Are Moral Values Merely Relative?

"What is true for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me."

This statement, attributed to the great Sophist, Protagoras, in a conversation with Socrates, is one of the earliest statements of philosophical relativism we possess in the records of early Greek philosophy.  The doctrine has been popular with thinkers ever since who are uncomfortable or hostile to notions of absolute or objective truth. (1)  Relativism is defined in different ways in contemporary discussions, but, following Protagoras, this one from Wikipedia is the most useful for my purpose here.

 “The term [relativism] often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism)."

A radical version of this theory would imply that there is no universal truth about the shape of the earth.  If a non-scientific culture says the earth is flat, then the earth is flat.  If others believe the earth is round, then that’s the truth.  Both beliefs are equally true or valid, or if you prefer - there is no objective truth about the shape of the earth or anything else, only culturally determined beliefs, which may contradict one another.  Too bad for logic and common sense.  Life is hard.

Not that hard.  Most philosophers realize that extreme relativism is self-contradictory.  Proponents do not offer their theory as a culturally relative opinion that may be validly contradicted in another context, but rather as a universal truth that is valid in any culture, any language.  In other words, it’s both a relative and an absolute truth, which is absurd.  A theory that refutes itself leads nowhere.  For this reason, most contemporary discussions of relativism are concerned with ethics and morals. 

Ethical relativism (ER) is the philosophical theory that there is no such thing as objective moral truth.  All judgments about right and wrong, good and evil, are either just matters of individual opinion (individual relativism or subjectivism) or are determined by cultural traditions (cultural relativism).   The version of ER that is most popular among liberals and postmodern philosophers is cultural relativism.  It’s a theory they think is required by multiculturalism policies in some liberal democracies.  Many ordinary people have absorbed the theory without knowing what it is and without thinking about it very carefully. 

Why would anyone believe that cultures alone decide what is right and wrong?  One popular approach is based on a well-known generalization I call Descriptive Relativism 1:  different cultures hold conflicting beliefs about right and wrong.  Here is the argument:

• Premise:  Different cultures hold conflicting beliefs about right and wrong.
• Conclusion:  Therefore, whatever a culture believes is right or wrong really is right or wrong, and if another culture holds opposite moral beliefs, their beliefs equally valid.  In short, there are no moral truths.

That cultures differ in their moral beliefs is a well-known fact which does not provide a basis for any interesting ethical conclusions.  The argument is a non sequitur.  Different cultures have held different beliefs about all sorts of things: shape of the earth; causes of diseases; how the universe came into being, etc.  So what?  We don’t accept that contradictory beliefs about these matters are all true.  Why should we accept contradictory beliefs about morals just because cultures don’t agree on them?

Of course, the argument can be made valid by adding one more premise:

• Premise 1:  Different cultures hold conflicting beliefs about right and wrong.
• Premise 2:  There is no universal standard by which we could decide which morals are right and which are wrong in different cultures.
• Conclusion:  Therefore, whatever actions or practices a culture believes are right or wrong really are right or wrong, and if another culture holds the opposite beliefs, then what they believe is right or wrong is also really right or wrong.  There are no moral truths.

Adding Premise 2 does correct the non sequitur, but now the problem shifts to Premise 2: why should we believe it?  What is the evidence for it?  You can hardly say that the evidence is right there in Premise 1 - that cultures cannot agree on a standard for settling moral differences - that would be circular reasoning.  Without supporting evidence, Premise 2 is useless.

Let’s make a fresh start.  The problem with DR1, some philosophers think, is that it does not probe deeply enough into the nature of cultural differences.  A more sophisticated approach would be this one, call it Descriptive Relativism 2:  different cultures hold conflicting fundamental beliefs about right and wrong.  The distinction between surface morals and fundamental moral beliefs is important because many apparent moral differences among cultures disappear when they are traced back to their deeper ethical assumptions.  For example, the Aztecs believed human sacrifice was justified, because they thought it was necessary for their survival to ensure the sun would rise each day.  Everyone agrees that societies need policies that will ensure their survival, but we disagree about the human sacrifice, because we know sunrises are governed by physical laws, not by rituals aimed at appeasing national gods.  Both Aztecs and ourselves agree that  policies that benefit our societies in important ways are good. That's a shared fundamental ethical principle.  So the dispute is about factual assumptions about how the universe works, not about fundamental values.  If the facts could be made clear to the Aztecs, the practice of human sacrifice should eventually disappear and the apparent ethical conflict along with it.

Now if moral disagreements between different societies were always like this one, ethical relativism wouldn’t exist.  Everyone would agree on a few fundamental moral principles, and their disagreements would be only about the relevant factual issues which could be settled by science.  Unfortunately, fundamental differences among societies about morals do exist.

