Momentary Language

George Bush: Amateur Ethicist

Another case of amateur philosophy in the news -- one so egregious, it has roused me from my summer-induced slumbers. As reported by the NY Times, George Bush issued a veto of a bill calling for federal support of embryonic stem cell research with the words, "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical."

That's odd. I thought it was the law of the land in much of this country -- and law that George Bush himself embraces -- that homicide is justified if committed to defend the lives of others or of oneself. (In fact, a law signed by Bush's own brother in Florida removes the duty to retreat, allowing people simply to gun others down if perceived to be a threat.)

Indeed, Bush would also certainly consider homicide justifiable if committed to prevent against other serious crimes ... like rape, armed robbery, or, say, making a big deal out of one's intent to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Heck, Bush even supports the death penalty! Unless he believes in backwards causation, that's not even a case of destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life.

Rorty as the mirror of philosophy (1931-2007)

When I began reading analytic philosophy seriously in the early 1990's, my introduction to the contemporary scene was Richard Rorty -- particularly his books Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and, more importantly, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

His breezy, seemingly superficial conversational style ... and, perhaps more significantly, his hard-won hostility to what he perceived to be the aridity of philosophy in the analytic tradition ... made Rorty, in some ways, ill-suited to be a popularizer of contemporary work in philosophy, even of philosophers whom he admired, like Quine or Davidson. Nevertheless, those very traits made for work that was always engaging, unfailingly provocative, and often brilliant.

As reported by Todd Gitlin, Rorty died on Friday, June 8, 2007. His voice will be missed.

[See also the discussion of Rorty at Waggish, here. Now they tell me ... the NY Times has finally posted an obit here.]

Paul Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007)

According to the AP, Paul Cohen, the mathematician noted for his revolutionary work in set theory, has died. The American Mathematical Society describes his contribution thus:

He made fundamental contributions to mathematical logic, mathematical analysis, and partial differential equations. In particular in solving Hilbert's first problem, "Cantor's Problem on the Cardinal of the Continuum," in which he proved that the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis are independent of Zermelo Fraenkel Set Theory, he introduced the powerful technique of forcing, which today remains one of the basic tools in set theory.

Here's a quote from Cohen's Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (p. 151):

A point of view which [I feel] may eventually come to be accepted is that [the continuum hypothesis] is obviously false. The main reason one accepts the axiom of infinity is probably that we feel it absurd to think that the process of adding only one set at a time can exhaust the entire universe. Similarly with the higher axioms of infinity. Now [creating] the set of countable ordinals ... is merely a special and the simplest way of generating a higher cardinal. The set C [the continuum] is, in contrast, generated by a totally new and more powerful principle, namely the power set axiom. It is unreasonable to expect that any description of a larger cardinal which attempts to build up that cardinal from ideas deriving from the replacement axiom can ever reach C. ... This point of view regards C as an incredibly rich set given to us by one bold new axiom, which can never be approached by any piecemeal process of construction. Perhaps later generations will see the problem more clearly and express themselves more eloquently.

"Everyone in his heart of hearts agrees with Baudelaire: 'To be a useful person has always seemed to me something particularly horrible ...'"

The Sunday Times of London reprinted a wickedly irreverent and very funny piece by Auden, entitled (by an editor at the Times, no doubt) "So You Think You Can Write." I can't resist giving you three longer excerpts.

First this:

The girl whose boyfriend starts writing her love poems should be on her guard. Perhaps he really does love her, but one thing is certain: while he was writing his poems he was not thinking of her but of his own feelings about her and that is suspicious. Let her remember St Augustine’s confession of his feelings after the death of someone he loved very much: “I would rather have been deprived of my friend than of my grief.”

Then this:

Everyone in his heart of hearts agrees with Baudelaire: “To be a useful person has always seemed to me something particularly horrible,” for, subjectively, to be useful means to be doing not what one wants to do, but what someone else insists on one’s doing. But at the same time, everyone is ashamed to admit in public that he is useless. Thus if a poet gets into conversation with a stranger in a railway coach and the latter asks him: “What is your job?”, he will think quickly and say: “A schoolteacher, a beekeeper, a bootlegger,” because to tell the truth would cause an incredulous and embarrassing silence.

