Is life worth living for the hedonist?

Those who see life as worth living only if it is a good pleasurable life must ask themselves if they could start over again with life, they would do it again. Life may begin over for them if reincarnation is true. More profanely, will they have good reason to continue to live life as they know it? I take it that just about everyone desire deeply a happy, pleasurable life and few are willing to sacrifice their happiness and pleasure for the life of a moral saint or martyr. But look at history and the world. Is there good probability that you will live such a good life? Though just about all people have tried, there does not seem to be a preponderance of such lives over miserable or boring lives. In fact, the desired life of the hedonist seems to be a rarity and its not a matter of not trying.

Most have tried; but it seems that living such a life is a matter largely of luck. If so, the honest-with-herself hedonist must admit that it would be unwise to go on to live another life (or even to continue with her current life) as prospects that it will turn better for her so that she will live such a life or if she is lucky enough to currently live such a life, not turn bad at some later time is slim. She will also refuse to have children on such conclusions.

But is life worth living? Who will still want to go on living? Who will still have purpose under such bleak prospects? Who will still have meaning and value? It is precisely the Moral Saint or those who try to be one through cultivation.

Is there such a thing as excusable rape?

Many crimes are punished far less harshly by the law because they are committed under passion. Consider the classic examples: A father kills his child's molester. A Husband kills his wife after catching her in bed with another man. A wife kills her husband after years of abuse in cases where this is not a case of self-defense (such as in some states where there is a battered wife law). Other kinds of excuses such as temporary insanity and other kinds of mental conditions also are taken into account in many legal matters and our intuitions seem to coincide that much as well when we excuse people of their behavior when we learn of their relevant mental disorders which had a contributing factor to their behavior.

The law recognizes extenuating excuses such as these and often hands out much lighter sentences, sometimes replacing jail terms with long parole combined with psychological counseling. Our reactive attitudes of blame, indignation, anger etc towards these people also seem greatly attenuated.

But would we feel the same if we found out that many rapist may also rape because of uncontrollable passions? To my understanding, the psychological literature on rape is undecided at this point whether many who do rape do so because of uncontrollable urges and "passions" of this kind. If there are such cases, would we be justified in excusing partially or fully those who rape under such excuses? Some cases of rape such as some cases of statutory rape, the law recognizes as excusable for obvious reasons such as when it is reasonable that the rapist believed at the time the victim is of age. I'm not of course, talking about these obvious instances of excusable rape.

But also consider this: many Iraqi men were imprisoned (often without any evidence of wrongdoing) in abu Ghreib. Many of those men were tortured by female soldiers some of whom were trained psyops to sexually humiliate their victims. It is understandable that some of these men will believe that the only way they will regain their dignity is by raping their captor-torturers. I will not discuss the justifiability of that belief but the excusability of that belief. It seems at least reasonable that if they happened on the opportunity to rape their former torturers, they could be justifiably excused for it legally and morally.

Of vices and rainbows

Many of us have a combination of vices and virtues. Whether or not we are viewed as primarily bad or good persons may depend on the viewpoint of the people that knows us. A mother may never have an "objective" perspective of her child. But is there really such an objective viewpoint? How will we judge and measure each other's wickedness (and goodness)? Perhaps one day, people in the future would view most of us now as as evil as we view many Nazis or Southerners during the early and mid 19th century who either had slaves or supported the institution. Future people may view us as primarily bad for things like eating or wearing animals or for the environmental damages, or for our wars, or for our racism etc, etc. So there is both substantial circumstantial, synchronic and diachronic perspectivism in moral evaluations of whole persons (and entire societies as the case may be).

Now I think vices and virtues themselves are objective (they may be dispositions etc) but how are people in whole to be morally evaluated under such perspectival considerations? Are our attributions of moral worth like our seeing rainbows or are they more like seeing colors; that is, with a substantial personal coloring (no pun intended) but still objectively evaluable? If the later what standards will we judge people by? Maybe the lines will be shown to be wholly arbitrarily drawn. It may be that the lines and standards are dependent on the society to a large degree in that certain societies make becoming good (or bad) easier or harder and it is that standard that we have to measure people against (relative to the place and time they live under) but is this the kind of objectivity that will do the job for a robust moral realism?

One possible response to this kind of perspectivism is that we may have to orient our blame at character traits and motivations (ill or good will, etc) instead of individuals which may have varying degrees or combinations of good and bad traits. This would mean giving up of contempt for contempt seem to be an attitude fundamentally attached to persons as a whole and not merely character traits. But this seem to be at odds with our most deeply held intuitions concerning the seeming fact that there really are bad (or good) people in the world, not just bearers of traits which are bad (or good) and that that the bad does deserve something like contempt. The sacrifice to shift to that reorientation of our moral outlook may be too much to give up that intuition. It would also push to problem back to traits instead of persons for we can always ask what is the standard for minimal amount of combination of good vs bad traits for moral decency? Maybe only purely moral saints, those who are morally perfect, are the ultimate standard to avoid the arbitrariness of it all. I would hope for all of us that that is not the case.

Alternatively, we may wish to draw the lines at those who either endorse/identify or are against their vices or endorse/identify with their virtues. Those who do the later are deemed good persons while the former are deem bad. This would mean that many if not most people we now regard as good may actually be bad because they do not try to go against their vices and may even endorse or identify with many of them. But this would also save the distinction of good/bad people. However, I don't think this will do much as there are varying degrees of endorsing and identifying with one's vices and virtues, both in degree of strength of endorsing, how often it occurs consciously, and which vices and virtues we do so. So we may be back at where we started. Some people may be largely against their vices but do not identify with their virtues or vice versa. Some may only rarely consciously be aware of where they stand with regard to their values and moral beliefs. There are so many combinations that lines may have to be arbitrarily drawn.

Are racists today, in our society, worse than racists before?

We all know that Nazis and Apartheid supporters and slave owners are evil, etc. That's a general statement and many Nazis probably were genuinely good people but most were quite evil. They were racist, militaristic, did not follow moral scruples (sometimes brazenly violating them) even the ones that never killed anyone or invaded anyone or stole from anyone; just by being a member of the Nazi regime and supporting the killing, invasion etc of that regime makes one vicariously evil with one's despicable viewpoints and spiritual allegiance. I will call this kind of Nazi the "Bystander Nazi". However, someone living today and in our society or comparably rich and free information societies who hold similar deplorable racist views, holding everything else equal to the Bystander Nazi, can be argued to be far worse morally than the Nazi.

This is because our culture has far more epistemic resources available to defeat racist views than 1930s Germany. Not only is information dispelling racist views much more common and available but the skills necessary to dismantle those views (and other views such as aggressive militarism, etc) are available to almost anyone who desires to acquire them. All one of reasonable intelligence needs to do is pick up a study a critical thinking book to acquire such skills. Holding everything else equal, the Bystander Nazi and the everyman/woman racist today, are not equal in their moral worth. You would have to display far more vices, especially ignorance, hatred, prejudice, lack of empathy, etc to be a racist today than someone in 1930s Nazi Germany. Since such a person has more vices, it is reasonable to see this person as more contemptible and blameworthy as well.

Why are physicists such bad philosophers?

In this hilarious post, a philosopher makes fun of the critical thinking abilities (or lack thereof) of some physicists and also has some justified words about their hubris. His observations of that hubris, and ignorance, and condescension for philosophy and many other disciplines mirrors some of my experiences with talking to them as well as was explained in one exchange with a string theorist.

Argument for the existence of coincident objects?

In a previous post, I mentioned that I believe in coincident objects. Here is another argument for their existence. It seems very likely that impure sets exist. Impure sets are even more plausible than the pure sets of mathematics which are either the null set or sets built up from the null set by certain (mental operations or otherwise) "operations." Thus you seem to get everything in the mathematical world out of nothing, ex nihilo. That may seem counter intuitive. But impure sets are sets that contain concrete objects such as the set containing president Obama and the world's largest potato. If any sets exist, impure sets must exist. A set is just a collection of objects. And surely, collections of individual objects exist as much as individual objects exists.

Now consider the set containing you, the person. Now consider another: the set containing all your cells. These are clearly two different sets as one has as its sole element, you, and the other contains more than a trillion elements. But it seems that both these sets occupy the same space-time region. (Also consider the set containing you and...you as another example).

Some may object by saying that since all sets are abstract including impure sets, they don't really occupy any region of space-time even if all their elements do and thus, the two sets don't really coincide. I'm not sure what to say about this. I'm not sure of its coherence to say that a set (which by definition is just the collection of its elements) is not instantiated in space-time but all its elements are. A corollary of this is that some abstract objects really occupy regions of space-time such as impure sets as weird as that sounds.

A Copernican Revolution in time?

There are three main competing theories for the topology of time. That's not to say that there aren't other possible topologies but there are three that are widely taken to be in the philosophical running: presentist, growing block universe, and eternalism. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. The first two are A-theories while the last is a B-theory. Presentism says that only the present is real with the past and future being non existent. Eternalism says that past, present and future all have the same "ontological status" of existence (i.e. being in the scope of our most unrestricted quantifiers for those those with a logical bent). Growing block says that time expands with stuff (events etc) being added at the front end of the growing block (the past being stationary).