Consider the Navajo game called Chicken Polo.  Navajo men bury a chicken in the ground up to its neck and then compete on horseback to see who can knock the chicken’s head off.  They freely admit that chickens feel pain but see nothing wrong in the game nonetheless.  Our culture, or at least a large segment of it, regards such activities as morally wrong, because we hold as a fundamental principle that it is wrong to cause pain to sentient creatures for trivial reasons.  The Navajos do not hold that principle, so the cultural difference in this case is fundamental.

Closer to home, consider the belief of many religious fundamentalists that women should be subordinate to men, because God has decreed thus in the Bible or the Koran.  Secularists do not accept that any scripture is the ultimate source of moral truth.  They argue from rational grounds that women should have rights and freedoms equal to those of men.  The clash between faith-based ethics and rational ethics, therefore, is a fundamental difference.  Which is correct?  Ethical relativists say there is no way to decide.  Let’s take a closer look.

A proper discussion of cultural relativism must focus on Descriptive Relativism 2.  The question then becomes:  if different cultures hold differing fundamental beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil, does this fact entail ethical relativism?  The answer is no.

Descriptive relativism in either version is an empirical generalization, not an ethical theory.  Ethical relativism is a theory about moral truth, not about what this or that culture believes about right and wrong.  This is important, because, as we have seen, without a premise that contains a claim about moral truth, any argument for ethical relativism will commit a fallacy, a non sequitur.  The more plausible versions of ER use Descriptive Relativism 2 plus an assumption about moral truth as a basis for the theory, as follows:

The Basic Argument:

• Premise 1:  Different cultures hold conflicting fundamental beliefs about right and wrong.
• Premise 2:  There is no objective standard of moral truth by which we could decide which of the conflicting fundamental beliefs are true and which are false.
• Conclusion:  Therefore, all moral values are culturally relative.  If an act or practice is believed to be morally permissible in one culture and morally impermissible in another culture, both beliefs are correct.

The argument for Premise 2 is that, because the conflicting ethical principles are fundamental - that is, not capable of support by additional argument, there is no higher principle available to us for deciding which of the contradictory fundamental principles is wrong in any given case.  Therefore, the conclusion means that actions believed on fundamental principle to be right in a given culture really are right, and those same actions, if thought to be wrong in another culture, really are wrong despite the fact that the fundamental principles are contradictory.  Chicken Polo is right and chicken polo is wrong - really.  A corollary to this conclusion is that no society’s moral code is better than any other’s.  Some philosophers further conclude that we have no just reason to criticize another society’s morals, and it would be especially wrong to attempt to impose one’s own moral system on another society, as Great Britain for example did in India.  We may feel horror about the Saudi Arabian custom of cutting off the hands of a thief, but we have to accept it and shut up about it.

What are we to think of this apparently stronger argument?  The first thing to notice is that Premise 2 suffers from the same objection we saw in the previous argument for DR1:  what proof is there that there is no objective standard of moral truth?  Even if no such standard has been discovered so far, it doesn’t follow that none is possible.  There are, in fact, some impressive candidates.  Premise 2 would need to be buttressed by a careful examination of the various attempts by philosophers to identify a plausible universal standard of moral truth.  The relativist would also have to show that all the criticisms of ethical relativism are wrong. A tall order, as we shall see.

Let’s start with an interesting, although perhaps inconclusive, observation: most relativists do not really believe their own theory.  Ask a relativist if she is really willing to accept that, if some culture believes that killing children or sexually mutilating adolescent girls is morally permissible, then those practices really are morally acceptable.  “Of course not, but …..”  All right, let’s move on.  A theory might be right even if the person defending it doesn’t really believe in it, although that seems rather odd.  More than a few relativists have felt uncomfortable with this challenge.  However, there are other serious problems with ethical relativism.

1.  ER can’t account for the fact that we reason and argue with one another about value issues. If there is not at least one universal ethical truth, we could not reason about values at all.  We could only plead with or shout at one another to get them to accept our point of view.

2.  ER can’t explain the many moral similarities among various cultures, e.g. the universal prohibition against betraying your own tribe or nation.  Despite the differences, there is a lot of agreement among cultures about basic moral norms.  If the Basic Argument were sound, we would expect far more basic disagreements than exist in fact in order to justify the conclusion “All values are relative.”

3. ER cannot explain why so many societies in the modern era are embracing ideas of universal human rights and freedoms as found in the American Declaration of Independence and the UN Charter.  This global trend suggests strongly that a liberal system of ethics is increasingly considered by people in most societies to be better than the traditional norms they grew up with.  This is powerful evidence that universal ethical standards exist, even if philosophers may not agree on what they are.

4. Why is culture to be the arbiter of moral truth?  On relativistic premises, why not say that right and wrong are determined by the whims of the king or dictator?  Or why not by the preferences of each individual?

