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Letters
Letters
Bombing Iraq • Intelligent Design – The Debate Continues • Milwaukee Confucianism • The Authentic Sartre • Rewards and Retribution • Quantized Brains • Why the sun looks bigger… • Why Be Moral?
Bombing Iraq
DEAR EDITOR: Your debate in Issue 32 about the bombing of Baghdad invites many comments.
Some of your contributors (Shahrar Ali, Mike Dewar and Hilo Matthews) entirely miss a crucial fact. The US/UK air ‘patrols’ over Iraq have no justification in international law, so there can be no question of bombing ‘legitimate’ military targets. The so-called ‘no-fly zones’ over south and north Iraq have never been authorised in a UN resolution or by any other legal instrument. Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has confirmed this (Unvanquished, 1999, p.296), as have many other independent experts.
This means that every US or UK flight over Iraq is a criminal act, involving the infringement of the airspace of a sovereign member of the United Nations. Bombing military or any other targets simply compounds the criminality.
In reality, there have been thousands of civilian casualties over the 10 years of the bombing campaign. Targets, many of which could not have been accidental, have included schools, hospitals, oil pipelines, residential areas, livestock, wheatfields and Bedouin tents in the desert. There is ample documentation of this from independent observers, including UN sources.
The economic sanctions, having caused more than one million deaths (mostly children) are opposed by the vast bulk of the international community, including three Permanent Members of the Security Council (France, Russia and China). The sanctions, like the bombing, are totally illegal: in particular, violating the Protocol 1 Addition (1977) to the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN Genocide Convention, many UN Declarations and Statements and the Articles of the UN-linked World Health Organisation.
The US/UK policy on Iraq is illegal at many levels and grossly unethical. The deliberate starving of the Iraqi people cannot be justified by the demonisation of Saddam Hussein. Yes, Saddam has maintained his position by bloody repression, as have most of the regimes in the area but, in the war against Iran, Iraq was part of a coalition that included the United States, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and a massive highlyprovocative economic war was being waged by Washington and Kuwait against Iraq in early 1990 (see, for example, Secret Dossier by Pierre Salinger, 1991).
Perhaps we should remember also that, in contrast to most of the pro- West Arab states, Saddam has introduced a minimum wage, invested heavily in social services, advanced the cause of women in the family and employment, and protected Christian practice/education in Iraq. The US and UK governments do not encourage comparison of Iraqi achievements in these areas with the appalling records of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, our principal allies in the region.
GEOFF SIMONS [author of Iraq: from Sumer to Saddam, 1996 ; The Scourging of Iraq, 1998; Iraq: Primus Inter Pariahs, 1999; Imposing Economic Sanctions, 1999]
Intelligent Design – The Debate Continues
DEAR EDITOR: I’d like to reply to some of people who responded to my article on Intelligent Design (ID) in Issue 31. Richard Fox complains that attributing phenomena to ID “doesn’t shed any light” on them, but “puts a cloak of mystery over them.” I’m not sure what to make of this complaint, but it appears to presuppose that ID must be false. If certain phenomena really were the product of ID, then it seems to me that having the right explanation sheds adequate light. To be sure, explaining phenomena as ID doesn’t explain everything about them, but what explanation does that?
Dene Berrington writes that “To assert that Darwinian evolution cannot produce irreducible complexity, and thus to posit design, amounts to personal incredulity coupled with an argument from ignorance.” He evidently disagrees with ID-skeptic Massimo Pigliucci, who writes in his article in Issue 32 that “irreducible complexity is indeed a valid criterion to distinguish between intelligent and nonintelligent design.” That is, Pigliucci agrees that Darwinian evolution cannot produce irreducible complexity, he just doesn’t think there is good reason to think that irreducible complexity is present in living things. Furthermore, Michael Behe’s observations cannot be dismissed as mere personal incredulity. He is a well-trained and accomplished biochemist; his incredulity is informed. But what of the charge, made by both Berrington and Pigliucci, that ID rests on the fallacy of argument from ignorance?
