Benazir Bhutto assassinated

Time to get back to the blog again, hopefully it'll be a bit less compact this time.

As far as personalities are concerned I've often used Benazir Bhutto as an example for women i gender-oppressive societies. Marry someone with money who doesn't mind what you do as long as the public ceremonials are observed, and do as you wish out of the public eye.

But the personal aspect isn't very relevant in relation to the assassination.

It's not primarily about personalities, but about policies. There are enormous pressures being exerted on Pakistan by imperialism, and by the populist opposition to imperialism currently being channelled by islamism.

Bhutto's policy was to lead the regime best able to manage imperialism's interests in the country while siphoning off some of the riches for her own and for her more powerful supporters, with crumbs from the table for her mass base among the petty bourgeoisie.

The populist opposition is fuelled by democratic demands for national and cultural self-respect, but the distorted ideological representation this finds in islamism will lead up a blind alley. The weaknesses of individual terror tactics are symptomatic in this respect - it destroys your most enthusiastic supporters, and generates heavily repressive countermeasures by the state.

At least islamist populism stands in opposition to the West and its stranglers... so far so good... but since it also stands in opposition to the need of the mass of Pakistanis for food shelter health education productive work and a say in their own lives, it will be as contradictory as the regime in Iran. And far from attracting the solidarity of the mass of working people in the West, it tends to alienate them and provide fuel for the misleading demagoguery of Western politicians.

Only a revolutionary (ie anti-capitalist) socialist mass movement can stop the rot and end the bloodshed and despair. Obviously in a socialist union with the rest of the sub-continent - India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to start with.

For the moment we can note that Eppur si muove - nevertheless, it moves, as Galileo noted of the earth around the sun. History, and beneath its bloody surface, the class struggle, is moving, and after the tensions piled up by the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR, the explosiveness of its movements should surprise no one.

The End of History - my arse!

So *why* do men hate women?

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A slur and an outrage

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2070272,...

A slur and an outrage

The reporter who blew open Watergate is part of a misogynist conspiracy against Hillary Clinton

Zoe Williams Wednesday May 2, 2007 The Guardian

All you ever read about Hillary Clinton is how the American electorate hates her, and yet the only reason you're reading about her in the first place is that she is, in effect, 50% of the candidacy for leadership of the Democratic party. Somebody, surely, must like her. It can't just be the internet. Is the net even allowed to vote?

Carl Bernstein is dishing the dirt in his forthcoming unauthorised biography, entitled A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bernstein is now known as "the one played by Dustin Hoffman" in the Watergate film. He is a seminal investigative journalist, and claims to have the unexpurgated truth, culled from 200 sources - one of which, wince-inducingly, is Clinton's closest confidante, Diane Blair. Or rather not the woman herself; she (and now you can wince) died of lung cancer seven years ago. Bernstein has filleted her papers and personal effects, which are being sorted for the University of Arkansas library. He stops short of calling Clinton a liar, apparently, but suggests that she played fast and loose with the truth. Well come on then, how would the truth look if she'd played slower and tighter?

The gobbet that's meant to stir us up and keep us going until publication next month is this: contrary to what she's said, she did know about Bill and his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Or at least, she probably knew. This is according to an uncredited writer who has followed her career closely. "She always knew about her. Anyone who has approached the subject of Hillary Clinton with a clear eye will run across many examples of stories that are not true."

It's a tricky one, isn't it? Maybe she did know, but there might be a question mark over how she knew - was it actual information, or a hunch? When exactly should she have announced that she knew, in order to keep her veracity slate clean in the eyes of the voting public? When she'd got hold of some DNA evidence, or just when he came home with a naughty look on his face? Never mind that this is his transgression, not hers. Never mind that he paid his debt for his lively undercrackers some time ago, as I think even the most stalwart conservative would agree. How can this possibly be a relevant test of her, as a person or as a politician?

This is so far beyond the old "does it matter what they do in the bedroom?" debate. It's outrageous even to suggest that her husband's sex life is salient to her career in the first place, let alone that she should be held accountable for it. The whole book, ranging across "everything" from Clinton's "complex relationship with her disciplinarian father" to "her courtship with Bill Clinton and the amazing dynamic of their marriage, during the most trying of circumstances", is a slur on Hillary Clinton, refracting her through the prism of the men around her to a nexus of feminine roles: daughter, wife, blah.

The greatest outrage is that the next accusation will be that she isn't a "heavyweight". Misogynist opinion sees no contradiction in reducing any given woman to a series of soap opera and/or biological roles - and then, using this as "evidence", levelling at her the charge that she isn't serious-minded!

The same has happened to Ségolène Royal, the socialist contender for the French presidency, who has found even members of her own party incapable of comprehending how someone can both be a mother and understand foreign policy. Oh, that we had time to caper through the various German responses to Angela Merkel's childlessness.

In the UK, our tabloids are still capable of this sort of thing, but in Westminster, in soi-disant quality journalism and publishing, it would be laughed off the page. At the risk of unseemly nationalism, it's worth remembering how far we've come.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

********************************

Choppa's response:

So, *why* do so many men fear women?

For the same reason many US-icans fear socialists and communists.

US citizens are so afraid of their peers - of each other -- and you can see this in any piece of US mass culture, which is full of organized bullying and brutality (Them) against weak and trembling individuals with a desirable goody to be stolen (Me) -- that they can hardly conceive of the Evil that must be inherent in Double Thems (Emperor Ming, Lex Luthor, the Joker, Saddam Hussein, Huns, Nips, Bogey de Jour).

Men likewise are so afraid of each other, so terrified, so browbeaten, so cowardly, so corrupt, so squishily yellowy-brown, that the Alien Other, the Double Them confronting ManHood, Woman, must be of an Evil so inconceivable that their balls clench and they shrivel up in the face of it (la Fica Dentata).

And the culture of fear is nurtured by a society of alienation and terror. Change society from Dog eats Dog to woMan helps woMan, live and let live instead of kill or be killed, and you drain the cesspit of fear we all splash around in.

Voilà.

Utopian bureaucracy for fat cats vs human life for us all

An article in the Register deals with the mingling of business and pleasure at work. I think it raises some interesting issues about where society in general is heading.

It seems totally unaware of this, of course, focusing instead on the apparently intractable problem of unravelling this Gordian knot and isolating private pleasure from its presumed opposite business (ie public pain??). The problem in fact is the business side, and particularly ownership and power over our work.

Remove private ownership and power, and the whole system falls nicely into order, with everyone owning everything and deciding together how to share it and (re)produce it. So let's have an end to the private appropriation of social wealth, to the private ownership of social production, and try social ownership of social production, the social appropriation of social wealth, instead.

First the article, then my comment.

The Register » Management »

The politics of email in the workplace

Mixing business with pleasure

Page: 1 2 3 Next >

By Mark Rasch, SecurityFocus → More by this author

Published Thursday 19th April 2007 10:13 GMT

It's springtime in Washington, D.C. The cherry blossoms have bloomed, the tourists descended, and on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue a new "scandal" is erupting.

In the Watergate era, there was the controversy about Rosemary Woods and the 18 ½ minute "gap" - a missing portion of a taped conversation of June 20, 1972. Now in connection with "US Attorney-gate" we have a new controversy. The alleged "destruction" of electronic mail sent by employees of the White House through email servers used by the Republican National Committee. The matter raises more important issues for government agencies, companies, ISPs and others. Do I really have an email retention policy, and what emails do these policies apply to?

The US attorney controversy

The immediate issue arises out of an investigation by Democrats on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee into allegations that certain federal prosecutors were fired for improper political purposes. The US Department of Justice asserts that the firings were for perfectly appropriate "performance" reasons and that these prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President and can be fired for virtually any reason.