Do these ruminations prove the demise of ethical relativism?  Not necessarily.  They just show that a certain approach does not work.  Cultural relativism is not a convincing basis for ethical relativism.  Is there a firmer foundation?  I doubt it. One philosopher has even argued that the worst problem facing relativists is that their theory is not even intelligible.(2)  Relativists could retreat to skepticism and challenge moral philosophers opposed to ER to produce a positive account of the possibility of moral truth.  It’s a legitimate challenge, and there are a number of plausible candidates:  the Golden Rule, the No-Harm Rule, the Interest Theory version of utilitarianism (Peter Singer, Practical Ethics), theories of justice and human rights, etc.  If any one or combination of these could survive critical scrutiny, that would be the final and fatal blow to ethical relativism. 

I must leave it to you readers to pursue these inquiries on your own.

____________________

(1)  Zogby poll findings regarding what is being taught in American universities. Studies indicate 75% of American college professors currently (2002) teach that there is no such thing as right and wrong.

(2) You can find a useful collection of recent essays pro and con on ethical relativism at the Philosophy Now website here.

Is Democracy Obsolete?

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."                                            - Winston Churchill

Is democracy obsolete?  The short answer is Yes, because the wicked problems humanity is facing today are global, not national, and all democracies are national.  There is no global democracy through which the peoples of the world could pool their wisdom, vote on the solutions to the wicked problems we so desperately need, and put them into action for the benefit of all.

What wicked problems?  Global warming, air pollution, worldwide degradation of oceans, waterways, and land environments, predatory multinational banks and other corporations 'too big to fail or jail,' declining biodiversity, worldwide habitat destruction, food and water insecurity, human trafficking, massive refugee crises, ethnic and religious conflicts, endless warfare, international terrorism, etc. (1)  

While these problems are often the subject of public opinion surveys, media conversation, and internet petitions, there is no political mechanism for a global democratic approach to their solution.  The UN was supposed to be that instrument, but it was never intended to be a true democracy, and it has failed even to deliver on its main mission of ending warfare among nations and maintaining peace.  Global problems cannot be solved locally, and all democracies today are local.  As instruments for solving wicked global problems, democracy is obsolete.

obsolete: something no longer in use or no longer useful                 

Am I suggesting a global democracy is needed?  Yes, but before outlining what that might look like, let's take a closer look at how democracy fails even at the national level to deliver on its promises.

Everyone who follows the news senses that something is wrong with their own democracy. and perhaps with democracy in general as we know it. The political wisdom of the crowd was on display recently at the October White Rock Philosophers meeting.  After deciding on a working definition of democracy, the members came up with a lengthy list of ills that today's democracies suffer from. 

One person thinks that a true democracy has never existed.  Others acknowledge democracy's existence but claim that it is in serious disrepair.  Complaints included the following and probably others which I have forgotten:

· democracy is a fiction; it has never existed.

· domination of elections by big money

· powerful lobbies have undue influence

· apathy, ignorance, and irrationality among voters

· ill-informed elected representatives

· corruption of various kinds

· party and districting systems exclude some voters from meaningful participation.

· lack of sense of responsibility among citizens, voter apathy

· corporate control of media

To this depressing list we can add massive lying, exaggerations, and fear-mongering by politicians, xenophobia against immigrants, racist policing, corporate crimes, predatory banks and other corporations, lack of accountability for people at the top, domination of elections by big money, enormous and increasing inequality, illegal surveillance of citizens, persecution of whistleblowers and protesters, government secrecy, revolving door between government and corporations.  Are citizens ever allowed to vote on these issues?

Theoretically, all those problems can be fixed, we might think.  However, the fundamental problem may be even worse.  Writer George Monbiot takes seriously the claim of some philosophers that democracy cannot work as it is meant to; human nature does not allow it. He asks:

"What if democracy doesn’t work? What if it never has and never will? What if government of the people, by the people, for the people is a fairytale? What if it functions as a justifying myth for liars and charlatans?" (2)

How is democracy supposed to work?  The word 'democracy' means 'rule by the people.'  Literally, the people, the whole people, are the sovereign, the supreme power.  This astonishing concept, first invented and practiced by ancient Greek city-states, has today become the aspiration of virtually all the world's peoples.  The ideal was immortally expressed by Abraham Lincoln: "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." 

These three components can be fulfilled in direct democracy, a government in which all decisions are made by the entire body of eligible citizens, outcomes to be determined by a majority of votes.  No nations today are governed by direct democracy, because populations are too large.  Instead, we have indirect democracy: citizens vote for representatives to a national assembly of some kind where laws are passed and handed on to an elected executive.  An independent judiciary is charged with ensuring the laws are fairly administered. 

So what we have is not 'government of the people': the governing bodies are made up of elected officials, not the whole people.  Many other officials are appointed, not elected.  We do not have 'government by the people' because only the elected representatives are allowed to vote on legislation.  We do not have 'government for the people' except insofar as laws benefiting the people also work to keep the representatives and their parties in power.  Self-interest is almost always the first motivation of politicians, not public service. 