Finally, this:

Happy the lot of the pure mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers and the standard is so high that no colleague can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes articles in the Sunday [New York] Times complaining about the incomprehensibility of modern mathematics and comparing it unfavourably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms or fill bathtubs with the waste-pipe open.

As I was reading that last passage, I couldn't help thinking that philosophers have a similar reason to envy the pure mathematician. (Come to think of it, both the philosopher and the pure mathematician can sympathize with the thoughts expressed in the second passage, the feeling of embarrassment at admitting to being useless.)

Some enchanted evening ... you will meet a very large stranger

Peter Singer has a new post, over at Project Syndicate, on the question, "Should We Trust Our Intuitions." In it, he refers to recent work in experimental philosophy by Josh Greene and Marc Hauser, both at Harvard.

There's an old chestnut in moral psychology known as the "trolley problem." Here's Singer's description:

In one dilemma, you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if the trolley continues on its current track.

The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should divert the trolley onto the side track, thus saving a net four lives.

In another dilemma, the trolley, as before, is about to kill five people. This time, however, you are not standing near the track, but on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the five people in danger, but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley.

Standing next to you, however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that it would be wrong to push the stranger.

Standard apriorist philosophy often seeks to provide a theoretical underpinning to validate our intuitions -- that is, to provide a deeper explanation for why it is right to flip the switch but not to push the stranger onto the track. Greene and Hauser, however, are using research techniques from social psychology and neuroscience to provide a naturalistic explanation for our intuitions. Again, here's Singer:

Greene found that people asked to make a moral judgment about “personal” violations, like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with the emotions. This was not the case with people asked to make judgments about relatively “impersonal” violations like throwing a switch. Moreover, the minority of subjects who did consider that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge took longer to reach this judgment than those who said that doing so would be wrong.

Why would our judgments, and our emotions, vary in this way? For most of our evolutionary history, human beings – and our primate ancestors – have lived in small groups, in which violence could be inflicted only in an up-close and personal way, by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club.

To deal with such situations, we developed immediate, emotionally based intuitive responses to the infliction of personal violence on others. The thought of pushing the stranger off the footbridge elicits these responses. On the other hand, it is only in the last couple of centuries – not long enough to have any evolutionary significance – that we have been able to harm anyone by throwing a switch that diverts a train. Hence the thought of doing it does not elicit the same emotional response as pushing someone off a bridge.

The lesson that Singer draws from this research is that

these findings should make us more skeptical about relying on our intuitions. There is, after all, no ethical significance in the fact that one method of harming others has existed for most of our evolutionary history, and the other is relatively new. ... And surely the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five, no matter how that death is brought about. So we should think for ourselves, not just listen to our intuitions.

I'm not as certain as Singer that, as a general rule, the evidence provided by our emotional responses to actual events or potential situations ought to be considered to be misleading as to whether it would be appropriate to bring about or prevent those events or situations. If Singer's evolutionary explanation of the particular responses to the trolley problem were correct, however, it would seem plausible to me that, in this case, the intuitions in question ought to be questioned -- as Singer says, "there is, after all, no ethical significance in the fact that one method of harming others has existed for most of our evolutionary history, and the other is relatively new."

I doubt, however, that the "personal"/"impersonal" explanation for the differing responses to the two cases is correct. Here's why. Suppose that one altered the second case so that, instead of pushing the large stranger off of the footbridge, you were removed from the situation, with access only to a switch that would allow you to move a crane so that the large stranger would be pushed off of the footbridge onto the track in the path of the oncoming trolley.

This, presumably, would make the second situation just as "impersonal," according to Greene's dichotomy, as the first situation. Nevertheless, my sense is that people would feel just as uncomfortable about pushing the large stranger off of the footbridge by flipping the switch and moving the crane as they would about "personally" pushing the large stranger off of the footbridge. If my hunch about this is correct, it would seem that the explanation of our intuitions in the trolley case has to appeal to something a bit more involved than the personal/impersonal dichotomy, at least as portrayed by Singer.

