that outlaws hate-speech may have a scheme like the Chinese over the Americans, say, valuing the freedom from racism over free speech but that does not mean that they do not value the later, just that when there is conflict, the higher-valued right ought to be the one that is prioritized over the lower-valued one in the law.

The rights framework was not conceived because of European High Mindedness as many westerners who love to engage in self-aggrandizement would like to believe. They are rather conceived by a reaction towards the rape of those rights by the religious, social and state powers that excessively and brutally controlled people’s lives. Many westerners also believe that the Chinese did not develop that tradition because Chinese culture or people do not value things like freedom and autonomy. But that is bigoted. It serves only to dehumanize the Chinese who are some of the most freedom loving people on earth.

It serves as no surprise, also, that Chinese people are now engaged in the discourse and legal codification making explicit what had already been valued such as protecting freedom of expression and so forth. Now the Chinese government is even further instituting the rule of law so as to protect people’s rights from unnecessary intrusion. This is a natural progression from the oppressive regime of the Cultural Revolution to the more relaxed environment most Chinese enjoy today to express themselves. Some westerners would like to take credit seeing this as influence of “western values” but this development is native much as the development of European and American Classical Liberal tradition was native to the west because it was a reaction against their own oppressive trends. China has far to go in this area but so do the west. Cultural centric and ethnocentric arrogance will not further the discourse but only hinder it.

Soldiers and moral responsibility

I made a post in the past about racists. I argued that racists ought to be held more accountable for their racism today than racist did in a previous time or in some other places than in the west. This is because we live in an information rich and free society. Often we think of soldiers fighting an unjust war as somehow excused (they were young, under threat, pressured by their society, etc, etc). I believe that these excuses for the most part, do not seem satisfactory. Now I don't think they deserve severe punishment for their actions unless they have committed war crimes but I do believe they deserve some responsibility and the consequences following for their actions.

But it seems to me that this further accountability is also attributable to soldiers who engage in unjust warfare. Excuses given in the past, for example by Nazis soldiers for invading other countries, if they had been poor excuses are now even worse excuses for doing the same acts (invasion, occupation).

The Nazis had better excuses than people do today for engaging in unjust wars because not only did they not live in a society in which disabusing information was available on ethical reasoning but because they were under a bigger personal threat for disobeying military orders than today's soldiers in places like Europe and the US.

So soldiers who have fought in demonstrably unjust wars, ceteris paribus, today ought to be held to a higher accountability than soldiers of a time before the Information Age (which may include Nazis). This of course, is only in regards to going to responsibility of going in an unjust war, not in what is done in war.

Is the Indian Caste System a form of Racism?

I've only read a few articles on the philosophy of race and critical race theory so I'm not sure about this area of philosophy but it seems that the question of whether the caste system of India (actually, there are many kinds of caste systems in practice today in India but I elide on this unnecessary complication) ought to be classified as a racist institution needs to be seriously addressed. It would obviously have large implications morally and legally for a large swath of humanity if it is deemed such. I don't know if the question has been addressed in the philosophical community but from what I have cursorily read about the caste system from the wikipedia page, the objections to such a classification (usually the one's from Indian sociologists) are quite lame.

The objection from these objectors to the racism charge is that castes are not races and so any discrimination among castes cannot be construed as racism or racial discrimination. Because they say that members of different castes are of the same race, the discrimination lower castes face, though may be repugnant, is still not racial discrimination.

This line of reasoning is based on a misunderstand how contemporary race theorists understand racism (see here for one example of a contemporary understanding of racism). Nearly all contemporary race theorists AFAIK do not understand racism to be defined by mistreatment necessarily from different races. They have good reason for this. For one, race is notoriously difficult to define and thus what constitutes discrimination on that basis is not clear. Furthermore, members of the same race may be racist towards each other. In other words, race component in racism is in the eyes of the beholder, or more specifically, the eyes of the perpetrators of discrimination or the negative intentional, racial attitudes. If members of a group sees racial differences in another group and treats them or have attitudes towards them that are discriminatory then that would be racist even if those differences are illusory and not in anyway biologically, physically instantiated. Also, remember that someone can be racist towards their own race.

Consider the racism that was met out to the Jews during Nazi Germany. That was racism as most race experts would agree though most German Jews are indistinguishable physically (and cluster closely even genetically) from “Aryan” Germans. The racial differences were merely in the eyes of the Nazis, i.e., they were wholly illusory. The Jews (among many other victims such as Gypsies and Slavs) were treated as somehow fundamentally different by their “racial essence” their “blood” according to their “Aryan” counterparts in society. That viewpoint from the perspective of the perpetrators is what counts, not the actual “race” (whatever that is) of the victim vis a vis the perpetrators. Also consider the genocide in Rwanda. The Tutsi and Hutu are physically (and linguistically, genetically and culturally) almost indistinguishable from each other. However the genocides they have committed against each other (in the 70s and 90s) are indeed racial in nature.

It was racial because the perpetrators each time saw their enemies, the people they would go on to exterminate as somehow fundamentally different in essence from them. That essence can be passed down from one generation to the next and is, for the most part, viewed as immutable. That sounds rather like the ideology behind caste system! 

Objectors to the caste-as-racism theory may object that though “actual race” is irrelevant to racism, the caste system is still not racist because the categories of races are a western categorization. But descriptively, there may be little to no difference between how the caste system structures society along the same lines as how racism structures society (i.e. based on perceived inherent abilities of groups that are passed down through generations). One may respond that any semantic hairsplitting is just an apologia for such oppressive practices as the caste system inherently may be.

One may wonder if different intuitions that separates a descriptivist versus a direct reference theory of language is at the heart of this issue. Descriptivists may say, “hey, if it walks like a duck, quacks like duck, it is a duck!” Thus because the caste system has all the qualitative hallmarks of a racialist institution (walking and quacking along perceived similar lines as racism), it is a racist institution. But direct reference theorists such as a causal reference theorist may say that the word “racism” has certain cultural connections to how they have been actually used in the west to refer to specific institutions and do not reference to other institutions no matter how qualitatively similar.

This brings up the issue of whether even if the direct reference theorists (or those who share that kind of intuition) are correct about the caste system, that would only be an empty victory for the caste system apologists because such a system though not “de jure” racist may be justifiably then deemed “de facto” racist especially if the institutions are extremely harmful like they are in actual racism (and there seems to be wide agreement that the caste system is extremely harmful to members of certain lower castes).

So if India has such widespread institutions of racism (or something very much like it) then it ought to motivate the civilized world to action in abolishing such oppressive institutions. India has already begun since the 1950s policies which aim at ameliorating the negative effects of caste discrimination. But it is still a largely caste society; sentiments towards different caste divisions still run deep in society and even if there are no more negative ostensible effects from the caste system, it may still be inherently oppressive system (or set of systems) and worth abolishing completely. Indeed the UN has already denounced Indian caste system as racism before.