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Letters
Letters
Neanderthal Resurrection • The Employment of Politics • Sore Points • Forced Cogitations? • The Ontological Argument Exists • Is Knowledge Logical? • Is Stoicism Still Relevant? • Aristotelian Ethics, Condensed
Neanderthal Resurrection
Dear Editor: The piece on de-extinction by John Kennedy Philip in Issue 170 summarised the main concerns regarding the subject; the only part it didn’t mention was AI, which may have an increasingly significant role in gene technologies. My point for reflection is this: should we not seriously consider the reestablishment of extinct hominid species first? My view is that we absolutely should – the only caveat being that we’d need to accord each member of these revived species full human rights. But once we’ve done that, we’d have a diversity unseen since the prehistoric period. It’d be very interesting for us as human beings of the 21st century. The social, artistic, and spiritual implications are likely to be profound. This is before we even discuss transhumanism, which seeks to create new forms of human life. I’d say we’d better start with forms that have already walked this Earth before we try anything more radical. Put simply, if we can’t manage to live alongside our Neanderthal cousins, we probably aren’t ready for anything more ambitious.
Anthony A. MacIsaac, Institut Catholique de Paris
The Employment of Politics
Dear Editor: Having read Norman Schultz’s article on immorality in jobs in Issue 170, I was surprised that the author made no mention of either soldiers or politicians. Let’s put aside enforced conscription – in many instances, conscientious objectors were imprisoned, put into mental institutions, or executed, so criticising someone with little or no choice but to become a soldier is unfair. Those who willingly enlist as soldiers might claim they signed up to help bring peace where there is conflict, but they know that such outcomes are most likely to be achieved by their shooting dead people the Top Brass deem to be ‘the enemy’: they know that state-sanctioned killing (or murder, depending on one’s perspective) forms part of their job description. So if one believes any deliberate killing or willingness to deliberately kill is immoral, it could be argued that all voluntary soldiers are immoral.
As for politicians: they’ll promise to do what those who vote for them want them to do, selling themselves as saviours determined to reset the moral compass supposedly wrecked by their predecessors; but once they achieve power, they generally resort to being self-serving, easily corrupted hypocrites who fail to deliver on their manifesto pledges. To some extent, it could be said that a politician is morally worse than a soldier who puts a bullet through someone’s head. After all, at least the soldier is doing what they’ve promised to do should they be commanded to do so (which is obey orders). The same cannot be said for a politician who, whether deliberately or apathetically, doesn’t do what they promised to do pre-election, which was to ‘obey’ an electorate who, it generally turns out, foolishly put their trust in them.
Stefan Badham, Portsmouth
Sore Points
Dear Editor: The article ‘Philosophers on Chocolate’ in Issue 170 has given me, a dental surgeon, the reason why Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre and de Beauvoir never smile in photos. They don’t want their carious, rotten teeth on show!
Eva Tyson, Fife
Forced Cogitations?
Dear Editor: Naina Krishnamurthy so clearly and succinctly lays out the different philosophical perspectives on forced vaccination in Issue 170, although in her definitions of the three types of refusers of vaccination she is also illustrating just how nuanced attitudes are towards this aspect of public health. Relevant here is what Krishnamurthy refers to as “the ignorant who strongly believe in vaccine inefficiency” and “the misinformed, who overestimate the real risks of vaccination” (putting aside her third group, ‘the selfish’). These ‘ignorant’ and ‘misinformed’ refusers could be seen as simply exercising their belief by acting in such a way as to not only protect themselves, but to inform others of what they perceive as a potentially harmful intrusion on personal safety. Perhaps it’s a minority viewpoint; but arguably it’s not entirely out of sync with the social contract, utilitarianism, or the ethics of care approaches. So it seems questionable whether refusal of vaccinations “ignores these ethical frameworks and endangers entire communities.”
Kevin M. Hickson, Exeter
Dear Editor: I have some qualms with the ‘Forced Vaccination’ article in Issue 170. First let me disclose that I received every round of COVID-19 vaccines so I am not objecting for any personal reasons.