"... to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything"

Over at Guardian Review is a previously unpublished Susan Sontag essay, "Pay Attention to the World." In it, Sontag offers a discussion and defense of the novel as it was written in the 19th century and after, that is, "at a time when it was likely that you would be definitively exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov."

I know, I know ... it's become fashionable among a certain group of writers to defend the great tradition of the novel -- Tom Wolfe and John Irving come to mind as particularly annoying exemplars of the trend. This, however, is Sontag; the essay, as one might imagine, is very good.

Here is a particularly nice passage:

There is an old riff I've always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy (as I was once myself), late one night, who had been struggling through Kant's abstruse account in his Critique of Pure Reason of the barely comprehensible categories of time and space, and decided that all of this could be put much more simply.

It goes as follows:

"Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once ... and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you."

By this standard, the novel is an ideal vehicle both of space and of time. The novel shows us time: that is, everything doesn't happen at once. (It is a sequence, it is a line.) It shows us space: that is, what happens doesn't happen to one person only.

In other words, a novel is the creation not simply of a voice but of a world. It mimics the essential structures by which we experience ourselves as living in time, and inhabiting a world, and attempting to make sense of our experience. But it does what lives (the lives that are lived) cannot offer, except after they are over. It confers - and withdraws - meaning or sense upon a life. This is possible because narration is possible, because there are norms of narration that are as constitutive of thinking and feeling and experiencing as are, in the Kantian account, the mental categories of space and time.

Here's another particularly strong one:

Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story's unfolding.

The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story's end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

One more (I can't resist!):

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention - a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched. But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one's head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding - which is also the understanding of the novelist - to take this in.

Anyone who has spent any time teaching philosophy will have observed the extent to which relativism enjoys a strong following among our students -- and among some of our colleagues in other disciplines in the humanities. I am convinced that such positions are intellectually impoverished, that there are convincing arguments against relativism, but Sontag's essay is a testament to the extent to which a relativistic stance would be morally impoverished as well, that the crux of the moral stance is the acknowledgment of importance.

Troy Jollimore in Paradise

I was surprised and delighted to discover that Troy Jollimore, the previously unknown poet whose debut collection, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won this year's National Book Award for poetry, is an analytic philosopher with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton, having written a dissertation on "Friendship and Agent Relative Morality" under the direction of Harry Frankfurt.

A good place to learn more about Jollimore is this interview at the National Book Critics Circle website.

Jollimore wears his erudition with the easy self-deprecation that often seems to me to characterize Canadian intellectuals and artists (if my Canadian friends will forgive me that comment!). These qualities are conspicuously evident in Jollimore's discussion of the identity of Tom Thomson, the thread that links the sonnets that compose "Tom Thomson in Purgatory":

he's not me. But every thought of his is a thought I have had. He's a projection of certain aspects of myself. Or a sheet of photographic paper on which various aspects of the world he moves through are registered. Or a kind of Emersonian subject, fully embracing the impulses and urges of each moment while rejecting the consistency that Emerson said is "the hobgoblin of little minds." I suppose it depends on when you ask me.

I first put a character named 'Tom Thomson' in a poem called "Trout Quintet." There, he was a semi-mythical figure who has some unspecified relation to the Canadian landscape painter, Tom Thomson, the presiding spirit over the group of painters later known as the Group of Seven (though he died before they officially formed). His death occurred under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and he has come to serve as an iconic figure in the Canadian imagination -- something less than a god but decidedly more than a mere mortal, if I may put it that way.

Later, when I came to write the "Tom Thomson in Purgatory" sequence, I was having some trouble bringing it together (in its initial stages it was largely composed of leftovers, poetic materials that had been excised from other poems or were never brought to completion and were simply lying about the workshop). Then, at a certain point my editor offhandedly remarked, with respect to "Trout Quintet," that he felt like Tom Thomson's story was not done. I realized at that moment that what the sonnet sequence lacked was a central consciousness to organize it, and that I could name that consciousness Tom Thomson. Of course it makes little sense, given that the character is very different from that in "Trout Quintet," and any relation to the Canadian painter is gone. But only Canadians know who the historical Tom Thomson is, so they tend to be the only ones who are concerned.

