Stuff only I know why is here 9:58 am
And yes, i recognize the irony
The system i oppose affords me the luxury
Of biting the hand that feeds
But that’s exactly why
Priviledged fucks like me
Should feel obliged to whine and kick and scream
Yeah until everyone
Has everything
They need.
Less Talk, More Rock?
Current Affairs 9:14 am
Oh, the wonders of the French State.
Remembering that i am half French, and thus i have the right to vote in French elections, the French State (no idea which bit of it) sent me something rather special in the post today: a lovely little packet containing an election poster-cum-leaflet for EVERY candidate standing in last Sunday’s Presidential Election.
Shame they sent it a day late…but never mind it’s the thought that counts i guess. Anyway i don’t vote for the French because i don’t pay taxes for them. No representation without taxation, I say.
But I now have fantastic new posters for my room. Tomorrow morning when I wake up, Nicolas Sarkozy will be beaming down on me from the right (see what i did there?), while Segolene Royal will smile seductively although she won’t have much to say, and Francois Bayrou will offer me a centrist alternative. Jose Bove with his handlebar moustache and twinkling eyes will remind me that it’s OK to go and smash up my local McDonalds. I can’t remember who the others are, but it’s ok, neither can anyone else.
But my favourite morning inspiration? Well it could only be one man, my favourite of them all…..
Unfortunately I couldn’t find an online copy of the delightful poster of Jean Marie i was sent, so this representation of secondary inspirational quality will have to suffice…enjoy!
Current Affairs and Politics 6:39 pm
Whilst having a little cycle to W.H. Smiths today i noticed at least two sets of Bobbies on the Beat. They looked rather foolish, in their yellow jackets and all, whilst I figured they were all too fat to chase me if i decided to do some impromptu shop lifting or granny-mugging.
And this got me thinking about all the demands Joe Public makes on her Majesty’s Government to have more Beating Bobbies, because apparently a visible police force makes people feel safer, whereas policemen doing paperwork to prove that, you know, they’re not banging people up or harassing them without good reason, is a total waste of time.
But let’s have a little think about the concept of Bobbies on the Beat and safety.
Premise 1: In the UK, people are not frequently mugged, raped, strangled and defecated upon in broad daylight in our gloriously homogeneous town centres. (In fact, as a matter of personal experience, the only times i’ve ever been attacked or robbed were times i was either in places I shouldn’t have been, or late at night in residential areas, where having Bobbies on the Beat would have required a Beating Bobby on literally every street, 24/7, in order to save my sorry hide).
Premise 2: Given P1, there is actually no need for there to be policepersons walking about, as they’re not actually protecting me from any substantial threat, because none exists.
Premise 3: If, however, we place policepersons on the street, that somewhat induces one to feel that there is a threat, because surely if there are policepersons walking around the logical conclusion is that they are needed because we are all at high risk, and need a visible presence to protect us from the would-be assailants lurking in every Starbucks or HMV.
Conclusion: Having Bobbies on the Beat, i.e. a visible police presence, should induce fear amongst the law-abiding public, as there are clearly miscreants waiting to pounce, and the police can’t be everywhere all the time!!
Resolution: Lobby politicians to get Bobbies OFF the streets, because they make us feel so very unsafe, albeit indirectly.
So what’s gone wrong? Well obviously Premise 1 tends to be forgotten by a substantial number of people, leading them to the false inference that they need to be protected from a hidden menace which doesn’t exist, at least not according to official statistics (tracking them down now) which indicate that the only figure for crime which has gone up is that for perceived crime rates.
What is to be done about this terrible state of affairs? Well here’s a start, albeit a cliched one….
Current Affairs and Politics and Sagar's Social Commentaries 6:55 pm
Believe the doomsayers. Society is getting stupider. Or at least, our media outlets are increasingly behaving as if all viewers/readers are moronic 13-year-olds with the corresponding attention span.