The email controversy arose when it was discovered that White House employees may have sent email communications about the US Attorney matter through US government computers or computer systems using email systems operated by the Republican National Committee (RNC.) Unlike most governmental emails, which as I will show have to be retained, there is generally no legal requirement that emails of the RNC be maintained. Thus, at least according to press reports, the emails in the RNC systems were "deleted" after 30 days. Or were they?

Personal vs non-personal email

The issues surrounding the controversy are not limited to the United States government. Every company that maintains a mail system has the problem of what to retain, and how to retain it. In addition to a "corporate" email system, companies may also provide employees with access to personal email. This may be through a separate exchange server, but more frequently, companies may allow employees to access their personal email through some form of webmail, either by POP3 or IMAP protocols. Most email systems allow access to email over the web, including AOL, Google's GMail, MSN, and its Hotmail service, Comcast, etc. While many companies expressly prohibit and indeed block access to personal email through their servers, there are actually legal reasons to permit such access.

Corporate or government email, coming as it does from "whitehouse.gov" or "company.com" carries with it an imprimatur of authority. It can be likened to a corporate letterhead or official government stationary. Yet people use such email for much more casual conversations then they would for a formal corporate letter. Nobody would consider whipping out company stationary to write a letter to their doctor or send a quick note to the girl scout troop leader. But an email - no problem. As a result, corporations and government agencies end up sending "official" email about all kinds of matters which do not relate in any way to official business. Indeed, it becomes difficult for recipients of email to effectively determine which communications are intended to bind the company, and which ones aren't - what the law calls "apparent authority".

Companies can deal with this problem in several ways. First, they can impose an outright ban on any kind of personal use of email. A quick note to the little league coach that Bobby is going to be late because mom has to work late is a policy violation which may result in disciplinary action.

Would such a policy be effective, workable, and enforceable? In most cases, probably not - at least not without a good deal of technology deployed around it, including "white lists" and content filters. One problem with this approach is that it is generally implemented inconsistently, and this can lead to legal problems. For example, a recent case involved a Virginia newspaper that prohibited personal use of its email system, but apparently only enforced this policy when employees used the email system for union organising activity lead to legal problems for the paper.

In that case (pdf), decided March 15, 2007, the court found that the uneven enforcement of the "no personal use" policy meant that the company could not select union activities for enforcement. The lesson is: if you are going to prohibit personal use of email, you'd better prohibit it entirely.

Page: 1 2 3 Next >

(and so on...)


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Choppa's comment:


Although the piece appears to encourage clearer demarcation between public and private affairs, in fact it points to where human society is heading. The arguments for separation are all based on the society we live in now - rotting capitalism, swollen to bursting with greed and gore, but grotesquely bound here and there with useless but painful red tape. But the behaviour of the actual human beings living their lives as best they can in this inhuman environment is heading the opposite way altogether. Work as part of life, and life as part of work.

In terms of who produces the stuff we use, everything belongs to everyone, as so many parts of society are involved in the production of both the tiniest everyday objects and the hugest international infrastructure projects. We could call this the forces of production. In terms of who owns the stuff we use, well, nothing belongs to everyone and everything belongs to the billionaires. Lets call this the relations of production.


Guess what? The forces of production and the relations of production are in contradiction. Tearing each other to pieces in real but invisible conflicts all around us.



Judge for yourself whether the forces or the relations of production are more human. Judge their relative strengths, now and historically over the centuries. Which will prevail??



Hmmm...

Massacres in Virginia - and Iraq. An anarchist's reaction

CounterPunch presents:

A Momentary Glimpse into Daily Life in Iraq

Massacre at Va Tech
By SHERWOOD ROSS

At the memorial ceremony for those slain at Virginia Tech, President Bush said today he did not know what the victims had done to deserve their fate. How this nation wept as one when thirty innocent Americans perished and twenty more were wounded! There is almost nothing else on the television news but this tragedy --- not even news from the ongoing slaughter from the war in Iraq.

Here we have the sorry spectacle of the man in the White House who made the war on Iraq, where a disaster comparable to the Virginia Tech massacre occurs four or five times a day every day, leading the nation in prayer! Yet when does this man go on television to ask the American people to pray for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered in the illegal war he launched? And just as the students and teachers who perished at the hands of a crazed killer on the Virginia Tech campus had done nothing to deserve their fate, neither have the people of Iraq committed any crime to endure the unendurable they are suffering at the hands of a president who professed to be "horrified" at the events on a peaceful campus. If a South Korean student is regarded as a berserk killer for murdering thirty people what is President Bush, whose invasion to control oil-rich Iraq has cost nearly three quarters of a million lives, created four million refugees, and plunged the Middle East into turmoil?

The American people, including the families of the murdered Virginia Tech innocents, have collective blood-guilt on their hands. I have not gone to jail to protest the war machine, so I am no better than they and probably a good deal worse because I have given the issue some thought. How many of those parents in the audience hearing the President's words had elected to Congress men and women who voted for lax laws on gun ownership? How many of those parents in the audience had also voted for legislators who backed the president's illegal invasion of Iraq? Are we, as a nation, too obtuse to grasp the connection between our "gun culture" policy at home and our militarist policy abroad that murders and mutilates human beings at every turn? Practically any one in America can buy a gun, and abroad, any dictator in the world can buy weapons made in America because we just happen to be the world's biggest arms peddler.

What kind of a society has America become? Why do we have two-million men in our prisons? Why, in some cities, is every second or third male either in prison or out on parole? Why is the murder rate soaring in so many cities? Why is there on average more than one killing a day in a city like Philadelphia? Why are our own terrorists murdering 30,000 Americans each year and injuring tens of thousands more with rapid-fire handguns of the sort used on the Virginia Tech campus? Do we realize, speaking of terrorists, that ten times as many Americans are being killed by Americans each year as all our troops in Iraq? Osama bin Laden is everywhere in America. He has a thousand faces. They are the faces of our own dispossessed, our own poverty-stricken, our own unemployed, our own underclass, our own idolized gangsters , our own youth who grew up in front of television sets that ooze violence and blood.

Who is responsible for the killings in Iraq except the same now bereaved parents of the murdered students at Virginia Tech? It's not that some of them voted to elect George Bush. Anyone can be deceived, particularly by a notorious liar. But when the president broke the law and invaded Iraq, violating the UN Charter, how many of them protested? Today they are upset that a young, crazed gunman has ran amok on the campus of a peaceful university, but where were they when President Bush defied the United Nations and ran amok in Iraq? Do they know, as Amnesty International reported on the same day as the Virginia Tech murders, the Middle East "is on the verge of a massive humanitarian crisis" because three-million Iraqis have been "forcibly displaced" by the war the grief-stricken Mr. Bush began? Who do the American people think made this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East if not the American people?

The same parents who weep for their children might consider that they and their neighbors are also spending a half trillion dollars a year so that the Pentagon, just over the horizon from Virginia Tech, can wage a war that is snuffing out the lives of children of other parents just like their own. Thousands of Virginians work for the military-industrial complex. They work for the Pentagon. They work for defense contractors. They work for the Central Intelligence Agency. They are in the business of killing directly or indirectly, yet how many of them are haunted by the consequences of their "jobs" in their dreams at night?

All across America, people who attend church and regard themselves as "good" people, such as the bereaved at Virginia Tech, are working in the plants that make atomic bombs and warplanes and napalm and cluster bombs and are creating new, demonical designs of germ warfare and space-based weapons so vile and horrible they defy description.

America as a nation has become an organized nightmare. Yesterday, the nation woke up to the pain of the kind of killing it has been inflicting widely around the world since its fleets of bombers roared out to destroy Dresden, since it leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since it laid waste to Vietnam, since it overthrew Chile, and now since it has invaded two Middle Eastern nations in its thirst for oil. Yes, weep for the innocent victims of Virginia Tech, who only wanted to study and live in peace. But weep also, America, for the people of Iraq! If President Bush cared as much for them as he cares for his own, he would have to hold four news conferences a day. He would never stop grieving.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist. For comments or to arrange for speaking engagements contact him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

*****************************

Choppa responds (to Stu who forwarded the piece to him):

Thanks!