Thus, representative government, as we know it today, falls far short in most cases of fulfilling the ideal of democratic rule.  As soon as an election is finished, the people's ability to control the functions of government is ended.  Representatives are supposed to carry out the will of the people, but very often they do not for reasons mentioned earlier.  Yes, a robust system of binding referenda, as in Switzerland, can help to maximize citizen power, but even the Swiss can't control everything their politicians do, e.g. prevent their giant banks from carrying on criminal activities without fear of legal interference.  Moreover, as I have pointed out, even the best democracies are helpless to solve global problems. 

It appears, then, that the 'folk theory of democracy' - our belief that a people in the right circumstances can elect representatives who will then carry out their will is a myth.

Here are some additional reasons for this rather discouraging view:

1. Democracy is not majority rule: a party can take power with less than 50% of the vote.

2. Public opinion has almost no influence on major political decisions. (3)

3. Wealth rules: supreme power is held by corporations and other vested interests.

4. Democracy fosters superficial and inadequate focus on the issues.

5. Party systems foster divisiveness; zero-sum-game dynamics. 

6. Democracy is not a meritocracy: politicians are often ill-qualified for office.

7. Politicians don't have an independent voice either - their vote is 'whipped.'

8. The system facilitates self-interest and scandal.

"Enough already," you might say.  "True, there is no democracy that doesn't have serious flaws.  Nothing is perfect in this world.  But look at all that democracy has accomplished over the centuries:  gradual broadening of voting rights to women and minorities - now everyone has the right to vote.  Protected rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have hugely increased the wealth of the masses and brought them all manner of life-enhancing social services like education and medical systems.  Freedom of thought has unleashed the creative brilliance of scientists, inventors, and engineers, as well as that of culture critics who work to keep the power of democratic rulers from morphing into tyranny.  Don't be such a nabob of negativity; think on the blessings of democracy.  Besides, despite its flaws, representative democracy is the best system available; direct democracy is simply not possible."

We can and we should keep the 'blessings' of democracy in mind, even as we take note of its shortcomings.  It is also true that the huge size of national populations has forced us to accept representation as the only method of expressing the will of the people - that is, until now.  The invention of the internet changes everything.

The internet confronts us with the stark fact that our constitutions, political parties, and election apparatuses are all obsolete.  For hundreds of years, voters have been forced to vote only for representatives from their state, province, or territory.  (In presidential systems, people are also allowed to vote for the national leader.)  They have been required to travel to some polling place where they enter a booth, put an x on a piece of paper, or press a button on an electronic machine.  In this age of the internet, is there any good reason why everyone could not vote online from their home?  The answer is no, of course, and a few countries are experimenting with just such a system (Estonia, the Netherlands).  We can expect more and more countries to adopt online voting systems in the future.

Will online voting solve the crises of democracy?  It will help to increase voter participation, but as long as the elective representative system remains in place, the deeper structural problems will continue to undermine the popular will.  Why?  Because all representative systems separate the people from the levers of power in actual governing. 

However, the possibility of elections being conducted entirely online has led to an even more dramatic proposal: online direct democracy - the replacement of congresses and parliaments with legislative power exercised directly by the people themselves via the world wide web.   

This radical proposal, currently being investigated only by a relative few social researchers, has already acquired a (rather awkward) name:  crowdocracy. (4)  Literally, the crowd rules.  Whereas traditional political philosophers have always distrusted the people as a whole ("the Beast") in favor of rule by experts, crowdocracy is based on a new but well-supported hypothesis:  the crowd is actually smart.  The theory is called 'the wisdom of crowds.'

Look for more on crowdocracy and the wisdom of crowds in Part 2 of this series.

_____________

¹  In a recent survey, millennials voiced their concern about 10 outstanding problems their generation is facing.  All are arguably global problems, only partially solvable, if at all, at the national level.

 ²  George Monbiot's essay can be found here.

³   Research by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page is cited in Crowdocracy.  For a useful summary and commentary, see this piece in The New Yorker.

 ⁴  See Alan Watkins and Iman Stratenus, Crowdocracy: the End of Politics, 2016.

Is it Rational to Fear Death?

"Most of us would admit that, at least in some way, we fear death.  But what if we're making a mistake - a reasoning error?  What if our fear of death is based on a misconception about death that, if corrected, would eliminate our fear?" 

 - Mark Berkson, Death, Dying, and the Afterlife

Many people, when asked, say they are not afraid of death - afraid of dying perhaps but not of death itself.  I tend to disbelieve them.  The religious mythologies and rituals, literature, and philosophies of all cultures from earliest times attest to the universal terror of death among our kind.  In our own time, over a hundred years of deep psychology have confirmed that fear of death lies deep within the unconscious mind, hidden from day-to-day consciousness by various strategies of denial.  Most of us don't want to talk or think about our own death at all.  The deaths of others usually takes place at a remove from us, and we don't have any role in preparing a corpse for its funeral or burial.