To respond to that, I’d like first to consider some of Massimo Pigliucci’s comments in ‘Design, Yes. Intelligent, No’, since I think this approach will take us to the heart of the matter. Behe argues that there is evidence of irreducible complexity at the level of biochemistry, but Pigliucci claims that this is “partly contradicted” by evidence adduced by scientists such as Kenneth Miller. This is an empirical issue, on which Behe has commented (see, for example, www.arn.org/docs/behe/ mb_responsetokmiller0101.htm). It should be played out in the scientific literature, if that will be allowed to happen. But Pigliucci adds, “To be sure, there are several cases in which biologists do not know enough about the fundamental constituents of the cell to be able to hypothesize or demonstrate their gradual evolution. But this is an argument from ignorance, not positive evidence of irreducible complexity.” Pigliucci appears to be conceding here that there are cases that appear to be irreducible complexity (This, I take it, is why he says that Behe’s evidence for irreducible complexity is partly contradicted), but he insists that “there is no evidence so far of irreducible complexity in living organisms.” Later, he flatly states “living organisms are not irreducibly complex.” What are we to make of these two claims? And what are we to make of the fact that Pigliucci goes from claiming that the evidence is “partly contradicted” to saying there is “no evidence”? How does he get from the first to the second, stronger, claim? He doesn’t say.
The claim that living things are not irreducibly complex is much stronger than the previous one, that there is no evidence of irreducible complexity in living organisms. How does Pigliucci get from “no evidence of irreducible complexity” to “no irreducible complexity”? He doesn’t say. But since he claims that Behe’s argument for irreducible complexity rests on the argument from ignorance, we have to ask this very important question: What, according to Pigliucci, would count as evidence for irreducible complexity? Since he concedes that it is a valid criterion of ID, there must be something that would count as evidence for it (If there weren’t, how could it be a valid criterion?). Again, he doesn’t say. In addition, irreducible complexity is not the whole story about ID, as Behe makes clear throughout his book.
Behe writes, “For discrete physical systems – if there is not a gradual route to their production – design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components” (Darwin’s Black Box, p.194). Note that it’s not just the absence of a gradual route that counts; it is also the functional organization and specificity of the components. Therein lies the positive similarity to machines known to be intelligently designed. This is not the argument from ignorance. The argument is really rather simple: We see many examples of machines that are highly functionally organized and irreducibly complex. We see in living things some (not all) systems that appear to have these same properties. Unless and until we can show that they are not in fact irreducibly complex, it is reasonable to infer, based on these similarities, that they are intelligently designed. It’s just scientific induction. If these similarities don’t count as evidence of ID, then what would? It really is as simple as this: There are components of living cells that are machine-like in their functional organization and that appear to be irreducibly complex. In our current state of knowledge, the best explanation of these properties is that these structures are the product of ID.
Pigliucci adds some interesting distinctions between kinds of possible ID: natural or supernatural-perfect or supernatural-sloppy. They are interesting but irrelevant to the case for ID, since ID has nothing to say about whether the designer is supernatural, perfect, sloppy, or not. The case for or against ID does not stand or fall on any conjectures of this sort.
TODDMOODY
PHILADELPHIA
DEAR EDITOR: Massimo Pigliucci exposes serious limitations in the Intelligent Design hypothesis (Issue 32). However, by glibly dismissing the traditional understanding of the nature of God, he is taking liberties which he does not earn within the scope of his article. It may be true that the world is in some respects ‘sloppily designed,’ – with physical and moral imperfections – however, it does not follow logically from this that the creator of such a world must be of “limited power” or “an evil omnipotent God who just amuses himself with suboptimal products.” The very notion of sloppiness as compared with perfection would hardly be intelligible in the perfect world which Pigliucci erroneously assumes must spring from an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator. Such a world would be without hope, aspiration, or any conceivable appreciation of the good. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine the existence of an exalted being like God in such a world, since the perfection of all his creations would be equal to his own. God may be benevolent; he is not necessarily an egalitarian.