According to McTaggart's famous paper, "The Unreality of Time," there are only two kinds of temporal order, namely the A and the B series, and all topologies must fall under these two classifications. Philosophers have not been able to find a plausible topology outside of those two series so on this account, McTaggart may be correct. The problem, as McTaggart pointed out, is that the B series are two-place relations (is before, is after) but that these relations cannot make sense of change which McTaggart believed essential to time.

The A series, however, does no better because it is incoherent. The reason is that the A series takes the past, the present, and the future to be genuine properties of times but that if the A series were true, all times would have all three properties at once and that is incoherent or contradictory.

I would like to concentrate on the growing block universe theory. Traditionally it has been thought of being described thus:

On this view, which we can call “The Growing Universe Theory,” the universe is always increasing in size, as more and more things are added on to the front end (temporally speaking).

However, why is the stuff always added on the front end?

Can't we think of time as receding away from the present? Instead of the past (especially the Big Bang e.g.) being the stationary reference point, why can't we see the present as such a point? Some may quickly respond and say that this view is clearly false because it seems that our subjective sense of time is of a "moving forward" into the future but what justification is there of that directionality? Can't we as easily see this as the past receding away from us? It would be analogous to people before Copernicus thinking that the sun and all heavenly objects revolved around the Earth when it was the earth that revolved around the sun. But here, there is no essential stationary reference point in modern astronomy.

My point is that we can see it both ways for temporal order. Better, I think the analogy is of a rubber band being stretched with us somewhere in between the two ends. At the beginning of (space)time, perhaps 14 billion years ago, there was just a point corresponding to the singularity that became the Big Bang. Now, the temporal order looks something like:

(future?)<-----------Present --------->Big Bang (beginning of time?)

One of the major advantages of this view of time is that it jibes well with relativity and the expanding universe idea (which presentism has notorious difficulties with among other things). If space is expanding, time is probably as well as space and time are unified under general relativity. Eternalism seem to be also at odds with an expanding spacetime. Also, notice that the expansion I am thinking of can be thought of as symmetric (which growing block is most certainly not).

We can simply think of the expansion of time like the stretching of a rubber band. The space between any two points on the band expands. In the case of space, astronomers thought that expansion of space is more like a balloon being inflated with any two points on the balloon's surface getting further apart when the region (balloon's skin) between them expands. This explains the odd observation in the early 20th century by astronomers that every galaxy in the universe seems to be flying away from us and each other.

I think doing so would mean making this kind of symmetric growing block have certain decided advantages of presentism without some of its problems. First of all, it can make sense of change and thus has some of the advantages of the A series. Second, it has some of the B series advantages such as making sense of "truth makers" for the past and maybe future as well for assertive claims about the non present. The past exists under the B series and has the same ontological status as the present, thus a fortiori, facts about the past exist rendering assertive statements about the past true or false unlike presentism which claims (implausibly) that all assertive statements about the past are strictly speaking false or have no truth value. My idea also has the advantage of symmetry which we know that our best physical theories posit. The general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics all posit temporal symmetry.

I am agnostic about whether we are at the growing tip of one end of that expanding rubber band or in the middle somewhere. This has the epistemic disadvantage that we may not ever be sure of where we are in the temporal order of things which was argued by David Braddon-Mitchell and Trenton Merricks to be a fault with growing block. We could be anywhere except one end which is the point of the Big Bang (Merricks argued that it is far more probable that we are in the past if growing block is true than any-when else). But notice that in my rubber band topology, all points on the rubber band, corresponding to times, will seem alike to any other. So it may be that we are between some point in the future and past and yet we would have the same perspective as any other point on the band. Any point on the band will look "alike" from the perspective of those in it.

I do think that we have reason to think that we are at the end band opposite from the Big Bang because we seem to have better epistemic access to information from the past than the future. We are better informed of the past than the future and this asymmetry may suggest we are at one of the end's edge. This epistemic asymmetry between knowledge of past and future presumably is because the future does not exist relative to our position.

My idea is disadvantaged however by the fact that any point in the future, if it exists and we are not at the endpoint opposite the Big Bang, is rocketing away from us (much like points in space are getting further apart from each other). That may seem counter intuitive. A further oddity that may have to be explained is that while the expansion of the universe and the Ptolemaic world views mistakingly see our own position as privileged and stationary, in the case of time, why is it that we seem to see the past (or perhaps the Big Bang) as that privileged and stationary point?

I also have some ideas about the semantics of talk about the present (and past, etc) which my view of time seem to offer ways around traditional difficulties with the other viewpoints. More to come on that later. This is just a sketch of my hazy idea which I will call (unimaginatively) "rubber band growing block theory." I need to think about it more. Also, we may see the view advocated here not so much as a growing block but a dynamic eternalism with a finite temporal extension (if such a thing makes any sense) but I suspect that that is a terminological point.