It's easy to say now, safe in our home and absent any reason to think the end is near, that we are not afraid of death.  But consider the following:  imagine you are captured by some evil people and imprisoned in a small, sealed cell from which escape is impossible.  After a while a note is slipped under the door saying that in one hour the cell will begin to fill with helium, killing you in matter of seconds.  Do you seriously believe you would not experience fear during that final hour?  Can you imagine that situation vividly enough to experience some fear right now?

Currently a group of White Rock philosophers is studying a video lecture course on death, dying, and the afterlife.  The topic of a recent session was "Is it rational to fear death?"  In a basic sense, the answer is 'no.' It is not rational to experience fear of death, since fear is an emotion, and no emotions are rational. They are passions - literally, things that happen to us.  Emotions just come upon us whether we want them or not.  The Greek philosopher Epicurus probes more deeply.  Knowing that everyone feels afraid of death now and  then, he asks:  assuming death is the final and complete end of a person's life, can you give a good reason for fearing death?  The question means:  after careful philosophical reflection, is it rational to fear death?  His argument goes something like this:

Death is nothing to us.  

1) Let's assume what seems to be true about death from all that we can observe, viz. that death is the complete end of a person's life - no more sensation or any other experience.

2) Now the only thing that is bad for us is pain or suffering.

3) But when we are dead, there is no pain or suffering.

4) Therefore, death is not bad for us and hence is nothing to be feared.

Epicurus argues that it is not rational to fear death, and it is difficult to refute his reasoning.  Accepting the argument, however, doesn't mean that you won't continue to be afraid of death.  It is unrealistic to imagine that a single act of reasoning can dispel an instinct as deeply rooted in us as fear of death.  Epicurus understood this and so advised his disciple in his famous Letter to Menoeceus to "Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to  us."  We know that Epicurus, like most of the Greek philosophers of his time, regarded philosophy as practical wisdom as well as the pursuit of intellectual understanding.   So he probably advised his students to reflect deeply and often on his argument that death is nothing to be feared.  A daily practice of repeating and contemplating the Epicurean argument amounts to using philosophy as therapy.  In our own time cognitive behavioral therapy takes a similar approach.

Lucretius, a later devotee of Epicureanism, offered a variation on the argument by pointing out that the infinite span of time that passed before our birth instils no regret in us, and therefore, the similarly endless time that will elapse after we die should be of equal unconcern.  This is known as the symmetry argument.

Against these thinkers, contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel proposes the deprivation argument: death is bad because we lose (the memory of) every good thing that happened in our lives and all possibility of enjoying similar experiences in the future.  He offers several thought experiments to support the argument.  He asks us to imagine (1) a husband's betrayal by his wife that he never finds out about, (2) an author that writes a book that, after her death, is destroyed by a fire, and so nobody reads it; (3) an intelligent adult who suffers a brain injury that "reduces him to the mental condition of a contented infant."  In each case, Nagel insists, the event is bad for the individual, even though he/she never experiences any negative feelings as a result of the event.  In each case, a period of time in the person's life must be taken into consideration, not merely a moment of experience, as Epicurus thought.

Against Lucretius, Nagel argues that the pre-birth and post-death periods are not symmetrical, because the first is devoid of all value, whereas a person's life before death includes many good experiences as well as the expectation of additional goods in future years.  Both of these are highly valued by everyone, and they are lost when a person dies.  Therefore, to fear losing them - to fear death - is rational.   

In the 20th century, some existentialist philosophers have sided with Epicurus with a slightly different take on the issue.  They argue that when it comes to death, 'fear' is the wrong term.  Fear in usual cases is fear of some object or event or situation - something specific like a charging rhinoceros.  Remove the object and the fear is gone.  Death is not like that.  Soren Kierkegaard's word dread or Heidegger's angst is more appropriate, since death has no identifiable, specific features at all.  Fear of death is really dread of the unknown, of our non-existence, which we cannot even imagine.  There is no way to remove death understood in this way and so no way to free ourselves from dread.  These philosophers agree with Epicurus that fear of death is irrational but disagree with his optimistic belief that rational contemplation can relieve us of that fear.

·

Misunderstanding Trump

I have read two major books by George Lakoff and several of his articles.  He is a sharp analyst of political discourse when he sticks to linguistics.  When he goes big in metaphysics (Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999) and in the recent Alternet piece, "Understanding Trump," not so great.  His "family metaphor" for America's political culture is mostly useless.

If Trump's supporters were all 8 or 9 years old, Lakoff would be spot on.  Almost no one past that age thinks of their culture in terms of "strict father" or "nurturant parent."  But Lakoff thinks all Americans do.

  "We tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms …."

"We" apparently means "all of us," that is, all adult Americans of voting age.  All of us (Canadians, too, probably), consciously or unconsciously think of the nation as a kind of large family.  That's nonsense.  As they develop from infancy to adulthood, individuals become members of other social collectives - peer groups, sports teams, military units, college fraternities/sororities, corporations, charitable organizations, etc. - which no one thinks of as extended family groupings.  This fact calls for different sorts of cultural categories.  Tribe, kingdom, empire, and nation are available.  Just as 'organism' is not a good metaphor for society in general, 'family' is a bad metaphor for culture in general.

"The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The nurturant parent family (progressive) and the strict father family (conservative)."

"Most readily understood," sure, because pitched at the mentality of a 10-year old.  Far too simplistic for a political theory.  Do family systems fall neatly into two simple categories, nurturant parent and strict father?  What about strict mother? Indifferent parent? Abusive parent?  Permissive parent?  Same sex parent?  Atheist parent?  Multiple agnostic parents? All right, give Lakoff a pass on that.  More to the point is his classification of voters: conservatives and progressives.  Are they all coming from the Family System perspective?

There are many different kinds conservatives and progressives.  Take conservatives:  this website lists 7.  Throw in Libertarianism for an 8th.  It's ridiculous to think that all those varieties can be lumped together into a single moral worldview governed by the family metaphor.  There is one group that does seem to fit the description.  Lakoff again:

 "Evangelical Christianity is centered around family life. Hence, there are organizations like Focus on the Family and constant reference to “family values,” which are taken to be evangelical strict father values. In strict father morality, it is the father who controls sexuality and reproduction. Where the church has political control, there are laws that require parental and spousal notification in the case of proposed abortions."

Ok, give him the white Evangelicals, even though Trump himself is not particularly religious.  However, Lakoff seems to realize that his metaphoric vessel cannot contain all the wine in the cellar of contemporary conservatism:

"There is a certain amount of wiggle room in the strict father worldview and there are important variations. A major split is among 1) white evangelical Christians; 2) laissez-fair free-market conservatives; and 3) pragmatic conservatives who are not bound by evangelical beliefs."

Indeed.  So much wiggle room, in fact, that only the first of his three "variations" is a plausible exemplar of the Family System Theory, as we have seen.  The other two whom he labels "pragmatic conservatives" and "laissez-faire free marketeers" don't fit the mold at all.  Those are not insignificant groups of conservatives.  They number in the millions, and none of them are operating from the pre-rational metaphors of God the Father, family system, or family values.  They are rationalists through and through.  Think Michael Bloomberg and the Koch Brothers.  Carly Fiorina and Condoleeza Rice.  Their donation dollars support candidates whose values are power and money and whose loyalties lie with the 1%, not with 'the people' or, rather, 'the children' in the Family System metaphor. 

So two of Lakoff's 'wiggler' groups do not operate from the strict father worldview.  There is a fourth group he might have mentioned:  the now fabled Angry White Male class.  These include traditional rednecks, second amendment fanatics, Reagan democrats, and hordes of newly unemployed mine and factory workers who feel betrayed by Republican and Democratic leaders alike.  Strict Father is not what these guys have in mind for their vote.  They are clamoring for something like a Warrior Hero or Avenging Chieftain on the order of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.  Trump is their fantasy Achilles at the walls of Troy gearing up to smite their enemies.

In light of so many 'wigglers,' just how useful is the Family System Theory as a descriptor of the worldview conservatives are supposed to share?  Nor are conservative outliers the only groups that won't march obediently under Lakoff's Family System umbrella.  Next up - progressives. 

Wait, what about liberals?  Lakoff doesn't bother to distinguish between these.  Liberals might protest, but since neither liberals nor progressives are using the Family System map, we can cooperate with Lakoff for the sake of this discussion.  

Progressives will justly ask, "What do you mean by 'nurturant parent family'?"  Lakoff doesn't say much about this here, but he does describe the nurturant parent model as the opposite of the strict-father family - basically, not governed by a fearsome boss-dad.  The nurturant parent family, in Lakoff's view, is not a dominator hierarchy, but it is a hierarchy nonetheless, a benign one headed up by a loving parent instead of a boss parent. 

Whatever that means in the details, progressives would reject the entire premise.  A progressive democracy, for them, does not consist of nurturing governors and childlike citizens.  Citizens of voting age, with important exceptions, are considered by progressives to be competent adults equal in dignity and rights to their elected representatives and capable of working out their own morality by means of rational thought and dialogue, not by taking direction from any kind of parent-figure, whether strict (the boss) or nurturant (the nanny). 

I have argued that Lakoff's Family System Theory is too narrow to encompass the large spectrum of political orientations in America's political landscape.  People who march behind Trump's banner arrive there with a variety of metaphorical perspectives and perceive in Trump several different kinds of person:  Strict Father for some, yes, but also Warrior Chief, Pragmatic CEO, Outsider Change Agent, Messiah for American Exceptionalism, etc.  What does Lakoff think?

"Trump is a pragmatic conservative, par excellence. And he knows that there are a lot of Republican voters who are like him in their pragmatism."