The article clearly defines ‘forced vaccination’ as implying requiring proof of vaccination to be able to participate in certain aspects of society. I approve of this definition. But the author goes on to propose that the only two options then are 1) get the vaccine; or 2) refuse it and put everyone else at risk. This ignores the definition we just agreed upon: as stated by the author, refusing the vaccine and so opting out of certain aspects of society is another valid option. Children can be homeschooled. Attending concerts and sporting events is not a human right. If your employer makes vaccination a condition for employment, finding new employment is an option. In the author’s example of the elderly woman with the unvaccinated neighbor, not visiting is an option; so is wearing a mask in her presence. Vaccine refusal alone is not morally negligent. Refusal to do anything to protect others is.
I think the false dichotomy presented in this article may have the counterproductive effect of galvanizing vaccine dissenters, who will tune out pro-vaccine scorn but also refuse any of the other mitigation strategies I mentioned, maybe simply out of spite. Now we’ve taken a step backward in protecting the greater good simply by being dogmatic. If we want the next pandemic to go more smoothly, we’ll have to take up a position that presents vaccination as a trade-off in which each individual has a choice in the matter, and where there are pros and cons to each choice – not a position of coercion, shame, and bullying.
Ray Saltrelli
Dear Editor: I read the article on forced vaccination with interest and would like to suggest a couple of points.
The first is that the author starts with a logical fallacy: can anyone prove who gave the kindly old woman COVID? The implication that it was the person who visited her for biscuits relies on multiple assumptions that may or may not be true. I find this interesting because my mum became seriously ill with COVID despite getting the vaccine and booster shots. She certainly did not get it from me, the social leper who did not take the vaccine, because I was too busy working each day to visit her.
A second possible fallacy is the author’s assumption that the vaccine is effective. It frustrates me that people still use the term ‘anti-vaxxer’ in a general way to imply that people like me are against all vaccines. I have no objections to vaccines that have undergone years of development and have been rigorously tested; but I do object to one rushed in to quell social hysteria. I would remind the author that people who, for example, said that tobacco or Thalidomide were dangerous were initially dismissed as cranks. In fact if you look at science in general, what humans believe at any point is often proven to be incorrect. I do not say this to dismiss science, but to remind that author that science is not always correct.
Another point is, who can you trust? Early on in the pandemic, scientists at Oxford University published a report which found that the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions were most at risk. Such was the social panic that citing this study soon became grounds for ostracism, as people insisted we should respect such experts as Piers Morgan or Nicola Sturgeon instead. Does the author think I should have listened to the non-scientists or the scientists when deciding what’s best for me? Thankfully, I am still here to debate this issue, whereas several people I knew can no longer join in because they died of previously undiagnosed heart conditions shortly after taking the vaccine.
As for the social contract, does it still apply to individuals who are shunned by society? As someone from a working class background cursed with a good brain, this interests me as I do not have to search hard for examples of privileged people railing at me for being the problem with society. The ex-First Minister of Scotland, who claimed there are too many white people, comes to mind. The current First Minister is also clear that people who do not accept the cosy consensus are ‘not welcome’ in society (curiously though, my tax money is). So do I still owe an obligation to this society? Luckily for society it was people like me, motivated by that old fashioned notion of duty, that kept things going while others talked themselves into a frenzy during COVID. Perhaps a topic for a future article might be the inverse proportion between someone’s importance to society and what they’re paid?
Terence Wilkinson, Scotland
Dear Editor: I’ve never written a letter to any editor before, but I could not withhold my incredulity at Ms Krishnamurthy’s defective analogy in comparing abortion with forced vaccination. Close to one million abortions are performed in the US annually alone. This is the destruction of an entire population of the most vulnerable creatures on earth. To imply that this does not pathologically affect the social psyche, much less those destroyed, is to imply that these unborn are not ‘persons’.
Sor Awdng, USA
The Ontological Argument Exists
Dear Editor: In Issue 170, Raymond Tallis disagrees with Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Central to Tallis’s argument is the claim that entities can’t have properties unless the entities exist, existence being a precondition of having properties.
I have two counterarguments. First, existence itself is a property. Kant disagreed; but I’d say that if something can be truthfully said about a particular entity, then it describes a property of that entity. If so, entities can have the property of existence. This seems to undermine Kant’s rejection of the Argument.
Second, and more controversially, some entities that have other properties lack the property of existence: some things don’t exist. Consider: a true statement is a description of something real. It’s implicit in the meaning of the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ that there is a cat on the mat. If the statement is true, the cat is real. But what about a false statement, such as ‘the cat is on the floor’? It is implicit in the meaning of ‘the cat is on the floor’ that there is a cat on the floor. So, if it’s not true that the cat is on the floor, then that means that particular occurrence does not exist. In other words, that cat is unreal. Therefore, it cannot be true that no entities are unreal. On the other hand, if there exist things that do not exist, that involves contradiction. As Tallis describes, some philosophers thought that referring to unreal entities (such as ‘the present King of France’) was a mistake, and found a way to avoid doing so. Instead, though, if some statements are false, that implicitly means that some entities are indeed unreal.
Peter Spurrier, Halstead, Essex
Dear Editor: It is with marked trepidation that I wish to question the work of Raymond Tallis. The first proposition he gives when ‘Revisiting the Ontological Argument’ (PN 170) is “God is by definition the most perfect being”. I question the term ‘most perfect’. Perfection is, by definition, absolute and so cannot admit of degrees: something is either perfect or it does not meet the criteria for perfection. In my reading, Tallis’s attack on Anselm’s argument is dependent upon comparing perfections, which is not possible. It may be that Tallis intends the term ‘most perfect’ as meaning the nearest to perfection. But that doesn’t help, as I then interpret his first statement as indicating that God is not perfect, and we must be able to identify some imperfection in God. Having done so, we can then conceive of a creature with all the qualities of God but without the imperfection.
Michael Shaw, Huddersfield
Is Philosophy Now Keeping It Real?
Dear Editor: I must vehemently defend your publication! In a letter in PN 170, Andrew Lewis complained about what he considers a ‘keeping with recent trends’ approach in the magazine. Whilst I am not popularist myself, and it is undeniably important to maintain a certain academic seriousness when philosophising, if we demarcate areas where philosophy cannot tread, it ceases to be philosophy. There is always depth to be found even in the most seemingly shallow subject matter. If we accept the view that recent trends lack intellectual gravitas, surely there is all the more need for a philosophical critique of such things. I summarise in a haiku:
Insight is obscured
If philosophy’s confined
To a narrow past
Thomas R. Morgan, Westcliff-On-Sea
Dear Editor: Sometimes PN provides LOL moments to share with one’s friends. This one’s memorable: “Their songs… with lyrics laced with profound thoughts on themes of peace, freedom, authenticity, alienation, protest and love… Most people have never read or even heard of Kant or Hegel, but most know some Beatles slogans, like ‘Let it Be’ or ‘All you need is Love’… an attempt to crawl out of our modern dead end of absurdity, meaningless (sic) and doubt, to perhaps find something more than ‘misunderstanding all you see’…” etc – Philosophy Now Issue 169.
Mike Bor, London
Dear Editor: About Clinton Van Inman’s article, ‘The Beatles: Nothing is Real’, in Issue 169. I was surprised and pleased to see the Beatles turn up as a subject for philosophy. It’s difficult to separate them from what was going on in the Sixties. That period saw a step change that brought on some new ways of seeing the world, including reality itself.
The ‘nothing is real’ idea for the Beatles starts with the Revolver album in 1966, the year they discovered LSD. The final track, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, was inspired by Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), itself influenced by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This song takes its title from Ringo Starr saying, ‘be here now’, so paraphrasing the Vedic teaching that to dwell on the past or the future is to be dead to the present.
The article refers to popular existentialism. I’m unsure if this had any influence on the Beatles. In Jann Wenner’s Lennon Remembers (1971), Lennon argued that people work to exist and exist to work: “surviving is what it’s about really, from day to day. Live now, this moment. We might get a moment’s happiness any minute now: cherish every day and dread it too.” Perhaps there’s a shadow here of Heidegger’s everyday sense of being, but not really the direct-action ideas of Sartre. So while the Beatles somehow represented the changing times, it could also be said that they, and the arts generally at that time, represented a last gasp of romanticism. There is a lot of Rousseau in Lennon’s ‘moments’.
Personally, I enjoyed the summer of love of 1967: the flowers and the colour, all the different things, the serendipity of different things side-by-side. The reactionary forces woke up in 1968 and political philosophy suddenly appeared on the streets. Marx was everywhere; and in Paris students threw paperback copies of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man at the police. Perhaps this was ironic, since the Frankfurt School to which Marcuse belonged understood popular culture as an undesirable part of consumer capitalism.