"... the numbers themselves may actually hinder the psychological processes required to prompt action."

Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research and professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, has a fascinating short essay over at Foreign Policy about the ways in which the brain processes responsible for ratiocinative, calculating thought may interfere with those brain processes responsible for affective responses, resulting in an inability to act on perceptions of suffering or injustice.

Slovic describes the difficulty in this way:

The psychological mechanism that may play a role in many, if not all, episodes in which mass murder is neglected involves what’s known as the “dance of affect and reason” in decision-making. Affect is our ability to sense immediately whether something is good or bad. But the problem of numbing arises when these positive and negative feelings combine with reasoned analysis to guide our judgments, decisions, and actions. Psychologists have found that the statistics of mass murder or genocide—no matter how large the numbers—do not convey the true meaning of such atrocities. The numbers fail to trigger the affective emotion or feeling required to motivate action. In other words, we know that genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not “feel” that reality. In fact, not only do we fail to grasp the gravity of the statistics, but the numbers themselves may actually hinder the psychological processes required to prompt action.

Traces of a many-hunekered soul

George Johnson is an exemplary science writer -- clear-headed, inquisitive, vivid, enthusiastic, and wide-ranging in his interests. Who better, then, to review a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, who exemplifies all of those traits as well -- and in spades!

Disappointing (further) evidence of philosophical illiteracy at NY Times

The underlying message of the editorial "Horton Sees an Image" in today's Times is a valuable one, namely that

We keep probing the animal world for signs of intelligence — as we define it — and we’re always surprised when we discover it. This suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with our assumptions. There is every reason to value other life-forms as much for their difference from us as for their similarity, and to act accordingly. That may be the only intelligence test worthy of the name.

Of course, the implications of valuing other life-forms for their difference -- and of the obligations to act accordingly -- would be quite wide-ranging; for one, it would seem difficult to justify eating such life-forms for pleasure, assuming that alternate sources of nutrition are available.

What struck me as someone paid to do philosophy, however, was the dismaying lack of sophistication in the Times's editors' discussion of what it is that an animal's "passing" the mirror test -- the test of an animal's ability to recognize itself in a reflected image -- reveals about that animal's mental life. Here's what the Times writes:

To the very short list of animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror — i.e., humans and apes and possibly dolphins — scientists have now added the Asian elephant, or at least three female Asian elephants in the Bronx Zoo. Faced with the presence of an enormous — and rugged — full-length mirror in their enclosure, the animals displayed clear signs of grasping that they themselves were the origin of the images in the glass. ... Such tests appear to mark a boundary between animals that display some form of consciousness and those that don’t.

A moment's reflection (pardon the pun!), however, should indicate that the Times's editors are plainly misguided with respect to what it is that the mirror test might measure. What the mirror test serves to indicate is not consciousness, but self-consciousness or self-awareness.

Consciousness, roughly, is qualitative awareness of something; if my dog, Julia, is spattered by drops of dew shaken down from the branches of a tree by a squirrel running overhead, it seems by her reaction that she is conscious of the cold wetness of the dew -- and of the scratching noises the squirrel makes as it scampers. As this example illustrates, there are creatures -- most obviously, perhaps, household pets like dogs or cats -- who are conscious -- that is, for whom there is a way their interactions with the world feel to them -- but not capable of passing the mirror test.

Actually, despite what the editors of the Times write in "Horton," it seems pretty plausible to me that consciousness is a good minimal criterion for the evaluation of the worth of natural phenomena. Indeed, it is presumably the fact that cows are conscious but wheat is not that contributes to the vegetarian's greater comfort in eating bread than she has in eating steak. The interesting question to which the Times's editors so inexpertly point is whether the having of self-consciousness is a useful criterion for demarcating further levels of the value of living beings.