Lakoff argues for this characterization by citing several broad policy statements that Trump has consistently repeated in his otherwise chaotic speeches:  support for Social Security, standing up to Chinese trade practices, cutting taxes, reforming immigration policy, law and order, etc.  Is he right?  Perhaps, but the ugly campaign Trump is running looks anything but pragmatic.  In any case, Trump, whether seen as pragmatic conservative or proto-fascist or loose cannon, is nobody's Family System man, and when his pragmatic pronouncements are arrayed against his bizarre and inconsistent ravings about everything and everybody he doesn't like, it is doubtful that any label can stick to him for long.

"Understanding Trump?"  Good luck. 

AI and the (non-)Mystery of Consciousness

On Wednesday night at the Philosophers’ Cafe meeting, Patrick Conroy gave us an excellent overview of the hot and very contentious issues regarding the present status and future prospects for artificial intelligence (AI).  The complexities of the topic include definitional questions - ‘artificial,’ ’intelligence’ ’singularity’ - the present capabilities of today’s supercomputers, the startlingly ambitious predictions about AI’s future, whether a machine can become conscious, what kind of intelligence is being discussed, concerns about losing control of ‘rogue’ or ‘malevolent’ machines, and many others.

Radical opposition to the strong or true AI project from critics like me turns on the fact that vast resources - billions of dollars - are being spent on research that is decades away, if not longer, from producing the promised super-smart machines at a time when the institutions for helping people become smarter are being systematically defunded by a neoliberal business class that regards workers as disposable people.  On purely philosophical grounds, the project looks idiotic when, as many critics have pointed out, we don’t even understand human biologically based consciousness very well, much less what consciousness would be like as an “emergent property” of electronic complexity or as an upload from a brain to a central processing unit.  Are the dreams of superconscious computers at all realistic?  I think not.

The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness is thought by many to hold the key to understanding the prospects for AI.  “How can a physical brain produce non-physical consciousness of mental events?”  So says the classic problem, with no definitive answer anywhere in sight, leading to general agreement by optimists and pessimists alike that consciousness is mysterious.  With at least one exception:  Galen Strawson, analytic philosopher and literary critic who currently holds a chair in philosophy at the University of Texas.  In a recent piece for the New York Times, Strawson makes the startling claim that consciousness “is utterly unmysterious” and that the Hard Problem has migrated somewhere else.  Let’s take a look.

Our source is:  Galen Strawson, “Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery,” New York Times, May 16, 2016.

GS says consciousness the only thing in the world we can claim to know.  “It is utterly unmysterious.”  Referencing Bertrand Russell a century or so ago, he appears to be invoking Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.    He is right, of course, in the sense that my immediate experience of anything is right there for me in the field of my awareness, effortlessly apprehended, requiring no reasoning or interpretation.  I look across the street and see a blue object and instantly recognize it as a car, but even prior to the act of recognition I am immediately aware of (acquainted with) a blue patch in my visual field.  I see it naked and exposed just as it is.  That I am seeing a blue something or other is, as Strawson says, utterly unmysterious, completely present and clear.  Similarly, if I am thinking of 5 + 3 = 8, I am  immediately aware of thinking “5 + 3 = 8.”  There is nothing mysterious about my direct experience of my own thinking.  There it is, just 5+3 = 8, pure and simple, all by itself.  I have no need of proof that I am thinking that thought, and no one can disprove it.  The same is true for any other experience:  feeling a pain in my toe or hearing a police siren, etc..  As GS says, I know these experiences immediately, because “having an experience is knowing the experience.” 

Frankly, I find the phenomenon of ‘having an experience’ pretty mysterious.  For example, who or what is this ’I’ that is having the experience? However, let’s go along with GS for a while, granting that immediate experience is unproblematic. But now he executes an astonishing right angle turn: as if by automatic transmission, he shifts the Hard Problem away from consciousness and parks it in the physics lab. By contrast with consciousness, he says, what is “deeply mysterious” is the “nature of physical stuff.” He cites Richard Feynman’s assertion that no one understands quantum theory. Hence, no one understands matter. Then GS quotes Russell for an exception: “The nature of physical stuff is mysterious “except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff.”  A “startling statement” indeed, but what exactly does it mean?  

It seems to mean (on materialistic premises) that, whereas the objective study of matter - particles and forces in physics - continues to reveal more and more mysteries, there is a subset of physical objects not studied by physics, namely experiences, that we do know perfectly well - no mysteries, as noted above.  So when we “have conscious experiences we learn something about the intrinsic nature of (some) physical stuff, because “conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.”

Here is the argument:

1.  Conscious experience is a form of physical stuff.

2. When we have conscious experiences, we have direct knowledge of the intrinsic nature of those experiences.

3. Therefore, when we have conscious experiences, we have direct knowledge of the intrinsic nature of (some) physical stuff.

That's a strange argument - logically valid, yes, but we can’t help but sense that there is something seriously wrong with it.  First of all, it seems odd for GS to say that in our everyday lives, as we move about our world seeing, hearing, tasting, and doing things, we know in each and every one of those experiences exactly what matter is; we experience the ‘intrinsic nature’ of matter directly.  But if we enter a laboratory to do some physics, we are immediately confronted by a deep mystery; we do not know the intrinsic nature of matter, even though that’s what physics is supposed to tell us.  This is not a fatal objection to Strawson’s argument.  It just seems odd.

More serious is Strawson’s failure to provide any supporting argument for his first premise.  Like nearly all of his materialistic brethren, he simply asserts that consciousness is physical, because in fact it cannot be proven.  Employing the old principle that what is easily asserted is easily denied, we can comfortably reply, “Sorry, consciousness is not physical.” We could go for coffee at this point, but wait … GS says we have made a “Very Large Mistake.”

The Mistake, he says, is to think we have only two choices when confronted by the Hard Problem:  dualism or eliminativism (consciousness is unreal). In search of a third alternative, GS tries the  old ‘you can’t prove the opposite’ ploy.  He writes:

…. Many make the same mistake today — the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, except — Russell again — insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. …. we don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff in spite of all that physics tells us. In particular, we don’t know anything about the physical that gives us good reason to think that consciousness can’t be wholly physical.

This looks suspiciously like the fallacy of reasoning from ignorance.  But even if it’s not, it’s absurd to claim that, although we don’t know the intrinsic nature of matter (as opposed to its surface appearances), there is nothing in what we do know (from physics) about matter that gives us any reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical.  That’s like saying that although we don’t know the intrinsic nature of justice, what we do know gives us no grounds for judging rape to be unjust.

Of course physics gives us no reason for thinking consciousness can’t be physical.  Physics is about the physical.  It has nothing whatsoever to say about what may or may not be non-physical.  That’s a question for philosophers, not physicists, and as a philosopher GS is simply wrong:  we have plenty of reasons for thinking consciousness is not physical, but those come from philosophy of science, not physics.  All we need is some basic understanding of consciousness and of the structure of scientific method, both of which we have in plentiful supply, as GS himself  knows.

Having written about this at length in earlier posts  (October 9 and 20, 2015), I will content myself here with just two arguments.  First, consciousness is subjective, physics is objective.  Studies of physical matter and studies of consciousness are carried out from two entirely different perspectives, one that looks outward toward objects that are publicly observable; the other looks inward to a domain that is entirely private, unavailable to direct access by anyone else - the world of my sensations, thoughts, imaginings, and feelings.

The subjective cannot be reduced to the objective, if only for the simple fact that in order to carry out the reduction, the philosopher has to use his own “I think…” which is his consciousness and which cannot be made both subject and object at the same time.  He could claim coherently, if absurdly, that other people’s consciousness is nothing but brain events, but he cannot make the same claim about his own without committing a performative contradiction.  The act of saying, “I am just a sequence of brain events” exposes its own absurdity instantly.

Second, the “rules and equations” of physics are useless when aimed at my experience of tasting garlic or the twinge of jealousy I feel when my girl friend spends too much time talking with another guy.  Those are real experiences, not abstractions.

Nor are the biological concepts of neuroscience any help.  Biological concepts refer to entities like cells, which have mass, and energy transfers between brain cells that can be measured by instruments.  The taste of garlic on my tongue or my thought of the square root of 2 have neither mass nor energy nor any other physical characteristic that can be observed or measured.  What has no physical characteristics cannot be physical.  Therefore, consciousness is not physical.

With his current line of thinking, GS thinks he has laid the Hard Problem of Consciousness to rest.  I sympathize with his wish to do so, but the path he has chosen leads nowhere.  His argument that we do not know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except when we are having conscious experiences, if not entirely nonsensical, looks like a sophistical trick to recast the Hard Problem of Consciousness as something other than it is.  The reasoning seems to work only because it begs the question by assuming what the argument is supposed to prove.

Speaking of the Hard Problem of Consciousness, let’s take a quick look at what it is and why it causes such headaches among philosophers.  It is usually stated:  “How does the brain produce consciousness?  How does a physical, biological organ give rise to non-physical conscious experiences?”  When a philosophical problem resists solution for a very long time, one begins to suspect there might be something wrong with the question.  As I have argued in earlier posts (October 9 and 20, 2015), there is indeed something very wrong with the Hard Problem, namely its underlying assumption that the brain produces or gives rise to consciousness.  Far from being self-evident, that belief is really an article of faith, an a priori assumption that just has to be true, because materialistic philosophers really, really want it to be true.  But what if it’s not true?  After all, no one has ever seen a brain produce a thought, and no one ever will for the aforementioned reasons.

What if ‘produce’ is a flawed metaphor for the relationship between the brain and the mind?  If that is the case, then not even a million years of philosophizing will reveal how brain-producing-mind takes place.  So where does that leave us?  We have the honest confession from from physicists themselves that physical matter is intrinsically mysterious.  We also know that the Hard Problem has survived Prof. Strawson’s deconstruction effort.  

Looks like Mystery is Us - still.