JONATHAN BIRCH
PONTEFRACT, WEST YORKSHIRE
DEAR EDITOR: I have been enjoying the discussion of Intelligent Design, Creationism and Natural Design in the last two issues of Philosophy Now. But when I read the article on “Heidegger, Metaphysics and Wheelbarrows” in the June/July issue, it struck me that the only design I can be sure of is the one I am sunk up to my neck in right now: ‘Marvellous Design’. Following my own experience and Aristotle’s thought that “In all things in nature there is something of the marvellous”, I suggest that ‘Marvellous Design’, an immediacy in which I experience design in wonder and astonishment, one that constantly overflows every theory and idea and exceeds every account that may be given of it, is the foundation or alpha of all theories of design and constantly belittles all of them. We find ourselves clinging to our pet theory, disembodied and disassociated, when we might better return to this swamp of ab-original wonder, re-animating all of our thought, over and over, from its standpoint. “Would it not be a luxury to stand up to one’s chin in some retired swamp for a whole summer’s day…” (Thoreau, Journal, June 16, 1840) – well! We are there already! All theory arises from this swamp. Moment by moment we are up to our necks in wonder and astonishment. So much depends upon it and “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.”
RICK VISSER, ARTIST
LYONS, COLORADO
Milwaukee Confucianism
DEAR EDITOR: I must express my gratitude to you for Philosophy Now. I’ve taken an early retirement and have discovered I feel most myself when reading philosophy. Perhaps it’s the right time for me; I recall one of the Confucian sayings which goes something like this:
I have over 50 years.
My hair is a wisp.
My bones become brittle.
I have over 50 years. I am ready to learn…
Please keep up your important work which is making philosophy compelling not just for scholarly experts but for general readers.
RON KRITTER
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
The Authentic Sartre
DEAR EDITOR: Having eloquently wrestled Sartre away from his detractors, Maria Antoinietta Perna (Issue 32) rather reduces his position to that of the iconoclast; his notion of ‘authenticity’ she takes to consist partly of “shattering those images, myths and conventional labels within which individuals enclose themselves.” This is taken as limiting one’s freedom, the task of the ‘possible’. If Perna really believes that with the advent of a purported ‘image culture’,Sartre’s theory deserves our renewed attention – and certainly I think it does – surely she needs to equip us with a little more to play with…
Play is perhaps the Achilles’ Heel of Perna’s account, for she is unwilling to take it out of the sphere of childhood, and we are left only, and a little cynically, with ‘bad faith’. Understandably ‘bad faith’ deals with a harsher sensation of alienation, but can we not then be taken to participate in bad faiths?
Perna upholds the distinction between reality and image. But it is perhaps worth our attention to drop this facade. The waiter ‘acting’ the part of a cafe waiter is surely still ‘truly himself’ as much as when he is not performing this role. Images need not be taken as the tyranny of reality – whether a common sense reality or in the more technical sense of Being. Rather, images are part of the very ecology in which we take our residence. As such, a distinction between imagination and creativity as Perna delineates is not to be discouraged, but equally any suggestion of stepping outside of these processes – as ideally would the iconoclast – strikes me as folly. When Sartre stresses the imaginary as mixed in with our real, it is not, in my opinion, to urge we free ourselves from this condition, but within it.
SUNILMANGHANI
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
Rewards and Retribution
DEAR EDITOR: Sorry to take so long to contribute to crime/punishment debate but my newsagent only got the December issue in May!
You ask for a reasonable retributionist account of punishment. I would make the following two points:
a) Punishment seems to be the mirror image of reward, and reward in the case of someone doing something especially good is not based on bringing about good consequences but is rather an appropriate way of showing approval for a good deed. Thus it would be incorrect to suggest that giving someone a medal for having their legs blown off is to encourage similar acts of bravery. Punishment could therefore be shown as an appropriate way to show disapproval of a bad action.
You may then ask why is it appropriate and this brings me to the second point
b) When you say someone has done a bad thing it would be inconsistent to also say the person should feel happy because of doing the bad deed. In fact you are saying the person should feel some unhappiness. The very meaning of saying that a person has done a bad act is tied up with the idea that bad acts should be followed by unhappiness. Punishment is therefore justified on the grounds that it brings unhappiness to those who do bad acts.
MICHAEL ANSTIS
BY EMAIL
Quantized Brains
DEAR EDITOR: Far be it from me to insinuate anything about the brain-sizes of people who talk about quantum states in brains – but I always thought that only very, very small-scale phenomena exhibited quantum behaviour. ‘Phenomena’ is, in fact, the mot juste, because uncertainty and complementarity are connected with the way an observer interacts with particles and radiation. More importantly, in larger systems the non-deterministic, probabilistic nature of causation (which is expressed by the wave-like probability functions that describe the likelihood of finding a particle in one place or another and form the other side of the so-called waveparticle duality) is averaged out statistically.