For example, i generally think the BBC is a Good Thing. I used to enjoy watching BBC News, although i noticed a few years ago that there was more of the standing-up-while-talking-a-la-Chanel-5-style presenting, and that in general the format was increasingly informal. But by itself that’s not really a bad thing, it’s just not my thing.
However things have gone too far. Today i turned on the News – the BBC news, supposedly a standard-setter and all that – and it was a joke. It opened with dramatic footage of violence, and an excited man shouting his words over the images like a raving demagogue. The same style continued for all the other headlines. Then there was a brief introduction on the first piece, and i couldn’t help noticing that more emphasis seemed to be being put on making the news sound exciting by talking like a Chris Morris parody, than actually telling me anything. All the formality has gone: it’s just another form of entertainment. I felt like i was watching Fox News or a Hollywood Movie (same thing, really).
Call me old-fashioned, but i quite liked it when the news was serious. When the producers expected me to sit there and listen to the man/woman in the suit telling me things in a serious and controlled manner. Why? Because the News wasn’t seen as being in competition with other programming; the producers assumed that i would watch the news because, well i wanted to find out what the news was. They did not assume that the only way i could possibly be interested in the news was if people talked in exciting voices while standing up in a virtual studio, as a screen behind them spelled out the monosyllabic words they were simultaneously saying, accompanied by dramatic images of glorified pie-charts. It was assumed that i could handle basic (and we’re usually talking very basic) statistics without having them visually re-inforced. After all, the news on the radio manages…
Of course, i’m being a bit over-the-top; having nice pie charts can be quite helpful, and in principle there’s no reason why the news has to be a bastion of British Formality. But at least when it was a said Bastion (or something like it), i didn’t feel like I was being treated as a moron. And lets be honest, when the producers have respect for the intellectual capacities of their viewers, instead of treating them like aforementioned 13-year-olds, the quality of the news reporting is simply higher. Fact.
Naturally, it’s not just television; reading 1970s copies of The Times and Telegraph last year (at University) convinced me that even broadsheet reporting has declined in quality; the amount of space given to articles vs. advertising, the standard of intellectual language and discourse employed, and the expectation that readers could follow an article (or even, perhaps, several articles) without the need for enormous pictures and charts, all convinced me of this.
So despite the sunshine, i’m not a happy bunny. Not only am i increasingly adamant that most people are stupid, but i’m convinced they’re getting stupider: and this is being directly facilitated by a quick-fix, me-me-me culture that the modern media increasingly panders to, because after all it helped create it.
The solution? Well this would be a good start i think:
Philosophy 10:44 pm
Today i decided to go for a late-evening run, from the station one down the line along the old fisherman’s path, and back to my house. It’s about 6-7K in total, and goes through an area of pine woods near the beach, the calmness and beauty of which i too often forget.
At one point the path i was running on emerged from the trees into a clearing. It was, quite simply, beautiful. The night was just approaching dusk, and there was a stillness in the air only present in spring, and it was fresh like spring air should be. The sky was a mixture of blue, and gray, and some oranges, mixed in with the wisps of lower clouds. In front me the forest resumed; great, enormous, old pines standing in front of the skyline, a mixture of browns, greens and greys. In the clearing chopped would had dried and turned to that unique light sandy-brown colour that only chopped would left outdoors can achieve. The air smelt like only evening spring air smells, and nothing moved, not even a rabbit.
Is stopped for a moment and watched the scene as if it was a painting, then not wanting to spoil the moment, i moved on.
But being me, this got me thinking. Aesthetics is an odd kettle of fish. It was so hard to stand there looking at what could only be described as a scene of pure natural beauty, and reconcile myself to the idea that there was nothing objectively beautiful about that scene. This has to be so, because the idea that beauty could exist without onlookers seems to me slightly mad, whereas a McDowell-esque line that it can still be objective even if it depends on me is equally implausible.