At Leicester University in late 1967, we marched and waved our banners, then we occupied the administrative block. We wondered what else to do with ourselves. We sat there for weeks while friends smuggled food through the windows. Then we got a telephone call from Paul McCartney, who wished us well. Suddenly, things had a purpose.
Revolution in the Head (1994), a famous book by Ian MacDonald, describes John Lennon as half-sceptical, half-awake, with a channel-hopping state of mind. This description, McDonald claimed, became true for the Sixties generation. Well, it hurts a bit, but there’s some truth in it. In my defence, I don’t think MacDonald understood what rock and roll was. Perhaps philosophy can help?
Dr Barry Witcher, Norfolk
Is Knowledge Logical?
Dear Editor: Peter Keeble in Issue 169 was correct in stating that we use inductive reasoning every day. But Hume’s original skepticism about the non-circular justification of induction [Can you prove the future will be like the past without assuming it will be?] cannot be easily dismissed – some of the world’s greatest philosophers (eg, Kant, Popper, Russell) have tackled this problem, but it’s fair to say that nobody has come up with a solution that would have satisfied Hume.
The idea that knowledge is justified true belief condemns us to keep updating beliefs based on flawed and uncertain evidence, in what Richard Jeffrey called conditioning under the ‘flickering light of a candle’. This confirmation process in the face of uncertainty guides most of our reasoning and actions. Hume might in fact agree that facts and experiences all have some degree of uncertainty, and that inductive rules might be the most appropriate in most practical situations. The goal of induction is to turn observed instances into general rules. However, if such observations are subject to limitations in the first place – chance, language, cognitive biases – then the epistemic value of induction is only as a safeguard against the more wild claims of universal truths.
In Hume’s Problem Solved:The Optimality of Meta-Induction (2019), Gerhard Schurz argues that although induction cannot be logically proved, the inductive method is the best among a wide class of competing predictive methods, and this optimality is perhaps the best we can hope for. A more utilitarian goal of induction may read like this: ‘Turn uncertain evidence into coherent rules for updating beliefs and for decision-making’. If it’s good enough for Machine Learning and AI, it should be good enough for philosophers, right?
Quang Duong, Ottawa
Dear Editor: In his excellent article on philosophical technique in Issue 169, Peter Keeble suggests that an action which neither intends nor causes harm can still be immoral, giving the example of a female giving birth at the age of fourteen to a child who has a happy life, even though the child’s chances would have been better if she had delayed pregnancy.
Keeble’s right. Actions can be immoral even when harm is neither intended nor caused: for instance, if they risk causing harm or reduce the chance of good occurring. Here are some other situations in which an action may be immoral even when harm is neither intended nor caused:
1. It is immoral to break the laws of a democracy, even if no harm is done.
2. If you intend to harm someone, and your action actually benefits them, you have still acted immorally. A man may seduce a girl knowing that this might harm her. That she and the baby are happy is irrelevant to his wickedness.
3. It’s immoral to agree on a course of action with someone unable to understand its relevant potential implications, even if no harm results. If both parties are immature, they’re both wrong to embark on activity whose possible consequences they haven’t adequately considered.
4. It is immoral to give someone a small amount of help (or none at all) when you could reasonably give more help.
Allen Shaw, Leeds
Dear Editor: In Issue 169, in an article traversing the limits of knowledge, Michael McGranahan explores the commonalities and contrasts between constraints outlined through Wittgenstein’s language and Gödel’s math. One perspective that’s missed is that of the later Wittgenstein. Later Wittgenstein focuses on language use rather than as an objective reference to the world around us. He goes back completely on his initial beliefs that language corresponds to facts: instead language finds its role in ‘language games’ where humans in agreement define the rules around and therefore the meaning of language. More succinctly, language is not according to a predefined rule book.
Gödel’s proof on the inherent incompleteness of formal systems shows that a formal system with a set of axioms and internal logic cannot be fully complete – so not all true statements can be formally proved. Interestingly, however (as alluded to in the article), we do find that humans are able to provide reasoning beyond propositional and logical reasoning.
A question then arises: is there an innate human capacity that affords us both language and our ability to reason? Let’s take the case of an alien intelligence radically different to our own: AI systems, especially LLMs. These have largely circumvented symbolic-logic focused design and have learnt through high order statistics. Yet while obviously different, they do offer a path of reasoning identifiable in characteristics to our own: they do not base their operations in systems with a complete logic, but are able to provide reasoning beyond. Their reasoning, to a human, is often flawed and implausible, as they do not map on to our human reasoning. But could they just be playing a different set of language games?
Suraj Pai
Dear Editor: I enjoyed Philosophy Now Issue 169 immensely. When I was young, it seemed like everyone was telling me what was right and wrong, what to do and what not to do. It dawned on me that I had no good reason to believe anything these people said, as lots of it was contradictory and ridiculous. Okay, admittedly I was a bit rebellious and stubborn back then. Some say I still am. But ultimately, this set me on a lifelong quest to discover what knowledge and truth really are.
Originally I thought everyone agreed that knowledge and truth were not relative but absolute. Seventy-plus years later I still think that’s how those concepts were intended by the Greeks way back when, and that’s how we should consider them today – even though it seems fewer and fewer people agree with this view.
A claim to knowledge is typically preceded by a justification. For example: “Someone told me”; “Lots of people say it’s true”; “I read it in a book”; “I like the idea”, etc. But since no absolute truth has yet been established as a foundation, claims of knowledge must be preceded by a leap of faith. I can accept something as true based on some story someone told me, or some dogma, having faith that the source is factual, or I can form a hypothesis and via empirical methods test it through continuously observed evidence. If my hypothesis is shown to be false, I abandon it or correct it.
Absolute truth is much like infinity: mathematicians and particle physicists love the concept, yet no one can touch it, or has ever seen it as far as we can tell. So too with knowledge. But just because you can’t find it, does not make it false. Popper be damned: keep looking.
Scott E. Newton, Pacifica, CA
Is Stoicism Still Relevant?
Dear Editor: Stoicism teaches that a worthwhile life may be achieved by cultivating virtue through self-discipline within four cardinal practices:
WISDOM: both factual learning and understanding (perspicacity);
JUDGEMENT: clear attention to all aspects of a matter before deciding;
COURAGE: diligence in sticking to one’s beliefs and practices unless proved wrong;
MODESTY: being neither too strident nor too weak in explaining one’s views.
The Stoics eschewed concern for the things over which we have little or no control – health, wealth, fame, status, possessions – which they called ‘indifferents’, and counselled strict self-control over the ‘natural appetites’ for leisure, food, sex, diversions, etc. Here lies the modern challenge to the otherwise excellent Stoic approach to leading a worthwhile life. As Dr Doolan emphasises in his article on Attention in Issue 169, we’re deluged by demands for our attention, and in this globalised, hyper-commercialised world, constantly encouraged to strive for multifarious indifferents – bigger houses, better cars, fancy clothes, foreign travel, love and sex, health products, etc – all of which distract from the important pursuit of virtue. As the article reminds us, a “serious goal of education should be to train attention” – that is, to train people to think clearly and deeply, and not to pursue individual interests at the expense of social awareness and responsibilities. As the opening line of Dr Doolan’s article points out, ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ have the same letters and are mutually necessary, together producing awareness.
A.C. Grayling writes in Philosophy and Life (2023) that we’re born into a ‘net of normativity’ dictated by circumstances, but we have free will and can cultivate awareness to structure our own answers to Socrates’ enduring question, ‘How should I live?’ For this the principles of Stoicism are still as relevant as ever.
David Morris, Oxford
Dear Editor: I find enlightenment and refuge, especially as a practicing lawyer, in the teachings of various philosophies, and religiously enjoy Philosophy Now!
It’s been humankind’s quest since the outset of civilization to achieve eudaimonia – how the ancient Greeks described the highest quality life – including ataraxia, a state of equanimity. In endeavoring to figure out ourselves and our state of being as a person in a society, the first prerequisite is to take cognizance of time – either chronos, chronological time, or kairos, opportune time, the hour to do – whether using Stoicism, as Professor Pigliucci illustrates in ‘Nine Spiritual Exercises’ in Issue 169, or Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, or Epicureanism, Existentialism, Nihilism or some other ism. Living that sucks the marrow out of life boils down to a crass philosophy of two potent tenets aptly articulated in slang: the first is an expletive, and the second an advertising slogan: ‘F**k it’, and ‘Just Do It’.
Michael Manoussos, Queens, NYC
Aristotelian Ethics, Condensed
If it’s imprudent
then you shudent
but as long as it’s good
you shood.
Daniel Galef
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