Good stuff - but...

No class perspective. Democratic illusions up to here... ¨¨¨¨¨

He sees what power can do (not blind) but he doesn't see its material basis. Anarchist lack of understanding and perception of the levers of social reproduction and social change. Anarchist worship of and paralysis before the Big Gun. Like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake or a deer in headlights, he can't even call for a general strike by workers in the arms industry! He doesn't even call for a vote on any policy!!

What it boils down to is blaming the "ordinary American" for the political system and for supporting its priorities. No mention of the machinery to keep ordinary people in check. Guns in America are in the hands of the antisocial - baddies. Not a word about the cops, the scabs, the spies, the military at home. Not a word about history and the constant tug of WAR between workers and capitalists, both national and international. Not a word about the USSR (ooooold story). Not a word about US strategy against the Soviet bloc. Not even a word about Cuba or Venezuela.

In other words, too much distortion, too much garish contrast. A news item as impressionistic in its way as the Fox reports it mirrors from the other side.

Still better this than nothing!

But still - what a featureless landscape he paints between the juggernaut Bush and the berserk loner at VA Tech. An America populated by zombies and hoods.

Copyright, copywrong, humanity and piracy

Techdirt: It's Not China's Poor Copyright Laws That Fuel Piracy There

www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20070409/105456

Contributed by Carlo

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 @ 3:02AM Permalink to this story.

It's Not China's Poor Copyright Laws That Fuel Piracy There

from the untapped-demand dept

In one of its roles as proxy for Hollywood movie studios and record labels, the US government continually complains to China that it's not doing enough to stop piracy, and threatens it with the big stick of sanctions or other actions through the World Trade Organization. While these threats are usually just hot air, the US has now formally complained to the WTO, saying that Chinese laws don't live up to WTO commitments in the area of copyright protection and enforcement. But there's a second element to the complaint, which takes issue with China's heavy restrictions on the distribution of foreign content, including DVDs, CDs, books and other products. Where things get a little bit more interesting is that the original article in the Wall Street Journal, and indeed, movie studios and record labels themselves, gloss over the second part of the complaint -- when it illustrates beautifully how backwards big content thinks.

A graph in the article says that China and France are the two nations where the movie industry suffers its biggest losses due to piracy. While the dollar amounts cited are pretty certainly bogus, is it any coincidence that the movie industry sees those two countries as the biggest for piracy when they both feature some of the tightest restrictions on the distribution of foreign content? France is pretty famous for its efforts to keep American content out of its media market, while the Chinese government allows just 20 foreign films to be shown in the country's cinemas each year. It would be reasonable to deduce that it's a lack of legitimately available, attractive products that's driving the demand for pirated goods in these countries, rather than weak enforcement of copyrights. This mimics what goes on in other markets: the content industry fails to provide consumers with attractive products to purchase -- though it's generally because of poor strategy rather than government interference -- so they turn to pirated goods instead. The market for legitimate movie downloads probably provides the best illustration of this scenario. The products offered by legitimate, studio-backed sites are so heavily restricted and overpriced that nobody wants to buy them. The idea that content providers like movie studios don't understand this is reflected in the fact that they aren't pushing the government to attack China's 20-film limit, they just want to make its copyright laws more strict. It's just another indication of how the industry won't compete with free, while it protests that it simply can't. The failure in the market isn't a failure of the government to sufficiently protect copyright holders; it's a failure of those copyright holders to provide products and services that are attractive to consumers.

Reader Comments

1. A contradiction. by Terri on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:33am

   This makes no sense. If the copyright holders provide no content that users want, then why do the pirates sell so many bootleg copies of that self-same content?

2. Re: A contradiction. by MadJo on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:39am

   my first thought would be price. These bootlegged/"pirated" material is much friendlier priced than the original stuff.
   In a way consumers are already voting with their wallets. ;)

3. THis is dumb by Cleveland on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:43am

   This has got to be the worst written article ever!!
   I do agree that the gov't may be keep the film industry down on these countries. Therefore making their citizens turn to bootlegs, but that still is not an vaild reason to steal.

4. Re: A contradiction. by Anonymous Coward on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:51am

   The copyright holder want to provide the content. As it said in the story China and France drastically restrict the amount of content allowed. The demand is there and the supply isnt. Thats what is driving the piracy.

5. by [caiocesar] on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:53am

   I think this is not all true. Se the case of Brazil. It's a wide-open country, specially for foreign content. Even though it has a huge amount of pirated material being bought and sold on the streets of nearly every city.
   The real cause might be the high prices that the so called legal content arrives to stores' shelves...

6. It's True by ImaniOU on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:53am

   As an American who has been living in Taiwan for almost six years now, I can choose to either miss out on really good movies and television programs because although there are some foreign films and TV shows here, the only ones picked up are the ones that are extremely popular or do not rely on understanding the language. If it involves fart jokes, then it makes it. If it involves a lot of dialogue, then the companies here don't want to be bothered translating it so they just don't carry it. The law enforces everything has to be subtitled in Chinese, even Chinese-language media because of the different dialects all over the island. If it weren't for pirated movies and TV shows, I would be missing over half a decade of American pop culture. The quality of programming here sucks and anyone who wants more from entertainment than caricatures and bathroom humor is forced to seek out alternative means for getting it.

7. Yeah by Wolfger on Apr 10th, 2007 @ 4:57am

   That about sums it up. Most people are honest, and would rather pay to get something legitimate. Piracy stems from two sources: unavailability and unaffordability.

***************************************

Choppam responds:

Good article. The US govt is very self-serving in its trade policies, hates international agreements that thwart its greed and selfishness, and censors officials and scholars and scientists who disagree with it whenever it can. And it shills for the corporations like Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Money and Big ShowBiz. So it tries to put a lid on the reproduction and spread of useful ideas and creative art for the benefit of useless fat cats and uncreative boneheads.

Most people don't realize that the ability to easily and rapidly reproduce ideas and art (eg books, articles, music, shows, movies, prints, photos) is heralding an explosion in interaction and creative development among ALL human beings - that's the whole of humanity, every one of us. Regardless of borders, bureaucrats or bombs.

The reason why the corporations can't compete is that almost everybody hates them, and most people can't afford what they demand. So as soon as the useful and creative things they've stolen from humanity slip through the prison bars they try and put around them, then they find their way home - to humanity.

The oligarchy (rule by the few) and plutocracy (power of the rich) that is fomenting war and destruction today wants to corner every market it can smell out in order to charge exorbitant prices for necessary products. This system wants everybody to act like ignorant selfish money-worshipping brutes like themselves. Fortunately for us (humanity) most people puke at this idea and do what they can to stay human and share their joys and thoughts with each other. You can't make lives and ideas into private property.

Artists and scientists etc need to live. Most people that make up society realize this better than the fat cats and their governments. So let society organize a fair way to do this without the insanity of present-day copyright and patent litigation.

If big stealing (say the looting of Iraq's oil, or the slave contracts big recording companies force on most musicians, or the destruction of our air and water) is sanctioned by law and government, while small stealing is stigmatized and smeared, then the system needs to be turned on its head.

Meanwhile people will do what they have to do to feel themselves as a real part of humanity, with access to the latest and greatest productions of their fellow human beings.

A utopian view of "academia"

Kenodoxia blogs:

Silver linings

Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, whose research interests include measuring and promoting happiness, has written something in the Independent about why academia is a rewarding career to enter. His comments about projected earnings look on the generous side to me, but otherwise he makes some good points and raises some significant caveats to potential applicants for academic jobs. Still, it's nice to read something which reminds me of the positive parts of my job.

On the other hand, I'll reserve judgement on his approval of the Labour government's introduction of top-up fees. Let's wait and see whether all those £3K/year bits of funding find their way into improving teaching, research, and academic salaries. And let's see what effects it has on the number and type of student entering universities. Perhaps Economics departments will feel less of a pinch than Classics or Philosophy departments. Time will tell.

Posted by JIW at 5:43 PM

**************************

Choppa responds:

To me, his piece seemed vague and a bit odd.

"Dedication to ideas" in the academic world is nonsense, if understood in the traditional sense. There is some awareness of ideas, and sometimes maybe a readiness to discuss them, but not more. You have to be very lucky to find yourself a congenial group of idea-freaks to pursue trains of thought for days and weeks with.

"Generosity of intellectual spirit" is self-serving flattery of the worst kind, given the warnings earlier in the same breath practically to "advertise" yourself "in a self-obsessed world" and to beware that "academics are mostly keen on acolytes who are mirrors of themselves". In a world of economically driven "publish-or-die" you will only find generosity of spirit among those who no longer care, ie who have nothing to lose or nothing to gain, or are professionally suicidal. And Oswald's world is economically driven, with pay obviously related to "success" measured in publications and status. It is also intensely individualistic and exceptionalist (elitist) - "if most people like your work you can be certain that you have not done anything important", "eschew the latest research fad, and go for iconoclasm".

For a happiness researcher, he is not in the least Epicurean!

And for an economist he has a touchingly naive (or cynically duplicitous) faith that the top-up fees will trickle down (oops, he said "slowly siphon" "vital resources) into [...] higher education". As my daughter would say - "yeah, right..." Resources that vital should be funded up front, like Trident or the nuclear industry. And for me (and the "squealing" trade unions, and most poor people and wage-earners, and damn near everybody in the reviled 60s ("equal pay for unequal talent and effort" indeed, ho yus I remember it so well... :-) )) it's a matter of principle that education should be made open to all appropriately interested youngsters , not just those with "real demand" in daddy's bank account.

Finally, for now, he seems totally unaware that "school" comes from the Greek "skhole" - meaning leisure from work (ie from hard sweaty materially productive work) enabling you to devote your time and energy to the active pursuit of things that interest you, like learning, teaching, ideas, theories, art, music, whatever.

He writes "you will be an obsessive self-employed thinker". "Obsessive" I doubt, "self-employed" is a hoot, although the blend "self-obsessed" might hit the mark?? "Thinker" - well and good - covers a multitude of sins, doesn't it?

I wonder how he would react to my iconoclasm? Somehow I don't think I'd like to find out. For my money, Andrew O is himself the hissing guy in the black helmet.

"Ethical" conundrums - philosophical rape?

Kenodoxia writes on choices:

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

More problems with trolley problems

It's surprising how many people are currently worried about what to do about runaway trolleys which threaten to run over a group of otherwise anonymous people. Hot on the heels of a study which seemed to show that sleep deprivation promoted consequentialist reactions to moral dilemmas comes a study which seems to indicate that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VPMC) are similarly more likely to opt for promoting the 'greatest good for the greatest number' even in so-called 'Personal Moral Scenarios'. (I gave some examples of what these are in an earlier post.)

A report of the study (involving, it has to be said, only 30 subjects) appeared in brief on the New Scientist Website and it appears to use very similar scenarios to the sleep deprivation study. The New Scientist report makes some excessively grand claims about how these findings might offer a radical challenge to ethical philosophy, but there is probably something interesting going on.

I have no idea quite what the VPMC does, exactly, but I bet that it is more complicated than just being involved in 'the emotions'. Precisely what an emotion is, for a start, would be a good question to ask, and it certainly does not follow from this experiment that we need to go for any kind of dualist moral psychology, with on one side the rational calculating faculty and on the other the affective emotional faculty. True, when wondering whether to push someone on to a train line to prevent a greater loss of life further down the tracks, there are all sorts of considerations which we might take into account. Some are rightly concerned with the numbers of people involved in each alternative; others are to do with a personal feeling of responsibility; yet more are to do with fear or excitement or panic. In fact, there is a very good case for the view that all these scenarios seriously misrepresent what it would be like to face any such dilemma in reality. We certainly wouldn't be faced solely with a bare set of propositions, designed by the experimenter to point towards the single variable subject to the testing. Rather, it would be a complicated situation affected by all sorts of factors to do with one's current disposition, the way the surroundings are and are perceived and so on.

In short, scenarios like those touted by this kind of test seem to me not really to offer any significant information about ethical thinking 'in the wild'. While they are useful ways of illustrating particular ethical theoretical views, our reactions to them are hardly indicative of our likely behaviour. It is common, for example, for a student to tell me that they would 'obviously' choose to divert a trolley to kill one person rather than five. I have no idea whether that is true and, I imagine, nor do they. Are they really able to imagine what it would be like to be faced with such a situation? I can't.

People still interested in exploring this kind of thought-experiment might like to ponder the following teaser, by Michael F. Patton jr.:

On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.

On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones, who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphans' bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can.

There's an explanation of the example here. There is a variation on the example here.

Posted by JIW at 9:35 AM

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Choppa's response:

Very briefly, I think the whole issue of "ethical" choices is weird and unreal. So many of us are removed from any opportunity of making real decisions in our lives, of the kind that leave a taste of blood in your mouth. No wonder adrenalin is sought as a substitute for blood that's more readily available - anger, cheating, humiliation, extreme display behaviour, substitute slaughter by proxy or fiction, etc.

The big social decisions, like mutiny vs conformity, are particularly repressed.

In the post-Alexander Greek world, Epicurus rejected Democritus's determinism for freedom at all levels of being - atomic to social interaction. But he remained locked in the subjective experience of the individual, with ataraxy, a cheerful tranquillity:

[...] sapias! vina liques et spatio breui
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur fugerit inuida
aetas. carpe diem! quam minimum credula postero.

as his goal - something for the happy enlightened few against a backdrop of war, slavery, disease, natural disasters, and (as in Horace's poem) the wintry pounding of the Tyrrhenian Sea on the sharp rocky shore. Lucretius, Roman that he was, had a more missionary, proselytizing, engineering approach than Epicurus, using fiery rhetoric as his instrument. But his social intension was concealed beneath his loyalty to his master regarding the goal of individual emancipation from the corrosive terror of ignorance and the superstitious bonds of organized religion.

So instead of foisting weird conundrums onto unprepared and unwilling objects - a kind of philosophical rape with little wisdom and less love - why not ask people if they have ever in their lives actually taken a real decision - life-changing, if not life-or-death? And then discussing it with them and comparing with the questioner's personal experience.

Renewable energy about to boom - forces of production asserting their primacy

A couple of snippets in today's news that remove any doubts (my emphasis).

DENVER -- State lawmakers laid out an ambitious plan this week to fund renewable energy development through a new Clean Energy Development Authority with the power to issue bonds.
"We'd love to see this become the Silicon Valley of renewable energy,"Colorado needs to move fast if it wants to be a player.[...]
Sen. Ken Kester, R-Las Animas, said the plan could provide virtually unlimited funds for renewable energy projects. The tax-free bonds could be backed by the state if the Legislature and voters approve. The authority could also issue bonds without state backing.
"Some of those transmission lines cost $1 million a mile," Kester said.
Kester said Texas, Wyoming and New Mexico are already ahead of Colorado in the race to build a new energy economy.
James Tarpey, a member of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority Board, said his board has the authority to fund projects that cost $1 billion or more.[...]
Gardner said there would be no limit on the amount of bonds the authority could issue.
"The capital infusion as a result of this bill is unlimited," he said.
Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, said Colorado has the renewable energy assets and can't afford to squander them.
"We are clearly the Saudi Arabia of wind, solar and carbon assets," he said.[...]

Colorado lays out ambitious energy plan

and:

BANGALORE: Tata BP Solar, a Bangalore-based 51:49 JV of BP Solar and Tata Power is looking at opportunities in other alternative energy sources like wind, hydrogen, natural gas (low carbon) and hydro apart from their solar energy business. It also plans to invest $300 million over a 300mw cell manufacturing plant to be launched by 2010 in Bangalore. This will be the largest manufacturing plant for BP Solar, globally. BP Solar has manufacturing capacities in Spain, US, Australia and China. BP Solar is a part of BP Alternative Energy, which over the next 10 years aims to invest $8 billion globally in solar, wind, hydrogen and natural gas power technology. BP’s investments in India include Castrol India and Tata BP Solar. Speaking to ET, Lee Edwards, president & CEO, BP Solar said, “The JV with Tata Power has huge potential, therefore, we could look at more opportunities in other alternative energy sources. Tata BP Solar has been witnessing around 40% growth in India over the last two years.” The company has recorded revenue of Rs 650 crore this fiscal. Currently, 60% of the solar cell produced in Bangalore is exported to Europe. Tata BP Solar has added 36mw solar photovoltaic production line capacity with an investment of $22 million to the existing 16 mw taking the total cell manufacturing capacity to 52 mw per annum. The board has also approved of $100 million investment for the next phase of expansion, which will see an additional 128 mw of cell manufacturing capacity to be added during 2007-08, taking the total capacity to 180 mw. This is a part of the planned 300 mw cell manufacturing plant.

Tata BP Solar may diversify into alternative energy -

The big deal here is two-fold.

First US politicians talking about the new energy economy in the terms of a race: "Kester said Texas, Wyoming and New Mexico are already ahead of Colorado in the race to build a new energy economy." And the talk of "unlimited funds", "virtually unlimited capital infusions", "the Silicion Valley of renewable energy", "move fast if it wants to become a player" - the competitive spirit is being cheer-leaded here with great vigour. "You're behind, get moving!" and the pom-poms and short skirts of capital are undulating and shimmying, arousing the sluggards to perform.

Texas and California have been jousting for months now about who's leading the wind generation league. So now solar is coming in too, and Colorado is piling into the ruck. As is Arizona in other news. This indicates that not only will all pessimistic forecasts for the growth of renewable energy in the next decade or so be trampled in the rush and forgotten, but that big oil and nuclear will have to shift their active capital and effort fast to stay in the game.

And blow me down if the Indian news doesn't underline this very thing. Everyone knows BP is big oil, but TATA INDUSTRIES is not at all well known. It is basically Manufacturing India, Inc. So with Big Oil and India Inc starting to move (and the figures aren't quite peanuts), the game is going to be sweatier for the US would-be players to thrust their way into than they might imagine.

Add to these very empirical signs the new emphasis on energy conservation in heating and lighting, moves to bio-fuels (ethanol, bio-diesel, wood pellets), and the still a bit speculative and research-based work on geo-thermal (heat pumps), tidal and wave energy, not to mention the revamped ideas about harvesting solar energy from space, and there's something spectacular under way.

Simply put, even under the warped and repressive social relations of capitalism (with its undemocratic and conflict-ridden monopoly ownership of resources, production facilities and what we might call Big Knowledge - the kind that gets patented and copyrighted out of the public domain and hidden away in corporate R&D or narrow specialist publications) the forces of production (technology and the demands of technology in relation to human social needs at this level of technological development) are forcing us into the realm of socialist (non-capitalist, cooperative, internationally coordinated) development.

Like a giant modern Prometheus in its boyhood growing into adolescence, human productive potential is right now being forced to contain its bulging body in the rigid childhood suit of armour provided for it by its wicked capitalist guardian. The spectacle is ridiculous - Li'l Abneresque (Li'l Abner) - shmoos are popping up everywhere ("shmoos is bad fo people" ), and yet "we" have to exterminate them for the "good of society" ("ah loves the law").

Marx wrote well over a century ago that finance capital (as a fully developed bank and credit system):

The banking system, so far as its formal organization and centralization is concerned, is the most artificial and most developed product turned out by the capitalist mode of production, a fact already expressed in 1697 in Some Thoughts of the Interests of England. This accounts for the immense power of an institution such as the Bank of England over commerce and industry, although their actual movements remain completely beyond its province and it is passive toward them. The banking system possesses indeed the form of universal book-keeping and distribution of means of production on a social scale, but solely the form. We have seen that the average profit of the individual capitalist, or of every individual capital, is determined not by the surplus-labour appropriated at first hand by each capital, but by the quantity of total surplus-labour appropriated by the total capital, from which each individual capital receives its dividend only proportional to its aliquot part of the total capital. This social character of capital is first promoted and wholly realized through the full development of the credit and banking system. On the other hand this goes farther. It places all the available and even potential capital of society that is not already actively employed at the disposal of the industrial and commercial capitalists so that neither the lenders nor users of this capital are its real owners or producers. It thus does away with the private character of capital and thus contains in itself, but only in itself, the abolition of capital itself. By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit thus become the most potent means of driving capitalist production beyond its own limits, and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.

Capital III Part V (Division of Profit) Chapter 36 (Precapitalist relationships) (a few pages before the end of the chapter)

So a world controlled by a fully developed banking and credit system (imperialism) is ready for the next "generation" of human society, socialism. Imperialism is capitalism pregnant with socialism, as Marx shows here and Lenin and Trotsky reiterated.

The problem is really more about politics and power than about economics - how can the majority of human beings, locked up as they are in their individual imperialist states, wrest control of the world economy and world power structure(s) from their current pro-monopoly, pro-banking-and-credit, pro-"capitalist" governors?

Skip to my loo...

Mary Beard blogs:

March 20, 2007

Where's the loo?

Most Cambridge colleges “went mixed” some twenty years ago. But they still preserve unexpected corners of male power and privilege. None of these corners is more irritating than the location of the female loos.

Imagine it. You’re sitting in the SCR – that’s the fellows’ common room – after dinner. You casually ask for the Ladies. The chances are that there will be a bit of a flap, while the equivalent of an AA route map and a compass is produced. It usually involves going out into the courtyard, through the rain, into the next court, up a staircase three doors on the left – only to discover a set of facilities which you know to be decidedly inferior to whatever is laid on for the men, and much less ‘convenient’ in almost every way.

Some colleges, to be fair, are a bit better organised; and my own, I confess, treats male needs with almost equal disdain. But the general rule seems to be that women’s ablutions are lower down the pecking order than men’s.

I have never really understood why single sex loos are necessary, anyway, in a place like a university (King’s Cross station late at night is probably another matter).

Why can’t we just share?

In my more paranoid moments, I strongly suspect that the answer has to do with men’s urinals being one of the few remaining sites of exclusively male wheeling and dealing. Men will disappear for a pee in the middle of a meeting and come back, after a cosy chat in the loo, with the business fixed.

Women can’t do that. Female toilets are strangely discreet places, for the simple reason that you never know who is locked in the cubicles – invisible, but capable of overhearing every word that’s said. There can hardly be a woman in the land who hasn’t learned her lesson on this one: bitching in colourful terms about a woman who two minutes later emerges to wash her hands.

This was something that repeatedly got Ally McBeal into trouble in that wonderful old television series. As the joke used to go: How do you know if you’re an Ally McBeal fan? Answer: If you look under the toilet stalls to see who’s using them before you start talking.

Surely it would be easier, and an imaginative blow for female power and equality, just to make urinals a thing of the past and put everyone in the same facilities. It’s already common enough in the USA (in fact, Ally’s loo was a ‘unisex’, as I recall). It’s we Brits who have this illogical obsession with urinary segregation – to the extent that we are even known make students use separate toilets from the staff.

. . . So what did the Romans do, you’ll be wondering.

Well domestic loos were something of a rarity. But the evidence from Pompeii suggests that, if they were present at all, the usual location was in the kitchen. There was convenient water supply and Roman assumptions about hygiene were rather different from our own. Better not to think too hard about the consequences.

Outside, and in places such as baths, they had an excellent line in splendid multi-seaters. like this one from North Africa. Though whether these were also mixed sex we don’t, I think, know.

I’d like to imagine that they were.

Posted by Mary Beard on March 20, 2007 at 09:36 PM |Permalink

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Choppa's reply:


Women can pee standing up. All the gen at:
How to pee standing up

And so they can use male urinals doing it, instead of this:
Loo queue

The traditional morning shit was usually taken at the village ditch/latrine communally as I've understood it. Men and women separately.

Sweden/the Nordic countries (open-air life in forests etc) has a tradition of open-air peeing with few constraints that sometimes leads girls in need to do it with minimal cover (behind a hotdog stand, say) on the pavement in town.

Men peeing like horses in the street I've seen in Austria.

Some fashionable eateries here in Sweden now have (unisex) twin toilets, where the frequent habit (of women at least) of sharing a visit to the loo is rendered a bit more civilized.

Most workplaces here now have unisex toilets, although a growing puritanism has been encroaching on the traditionally perhaps less constrained intersex behaviour in other areas.

In Finland the sauna is taken naked, of course - towels are used to sit on not wrap, knickers etc are laughed at - but how the family/friends mix or segregate is an individual matter. A common habit is kids first perhaps with a woman (coolest), then women, then men (hottest). No drink (or sex) in the sauna while it's hot (you'd collapse), but plenty after. Or before if you're trying to cure a hangover.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela "In the sauna"

Now, Mary, how about a blog on classical farting? - I vividly recall Claudius being advised by his medicus to let it all blow free in the TV Claudius. Did they care at all?

Posted by: Xjy | 21 Mar 2007 11:09:24

Must, won't, Kant, will - Means Ends Duties

Response to Kenodoxia

Kenodoxia stirs it up again:

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Get more sleep and be a better person?

You might think that I am a little obsessed with sleeplessness. Most parents of young children, I reckon, don't get enough sleep, so perhaps I have an excuse. But more support comes from an interesting study in the journal Sleep which tried to measure the effects of sleep deprivation on 'moral judgement'. (You can download the .pdf if you're viewing the page from a domain which has access privileges.) I'm interested in the methods used: participants were asked to answer questions as part of a 'Moral Judgement Task', which involved 40 moral questions, further divided into 'Impersonal' and 'Personal' types. 20 other non-moral questions were also asked. This is how the paper characterises the two types of moral question:

In the present study, Moral Impersonal (MI) dilemmas were those that required the volunteers to judge the appropriateness of various non-personal moral violations in scenarios in which the respondent is presented with a solution to the dilemma that would benefit a larger group by merely deflecting an existing threat of serious bodily harm or death onto another individual or smaller group. In this form of dilemma, the individual performing the action does not directly or personally inflict harm on another, but the course of action described will indirectly bring about serious harm to one party through deflection of an existing threat away from another party.

Moral Personal (MP) dilemmas were similar to the MI dilemmas, except that the moral violation was of a more personal nature in that the course of action initiated by the respondent in the MP dilemmas would directly inflict serious bodily harm or death to a specific identifiable individual in order to reduce the impact of an external threat to another party. The key difference between these 2 types of dilemmas is the degree of personal involvement in producing the harmful consequences; in the MP scenarios, the actor is the “author” of the outcome and directly inflicts the harm, whereas in the MI scenarios the actor merely “edits” the inevitable harm by redirecting an already existing source of harm onto a different victim.

You can see examples of the two types, and also the non-moral scenarios also included in the questionnaire here. They are of the kind familiar from lots of ethical philosophy and of the kind which pop up regularly in Cambridge Admissions interviews. For example, this is a Moral-Impersonal scenario:

You are the late-night watchman in a hospital. Due to an accident in the building next door, there are deadly fumes rising up through the hospital's ventilation system. In a certain room of the hospital are three patients. In another room there is a single patient. If you do nothing the fumes will rise up into the room containing the three patients and cause their deaths.

The only way to avoid the deaths of these patients is to hit a certain switch, which will cause the fumes to bypass the room containing the three patients. As a result of doing this the fumes will enter the room containing the single patient, causing his death.

Is it appropriate for you to hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the three patients?

And this is a Moral-Personal scenario:

A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the tracks, in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very large.

The only way to save the lives of the five workmen is to push this stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workmen will be saved.

Is it appropriate for you to push the stranger on to the tracks in order to save the five workmen?

It is a good question whether there is a morally significant difference between these two kinds of cases. It is nevertheless plausible that there is a significant psychological difference between reactions to the two kinds of scenarios, precisely because of the differing degree of direct personal involvement involved, particularly regarding the causing of a harm -- albeit one which might prevent another, greater, harm.

So what effects does sleep deprivation have on the way you answer this sort of question? It's complicated, as you might expect. The headline results are:

1. Sleep deprivation increases the decision-making time for Moral-Personal scenarios relative to Moral-Impersonal and Non-moral scenarios.

2. In general terms, sleep-deprivation tends to increase the likelihood of a participant answering that a proposed course of action (in both types of case) is appropriate.

The researchers, probably rightly, avoid making claims about which course of action for a given scenario is 'correct', so there is no sense in asking whether these results suggest that there is a 'moral decline' associated with the absence of sleep. But, regardless of which course of action is right, it seems to me that since the action suggested, both in the Moral-Impersonal and Moral-Personal cases, tends to be one which is likely either (i) to foster the agent's own interests at the expense of someone else or (ii) to foster the interests of a larger group at the cost of a smaller group or an individual, it does seem that lack of sleep tends to promote an acceptance of broadly consequentialist reasoning (of either egoist or a more agent-neutral kind).

Which raises a further good question: did Bentham and Mill just not get enough sleep?

Also, as Sara reminds me, didn't Margaret Thatcher famously get by as Prime Minister on only four hours of sleep per night? (She certainly claimed to: see this interview from 1989.)

Posted by JIW at 11:59 AM

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Choppa's response:

For a quick introduction to the basics here Wikipedia's entry seems OK, and the links from the following will get you away and into further reading easily enough. It's about duty vs consequences in relation to how we understand ourselves and what we do. The "duty" line (means) is represented by deontology (with Kant in the blue corner) and "consequences" (ends) by consequentialism, (with Bentham in the waxy yellow corner).

Criticism of deontology

Many Act or Case utilitarians offer critiques of deontology as well as Rule Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham, an early utilitarian philosopher, criticized deontology on the grounds that it was essentially a dressed-up version of popular morality, and that the unchanging principles that deontologists attribute to natural law or universal reason are really a matter of subjective opinion. John Stuart Mill, who lived in 19th century Britain, argued that deontologists usually fail to specify which principles should take priority when rights and duties conflict, so that deontology cannot offer complete moral guidance.

Shelly Kagan, a current professor of philosophy at Yale University, notes in support of Mill and Bentham that under deontology, individuals are bound by constraints (such as the requirement not to murder), but are also given options (such as the right not to give money to charity, if they do not wish to). His line of attack on deontology is first to show that constraints are invariably immoral, and then to show that options are immoral without constraints.

Another, unrelated critique of deontological ethics comes from aretaic theories, which often maintain that neither consequences nor duties but "character" should be the focal point of ethical theory. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, sought to describe what characteristics a virtuous person would have, and then argued that people should act in accordance with these characteristics.

I'll get back to Aristotle and his virtue (Gk. "arete") later.

Duties and constraints always make me ask "who decided this?" and "who stands to gain by it? (cui bono?)" A less ironic and indirect way of asking "who guards the guardians?". And my next questions are: "have I got to obey you?" and "what will happen to me if I don't?"

The train examples are typically mindless examples of individual ethical guilt-prods, designed to paralyse the unprepared in the same way as military tribunals try and paralyse potential conscientious objectors. "If a Hun was about to slit your mother's throat, what would you do? Hand him a flower?"

I think I would refuse to answer questions like this without a social hat on. Commander-in-Chief, Prime Minister, schoolchild, drunk, local vicar, undertaker, Pope... whatever. It's like the old chestnuts from primary school about being stuck in a sinking balloon and having to jettison a cook, a bus driver, a hunter or a Senior Lecturer. Who are you prepared to kill, you murderer!!?

Nuremburg tried to make this type of decision imperative (a duty) for everyone in war too. No more hiding behind "Befehl ist Befehl" (orders is orders). The UN tried something similar with its conventions. But the optimistic ideals of postwar humbug and dogoodery have since been trampled down by decades of violent violation. Individuals can rarely stand up en masse (so to speak) against the holders of collective power. And there is no constituted single holder of power (or body) in human society today to give even the illusion of potential consensus.

The abstract ideals of various competing factions of humanity (the working class national and international, the bourgeoisie national and international, ethnic groups, states, groups of states, genders of various nationalities, classes and gradations, etc) might have some superficial resemblance, or not, but the concrete aims of these factions are mutually contradictory and often lead to injury or death for the antagonists, especially the weaker party. Like industrial accidents (the massively fatal leaks in Bhopal, for instance, with the owners of Union Carbide pitted against the workers and local residents there). Like the wars directly engendered by the dismantling of the USSR by its bureaucracy (Armenia-Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya etc etc) and less directly too (the Balkanization of Yugoslavia, Iraq etc, Africa). Like the rollback of the welfare state's priorities of a high general level of education, health and social security, which has translated into increased ignorance, disease and social precariousness for millions of unpropertied families throughout Europe, and into increased profits and wealth for thousands of propertied families.

So basically, the effect of your decisions on the lives and welfare of others depends on who you're fighting with, and what position you hold in the your group (faction of humanity). And the "intrinsic" moral value of your decisions depends on the formal or informal moral code that holds in your group, and how this compares with the code(s) of other groups, and the group to which the evaluator belongs and its relationship with your own group.

And the more antagonistic the relationships between the group of the evaluator and the evaluated, the more likely the clash of values is to lead to death and destruction, given the empirical propensity of human groups to organize themselves into armed and combative entities.

Imagine for instance that two people were in a position to affect the outcome of the train incidents exemplified above in K's blog. One with a close relative or friend in one of the threatened groups, the other with an enemy (creditor or boss, say) in the same group. It's easy to imagine the "demons of private interest" that Marx refers to propelling their interventions into violent conflict.

Now what effect might lack of sleep have on any of this? For an individual perhaps just to strip away a veneer of conventional (lip-serving?) respectability? Neutralize the dickering of a confused ego and let the super-ego and the id hammer at each other for the right to decide?

Or maybe group decision-making is a kind of enforced collective insomnia by which deep collective needs are connected up with powerful collective desires, with the kaleidoscopic variety of individual differences cancelled out.

It's worth bearing in mind too, that the things you can do without thinking, automatically, are often referred to in terms like "I could do that in my sleep". In other words, behaviours that we have acquired so well, so thoroughly, that they become second nature. We do them without conscious thought. Tying a shoelace, putting on a coat, opening a familiar kind of packaging, negotiating an initially confusing route. So an insomnia test would reveal how deeply a particular set of behaviours, in the present case "moral" responses, have penetrated our being. I know from personal experience how important this depth of knowledge can be from teaching, where the pressures of a classroom full of frustrated and unmotivated teenagers can strip away superficially acquired skills and attitudes and only the "instinctive" gut response is left.

Both Kant and Hegel claimed that there was a single universal moral good that could guide people in their moral decisions. Kant the categorical imperative for all humanity (rigid but optimistic pre-French revolutionary stance), and Hegel the will of the Spirit so fortuitously embodied in the bureaucracy of the Prussian state (dynamic but less optimistic post-revolutionary stance). All other motivations for decisions were demonstrated to be philosophically inadequate. Kierkegaard individualized the Spirit to hold up the ideal of Faith (credo quia absurdum) against Duty (Kant) and Aesthetics (art, the Greeks, Catholicism, god only knows what!). Marx saw the Spirit embodied if you like disparately in the collective decisions and actions of the antagonistic classes into which humanity is divided, and realized that its full flowering (as the active creative potential of a united humanity freed from the fetters and filth of permanent war and want) would only come when the class struggle had resolved itself in accord with the material preconditions laid down by historical development so far and the intellectual and artistic capacity of the materially productive class -- these preconditions and this capacity requiring a cooperative government/management of the whole of humanity in the interests of itself without antagonistic internal divisions. That is, the removal of class divisions in the world consequent on the seizure of power by the working class in more and more states over time. The victory of the bourgeoisie is unthinkable, in that we have seen a world ruled by a victorious bourgeoisie for the past couple of centuries at least, and it is getting progressively more and more feverishly destructive. It's already eaten its own tail, and is on the way to devouring its own belly. A final victory for the bourgeoisie would only lead to the destruction of all humanity as we know it, before any such final victory - which is why it's "unthinkable".

And how does this lead us back to Aristotle?

If we see the "virtuous man" as a collective being, a collective decision-maker, then it's possible to draw up a reasonable list of "good" qualities, get a consensus on them in the collective/group concerned and commit them to general awareness in the form of statutes or a constitution, complete with sanctions for violation. This can be seen in action in revolutionary wars for instance, in such cases as the New Model Army (in England) and the Red Army in 30s China, in which strict orders were issued for the magnanimous treatment of civilians and enemy combatants. As against the atrocities done to these by reactionary armies (such as, for instance, the Swedes in Germany in the 30 Years War).

In this way a reasonable mix of individual and collective behaviours (deontological and consequential) can be codified, subjected to the purifying flame of experience, and refined further until eventually there remains one relatively stable code to which all people are able to relate individually and collectively and by which they feel adequately guided in the decisions and choices they need to make, and which is transparent and instrumental enough to be accessible to necessary modification as circumstances and the development of consensus demand.

And it's nice to think that if we interpret Aristotle in this way, we're corroborating Marx's view of the Greek civilization as the "childhood of mankind".

On change, growth, Swiss rolls, men and feet

Response to Kenodoxia, who writes:

Friday, March 16, 2007

Dion's foot, again

Nick (see comments to the last post [Dion's foot, Thurs March 15]) is surely right that something important is being done in this example by the usual conception we have of the relationship between a person and his foot. Is this a problem for the Stoics? It may increase the plausibility of their analysis of this example, but does it thereby make it less likely that we will draw a general metaphysical lesson on the basis of a particular case of a man and his foot?

Consider an alternative version of Chrysippus’ story. Imagine Dion as before, but rather than imagining Theon to be that part of Dion which omits only Dion's foot, now assume Theon to be only Dion's foot. Again, Theon is a part of Dion. (True, Theon cannot – in this example – be easily thought of a potential persisting individual in his own right, but this is itself an interesting point to bear in mind for later.) Now, rather than considering what will happen if the foot is removed, we might ask what would remain if everything other than the foot is removed. That is to say, let us remove all that constitutes Dion but which is not also part of Theon. Is what is left Dion or Theon? (It cannot be both.) Now, if we have any intuitive response to this admittedly peculiar position, I think that the more likely answer is that the single disembodied foot before us is more likely to be considered to be Theon than Dion. Now this thought experiment was just like that provided by Chrysippus, but it produces quite the opposite result. In both cases the part discarded is the 'overlap', the portions of Dion which are not shared by Theon, and in both cases what is left was at one time both part of Dion and part of Theon. Indeed, in both cases what is left was once part of Dion and is the whole of Theon.

So if these two examples are relevantly similar, how can we explain the different reactions to them? Chrysippus' original example offers us a picture of two conceivable and viable individuals and focuses on one small part which one has and the other has not: a part which is, we would agree, inessential to the larger individual. (But: Polly Low once pointed out to me that for some people it may be the case that their feet are so essential to their persona (if not their identity as a persisting individual) that for them the removal of a foot may be a more telling loss. What if David Beckham’s right foot were removed?)

It may be suggested that Chrysippus' example is not unfair, indeed that it is perfectly suited to his purposes, since – remember – it appears in the context of a counter to the 'Growing argument'. This argument proceeds precisely by asking if small and apparently minor alterations in material constitution, namely the gradual process of growth or diminution, should in truth be thought to be cases of coming to be or passing away of whole individuals. Chrysippus counters this by generating the conclusion that Dion persists throughout the process of losing a foot, even though there is another candidate for what remains once the foot has been removed – namely Theon. On this account, there is no need for Chrysippus to consider such radical cases as that of my alternative formulation of the story of Dion and Theon. He is not concerned with such radical cases as this, and might well agree that is all that is left at the end of the process is a single foot, then it is in fact reasonable to conclude that Dion has passed away! All that remains is a foot, strangely designated by the name Theon.

But if Chrysippus were to agree to this account, and were therefore to accept that this particular radical case of diminution will count as the passing away of Dion, then a further obvious question arises. Just how much of Dion can we take away without concluding that what is left is not Dion? It may be easy to think that a foot is a non-essential part of a person, but how much could we shave off and still have Dion at the end? If the Academics were to press this point then it is a perfect context for the application of a sorites argument. Now it is possible to ask whether the answer to this question is a matter of specifying in quantitative terms how much could be lost (49%?), or is it better to think about the particular parts which can be lost? (For example: perhaps feet, hands, even limbs are eliminable, but what about heads, hearts, brains and so on?)

Indeed, the Stoics themselves may have produced difficulties for Chrysippus' favoured account. In Sextus Empiricus' discussion of the theories offered by dogmatic philosophers about parts and wholes, he gives us this piece of Stoic theory:

But the Stoics assert that the part is neither other than (ἕτερον) the whole nor the same; for the hand is neither the same as the man (for it is not a man) nor other than the man for it is included in the conception of the man as man (σὺν αὐτῇ γὰρ ὁ ἄνθρωπος νοεῖται ἄνθρωπος).

SE M 9.336, trans. R.G. Bury

The first part of this is straightforward. A hand is not the same as a man (presumably the man whose hand it is) since one is a hand and the other is a man. But there is of course a link between hands and men, and this is what the Stoics try to characterise in the second half of this text. A hand is not 'different from' a man, since when you think of a man you think of a man with hands. Hands are not, in other words, merely optional accessories for humans.

But the Stoics do not make so clear exactly what this last claim amounts to. Does it, for example, make 'handed-ness' an essential property of a human, so that anything which does not have hands cannot be a human? I assume that the Stoics would have known of cases of people losing their hands in accidents or in battle, and if so then they would have to give an account which allows these too to count as humans. Perhaps 'having at some point had hands' is an essential characteristic of a human.

In any case, what does this mean for Dion and his foot? It might explain why it is a foot which is removed rather than a hand, since the footless Dion is not on anyone's account in danger of failing to be a human. And a foot on its own is on no-one’s account likely to be thought of as an individual. Having feet, after all, is not a peculiar characteristic of humans as having hands might perhaps be thought to be; lots of creatures have feet, but not many have hands.

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Choppa's response:

First, a thank you for getting me to look up "sorites" in "sorites argument", which led me to the wonderful entry on teuэ- at Bartleby:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE531.html

relating thigh, thousand, thumb, butter, tumescent, quark, and creosote.

So, when is pile not a pile, a beard not a beard, a man not a man?

It's interesting to me that the practical engineer and mathematician Archimedes had a description of this kind of movement - growth and negative growth - in his pre-calculus. "The greatest mathematician of antiquity, Archimedes of Syracuse, displayed two natures, for he tempered the strong transcendental imagination of Plato with the meticulously correct procedure of Euclid." (C.Boyer, History of the Calculus, Dover 1959:48) Further: "In the seventeenth century, however, the infinitesimal and kinetic methods of Archimedes were made the basis of the differential and fluxionary forms of the calculus." (ibid:59) To calculate changing surfaces and volumes he imagined them as made up of "mathematical atoms" or thin sheets and pursued their interaction to exhaustion, so to say. BUT Boyer explains, in relation to A's work on the parabolic segment that: "In order to define 4/3 A as the sum of the infinite series, it would have been necessary to develop the general concept of real number. Greek mathematicians did not possess this, so that for them there was always a gap between the real (finite) and the ideal (infinite).
"It is not strictly correct therefore to speak of Archimedes' geometrical procedure as a passage to the limit, for the essential part of the definition of the limit is the infinite sequence." (ibid:53)
So not even Archimedes was able to give a clear and explicit answer to the problems raised by Zeno's paradoxes.
"The notion of the limit of an infinite series is essential for the clarification of the paradoxes; but Greek mathematicians (including Archimedes) excluded the infinite from their reasoning. The reasons for this ban are obvious: intuition could at the time afford no clear picture of it, and it had as yet no logical basis. The latter difficulty having been removed in the nineteenth century and the former now being considered irrelevant, the concept of infinity has been admitted freely into mathematics." (ibid)

Boyer emphasizes that in his "Method" Archimedes "realized that it is advantageous to have a preliminary notion of the result before carrying through a deductive geometrical demonstration..." (ibid:49)

And this is where Hegel's disembowelling of Kant's antinomical dragons starts. A notion of the Whole, that works (eppur si muove), of movement, change, growth, in a word of the interaction of Being and Nothing generating Becoming, the full understanding of which is an understanding of the Whole and all its parts.

If we take a subsidiary Whole (one considered as such just for the illustration) and instead of calling it Dion or Swiss Roll or Capital we call it A, then we should perhaps not exclude from our intuitive consideration of it the existence of other similar As, as this helps us get a "preliminary notion of the result" before our analysis.

Then we add or subtract a bit to A, leading to positive or negative growth of some kind. So we can call the result A', with the addition of an absolute bit (plus or minus) to the original entity.

Boyer mentions Democritus and the Platonic school "groping" towards "infinitesimal considerations", and this is what happens here - a series of A', A'', A'' etc arises, and regardless of the size of the [increment] sooner or later the quantitative change turns qualitative, and A becomes different from the other As not merely in degree but in kind.

And here the collective judgment of those considering the matter comes in. Consensus in human communities rules, and is codified sooner or later into habits, concepts, laws, and given linguistic expression, and proceeds dialectically in conflict or harmony with the consensus results of other communities to generalize itself or shrivel.

The Greeks reached no consensus about the growth problem, and the gap between the real and the ideal remained unbridgeable. The potential solution of fusing "Archimedes" with "Democritus" never happened. Even Descartes insisted on having an unbridgeable. And Kant.

And even today most maths teachers go by rote and flog the algorithm rather than visualize the result and give the maths its head.

Perhaps our philosophical unbridgeable today has moved on to the gap between our behaviour as humanity and our behaviour as human individuals or limited collectives (states, say).

The foot of a man is a more drastic example than a slice of Swiss Roll. Perhaps the more drastic the better and we should present Dion with his balls chopped off. Popular culture grapples with these problems asking when is a man not a man in terms of man-like creatures - replicants, zombies, vampires, aliens... Political culture grapples with them by adding or subtracting various defining bits (veils, hair, sex organs, skin colour, ethnic or geographical origin, missing or damaged chromosomes or genes) and sanctioning perceived non-As. History grapples with them by making certain As work side-by-side with "their" non-As for common goals and discover their original definitions were wrong.

For me now, the question of What bit of Which (Foot of Dion, Slice of Swiss Roll, Surplus Value of Capital) takes on a new relevance. Because what's at issue is understanding ourselves and what we become and how.