But the idea of mutually exclusive complementary ways of describing reality certainly can have important philosophical applications. For example, one simply cannot talk about minds in the way in which one talks about brains, however much minds may depend on the existence and functioning of brains.
The trouble lies, it seems to me, in the dual meaning of ‘consciousness’. If I say that I am conscious of light entering my eyes, there is no problem in extending this meaning to, say, a digital camera connected to a computer controlling some mechanism or other. In this sense one can even talk about feedback loops creating ‘self-consciousness’ by making the system respond to its own physical state at any given moment.
But in addition to this meaning, in which ‘consciousness’ is an attribute, ‘consciousness’ can also mean a subject that conceptualizes, constructs, even creates, the world. One may talk about the mechanisms whereby consciousness (in this sense) externalizes itself or interacts with phenomena; these mechanisms may include brains; brains may function by means of electrical nerve discharges, which may manifest quantized energy levels. It is not even, perhaps, quite inconceivable that some kind of coordination of these states within a part or whole of a brain might lead to step-functions in macroscopic brain activity – though it is more likely in very small brains.
No doubt this would affect (though hardly generate) consciousness in the first sense: that of an attribute. But that would be of neurological, not at all of philosophical, interest. To talk of quantum mechanics in connection with the second, philosophically central, meaning is like imputing to the mechanism of a typewriter the relationship of a poem to the emotional state of its readers or the ethical implications of a code of laws.
MICHAEL GRAUBART,
LONDON
Why the sun looks bigger…
DEAR EDITOR: Kevin Tyson/Sir Hackalot (Letters, Issue 32) discusses the fact that our perception of reality may be distorted, and cites the way that the moon looks larger on the horizon. This is indeed a good example, but that illusion is perhaps more subtle that he implies when he says “The brain magnifies everything on the horizon because, over the millions of years of our evolution, it is from the horizon that opportunity and danger have come.”
Large animals have evolved from small ones, and for small animals (and animals that live in forests rather than on plains), danger comes from above as much as from on the same level. And one can put the matter the other way round; why should the moon look smaller when it is high in the sky? Are there any other things (trees, birds, leaves, leopards up slopes or on cliffs) which look smaller when they are high up? At night, do the constellations look larger as they approach the horizon? And the sun shows the same effect as the moon. But in evolutionary terms, the sun has been familiar and harmless for as long as sight and the ability to recognize objects has existed, and ought to be ‘minified’ rather than magnified.
The sun and moon are unlike most things, in that their real distance is not intuitive and bears no relation to their apparent distance. We can see that the sky is a long way away at the horizon, at least as far as the horizon, and possibly further. But how far away is it above us? A cloud layer looks clearly fairly flat, and although the sky seems to be behind the clouds, the sky itself seems flattish rather than hemispherical. And the sun and moon appear to be ‘on’ the sky rather than beyond it, so as they move from overhead towards the horizon, they seem to get further away, and should look smaller, like everything else that moves away. But in fact they stay the same angular size, which we interpret as actually getting larger.
MICHAEL HARMAN
CAMBERLEY, SURREY
Why Be Moral?
DEAR EDITOR: I very much appreciate Richard Taylor’s positive comments, in a letter to you in Issue 32, about my treatment of ‘the Gyges problem’, as he calls it, in my article ‘Why Should I Care about Morality?’ (Issue 31) I do, however, disagree with what he goes on to say against my attempt in that article to solve the problem.
The solution to the problem of where morality gets its authority can be found, I claim, in a view of moral motivation that I say in the article could do with clarification and defence beyond what I am able to give it there (at which point I refer the reader to my longer paper, ‘Morality as What One Really Desires’, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol.20, 1995).
