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Letters
Letters
War of the Words • Witt and Wisdom • Classics and Scholarship • Determined Not To Know? • Reality and Morality • A Climate of Criticism? • Caged by Mathematics? • Relationships and (A)Morality
War of the Words
Dear Editor: I found that Issue 105 on ‘War and Peace’ focused more on war. That’s understandable since war is more primal, garnering more attention. Peace is complex, and dull by comparison. But I think our natural emphasis on war and violence also has to do with the fact that wars still occur and the feeling that maybe we haven’t learned anything.
Margaret MacMillan’s book The War That Ended Peace is about a peace lasting many decades that was ended by the outbreak of WWI. But how peaceful could things have really been if they ended in a world war? Eleanor Roosevelt said, “One has to work at peace.” The leaders involved didn’t work hard enough at it. Perhaps they didn’t have the political skills or will to do so. Had they developed the political wherewithal after WWI, maybe WW2 could have been avoided. So something Philosophy Now could have explored is what promotes peace and keeps it.
Maintaining peace requires a certain enlightenment and a collective political will. Carl von Clausewitz observed that war is politics by other means. Fortunately, we are seeing more ‘standard’ political activity today. For example, today we have the European Union, the United Nations, and many other political alliances that not only have helped promote and keep the peace, but have contained regional wars, preventing them from escalating into potentially bigger wars, as they certainly could have done without such efforts. Take the Cold War, which lasted roughly between 1947-1991. Had it not been for the political skills and initiatives that developed as a result of two devastating World Wars, the Cold War could easily have been a Hot War. Churchill said, “Jaw jaw is better than war war.” I think his words and insight were later influential in getting the United States to engage the Soviet Union in politics and détente rather than engaging in war.
David Airth, Toronto
Dear Editor: I was surprised that the articles on war and peace in Philosophy Now Issue 105 ignored the contribution to wars that leaders might make. Historians may say that the influence of one person is not significant in the evolution of history but the person at the top of an organisation often sets the tone of that organisation. This must also be true when a President or Prime Minister chooses their supporting staff. American psychologist Irving Janis has drawn attention to the problem of Groupthink, whereby a small group of like-minded individuals are recruited around an idea. They share feelings of moral superiority and a sense of mission. Opposition is pressurised to conform or else suffer the disdain of the others.
I imagine that psychiatrists have suggested the advisability of having future leaders psychoanalysed before being promoted to office. It is evident that the ego of some leaders is boosted by parading on the world stage. The problem is exacerbated when career politicians are reliant for promotion on conforming to the leadership views. The problems of a tyranny are clearly even worse.
One wonders whether the enthusiasm of present day leaders for starting wars might be reduced if they had to follow the historical examples of kings leading their troops into battle. There could be an evolutionary benefit if war enthusiasts were disposed of in this way, leaving more peaceful minds in charge.
Derrick Grover, West Sussex
Dear Editor: It seems to me that I have the right to defend myself and my justly-acquired property from aggressive destruction, and to extend this defence to others whom I care about. If I am entitled to protect my family and home, why not also my community and homeland against invasion or the violent deprivation of its essential supplies?
David Ashton, Norfolk
Dear Editor: Is it even worth considering the abolition of war? The idea that one day we might abolish war seems to most people as outlandish as the proposal to abolish human sacrifice would have appeared 4,000 years ago. The fact is that we did manage to abolish human sacrifice to the gods, though we can imagine the centuries of impassioned debate that went into that decision. Sacrifice is a persistent psychological motif, as can be seen in the thousands of young men who give up their lives on the altar of ‘national security’ in our own times.
Most of the writers in Issue 105 struggle with the notion that the inclination to go to war is inherent in humans, at least when we are organised into nation states. But the idea that war is inevitable sits uneasily with the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, where it is claimed that possession of nuclear weapons is a guarantee against attack by other states. Nuclear deterrence, it is claimed, got us through the Cold War intact, and so can be counted on to act as an insurance policy in the future (albeit a special kind of insurance policy that destroys the whole neighbourhood in the event of our own house being damaged).
We came close to nuclear war several times during the stand-off with the Soviets. A combination of political crisis coinciding with an error in the early detection system could still only too easily result in the decision to initiate a nuclear strike. It is almost certain that once the first missile is fired, the whole global arsenal will follow, because if they are not fired they will be destroyed in their silos by the other side’s weapons. Therefore, although the effect of possessing nuclear weapons is to raise the threshold at which nations go to war, this threshold is only relative, not absolute. If we retain nuclear weapons, there is a real chance – indeed, a near certainty – that they will be used at some time in the future. It is also clear from the history of deterrence that the chance of breakdown of the deterrence system is greater than zero. Therefore reason dictates that humanity should divest itself of nuclear weapons. In which case, we need to communicate this conclusion to our political leaders.
Richard Lawson, Somerset
Witt and Wisdom
Dear Editor: Issue 103 on Wittgenstein brought to mind a camping trip a few years ago. The sun was setting as a couple of friends and I finally found a suitable place to pitch camp after a long hike. But then we spotted a U.S. Forest Service sign on a post lodged in the ground: ‘NO CAMPING HERE’. As it grew dark, we stood pondering this sign. We asked, “What do they mean by ‘NO’?” We had to admit that that was pretty explicit – ‘no’ means ‘no’. We then asked, “What do they mean by ‘CAMPING’?” Again, we couldn’t deny that pitching tents fits that word. Now, none of us knew anything about Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, or analytic philosophy, but we knew a loophole when we saw one. “What do they mean by ‘HERE’?” we asked. We concluded that ‘HERE’ meant no camping where the post was embedded in the ground. We then pitched our tents, made a nice fire, opened a bottle of wine, and puzzled over the utter impossibility of camping where the stake was stuck in the ground. We all agreed that the sign wasn’t really necessary. They could have just left the stake.
Chris Christensen, Portland, Oregon
Dear Editor: Perhaps the two most profound yet parsimonious statements ever made on the nature of reality begin and complete Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It begins with: “The world is everything that is the case” and ends: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”
Wittgenstein being an engineer, and having also been a soldier who had experienced the horrors of war, was fed up with philosophical cannibalism – philosophy’s tendency to create its own problems and then feed off them. To Wittgenstein philosophy wasted intellectual endeavour in a meaningless chase of ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. As Husserl pointed out, philosophy’s task is to get back to the things themselves; and to that end language needed to be based on pictures of reality if it was to be meaningful or useful.The problem is that our ability to distinguish reality from imagination is limited. It is for this reason above any other that we question the nature of reality. But reality is there to be seen and felt, if only human beings had the ability to perceive it uncluttered by our perceptive inadequacies and imaginations. Yet our imaginations are capable of building realities out of nothing – not only in our minds but in the machines and technology we create out of them. Our sense of imagining what is currently unreal allows our current realities to be dramatically altered and to create new realities in their wake.
Prof. David Coldwell, Univ. of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Classics and Scholarship
Dear Editor: I am writing in response to, and in support of, Raymond Tallis’ article in Issue 104 about ideas and scholarship in philosophy. As an undergraduate student in philosophy, I know I would be quite distressed if I had no secondary literature to refer to when faced with the (sometimes overwhelming) task of reading the classics. Secondary sources are especially useful to beginners when approaching the more difficult philosophers such as Derrida, or when we have to wade through seemingly endless paragraphs of prose to find Aristotle’s point. While there is certainly merit in going back to the originals, reading the viewpoints of others who have studied the texts at length can help you to see what you may have missed, or perhaps would never even consider. Although I still have a great deal to learn, I could not have gotten this far without leaning on the shoulders of other philosophers for support and guidance.
Christina Leach, Student, University of Calgary, Canada
Dear Editor: It is obviously important to have a good translation of the original text in philosophy, whether we are trying to understand the works of the Ancient Greeks, Kant or Wittgenstein. What is also true is that many philosophers (and their translators) fail to acknowledge the influence of their various predecessors, from whatever field or calling.
A little-known instance of these omissions is in the early work of Wittgenstein, most importantly his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Nowhere in the many references and quotations from this work is the profound influence of the work of Hollywood and Berry acknowledged. Their influence on Wittgenstein’s seminal work is clear from the many references to sacher torte. This key term is profoundly important in Austrian culture and we should hardly be surprised that it features in Wittgenstein’s great work. Unfortunately, it was misread or misprinted as sachverhalte and not only did European cuisine miss out on a great cookbook but twentieth century philosophy took a very strange turn in search of the elusive ‘atomic fact’.
Perhaps the worst mistake concerned Wittgenstein’s apparent declaration that “the world is all that is the case.” If only this had been adequately checked, generations of undergraduates could have been spared hours of incomprehension and headaches. As researchers now acknowledge, it was a ‘typo’ or a mistranslation of Mary Berry’s exclamation: “the world is all that is the cake.”
Unfortunately, such errors and philosophical red herrings were not limited to the twentieth century. Immanuel Kant suffered from the incomprehension of his readers just as much as Wittgenstein. Once the translation of his Critique of Pure Raisins went to print many bakers lost a definitive cookery book and many more young philosophers seeking a simple answer gave up in despair.
Rob Nicholls, Devon
Determined Not To Know?
Dear Editor: In response to Issue 105’s book reviews on free will, can someone please explain to an amateur philosopher why the following argument – an old chestnut – isn’t a knockdown confirmation of the existence of free will? If all our thoughts are determined by forces beyond our control, we can’t make any claims to know what is true because our access to facts and logic is restricted, distorted or blinkered by those forces. Therefore, in claiming “I am determined by forces beyond my control” I am claiming something to be true whilst implicitly denying my ability to access that truth. No amount of discussion can cancel this self-contradiction. Even the statement, “Determinism makes everything we say, do and feel arbitrary – that’s an unhappy truth of the deterministic world” is subject to the argument. Although we don’t yet understand the mechanism of consciousness, it is unjustified and capricious to dismiss free will by making statements that defy logic.
David Buckingham, London
Reality and Morality
Dear Editor: Zeno’s Paradoxes purport to show that movement is impossible. In Issue 104 two of your contributors, Will Bouwman and Frank O’Carroll, offer the same solution to them. Zeno argued that any movement entails an infinity of steps and therefore requires an infinity of time, and so can never happen. Your writers’ escape route is to propose that space is ‘grainy’ or noncontinuous, thereby removing the awkward infinities. This is a mistake. The solution to Zeno’s Paradoxes does not require that we change our concept of space, but realising that Zeno has confused two different things: the real event in time (for example, Achilles chasing after a tortoise) and the description of the event, which is an abstraction (in which Achilles is described as endlessly arriving at points the tortoise has already left). The description can be as long or short as you like, depending on your method of abstraction. The method Zeno has chosen, in order to create the apparent paradox, is to count an infinite number of points along the path. Clearly, you will never finish making this description. But this has nothing to do with the actual race. Nevertheless, you may say, in reality Achilles, the tortoise, and anybody else moving from any A to any B, has to pass through an infinity of points, and if it takes time to pass through each point, then infinite time is required. There are at least two things wrong with this argument. First, since a point is dimensionless, it cannot take time to pass it by. Second, movement is not passage through space as such (although for convenience we often describe it thus), but is change in the distance between two bodies over time, measured by an observer. Zeno’s gift to posterity was a serious prompt to reflection, not a good argument.
Bob Williamson, London
Dear Editor: I enjoyed Benjamin Kerstein’s article ‘Epicurus and Job’ in Issue 104. However I feel that there is an element missing in his analysis of meaning: creativity. The Epicureans (along with many other Greeks) were right in stating that there is no absolute meaning, as meaning is relative not absolute: an entity can only have meaning in relationship to another entity or concept. J.S. Mill the Utilitarian (in many ways the successors of the Epicureans) claimed that mental pleasures are superior to physical ones. By being creative and satisfying the needs of others we can affect the world in a positive way, which can compensate for the suffering we endure without resorting to despair. Some psychologists believe that the greatest pleasure one can achieve is composing music. Even negative emotions including anger and despair can be turned by creativity into art, music, poetry, or literature, which others can learn from and enjoy. Perhaps this is the path to our new city.
Russell Berg, Manchester
Dear Editor: In his article ‘The Morality Machine’, Phil Badger acknowledges that some of us will have issues with his thesis. In this respect I won’t disappoint. As a psychology teacher (if not a psychologist), Phil knows that humans need emotions to make decisions. My essential point is that moral decisions need emotional input: the highest, moral actions arise from an emotional response through empathy; and the lowest, immoral actions arise from either a lack of empathy or its conscious negation. Morality essentially arises from an ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. The converse also applies: it’s our ability to dehumanise people or groups that allows us to treat them as less than human. In other words, morality is at heart a psychological issue. For most people, moral issues are resolved by cultural or social norms. Our conscience is determined by our education and cultural milieu. However, we can transcend that if we can imagine being in someone else’s situation. This is why reading fiction enhances empathy; in order to be engaged in the story, we have to adopt the protagonist’s point of view. The problem with a Morality Machine is that it doesn’t engage empathy. In fact, its whole purpose is to avoid any emotional input – which makes it an oxymoron.
Paul Mealing, Melbourne, Australia
Dear Editor: The article titled ‘The Morality Machine’ is typically representative of the plainly theoretical academic pondering on morality which has no relationship with facts in the real world. The Trolleyology, which is the perennial moral conflict created by a trolley running out of control downhill with the choice of killing five guys or perhaps the operator of the switch’s grandmother, is worn out and absurd. Why not use as an example something with real hurt – like have a conversation with an ISIS fighter in Syria whose family were killed by combat airplanes from the UK, and who was in charge of cutting the head off a totally innocent British bystander? For this fighter, his moral reasons are totally understandable and justified. His family were killed and he is killing somebody from the group of people who piloted the airplane that left him sole survivor of his now non-existant family. This makes the true nature of moral justification obvious and reasonable. Or am I wrong?
Henry Back, Flagler Beach, Florida
A Climate of Criticism?
Dear Editor: Each time I see an article about global warming my heart rises in the hope that at last we’ll see not only abundant knowledge about the topic, but also the intelligence to judge the logic of the argument. ‘What we need,’ I say to myself, ‘is some fearless, hard-nosed philosophers to weigh in!’ So when I saw Paul Biegler’s article, ‘The Climate of Disbelief’ in Philosophy Now 103, I felt a zesty surge of hope. Alas, it was misplaced.
Realize: A plea to ask the right questions about global warming is not answered by mere ridicule and name-calling. And don’t say, “Everyone knows that human activity is causing global warming!” That’s exactly what’s at issue. And yet Biegler, evidently lulled by (dis)comforting assurances from alleged ‘scientific experts’, completely accepts that the issue has been decided. Neither say the likes of, “It’s undeniable that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are twelve times higher than they were in 1900.” So what? If someone said to you, “I have twelve times as much money as I had a decade ago,” would that tell you anything about his percentage of the total wealth in his community? Let’s momentarily suppose persuasive data could be mustered that human activity is to blame for, say, one percent of current global warning. With no confirmed data yourself, don’t say, “One percent is absurd.” How do you know? Very few pertinent data are verified. Just in the last decade a startling 1,000 unanticipated deep-sea volcanoes have been discovered, throwing into chaos previous ideas of the sources of CO2 in our atmosphere. Now let’s consider the implications if a recent estimate was roughly right when it said the cost of an effort to correct the anthropogenic contribution to global warming would be two hundred and fifty billion dollars a year for five years. Would you elect to spend over a trillion dollars to reduce global warning by one percent? Don’t turn away in disgust, murmuring, “This is silliness.” How do you know?
Thomas McCormack, New York City
Caged by Mathematics?
Dear Editor: It is reasonable in our era to conclude that mathematics is powerfully effective in understanding our world, as Ray Tallis does in Issue 102. In the past, it was by no means clear that a rational vision of the universe would be the correct one. If our universe did not contain a high degree of order, numbers and equations would not be so powerful. Yet, the danger today is no longer that mathematics will be dismissed as unreasonable but that it and its less exact step-children (science, technology, and even lowly economics) will be considered the only legitimate way to understand the world. We will then have put infinity in an iron cage and called it truth. This is where legitimate confidence can slide into dangerous hubris.
Let me give an example. A nearly wild valley, with a river running through it. October, late in the evening. The pale moon is full. Its white light reflects on the ripples in the river. A red leaf falls, then is blown into the river, and gently flows down it. A man watches all this. With his naked eye he sees neither numbers nor equations. I can assure you no one will ever find numbers and equations in this valley, water, moon, leaf.
To be sure, if we abstract from the scene, if we break it down into constituent parts, isolate forces and idealize shapes, we can generate a university full of books of equations. In this reduction we may have accurate mathematical, scientific, technological, and economic equations, but we will not have fully grasped this valley, and the falling red leaf.
Robert Girvan, Toronto
Relationships and (A)Morality
Dear Editor: In his review of Joel Marks’ book Ethics Without Morals in PN 103, Bill Meacham quotes Marks’ argument that “there are several explanations of our belief in morality and that the one that does not assume that morality exists makes a lot more sense than the others.” If there is any meaning to this sentence, it must depend upon the meaning given to the word ‘morality’. Marks’ argument rests on his definition of morality as ‘universal’, ‘imperative’, ‘prohibitive’ and ‘objective’. However, throughout this piece the words ‘social relationships’ could be substituted for his ‘morality’, as there are forms of social behaviour commonly labelled ‘moral’ and which may be seen by others as good or bad. Yet had Marks said that the study of morality was the examination of social relationships, then there would have been no need to deny their ‘objective existence’, because social relationships are of their essence subjectively dependent. However, by choosing a definition of morality as “universal absolute imperatives, a set of rules which everyone is obliged to obey,” Marks can hide the apparent fact that what he dislikes is that moral judgement, if it exists, may be regarded as having some authority over, or at least influence upon, one’s personal desires (‘desirism’ is Marks’ term for his ethics). Meanwhile Meacham applauds Marks’ “excellent rant against the defects of our typical sense of morality” – which rant includes the claim that Marks’ amorality is ‘free of guilt’. This freedom is nonsense. The basis of Marks’ desirism is the fact that it is free of the obligations which social relationships demand. However, the constraints of our ‘typical sense of morality’ are inseparable from those imposed by committed social relationships. When in following our own desires we fail to respect the desires of others, then we feel guilt. It seems then that Marks’ amorality is inconsistent with committed social relationships.
Also, the criteria applied by desirism are of little help in making good judgements. For instance, if your desire is to destroy the Jews, then a Holocaust may be ‘effective ‘or ‘efficient’. But that does not justify or warrant Marks’ claim that “amorality will make things go better” (p.3), or be “effective in achieving a common goal of satisfying our considered desires” (p.63). Compassion is an example of social behaviour approved of by Marks which shows that morality can more helpfully be studied as an attitude, not a metaphysical belief or a rule demanding obedience. It is a choice of how to live one’s life with others in the world.
Neil Leighton, Totnes, Devon