Yet whereas in moral philosophy – to which the same general considerations seem to apply – i can comprehend how it comes about that we feel so compelled to perceive our value judgements as objective when at root they must be our own projections. The survival value of forming moral codes is, to say the least, immense, while the inculcating power of socially-constructed moral precepts is considerable indeed.
But with aesthetics, can the story be the same? What is the evolutionary value of beauty(if we are going to jump the gun and ask ‘how’ before we ask ‘why’, thank you Mr Thomas Nagel)? Is my finding, say, a piece of music sublime, or a landscape inspiring, really just a product of social convention? It seems ever so hard to reconcile myself to that view. And here again i tip my hat to Mr Nagel; the objective conception of myself as just a bag of bones struggling to survive on a lump or rock hurtling through space, whose personal perceptions and experiences count – to the universe – for absolutely nothing, seems utterly irreconcilable with what i experienced tonight. My subjective perception of the beauty of that scene feels so utterly robbed, so utterly hollow when i admit, from the objective view, the sheer subjectivity, not to mention futility and irrelevance, of it all*.
Whereas i can reconcile myself comfortably to the notion of moral judgements as projections onto the world of my inner dispositions and states, regarding beauty I feel a problem remains. I wonder why.
*Though i confess, despite any hat-tipping, i suspect Mr Nagel won’t like what i’ve done with his conceptions.
Philosophy 11:09 pm
Apologies all, as updates have been sparse indeed as of late. My excuses are poor; work, reading, sitting in the sun, going to the gym and getting drunk have taken vacation priority. But I now return, and although the following post is a little esoteric, I hope non-philosophers might get something out of it.
Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is a fascinating little book. Not least because it appears to me to misunderstand the nature of moral systems – and ethics more generally – in a deep, at times positively shocking sense.
Let me illustrate. It is often complained of the position laid out in the Groundwork that “Kant would tell Hitler where the Jews were” if saving the Jews required him to lie. (An actual quote from an Oxford finals paper – though surely he would have told Himmler not Hitler? But I digress). This of course is presented as self-evidently a ‘bad thing’. Now, of course I myself being a well brought up human being do think it would be a bad thing to tell Hitler where the Jews were hiding. But there are two interesting questions here raised; 1. why do we automatically know (think?) this to be a bad thing to do, and more interestingly, 2. why did Immanuel Kant – one of the greatest thinkers in human history – formulate an ethical position which leads to such counter-intuitive and unpalatable requirements and imperatives. The answers to these two questions are I think related, but in a very intricate way, which I am now going to try and run past the reader.
Firstly we must focus in on the second question. Kant’s Groundwork is in essence a piece of logical deduction. The tripartite Categorical Imperative is derived from a set of assumptions introduced at the very start of the Groundwork, which Kant takes as axiomatic and whose acceptance is required by any rational being (i.e. not only rational humans, but anything that can reason sufficiently to deserve moral treatment by virtue of the faculty of reason. So rational beetles from the moon are as compelled to follow Kant’s logic as we are, or so he believed). The key assumptions in the Groundwork take place when we meet Kant’s three shopkeepers. Let me take a moment to expound the scenario.
Kant is attempting to determine which, out of three shopkeepers who do the same act of treating their customers fairly when they could take advantage of them, but from different motivations, acts morally. Shopkeeper One is a cynical manipulator of people; he does not take advantage of his clientele purely because he calculates that honesty pays the greatest financial rewards. If things were to change, he would have no hesitation in deceiving his customers to increase his profits. Shopkeeper Two, on the other hand, treats his customers well because he likes doing so; he knows that it is morally right to treat one’s customers fairly, but the reason he really does it is at least in part because he likes doing the morally right thing as well as taking pleasure in being nice to people per se. Finally there is Shopkeeper Three; he has no emotional inclination to treat people fairly whatsoever. He treats his customers fairly because he perceives that it is rationally required of him to do the moral thing. He is unmoved by sentiment in any way, and acts purely from a rational recognition of what morality requires in this case.
I think a Humean like myself can agree with Kant that Shopkeeper One is not acting morally in any meaningful sense, and so we can dismiss him from our investigation. The interesting division falls between Shopkeepers Two and Three. According to Kant, only Shopkeeper Three acts morally. While Shopkeeper Two does the moral thing, there is no real moral worth in his action because he acted from an emotive desire – he did what he did because he wanted to anyway, and not (purely) because he realised it was morally required. For Kant only Shopkeeper Three performs a truly moral act – although it is conceded that such a man may never have lived, and hence no purely moral acts may ever have been performed by human beings, whose rational faculties are so often clouded by desire and emotion.
In certain moods I sometimes see the allure of Kant’s thinking. He wants to cleave off morality from selfish, egotistically driven motivations; he wants moral action to be pure and selfless – a reflection of his deeply puritan upbringing of course. But while this may at first glance appear to have some plausibility, I am of the belief that it is a deeply mistaken view to hold about human beings. The following – for which I am indebted to James Arnold – should outline my position adequately.
Firstly, imagine three friends, Paul, James and Ste, are all out for a drink. It comes up to James’ round, and he offers to buy the drinks. As we’re on the topic of morality we ask James why he is buying us a drink. To our surprise, he answers that he is buying the next round because he recognises that it is morally required of him that when out with friends he should be sociable and buy his fair share of drinks. We then ask him if he wants to buy us any drinks, to which he replies that he has no feelings one way or the other on the matter. He is buying our drinks purely because it is rationally required of him to do so. Needless to say, the evening goes somewhat cold. Ste and myself are rather disappointed; we had rather hoped James wanted to buy us drinks, because he was our friend, and it brought him pleasure to do nice things for us. Now that we see he is merely fulfilling his rational duties, the world is a littler less comfortable. In fact, it is now difficult to even describe this as a friendship anymore; it rather seems like James is performing a moral ritual that the perfectly rational being (that he aspires to be) must fulfil.
That example should illustrate that I think Kant’s approach misses something very deep about how human beings are to one another, and how we should want them to be. But two points arise out of this, one easily dealt with, the other less so. The first is that one could argue buying drinks for one’s friends is not a moral issue, and so the above example misses the target somewhat. To reply to that I think one need only substitute the example of buying drinks with saving somebody’s life: “James, thank you so much for pulling out of the bus’ way!”, “Don’t thank me at all Paul, I only did it because I rationally perceived it to be required of me, there was no emotion involved what so ever”. The unpalatable nature of that reply should suffice for the first objection.But the second objection is far trickier. Let me take a moment to expound it.
I have so far attempted to show that Kant’s assigning of moral praise to Shopkeeper Three is a mistake. By appealing to examples of friendship and emotive motivation, I have tried to show that Kant misses out something fundamentally important in ethical thought. But the problem is, in order to make that claim, I must myself assume that emotive motivation is important. In essence, I must hold it as one of my ethical axioms that desire and emotion should (and do) play a role in correct moral action. But Kant does not hold this assumption, because he holds a contrary axiom about ethical action; that emotion and desire infect the purity of moral action.
And there seems here to be something of a problem. That for all my attempts of pointing to the world and the way human beings are and saying “look, this is what human beings do – their moral actions contain desire and emotion and that is a good thing”, somebody like Kant simply holds that while human beings may do such things, they shouldn’t. This appears to be because we hold different axioms about what moral life should or should not be about; yet the problem with axioms is that you can’t question them beyond a basic acceptance or rejection. And this yields a serious problem; if I turn to the Kantian and say “listen, having a desire to perform the moral act is a good thing and should be encouraged” he can simply reply that I have begged the question; whenever I point to emotive moral action as an example of how moral action should be conducted, I have begged the question by assuming axioms which state that moral action should be like that. And it doesn’t seem to matter how much I point to how human nature currently is – he can simply reply that it shouldn’t be like that. But of course, when he says that it shouldn’t be so, I can simply accuse him of begging the question against me, by assuming axioms that say that moral action should be rationally motivated and devoid of desire. We appear to be at loggerheads until one side opts to abandon their axioms: though how one side could be convinced to do so is beyond me. It seems that all I can do is point to the world and say “it is like this, so change your axioms to be like mine”. But that the world is like this is precisely what is being denied, and so this line is hardly likely to convert the thinker of Kantian temperament.
Now there does seem to be one solution that avoids begging the question. Kant’s position rests on the belief that rationally perceiving what is morally required of one can lead one to do the moral act. However, if we follow Hume’s claim that reason alone can never motivate the will, then the Kantian position would seem by necessity to fail. If in order to act one must have a relevant desire and belief, then ‘pure’ Kantian rationality can never yield moral action in the Kantian sense. Of course, as a good Humean, I hold this to be decisively argued in Hume’s favour. But having said that, many modern day Kantians (as well as Kant himself of course), maintain that reason alone can motivate the will.
What worries me here is that we appear to be returning to the place we thought we had left. Although this is not the time to discuss the complex issue of moral motivation, I will say only that there appears to be an outer limit to this debate, where once more both sides fall back on assumptions; those of a Humean temperament claiming it is at root just axiomatic that motivation requires desire, those of a Kantian temperament adamant that this is, at root, not so.
So it should now be clear how our two questions at the outset are interestingly related. The question of why we ‘just know’ that telling Hitler where the Jews are hiding is a bad thing to do is not as clear cut as it first seemed. It rests on deeply held assumptions about what is morally right and how our actions should be motivated. The second question – why Kant opted for a line of thought leading to such odd places – now has new light shed upon it. Through a careful process of reasoning from his starting axioms, Kant presents a position which is logically derived from his assumptions of what morality is. The problem for those of us who wish to oppose Kant is that it is unclear how exactly we can show him to be wrong, short of asserting that “the world is just not like that” – but here the debate suffers from a vertigo effect of staring across an abyss where one side shouts “white!” and the other replies “black!”. And that may seem a disconcerting feeling indeed, especially when discussing the foundations of morality.
But perhaps it is not such a disconcerting feeling after all. I believe I can in fact offer some suggestions which might one day be improved and serve to be decisive in favour of the Humeans. On the Humean picture of humanity it makes perfect sense for there to be fundamental disagreements about the world and the humans in it, because reason plays a very limited role in that worldview. Because the world is not rationally intelligible all the way down (and nor should we want it to be), it makes sense that the billions of human beings on this planet - who have been moulded by their environments in so many different ways - do not all come to agree on how the world, at base, is. It certainly seems to me that a position which is not disturbed by the fact that rational human beings can come to hold irreconcilable differences regarding the way the world is and the way human beings are and should be, is a stronger position than one that cannot. The fact that there plainly seem to be such deep temperamental disagreements implies that the position which can take account of them is superior to one that cannot. Yet having said that, I cannot quite shake the feeling that there is something unsettlingly paradoxical in that very line of arument.
A Milestone Sunday, Apr 22 2007
Current Affairs and Sagar's Social Commentaries Paul Sagar 10:22 am
Today is a milestone day. For today I can officially say that I have been published.
Nothing big, just a letter in today’s Observer. But in future we shall look back upon this moment as my first step towards recognition as a Man of Letters.
You can read the edited version that was published over here.
Or the original:
In regards to last week’s report that drugs education campaigns appear to have little to no impact on illegal drug use, and that rates of teenage drug-use are increasing, consider the following. Until the government, or anyone else, is able to explain to young people why there is a moral difference between going to Bargain Booze and buying a £9.99 litre of vodka rather than using ecstasy or cocaine, why should young people abstain from the latter? When you factor into this that everybody knows you are more likely to become ill (in the short and long term) or to kill yourself from (ab)using alcohol than recreational drugs, especially cannabis, it’s no surprise so many young people use drugs. I rather suspect there is no moral argument against drugs but not simultaneously alcohol, and most of my peers agree.
So yeah, everybody go get stoned.
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