I shall here, in even less space, try to get across something of that view of moral motivation. We start with the necessary truth that all desire is dependent on belief about the objects of that desire. (My example of this dependence is the way a certain desire to drink a cup of hot mud is dependent on a mistaken belief that it is a cup of hot chocolate.) Every desire, because it is in this way dependent on belief, is therefore correctable along with the belief that the desire depends on. (Thus I cease to desire to drink that stuff when my belief about what it is like is corrected. And, all along, this wasn’t something that I really desired. My desire to drink that stuff was a mistake.)
This recognition, of the dependence of desire on belief and the consequent correctability of desire, then leads me to a sweeping conclusion. One can only really desire an object that one would still be desiring with a perfect grasp of everything about the object. Anything one desires only because one’s grasp of it is less than perfect cannot be what one really desires – and therefore getting such an object cannot be in one’s real self-interest.
Now, a hypothetical perfect grasp of all objects, whose responses to the world would thus be equivalent to the real desires of each and every being as it actually is, no matter what its actual, limited state of awareness may be, “would have to be [as I say in my article] like the all-penetrating knowledge that is often attributed to God. It would have to embrace not only the full experience, from behind the eyes (or other sensors), of every sentient being but also every potential development of experience. It would include within it, then, all the motivation of all of the various systems of desire, but it would also have the correction of all that motivation in light of the perfect grasp. The overall result must be a desire for the reconciliation of all systems of desire. And that … is the concern that defines morality.” So it turns out that the concerns of morality and corrected self-interest are one and the same.
Gyges, the character in the story with which my article begins, has been offered £10 and assured impunity if he pushes a button resulting in a stranger’s death. The above account of moral motivation is my answer to the challenge of providing Gyges with a reason not to push the button. What Gyges really desires must be what he would be desiring in a perfect grasp of everything involved. And in the article I claim that “even from the actual, limited perspective of Gyges, he may easily calculate the overwhelming likelihood that a perfect grasp would reveal an immeasurably greater value in the life” of the stranger than in the acquisition of £10. Apparently Richard Taylor does not notice that I speak here in terms of probability (‘likelihood’) regarding the value of that life. He thinks that I am assuming “an absolute intrinsic worth” of “all human life”. But nothing I say here commits me to any such thing.
The much more important mistake is his suggestion that my whole solution of the Gyges problem, as applied to this case, is restricted to pointing out that a perfect grasp would show that the stranger’s life had more value than the £10. But this claim in itself, as far as it goes, would represent precisely the sort of failed attempt to supply a reason for Gyges not to push the button that I reject again and again earlier in the article. After all, Gyges has no perfect grasp – so how could the way a perfect grasp would have motivated him give him a reason, as he is now, not to push the button? What has been left out is the above reasoning that demonstrates the equivalence of what one really wants now to what one would want in a perfect grasp.
Anyone on my view always has an overriding reason to strive for the goals of morality – the reason is that the goals of morality are what anyone really wants. David Hume, however, insisted that all motivation, including moral motivation, was contingent, dependent on whether a person happened to possess such emotional responses as the disinterested benevolence that Hume offered as the basis of moral motivation. In my article I support Kant in his rejection of such a view. Proper moral motivation cannot be contingent. So Richard Taylor’s Humean charge that I illicitly derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ merely reflects an allegiance to a Humean conception of moral motivation that I explicitly reject in the article. (The Midwest Studies paper mentioned above goes further into what I find wrong with Hume’s famous dictum.)
Richard Taylor ends by commending what he identifies as Plato’s solution to the Gyges problem. But his two-sentence description of what Plato says on this topic forks, to my mind, into two distinct lines of thought. First he says, on Plato’s behalf, “Injustice is the debasement or corruption … of oneself.” But this kind of appeal to an interest in one’s own internal condition cannot be what sits at the heart of moral motivation. If it did, then 1) a Gyges who happened to be without self-concern need have no reason to refrain from pushing that fatal button and 2) a decision to risk one’s own debasement for the sake of others could not be morally motivated. But in the next sentence Taylor says for Plato, “The unjust tyrant doesn’t really get what he wants…” Now, especially if we add an emphasis and change the word order slightly to “the unjust tyrant doesn’t get what he really wants”, what we have here sounds a lot like the solution to the Gyges problem that I give. And in the Midwest Studies paper I do indeed credit Plato (particularly in the Protagoras) with arguing for a view like this.
ARNOLD ZUBOFF
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON