Our Kids Don’t Want Our Legacy of Bigotry, Thank You Very Much

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Amy M Cools

Atticus and Tom Robinson in Court, By Moni3 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson from false rape charges in To Kill a Mockingbird

I just finished reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. It made me good and mad all over again.

I had been reading it a week or so ago when I came across a Facebook post of a young man (I’d guess about 15 years old) who started making videos, on his cell phone, of salespeople following him around in stores. You can make a pretty good guess what color his skin is. In a temper, I made a comment on that post, perhaps an incautious one, in that it could have been interpreted as too broadly accusatory. I called out anyone who was reading it, who might be engaged in that sort of behavior, to just stop it!

The thing is, I could be a target of my own comments. Even though I don’t remember ever following anyone around a store because of their skin color, I know my thoughts and actions are sometimes influenced by unjustly negative biases too, and I’ve caught myself, from time to time, automatically having low expectations of people, based on their appearance, before I’ve spoken with them or had a chance even to observe how they actually behave.

But that makes me mad too. I remember when I was very small, when I first became aware of (often subtly) bigoted comments and attitudes, in some of the grown-ups around me, be it towards people of another race, religion, sex, or sexuality. There was a black family next door, for example, and we played and chatted with those kids blissfully unaware of race issues. Over time, I realized that there was some sort of divide, some awkwardness, between ‘my’ people and ‘their’ people. I won’t say who, but I have quite a few relatives and family friends who are quite bigoted, and many more who are but less so. It made me uncomfortable, and the way the adults answered my questions often sounded dishonest, and were unsatisfying. That may be why, when I was in sixth and seventh grade especially, I was obsessed with the civil rights movement and the whole issues of American racism. I’m sure I checked out every single book in our school library on the subject, and I remember when I was assigned to read ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ a few years later, I had already read it several times. It’s still one of my favorite books.

So why am I mad at other people when I, too, catch myself in biased thinking? I’m mad on behalf of myself and every single other young person who inherited that unwanted baggage from each previous generation. And I’m willing to bet that, all things being equal, those adults who passed on those bigoted attitudes wouldn’t have chosen to inherit them either, since they are good in other ways.

Although I’m so conscious of that bias that creeps in, I’ll often adopt an exaggeratedly non-bigoted attitude (even if a person of color is behaving suspiciously or badly, I’ll sometimes pretend they’re not, for example), and for all of us who feel a little bigoted against our own wills and fight against it, young people pick up on subtle cues with astonishing insight. They pick up on those awkwardnesses, those little changes in the way you hold yourself, in the way you think and speak, in the presence of different people, and they all too often internalize it, adopting those attitudes themselves over time, even becoming more racist themselves in an attempt to justify those adopted instincts.

I feel that for every one of these kids who inherit racism, their innocence has been violated: not the kind of innocence that, I think, is often just idealized ignorance (like that regarding sex), but the good kind, where people are just people and they’re all equal candidates for companions and playmates. Little kids treat each other more or less the same when it comes to color, once they’ve asked those funny getting-to-know-you questions that, to adult ears, sound racist, though they reflect only honest curiosity (hence the lack of self-consciousness). The racial divide happen later, when the awkwardness creeps in, as you grow and realize that your very thoughts have become tainted with the quality of injustice that is bigotry. In these subtle little ways, people pass on those old nasty habits of thought and behavior, robbing the next generation of that kind of inner peace that justice brings, and of so many opportunities to have a wider circle of friends, companions, and allies.

That’s how I remember it happening.

Going back to the teen and his cell phone videos: while I felt defensive on his behalf, I was also disturbed that he called one of the women following him around ‘bitch’. Then I felt doubly sorry about how this kid is being betrayed: not only are adults around him behaving badly in treating him preemptively, and therefore unjustly, as a criminal, but he’s been inculcated with at least some degree of sexism already, in that he’s comfortable with calling women ‘bitch’. An epithet on his part would be warranted, I grant, but ‘bitch’? That’s as sexist as those women following him are racist.

In every way, as with the one before, and those before that, the older generation is letting this kid down, as we do all other kids we’re subjecting to our bad example.

But I’m hopeful. I think the internet, even as it’s making our kids more sophisticated and worldly-wise than we might be comfortable with, are also bringing kids in constant contact with others of all races and cultural backgrounds, and they’re communicating freely with them clear of adult interference. They’re learning that others, whose bodily appearance may be different, have the same sort of thoughts and emotions that they do, just as we did on the playground. Now, however, the adults are not present to infuse those interactions with their racism, purposefully or not. Mr. Barack Obama was right, when he observed of his daughters and their friends ‘…when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on those issues.’

Kids these days: they’re becoming cosmopolitan, in spite of all of those adults around them who justify their own bigotry by trying, unconsciously or not, to pass it on to their kids. Fortunately for the kids, I don’t think that’ll work this time around.

Hume, Aristotle, and Guns

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Amy M Cools

Antique firearms at the Scottish National Museum, Edinburgh

I’ve been mulling over the issue of ‘gun rights’ for some time now. It’s a pressing issue here in the United States, since more people are injured and killed by citizens wielding guns than in any other state with a stable government and a thriving economy.

It’s also a divisive issue, as it’s generally argued in terms of liberty, a core value in our culture and politics. One side emphasizes the right to self-defense, the other the right to freedom from fear and from the pressure to join the arms race. And whether or not people chose to arm themselves, their fellow citizens feel that they are placed under some kind of obligation or burden as a result.

From the anti-gun perspective: if at least some of your fellow citizens are armed, then you are forced into a position where you must arm yourself too whether you’d like to or not, or remain at their mercy. After all, in a moment of greed, anger, zeal, fear, mental illness, hate, or accident, one person with a gun can permanently remove all freedoms that another could ever enjoy, within seconds, with the simple squeeze of a trigger. When another is armed, they have the potential power to wield complete control as to whether you live or die, and to force you to act according to their will, and against your own.

From the pro-gun perspective: if your fellow citizens choose not to arm themselves, you leave all the work of crime deterrence up to gun owners. Not only that: since a gun is the most effective weapon which can be wielded by a person of nearly any degree of strength, it’s the only available method for many who feel the need to defend themselves and others. In other words, it’s the one real equalizer: anyone with a gun has as much power as any other, so long as they know how and when to use it.

What would help us decide how to settle this, since the freedom to live the life we want, and the freedom to live at all, are in direct conflict here? We’re still figuring it out here in the US. Some nations have chosen in favor of individual gun rights, and others have disarmed their citizens, with varying results. While, generally speaking, nations and states with low gun ownership rates have much lower rates of gun violence, there are some exceptions. The gun rights dilemma, therefore, is not simply and immediately solved through legislation designed in favor of one set of rights issues over another.

Putting the conflicting liberty and rights issues aside for the moment, perhaps it would help to consider the relevant moral issues. Here, we can look beyond local, cultural considerations to a broader source of guidance as to what we should do about guns. What does it mean to be a good person, a virtuous person, and how do we cultivate that in ourselves and in each other? How does a society cultivate that in its citizens? Can these and other considerations help us decide what’s right, morally, when it comes to the rights and responsibilities of owning a gun? What should we do about it? Is it right or good for people to hold so much power over life and death? Permissive gun laws, which make it easy for responsible gun owners to trade in guns, also make it easier for members of drug cartels and other criminals to get their hands on them, too; that being known, are those laws right?

I think two of the greatest thinkers on morality and virtue, David Hume and Aristotle, can do much to help us discover some answers to these questions. Let’s explore their ideas, look for some answers there, and see how they fit with modern discoveries in behavioral science, psychology, and neuroscience.

According to David Hume, morality originates in the ‘passions’, or feelings. We can see ourselves as naturally moral creatures, since we come equipped with those emotions, those motivations, that make morality possible. We demonstrate altruistic, ‘pro-social’ (not Hume’s term, a more modern one), even as children, though we develop our moral character as we grow, through life experience, conversation with other moral beings, and by acquiring and developing the use of reason. For example, from the earliest age, we approve of kindness and disapprove of cruelty. We desire happiness, love, and generosity, and detest pain and avoid selfish people; we crave learning, and enrichment, and the approval of others. Those ‘sentiments’ ennoble us, and are responsible for that which is best in our characters. Yet the emotions we come equipped with are not sufficient, in themselves, for a morally developed person. Reason also plays a key role, enabling us to universalize and expand morals, and to apply these needed in any given situation.

Yet morality cannot be founded on reason alone: as Hume points out, reason is the means to means to link one true proposition with another, but cannot, on its own, show us what to value, or make us care about each other or anything else. It’s moral feeling, the passions, that provide the motivations, and provide reason the materials to work with to develop our morality. So as we grow up, we learn to develop our moral instincts, to ‘expand our moral circle‘ through conversation and the use of reason. By spending time with others, by being exposed to diverse ways of thinking and being, we learn that others have emotions and interests just like we do, that are just as important to them as ours are to us. Emotionally, we empathize with others; rationally, we know that what we expect of others is no more or less than what we must demand of ourselves. A very young person has the instincts for morality, but prior to experience of the world and the use of reason, it’s a very limited morality, or can even be considered a sort of proto-morality. Experience of other moral agents, through discourse with them, reveals there are others whose feelings and interests matter just as much to them as ours do to us, and finally reason shows that there is not particular reason to favor oneself over another when determining moral rules and guides of behavior. A morally good person, then, will seek to be pleasant and generous, to make others happy and improve their well-being, to respect and protect their interests as much as possible, just as we desire and expect they will do for us.

Hume’s account of how morality works, combined with the body of knowledge we’ve discovered since his time, reveals that it’s as much a natural part of the makeup of the human personality as any other, as are creativity, romantic passion, mother love, curiosity, and hunger, as well as (sadly!) rapacity and cruelty. A natural explanation of morality does not require a complex suite of arguments to found its origins in logic and reason, nor does it require some cause outside of ourselves, as traditional explanations claimed. To find out what morality is and how it works, we observe human beings, how they act and how they desire themselves and each other to act; we explain how and why morality developed as a natural adaptation for human beings; and we apply reason to determine what kinds of mindsets, rules, and behaviors lead to their flourishing.

Behavioral, biological, and evolutionary sciences have, over the years, lent support to Hume’s explanation of morality. Rebecca Saxe and Alison Gopnik, among others, has closely observed the behavior of infants and very young children over time, and has gathered a large body of evidence that people demonstrate moral instincts from the very earliest age, recognize that others are moral beings with their own interests and emotions just like us, and make moral judgments accordingly. Evolutionary psychology (Darwin considered Hume one of his great influences), in which morality is considered as much an adaptation as our opposable thumbs and long limbs, inherit much from Hume’s account. In fact, Hume is widely considered a founder of naturalistic moral theory, and a father to modern cognitive science.

Aristotle’s grounds the origin of morality more on reason, though his theory is founded, like Hume’s, from his observation of the world and how people behave. His elegant ‘function argument’ is the centerpiece of his moral theory. When you consider what something is for, and observe what it does and how it functions, you’ll know where to start. The quality of goodness in material things is closely related to the quality of goodness when it comes to actions and moral feelings. A musical instrument is for making music; therefore, an excellent, or good, musical instrument is that which produces the best music. Further, if we consider a case in which we’re deciding who the musical instrument should belong to, it would be the right thing to do to give it to the best musician. Not to the nicest person, or the one who can pay the most for it, or even to the person who made it; those considerations are irrelevant since none of those have anything to do with the proper function of the instrument.

To Aristotle, reason is the one definitive human trait that no other creature on earth possesses. That’s what we do uniquely, and what we’re best at, or at least, that’s what we do when we’re at our best. So what we should do, the moral thing to do, is what’s most reasonable, what’s most in keeping with our nature as reasonable beings. What helps us recognize that, in turn, is called the ‘Golden Mean’: consider all those traits we have, see how they fall on a spectrum, and we will see that the virtue consists of the happy medium between extremes. For example, bravery would be the virtuous golden mean between cowardice and recklessness, love between disdain and fawning or obsession, and so on. (Fun fact: Hume himself placed great importance on moderation, temperance, and fairness, eschewing divisive party politics, for example, as if it was part of his mission to live out the ideal of the Golden Mean!)

Making the leap from the function of a thing which is an artifact of intentional human creation, to the function of a human being itself, is quite a leap. Aristotle recognized this and sought to address it, but did not yet have the modern knowledge of the theory of evolution, and of evolutionary psychology, and how well they account for the origin and development of moral virtues such as kindness, sympathy, generosity, bravery, and so forth. Nor did Hume, but he did not consider it justified to form conclusions by building a logical case as far removed from original observations as many who followed Aristotle later. Hume saw human beings as much a product of the natural world as any other, and their nature as fully explicable in those terms. So leaving the function argument aside for the time being, let’s consider another important contribution of Aristotle’s to moral philosophy: the importance of habit.To Aristotle, habit is essential to the practice of virtue. By emulating virtue, we habituate ourselves to it. Over time, morality, the practice of virtue, becomes second nature. Here, Aristotle proves himself a keen observer of human psychology, and his emphasis on habit as a central driving force behind human thought and behavior, as well as something which can be deliberately instilled through practice, is confirmed by the findings of modern psychologists and neuroscientists. A recent article in Scientific American outlines some of the ways in which habits are formed, and how necessary they are if we wish to improve our behaviors systematically. Cognitive behavioral therapy, now widely considered among the most effective ways to overcome addiction and anxiety-depression, among other disorders, is also founded on these scientific discoveries.

Here’s where I find a link between these two moral theories: Aristotle’s emphasis on habit works hand in hand with Hume’s account of how moral sentiments arise from human psychology. Whether it be from habit or other mental processes we are naturally equipped with when we achieve consciousness, moral behavior is largely a spontaneous reaction to the situation at hand. Early in our development, as Saxe and Gopnik describe, a basic set of moral instincts are included in human consciousness in its earliest stages. As Hume observes, experience and reason help us expand, develop, and perfect our moral characters over time; the moral character, as Aristotle recognizes, is the set of, and relationships between, the virtuous habits we’ve cultivated through practice.

This also consistent with other findings of modern neuroscience and psychology. The way we tend to act in any given situation, the emotions and motivations that arise in us as we respond to stimuli, are formed as we react to circumstances, and by engaging in patterns of action, reactions, thoughts, behavior, we create mental channels, so to speak, or ‘paths of least resistance’, which predict our reactions, our thoughts and behavior, given similar circumstances. We usually act and think in accordance with how we’ve been given to act and think before, and only change when some new consideration(s) arises that makes us stop and consider whether to do something else this time. These considerations, the combination of reason and emotion (how do I act that will make me feel good about it, given the consequences of my actions for myself and others? How did the decisions I made last time the sort of thing came effect me and the world around me? How do others act in these situations, and what are the effects then?) inform how we habituate ourselves to new and improved moral actions and reactions.

Let’s pause for a moment. So far, we have these two thinkers’ descriptions of morality and virtue, supported by the findings of modern psychology and neuroscience. Hume and Aristotle show us where they think we should look for virtue, how to recognize it, how to describe and explain it, and where it originates. In other words, they are engaged in metaethics. But as you may have noticed, this tells us only how people actually do think and behave; what about telling us what we should do? What are the criteria for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong?

Arete (Virtue)

I think Hume and Aristotle point us in this direction: human beings not only do, but should habituate themselves to those practices which form in us the best moral character. While both men don’t explicitly tell how we can definitely say what’s right and wrong, they go to great lengths to show us what an admirable character looks like, and how they think and behave. I think they do so in order to reveal to us not only how we could be, but how we should be. In his writings as well as by example (he was widely known to have a particularly admiral character), Hume emphasizes such virtuous sentiments as sympathy, sociability, amiability, beneficence, generosity, and so on, and advocates the cultivation of these traits, especially through conversation and spending time in the company of others, especially those who can broaden your understanding of the world, and by avid reading and study of philosophy, literature, and history. Aristotle emphasizes the virtue of moderation in all things, of wisdom, self-control, courage, and nobility. Both men emphasize, to the highest degree, the use of reason, and the value of its careful and consistent application in all matters of life. It appears that they go through all this trouble not only to show us what a good person looks like, but to offer us something to aspire to: the formation of an excellent, moral character, which leads to the best life a person can achieve.

So, finally, we return to the gun issue. What does all this have to do with owning them, and using them? What does this have to do with what we observe in human behavior when people own guns? How about when people value, or even glorify, guns?

Let’s return to the consideration of the evidence, which can reveal how attitudes and practices relating to guns manifest themselves in human behavior; in other words, what habit or habits does a gun-owning society promote?

There are conflicting statistics to when it comes to gun-related behavior. For example, people in the United States own almost twice as many guns per-capita as Canadians and Germans. Canada and Germany, in turn, have a much higher rate of gun ownership compared to most other developed nations. Yet among these three nations, the United States has a far higher gun-related death rate, about four times that of Canada, and about 8 times that of Germany, though the three share many key cultural and political traits: they are democratic, capitalistic, and culturally and historically Christian. There are also examples where lower gun-related death rates correlate with higher per-capita gun ownership. This is the case for some states in the U.S, and for Switzerland, a country that, interestingly, imposes a requirement on all households to own a gun.Yet given such outliers, most states in the US, and most countries in the world, see a strong correlation between lower rates of gun-related death and injury and lower rates of gun ownership. The U.S. ranks near the top in gun-violence rates, just under Mexico’s, a country overrun with trigger-happy drug cartels, and outranked almost entirely by countries with weak, unstable governments, poor human-rights records, and high rates of poverty and income inequality. The very lowest rates of all, by contrast, are enjoyed by those countries who possess a high degree of personal liberty and human-rights protections while at the same time restrictive gun-ownership privileges, or none at all. Even in Switzerland, often cited by gun-rights advocates as an example of how high rates of gun ownership can correlate with low levels of violence, there are 16 times as many gun deaths as in the U.K, and 64 times as many as Japan. The rates are low in Switzerland only as compared with the most violent countries, but not in comparison with the least violent.

Antique long guns at the Scottish National Museum, Edinburgh

Returning to the liberty issue for a moment, it seems that overall, since you must be alive to enjoy any liberty at all, liberty is best served when there aren’t many guns around. When a fight ensues, or the home is broken into, or a child has figured out how to get into a locked cabinet, or a person goes on a violent rampage due to mental illness, few, if any, people actually end up dying or disabled when there’s no guns nearby to reach for. It’s relatively difficult and messy to kill someone with a knife and other non-gun weapons, and the planning that goes into other kinds of homicide, like poisoning, gives people more time to consider the consequences of their action, decreasing the chance they’ll go through with it, or decreasing the chances of success at homicide.

As we’ve seen, however, the liberty issue can’t be the only determining factor in deciding the gun issue, since liberty considerations conflict so sharply when one’s liberty interests run counter to another’s. There are still compelling arguments to be made that individual liberty requires the right for each person to make their own decision in the matter, from the right to self-protection and self-determination. There’s also the fact that there are some states and countries where higher rates of gun ownership do correlate with low gun violence, especially in places where the population is more homogeneous, ethnically, religiously, racially, economically, and so on, even if they are relatively few. Conversely, there’s the liberty considerations of those who wish to be free from the fear of coercion and bodily harm, ever-present dangers that usually result from a heavily armed population, as the statistics reveal.

This is where the law comes in. One main purpose of the law is to defend the rights and liberties of the citizenry at large, and this involves protecting citizens from each other. A population is always composed of people who have conflicting interests, needs and desires, so to keep a society functioning, prosperous, and harmonious as possible, the law (ideally) is crafted to balance the rights, responsibilities, and interests of each citizen, impartially, with the other.Another purpose of the law is to codify, universalize, and enforce the mores of a given society, or at least those that harmonize with the principles of justice, equality, liberty, and so on that are central to the political system of that society.And last but not least, the law encodes a system of rights, responsibilities, and prohibitions, the practice of which is requisite to being a good citizen. In other words, the law is a society’s (in a democracy, the people’s) way to habituate its citizens to those practices which form a virtuous, a good citizen.

Gun law is no exception. Prior to passing laws relating to gun ownership, there are societal attitudes towards guns that people possess, cultivate, and enforce not only through custom and discourse, but eventually through law. Famously, in the 1990’s, the Australian government, with widespread support from its citizens, collected and destroyed a large proportion of the country’s firearms, and imposed restrictive gun laws. These laws were a direct result of the public’s horrified reaction to a series of gun-related mass murders that had happened in the decade prior. The public’s new attitude towards guns was made manifest in the law. It’s still in debate whether the sharp decline in gun violence that followed the new laws were a result of the laws, or vice-versa. It appears most likely that it’s some combination of the two: after all, as we’ve observed throughout history, there’s a feedback loop between the law and a society’s moral progress.

Consider the history of civil rights legislation in the United States: desegregation and other civil rights protections happened gradually, with each disenfranchised group demanding the full rights of citizenship, despite the current will of the majority to keep those groups subjugated and oppressed. Over time, the use of reason (in these cases, legal reasoning) and consideration of the values underpinning the foundational political philosophy and documents (in this case, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) led to new laws which not only enforced better practices, but habituated citizens to more virtuous thought and behavior, often in spite of themselves. We see this time and time again in American history: the disenfranchisement and oppression of black people, religious minorities, the poor and non-landowners, women, Jews, gay people, and so on, once common practice, came to be looked upon with righteous distaste, worthy of contempt. In so many of these cases, it was the law that changed commonly held attitudes, more than the other way around, and the change in attitudes and behavior often happened far more quickly than it would have otherwise if the practice of virtue wasn’t inculcated through law.

In sum: Considering the lessons of history, the evidence of the current states of affairs in which high gun-ownership rates correlate strongly with destructive attitudes and behavior when the entirety of the evidence is considered, and how the wisdom of two of the greatest moral thinkers is confirmed by the findings of modern science, I think that laws restricting, even eliminating, gun ownership by most individuals help lead to a wiser, more prudent, more beneficent, more amiable, more free society.

What do you think?

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

– I’d especially like to thank Guy Fletcher, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, who kindly gave me some of his valuable time (despite it’s being finals week), invaluable insights, and excellent pointers regarding the subjects covered in this essay, especially in reminding me to make clearer the distinctions between meta-ethics, morality, and ethics.

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Sources and inspiration:

Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. About 350 BC.

Boseley, Sarah. ‘High gun ownership makes countries less safe, US study finds‘. The Guardian, Sep 18, 2013.

De Waal, Francis. The Bonobo and the Atheist : In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, 2013.

Gopnik, Alison. The Philosophical Baby, 1998.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind, 2013.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, Volume III – Of Morals. Printed for Thomas Longman in London, England, in 1740. (I had a glorious time referring to versions published in Hume’s own lifetime during my trip to Edinburgh!) Online version: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm

David B. and Stephen D’Andrilli. “What America can learn from Switzerland is that the best way to reduce gun misuse is to promote responsible gun ownership.” American Rifleman, Feb 1990

Kraut, Richard, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics‘. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014

Morris, William Edward. ‘David Hume‘. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2009.

Saxe, Rebecca. ‘How We Read Each Other’s Minds‘. TED talk, 2009

Tucker, Abigail. ‘Are Babies Born Good?’ Smithsonian Magazine, Jan 2013.

On Morality: Objective or Subjective?

Posted on July 13, 2014 by Amy M Cools

The Good Samaritan by Jean de Jullienne, 1766, after, public domain via Wikimedia Commons Is morality objective, or subjective?

If it’s objective, it seems that it would need to be something like mathematics or the laws of physics, existing as part of the universe on its own account. But then, how could it exist independently of conscious, social beings, without whom it need not, and arguably could not, exist? Is ‘objective morality’, in that sense, even a coherent concept?

If it’s subjective, how can we make moral judgments about, and demand moral accountability from, people of times, backgrounds, belief systems, and cultures different than our own? If it’s really subjective and we can’t make those kinds of moral judgments or hold people morally accountable, then what’s the point of morality at all? Is ‘subjective morality’ a coherent concept either?

Take the classic example of slavery, which today is considered among the greatest moral evils, but until relatively recently in human history was common practice: could we say it was morally wrong for people in ancient times, or even two hundred years ago, to own slaves, when most of the predominantly held beliefs systems and most cultures supported it, or at least allowed that it was acceptable, if not ideal? Does it make sense for us to judge slave owners and traders of the past as guilty of wrongdoing?

From the objective view, we would say yes, slavery was always wrong, and most people just didn’t know it. We as a species had to discover that it was wrong, just as we had to discover over time, through reason and empirical evidence, how the movements of the sun, other stars, and the planets work.

From the subjective view, we would say no. We can only judge people according to mores of the time. But this is not so useful, either, because one can legitimately point out that the mere passage of time, all on its own, does not make something right become wrong, or vice versa. (This is actually a quite common unspoken assumption in the excuse ‘well, those were the olden days’ when people want to excuse slavery in ancient ‘enlightened, democratic’ Greece, or in certain pro-slavery Bible verses.) In any case, some people, even back then, thought slavery was wrong. How did they come to believe that, then? Was the minority view’s objections to slavery actually immoral, since they were contrary to the mores their own society, and of most groups, and of most ideologies?

Morality can be viewed as subjective in this sense: morality is secondary to, and contingent upon, the existence of conscious, social, intelligent beings. It really is incoherent to speak of morality independently of moral beings, that is, people capable of consciousness, of making and understanding their own decisions, of being part of a social group, because that’s what morality is: that which governs their interactions, and makes them right or wrong. Morality can be also viewed as subjective in the sense that moral beliefs and practices evolved as human beings (and arguably, in some applications of the term ‘morality’, other intelligent, social animals) evolved.

Morality can be viewed as objective in this sense: given that there are conscious, social beings whose welfare is largely dependent on the actions of others, and who have individual interests distinct from those of the group, there is nearly always one best way to act, or at least very few, given all the variables. For example, people thought that slavery was the best way to make sure that a society was happy, harmonious, and wealthy. But they had not yet worked out the theoretical framework, let alone have the empirical evidence, that in fact societies who trade freely, have good welfare systems, and whose citizens enjoy a high degree of individual liberty, are in fact those that end up increasing the welfare of everyone the most, for the society as well as for each individual. So slavery was always wrong, given that we are conscious, social, intelligent beings, because as a practice it harmed human beings in all of these aspects of human nature. Slavery is destructive to both the society and the individual, but many people did not have a reasonable opportunity to discover that fact, other than through qualms aroused by sympathetic observation of so much suffering.

In sum: it appears that in many arguments over morality, where people accuse each other of being ‘dogmatic’, or of ‘moral relativism’, or various other accusations people (I think) carelessly throw at each other, is due to a basic misunderstanding. To have an ‘objective’ view does not necessarily entail one must have a fixed, eternal, essentialist view of morality which does not allow for moral evolution or progress. Likewise, to have a ‘subjective’ view of morality does not entail thinking that ‘anything goes’, or that morality is entirely relative to culture, religion, or belief system. Here, as is the case with so many important issues, simplistic, black-and-white explanations do not lead to understanding, nor to useful solutions to life’s most pressing problems.

* Also published at The Dance of Reason, Sac State’s philosophy blog

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Money and Deservingness

Posted on June 28, 2014 by Amy M Cools

A little while ago, I took part in a discussion about how medical care is paid for. It took a negative turn, as you would expect, since American health care is the world’s most expensive and the medical insurance field is highly dysfunctional. But the complaints were aimed especially at patients, since a couple of people I was talking to were jaded by observing apparent Medi-Cal fraud too many times over the years

I’ve been working in a medical office for nearly a year now, my first job in the medical field, and for the first time am getting a close look at what goes on behind the scenes at a doctor’s office: how many things can go wrong with skin (it’s a dermatologist’s office), how much patients are cheered and made to feel better by the simple act of talking with someone who can perhaps heal them, the complexities of billing and navigating the disparate requirements of insurance companies, the difficulties of receiving adequate medical care when one is disabled or poor, and so on.

The limits on what one can earn while receiving Medi-Cal, a free (to the patient, of course) state-run health care, are quite low, set at only 138% of the federal poverty level. For a state like California, with its relatively high cost of living, those limits are very much a low-ball estimate of what one can actually live on in an average California city. The qualifying limit on the yearly wage for a household of two, for example, is roughly the same as an average year’s rent alone.

Anyway, in the aforementioned conversation, anecdotes were passed around of people who present with Medi-Cal insurance, yet own expensive smartphones (data plans are not cheap, either!), nice clothes, talk about their vacations and nice cars, have tattoos and elaborate salon hairdos, and so on. This, of course, raised the question: how could they afford these things if they’re actually poor enough to qualify for Medi-Cal? Putting aside obvious objections, that they may have purchased those things before losing their jobs or becoming disabled, or that their family and friends supply the ‘luxuries’ as gifts, etc, the implication was that applying for taxpayer-funded health care should be an option of last resort, only after the smartphone is returned and the data contract expired, the nice clothes worn out, the valuable car sold.

One person proposed this solution: those too poor to afford health care insurance and other necessities of life should be given a one-time check. If they choose fritter it away and don’t spend it wisely, let them suffer the consequences. People who are responsible enough to have the money to pay for health care when they need it, should be the ones who get it; the rest are on their own.

I understand the frustration of those fellow conversationalists. We all know people who chronically don’t (can’t?) ‘keep it together’: they don’t (can’t?) get and keep decent jobs; they squander their money on junk food and useless luxuries and cheap trendy things that don’t last more than a season; they date or marry or make babies with ‘losers’ who drain their finances and don’t contribute; they don’t have a savings account for emergencies, and so on. Those habits are maddening, and don’t endear the possessor to those around them. Many of those habits drive their family and friends crazy, and arouse much resentment in others who end up paying the costs.

But I never hear the opposite argument: some people who have the money to pay shouldn’t get the healthcare resources. We know that some people who have money don’t contribute anything of value to society, and even do a lot of harm. There are some who make their money polluting or from sweatshop labor; there are some who are the lazy, spoiled, entitled children of wealthy parents; there are some who defraud their customers or knowingly sell toxic drugs to addicts; and so on. Why should they get to use up valuable, finite healthcare resources, then, if they, too, have lousy habits and are a drain or a bane to society?

So why the discrepancy? Does having money make one, generally, more deserving somehow? I think the discrepancy in our attitudes toward who should get health care, and who should not, reveal what most of us in the United States implicitly, unquestioningly accept, as a core value of American culture. It’s not so much that might makes right. Cash does. If you have the money to pay for something, you not only should get it, you deserve to get it. Period.

It’s not hard to see why we assume that this is so. We are a capitalist society, founded on the values of our country’s Calivinist founders. Money is the reward for our labor, and a sure sign, described as such in earliest Biblical times, of God’s approval. To accept money-as-deservingness as a core value is to encourage hard work, thrift, and innovation. Money is the surest way that a capitalist society automatically rewards its most productive, contributive members; obviously, those who work hard deserve the most money.

And very often, this is the case: doctors and other healthcare professionals, leaders of industry, civil-rights and defense lawyers as well as prosecutors, scientists, judges, professors and leading public intellectuals, and so on, do vastly important work, and they are, justly, well rewarded.

But wait a minute. How about those examples we just considered, of people who have money that don’t work hard or don’t contribute? There are myriad exceptions to the rule that the most deserving get the most money. A money-centric society also encourages theft, cheating, lying, fraud, ‘let-the-buyer-beware’ selling tactics… the list goes on and on.

And how about all those people we know whose work is among the hardest and most contributive, but who don’t make much money? In our country as in much of the world, for example, we are awash in a wealth of ready accessible, super cheap, delicious, quality food, such as the world has never seen before. That’s largely because masses of people work for subsistence wages, often in harsh conditions, for most of their waking hours, for years if not all of their life. In fact, the health and wealth of our society absolutely depend on these people’s labor, since without it, we are all impoverished, and would have little time and energy to expend in innovation, the arts, all the best things society a society produces, without a steady, high quality food supply.

But of course, the wages of field workers are not mostly determined by deservingness in accordance with the importance or value of the work done or the contribution made, and neither are the wages of most people. Wages are determined by supply and demand, or by how easy it is to replace one worker with another. Laboring in a field requires stamina and the will to work, but not education or highly skilled work experience. There are a seemingly endless supply of people who are willing to work in the fields for low wages in order to escape even worse living conditions or starvation, or increase the chances of success in their children’s future. The same conditions determine wages for myriad other areas of work, such as factories, restaurants, in-home and facility care for children and the elderly, and so on. And of course, there are those who did valuable work all their lives, until advances in technology rendered a lifetime of experience and skill useless. The stenographer, the postal worker, the journalist, the machinist, the autoworker, are seeing their jobs replaced by robots, computers, pundits, and overseas low-paid workers, and they are left middle-aged, suddenly unemployable, with large bills and children still demanding they make decent salaries, to start all over again in a job market that doesn’t need them anymore, with depressed wages for the entry-level work they must now accept when and if they can get it.

In contrast, there are those whose work is in demand because the product of their work is desirable, such as luxury goods, but the people who produce them are in short supply. Designers and developers of video games and movies, including violent and misogynistic ones, can make a great deal of money. Same goes for high-end fashion designers, CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, speculative bankers, plastic surgeons, lobbyists, and so on. The product of these people’s work range from the most beneficial, beautiful, and life-enhancing, to the most useless, harmful, and ugly; either way, the work they do can be highly lucrative, since their work is in high demand.

As we can see, the value of money-as-deservingness may originate from some of our best instincts and desires, such as justice in compensation, the liberty to pursue our own goals, and the drive to better the lives of ourselves and our children. But in the real world, things don’t play out that way, not by a long shot. The cynic, the cheat, the liar, the predator, is all too often more adept at making money than the honest, hard worker. The possession of money is not a reliable reflection of character, nor of the actual value of one’s contribution to society.

So as we’ve just seen, money-as-deservingness is deeply problematic at best, and nearly useless at worst. Money is a tool, nothing more, and the fickleness and vaguaries of the market, not worthiness of the work done, mostly determines who get the most.

So to return to the example we opened with: what conclusions should we have reached in our conversation about health care and who should have access to it?

It’s hard to say, exactly. It seems that collective action problems (the tragedy of the commons, for example) are part-and-parcel of every real-world society, and capitalism is one way around them, as it’s an (ideally) impartial, and therefore fair, way of allocating resources. This may solve many efficiency problems, but to my mind, it doesn’t solve a far too many other, even more important problems, including those that arise from our concern with justice, human flourishing, dignity, the value we place on individual human lives, and so on.

And we haven’t even considered the dilemma of how we are to care for people who are not ‘marketable’: constituted in such a way that they can’t contribute in the ways the market rewards: they don’t have the health, mental capacity, or perceived attractiveness that make them likely to get a decent job, even if they are able to try. Do we return to a society that depends only on elective charities to care for them, reneging on the commitment we’ve made over the years to take their care on as a collective responsibility? Remember, public assistance programs arose precisely because elective charities weren’t doing the job: if they were, there would have been no-one to need public assistance. Do we return to a eugenics-based belief system, where only the ‘fit’ deserve to survive? But this ignores that which makes human beings simultaneously the most intelligent, capable, and successful species: our highly developed social skills, in which we cooperate, pool our resources, and build on on the work and ideas of others to invent language, technology, and culture such as the world had never seen or likely will again if we eventually go the way of the dinosaurs. If we undermine our own moral sense and hard-heartedly ignore and dispose of the ‘unfit’, we blunt our moral sense and head down the path of mutually assured destruction, where it takes more and more qualifications to remain in the category of the ‘fit’. We’ve gone down that slippery slope before, have already caught a glimpse of such a dystopia in mid-century Europe.

My proposed solution? Re-classify and institute healthcare as the same sort of infrastructure as our system of roads and bridges, the military, the water supply, food-safety administration, our currency, and so forth, as all of these are basic necessities of life, communication, and trade. Collective action problems always have and always will exist, in the free market as well as in public welfare systems, and to give healthcare over to the vaguaries of the free market as if it’s an elective luxury, is a failure of our society’s commitment to the value of the life and liberty of each individual person. Our free-market healthcare system, which leaves so many without the care they need, is not a solution, it’s the result of a lack of political will and imagination, and a moral disgrace to boot.

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Sources and inspiration:

Ariely, Dan. Multiple works on behavioral economics, including his TED talks, lectures, and articles.
http://danariely.com/

Heath, Joseph. Economics Without Illusions, 2010.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Economics_Without_Illusions.html?id=4V8cvQo1Dw8C

Free Will and the Self

Posted on June 14, 2014 by Amy M Cools

Free will and the self. What are they? While they are the two most important phenomena to each and every one of us, they’re notoriously hard to describe. Of course, we ‘know’ what they are: respectively, they are the experience, the feeling, of being in control of our own actions, of our thoughts and behaviors, and of having an identity and a personality that exists over time. Without them, our lives seem pointless: if we have no free will, then we are mere automatons, and we can take no credit and no responsibility for anything we do. If we have no self, then there is no we, no ‘I’, at all.

Experiments and scholarship by neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, and others have revealed some starling things about the workings of the brain and how human beings think, behave, and make decisions. The field of neuroscience has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades since the advent of technologies that allow us to observe the living brain at work, though we’ve been learning much about the brain over the last few centuries by observing the results of damage to its various parts. These results have, in turn, thrown traditional accounts of the self and free will into question.

Many have gone so far as to say that since we’ve discovered that our actions result from the cause-and-effect processes of a physical brain, then we have no free will: our actions and all our thoughts are determined by the cause-and-effect laws of nature. And since we’ve discovered that the sense of self arises from the confluence of the workings of the parts of the brain, and damage or changes to those parts can cause radical changes to our personalities and the ways we feel about the world and ourselves, that the self is an illusion too.

Yet, how can free will and the self not exist when we experience them throughout our lives? Since we can talk about them to one another, they must exist in some sense, at least. And it’s not that they exist in the way that fictional characters in a story exist, for example, or other artificial creations. We experience these phenomena intimately, from the time we attain consciousness early in life, until the time our brains are so aged or damaged that we are conscious no longer. The concepts of free will and the self are ubiquitous in our language, our culture, the very way we think. Read this paragraph again, review all the thoughts you’ve had in the last hour (and ever had, in fact) and you’ll find that the concepts of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’ (distinct selves in the world), combined with the concept of some action or thought purposely performed by one’s self, are a constant theme. In fact, almost everything we talk and think about would be incoherent without these concepts, and all the purposes that drive us would disappear and render all we do meaningless.

So what gives? How do modern discoveries about the workings of the brain jibe with traditional concepts of free will and the self?

It appears the confusion results from the way we use the terms. There are actually two things we’re referring to. One is the actual experience of the phenomena we call ‘the self’ and ‘free will’. The other is how we account for them, how we define them and explain how they work.

Consider what we mean by other terms, such as ‘disease’. At one time or another, we had various explanations as to what these things are, and how they are caused. One popular explanation that convinced people for hundreds of years: disease is the result of the imbalance of the four humours of the body: blood, black and yellow bile, and phlegm. A physician’s job is to restore the balance and so bring about cure. Other explanations are vitalist (life and health are the result of the interaction between some sort of non-physical spiritual ‘force’ or ‘energy’ and a physical body), such as chiropractic and traditional Chinese medicine. Disease is cause by some sort of disruption in the body, and a physician’s job is to correct the alignment and communication channels of the parts of the body so that the vital force can flow freely and restore health. And the most pervasive and popular explanation of disease throughout human history, of course, is that it’s caused by the vengeance of an angry god or the maleficence of evil spirits (witch-burnings, anyone?).

Over time, human beings invented and developed the scientific method pioneered by Francis Bacon, and began to more carefully examine the correlations of disease symptoms with the circumstances in which they occurred (outbreaks of cholera mapped so that the epidemic was revealed to center on a polluted source of drinking water in 1830’s London; the correlation of damage to a particular parts of the brain to the symptoms of brain damaged patients; the dissection of corpses, comparing diseased organs to healthy ones). With the discoveries of the physical causes of disease, by pathogens and by damage to parts of the body, effective cures were finally able to be developed.

Given that the explanations for the origins of disease are based on the understanding that they’re natural, the result of physical processes, and traditional explanations, does that mean that disease can no longer be said to exist? Does that mean we have to come up with an entirely new terminology? I don’t think it does. The term ‘disease’ refers to instances of the body suffering in some way, not functioning as a healthy body does. What we do when we are confronted with the phenomenon of disease is the same as it ever was: we seek to avoid it, we detest being afflicted by it and seeing others afflicted by it, we seek to understand its causes, and we seek to cure it.

Similarly, the denial of the existence of free will and the self is based on the misguided assumption that understanding the inner workings of a thing, in a way incompatible with traditional explanations, is to deny that the phenomena exist at all. To understand that the mind is the product of a physical brain obeying the laws of nature rather than a sort of spirit or soul inhabiting a machine-body is not to say the mind doesn’t exist. The experience of free will and the self is the same either way, and whether what makes the ‘I’ an ‘I’ is better explained naturally or supernaturally makes no difference. We are still agents, it’s still what’s going on in our brains that cause everything we do, and we still make choices, and it’s still ‘we’ that make them.

In sum, discovering how the phenomena we experience that we’ve dubbed ‘free will’ and the ‘self’ really work doesn’t mean that they don’t exist; it just means we understand more about them now. And to me, as to other lovers of knowledge and understanding, that’s a good thing.

* Also published at Darrow, a forum on the cultural and political debates of today

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Sources and inspiration:

Dennett, Daniel. ‘On Free Will Worth Wanting’. Interview on Philosophy Bites by David Edmunds and Nigel Warburton. http://philosophybites.com/2012/08/daniel-dennett-on-free-will-worth-wanting.html

Klein, Jürgen, “Francis Bacon”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/

‘John Snow’, from BBC History series. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/snow_john.shtml

Kean, Sean. Interview on Inquiring Minds podcast by Indre Viskontes and Chris Mooney, published June 12, 2014 https://soundcloud.com/inquiringminds/38-sam-kean-these-brains-changed-neuroscience-forever

Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503-the-ego-tunnel

Sharif, Azim F. and Kathleen D. Vohs. ‘What Happens to a Society That Does Not Believe in Free Will?’ Scientific American, June 2014. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-a-society-that-does-not-believe-in-free-will/

Wikipedia (various authors): ‘Daniel David Palmer’ (founder of chiropractic), ‘Humorism’, and ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_David_Palmer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine

Pornography

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Amy M Cools

Recently, I read a post on Facebook where my cousin’s wife woefully reported that my cousin’s new anti-pornography site had to be taken down due to a huge negative reaction (though he received much support as well). The site is (was?) called ‘Her Name’, and it’s a forum where you assign a name (first name only) to a woman whose dignity had been affronted through pornography: women you know, women you’ve seen but not met, and so on. By naming these women, their humanity, their individual worth is re-affirmed, and all are reminded that each woman a life and a story beyond the simple object of gratification that pornography portrays them as.

That was what I was able to gather from the description of the website and from my cousin’s wife’s post. But I didn’t find many details of why many objected strongly to the website, in the blog review and discussion of ‘Her Name’ I found on Patheos, nor on Facebook. Nor was I able to discern clear arguments in support of the claim that women are, in fact, dehumanized or injured in other ways by pornography.

Here’s what I gathered about the nature of the angry comments: by providing a forum to name these women, my cousin was (inadvertently, I believe) also creating a handy tool for ideologues to shame women taking part in pornography, or to ‘out’ women who want to keep their porn careers private. And here’s what I gathered from the discussion overall: pornography is bad, especially for women, period.

I’m glad that my cousin feels passionately about the issue insofar as he is concerned with promoting the dignity and freedom of women. And I’m glad that he’s taking part in the public discussion that we should all continue to have about pornography. It’s such a complicated subject, to which the blog reviewer doesn’t do justice: she offers no arguments to support her assertion that porn dehumanizes women. She simply claims that it’s a tool of the devil to destroy souls by denying their existence without explanation as to why or how.

Another thing: the overall characterization of porn, on the site and the blog post, was almost exclusively about the victimization of women, yet both sexes are involved in its production as well as the consumption, to one degree or another. I presume that the assumption is that men are making most or all of the decisions, and the women are all victims and dupes. I have serious doubts about both of these claims, if they really are such. Be that the case, let’s keep in mind that while I offer primarily offer women as examples in the discussion here for consistency’s sake in comparing the arguments, most of the points made apply to all sexes involved.

Based on his replies to the blog review comments, my cousin’s objections also appear to be based primarily on his religious beliefs: lust is sinful, tempting another to lust is sinful, sexual intercourse outside of marriage is sinful, and so on. These claims will have little meaning for those not adherents to particular dogmas. Yet we can infer broader points from what he has to say. For one, the anonymity and secrecy surrounding pornography, of the actors and the viewers, indicate that shame, an instinctive reaction to pornography, indicates there’s something wrong with it. Secondly, porn, by its very nature, dehumanizes the participants by reducing them to a collection of parts that have no purpose other than to gratify sexual desire. And thirdly, supporting the sexual gratification market that is porn, also supports awful practices as sex slavery and rape by validating the general idea that it’s okay to view some women, or all women, as nothing but objects of lust.

Those who subscribe to the ideas of the growing sex-positive movement, however, would not recognize this wholly negative portrayal of pornography. Sexuality, they say, is not only natural, but as valuable a characteristic of the human personality as reason or creativity. It originates from the best parts of human nature: empathy, sympathy, cooperation, our rich emotionality, the urge to create new life. It’s one of the most exciting ways that humans can bring each other joy, and unite in one of the most emotionally intense, intimate ways that we can. In short, sex is beautiful, and the ways in which we enjoy it can be, and should be, as variable as is the range of human personality itself. It’s precisely because of patriarchy and religion, in fact, that human sexuality has been shamed, perverted, twisted, and portrayed as ugly and exploitative in all contexts outside of the confines of male-dominated monogamy. That type of sex-negative religious view, in turn, is a regrettable inheritance from our evolutionary ancestors, who felt the need to exert control of women’s sexuality in the competition to successfully procreate with limited resources. When religion and patriarchy lose their influence, sexuality can again be freely expressed in all its joy and beauty, and the religiously-imposed shame will melt away. After all, as Mark Twain says, ‘Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.’

Pornography, then, in this view, is to sexuality as academia and the scientific community are to intelligence, and sculpture and novels are to creativity: an expression of our sexual nature. There’s bad pornography, and good pornography, just as there are harmful scientific theories such as eugenics, and clunky, tacky, poorly written novels such as ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘Naked Came the Stranger’, and lousy art such as Dan Lacey’s pancake and unicorn paintings (though hilarious!)

So why is sex the one part of the human nature whose expression and gratification we consider most taboo even as it’s most alluring? Why single it out this way? We don’t consider gratifying hunger and thirst as shameful, nor other needs and desires such as art, music, or intellectual stimulation. What is it about sex that engaging in it, and portraying it, is considered dehumanizing in all but the very narrow context of marriage, when it’s such a very human thing for all to do and to desire? Why is considered so good and yet so bad?

Let’s explore the problem of treating sex differently than other aspects of human nature by considering a rather extreme example. I read an opinion piece the other day about Somaly Mam and her apparently now-dubious credentials as an advocate against sex trafficking. The author makes what I think is an excellent point: Mam would ‘liberate’ sex-workers only to place them in what many might call ‘honest’ work: jobs in the apparel industry, where in Cambodia, as in many other places where sex-trafficking is a big problem, it’s a free-for-all. There are few to no human rights protections or regulations, and the women work long, back-breaking hours for little pay in awful conditions. It’s that, or starve, so there’s no real choice for most of these women. So what makes the sweatshop job more ‘dignified’? In both cases, the women have little to no autonomy, and are treated with contempt (perhaps, one might argue, more so in the sweatshop job, since the woman is not even considered a ‘possession’, and therefore of some personal value to the owner!) Is it the only the fact that it’s there’s sex involved that makes the latter condition of miserable servitude somehow better than the former? We would probably hear many on the anti-pornography side of the argument say that, of course, both are examples of terrible behavior of the slavers and of the sweatshop owners, but I would wager that they would not be impassioned advocates of labor unions, minimum wage laws, and regulations as they might be anti-sex-work activists.

The porn industry does not, for the most part, resemble the terrible practice of sex slavery, so considering them side by side is only useful insofar as it helps us recognize our own often inconsistent attitudes about sex and respect for our fellow human beings. So let’s return to a less dramatic example, where autonomy is not in question. Does the dehumanization lie in portraying a woman in such a way as to present only one aspect of her nature for the satisfaction of the audience, in this case her sexuality? How about when she is ‘reduced’ to another aspect of her person, say her physical appearance? Let’s take the example of a model for fine art, or for fashion photography. She is chosen because she is beautiful (or interesting-looking, for fits the chosen profile, or whatever), and is paid to stay still while the artist captures the outward appearance of her body, and is dismissed when the work is complete. Is she dehumanized then? How about any interaction in which a human being is only considered in the light of the narrow role they play in the other’s life in that moment, the waiter, the conversationalist at the bar, the cashier, the barista, the taxi driver, the person who makes the clothes one buys, the arms dealer? They are anonymous, or will be except during that particular transaction, and they will never be seen again. Are they dehumanized too? Why is it that interacting with another person in only their role as a sexual being more dehumanizig than interacting with them only insofar as they play a different role?

One may reply, that sex is deeply intimate and meaningful, where a painting a portrait is not (necessarily, anyway), nor is ordering food or coffee or buying stuff, nor chatting up a stranger at a bar. But why must sex always be intimate and meaningful? Just as conversation can be intimate and meaningful, it can also be casual, or meaningful but not lasting (that fascinating, intelligent fellow traveler on an overnight flight who shared the best stories and ideas you ever heard which stayed for you for life, while you never see them again), or baby talk that the infant will not remember, or part of the larger conversation a committed pair have over their shared lifetime. Yet all of those types of communication are an important part of a full life. So it goes with all other parts and products of human nature. Just because it can be deeply intimate and meaningful and long-lasting, doesn’t mean it has to be; there’s room for simple, easy, non-committed encounters as well, isn’t there?

Again, what’s so special about sex?

For the last half-dozen paragraphs, I’ve offered arguments and counter-examples from the sex-positive perspective against the anti-pornography view I (admittedly briefly) summarized at the outset. (Since I outlined only those arguments I could muster that have a broader-than-religious applicatio, it was necessarily relatively brief). Intellectually, I sympathize with the latter, since they not only harmonize best with a naturalistic philosophy most informed with verifiable evidence, but are more consistent with the values of autonomy and liberty. Yet anti-pornography advocates makes some valuable points, too, as we shall see.

Thus far, we’ve considered arguments in favor of anti-pornography and pro-pornography (or at least anti-anti-pornography) ideas. But how do they play out in real life? Is pornography really as nasty, destructive, and shameful as some say, or as pro-human, life-affirming, nature-celebrating as others say? What does porn really look like out there, and what is its actual effect?

Here’s where I think the anti-pornographers have a point: much of the actual, mainstream pornography doesn’t seem to celebrate the same degree of respect for autonomy, diversity, and positive-body-image values that the sex-positive community has. Mainstream porn seems to chew women (and men) up and spit them out in the same way as Hollywood and the tabloids do (and these days, even Fox News and CNN!). The only people that are considered sexy enough to be featured are the hard-bodied, perfectly evenly tanned, straight and/or blonde haired, fake-white-teeth, heavily made up, simultaneously tiny-waisted and big-titted (or -cocked) stars of Barbie and Ken’s dreams. If you want to be a porn star and aren’t born with this set of attributes, under the knife and chemicals you go! There is porn made for people with other body types who wish to act in it, but as of yet, it’s generally of the boutique, Good Vibrations variety (G.V. is like Whole Foods, for the socially-conscious and horny). As of now, the body-positive attitudes celebrated in those wonderful You-Tube manifestos have not yet influenced the mainstream porn industry, just as they have not influenced Hollywood or news outlets.

I wish the porn industry overall actually looked more like the sex-positive activists’ vision, I really do! One day it may, when people grow tired of the monotony of seeing people of a only very few body types represented. Real-girl-next-door, all-natural, widows, Wallendorf Venuses, seniors, divorcees with empty nest syndrome, all of these may one day be represented as widely, and more personally, in mainstream porn as they are in people’s actual day to day fantasies and moments of curiosity. But I doubt it will happen anytime soon, if beauty magazine covers and increasing rates of plastic surgery are any indication. When it comes to body-shaming, it seems the narrow conception of beauty that informs mainstream pornography, as in all those other aforementioned public arenas: the only beauty that is celebrated is of such a rare type, and so many slice and paint themselves to artificially achieve it, that most women and girls are left to feel self-conscious and in some way not valued, since most don’t look like that standard. So they binge and purge, cut and paste, and smash themselves into ill-fitting clothing and tottering shoes.

Yet it’s not all bad news with mainstream pornography. When women are supposedly more dehumanized than ever through its unprecedented consumption as well as its extreme appearance standards, it’s also the era of unprecedented levels of legal protection of pornography actors, and of moral attitudes against the their oppression, in all categories of sex work. State by state, country by country, developed nations are instituting health regulations, labor unions, and laws that protect sex workers from the disease, exploitation, coercion, and violence that plagued them as long as sex work as existed (as the ‘oldest profession’, that’s a long time!). Sex workers, from pornography actors to prostitutes, need to worry less and less that they will be further victimized by the police or by the courts when they report crimes done against them, and sex trafficking, sex with minors, pimping, and other crimes of coercion (and patriarchy!) are less and less morally and legally acceptable than the sex-for-pay itself.

So on the whole, I find must side with the sex-positive community in the matter of pornography. Their arguments, as I interpret them, are not only more logically consistent with what we observe in human nature and behavior, but are better aligned with what we actually see happening when it comes to protecting and caring for women and everyone else in porn. But we must keep in mind the nastier elements that are still very characteristic of the market overall, that I think my cousin and some others in the discussion recognized. There is a significant level of disrespect for our fellow human beings in the industry at large, and we must keep up the good fight against all manner of body-shaming, violence, exploitation, and coercion that are still endemic in porn.

P.S. It may seem odd that, throughout this post, I never refer to my cousin and his wife by their names, though they made their names public in the blog post discussion. My purpose is (somewhat smart-alecky, my apologies if my little joke offends!) to illustrate the point: perhaps it’s best to let people make their names public when and if they want to, when it comes to such a still-delicate subject. While it’s true that many porn actors have published their names, it’s often with the understanding that the only people likely to notice are in the porn-making and porn-watching communities, not likely to be seen by grandmas and co-workers who may not understand or agree with their choices due to the stigma that remains. The choice should be left to the porn actors publish their names more widely; it’s up to the rest of us to make the public sphere a more welcome, less harmful place to do so.

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

Sources and inspiration:

– Thanks to my cousin and his wife for starting such a fascinating and complex discussion of pornography in the context of naming versus anonymity, which brings to bear so many important and practical issues: human nature, sexuality, morality, the meaning of dignity, autonomy, and so much more

– My husband Bryan, whose intelligent conversation inspired and informed this piece throughout, besides being the most beautiful and sexy man I’ve ever had the pleasure to behold both naked and clothed.

– My sister Therese and my dear buddy Kristin, who also offered valuable insights, and patiently put up with my pestering them with counterexamples and devil’s-advocacy

– Dan Savage http://www.savagelovecast.com/

– Greta Christina http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/

– All whose work I linked to throughout the article

Last Day in Edinburgh, May 13th, 2014

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Amy M Cools

I’m sitting here in James Court, having a pint at the Jolly Judge, under a cozy little overhang, watching the rain fall all around me. It started out as a sunny day, with a brilliant blue sky with scattered big puffy white clouds, probably even a hot spring day by Scottish standards.

I’ve been wandering Edinburgh all day to say goodbye to the city, and started by walking the length of the Water of Leith again, from Murrayfield Stadium to Canonmills this time; I’ll be adding some more pictures to my photojournal of that lovely place.

Then I pop by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, since it’s on my way to the bus stop where I’m to transfer. I had forgotten to take a picture of the sculptures of David Hume and Adam Smith that adorn the southeast tower (which I’ll be adding to my account of that day), and I chat a bit with Sarah at the information desk, such a sweet woman!

I return to Easter Road to a wonderful bakery called The Manna House, a new favorite haunt, where I celebrate with a piece of chocolate pistachio opera cake and a creamy coffee. If you ever come to Edinburgh, be sure to come here, everything they make is as delicious as it is pretty.

Then over to Calton Hill, to say farewell to the mortal remains of the great thinker I came here to discover in his hometown. As anyone would in my place, I feel deeply moved, my chest tight, my eyes prickly. Is there someone you deeply admire, where you’ve often felt that bittersweet ache that you so wish you could meet them, knowing you never could except through the artifacts, and more importantly, the words and ideas, they left behind? Then you know how I’m feeling just now.

Then to the Scottish National Gallery (not to be confused with National Portrait Gallery) home to some of the great masterpieces of the world. I discover that one of my very favorite Rembrandt paintings here! That cheers me up quite a bit.

About ten minutes after I go inside, I hear the rain start to pour, and see the lightning flash through the skylight. I decide this would be a good place to linger ’till they close at five. And as soon as I leave, the rain abruptly stops, and I’m greeted to this spectacular sky again:

What a nice place Scotland is in May! The weather is changeable and keeps you on your toes, but it’s exciting in its variety. And I realize I just can’t bring myself to go back to the library and research and write anymore, as much as I intended to. I just have to walk around the city as much as I can in the time I have left, and besides, I’ve gathered a lot of material at this point. More to come on that.

Which brings me again to where I am, the first Hume site I came across when I got here: he lived somewhere in James Court with his sister for a number of years (as I mentioned in my first blog post). I think this was his second house in Edinburgh he lived in as an adult, after his Riddle’s Court sojourn.

Soon, I’ll be having dinner with my kind and friendly hosts, Adam and Krystallenia, and early in the morning getting on a plane to return to my loving husband, my family and friends, and my beautiful California. And as soon as I can, I’ll be back, next time with my Bryan.

Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, entirely supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

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Water of Leith

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Amy M Cools

Among my very favorite discoveries in Edinburgh is the walkway along the Water of Leith, a small river that runs through the city a little south of the center of town. You duck down below the city into a little ravine, and as you walk, you find spectacular series of the prettiest views you’ll ever see, so lush and green and full of the sound of rushing water and birdsong. The mills where they ground the town’s flour used to be here, and now and again you can see the remnants of the old structures; look for them in the stone wheels, waterfalls, and other stone artifacts in and near the water.

On Sunday night, I took the very long way home, and walked the river path, which runs mostly uninterrupted, from Stonebridge to Roseburg Gardens, a walk of a few miles. I had visited the river a few times at this point, but this time I wanted to see the length of it all at once. I went again on Tuesday, my last day in Edinburgh, and stretched the route a little, this time starting at Murrayfield Stadium (where I came across the heron) and ending at Canonmills.

Here’s a series of photos, in no particular order, except for the first few. I first visited the riverside below the Dean Bridge, where there’s a cozy little village that looks like this

And here it is, the Water of Leith

See the heron?

Hume Sites and Monuments, Part 3

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Amy M Cools

I enjoy a pint at the Abbotsford pub, traditionally a literary hangout, as I begin this account. Here’s hoping I’ll absorb more of that skill!I’m here at the Abbotsford because it’s near the site where I returned a couple days ago, to see if I could find that invisible plaque marking the site of David Hume’s New Town house. I’ve done some more digging in the meantime, and found that I had formed the wrong impression from my original source. I’ve found some photos of the actual plaque, which is actually just carved into the stone of the building, rather than the embossed brass plate I conceive of from the word ‘plaque’. Another traveler’s article I’ve discovered helpfully remarked it’s higher up than one might expect. Also, it’s at what’s now 21 St David’s St and 8 Rose St, which numbers are on different sides of the same building, not 8 St David’s as the address had been numbered once upon a time.

So here’s the plaque, on this building right by pretty St Andrew’s square, right across the street from Jenner’s. Can you see it?

Look up, way up, above the gray stone part of the building, between the windows.

Up, up, up…..

There it is, up there, near the upper right of this photo. It reads ‘On a house in this site David Hume lived, 1771 – 1776’. This is also where he died.

I also happen to be waiting for someone right across the street from Hume’s statue on the Royal Mile the other day, and while waiting, I decided to snap some photos of passersby rubbing the statues toe for luck, so that some of Hume’s knowledge would rub off on them. I wrote a little essay about that practice.

I’ve been tentatively planning to go to Chirnside, the place where Hume grew up. The house is no longer there, but the gardens are, and the place where the house was is well marked. The fares turn out to be quite expensive, and since the house isn’t there anymore, it seems a lot to pay since I’m traveling on the cheap. I decide to spend the money instead enjoying my remaining time in Edinburgh, immersed in the place, eating locally made delicious food. So I go and have some marvelous pastries at The Manna House instead, planning to visit Chirnside next time I’m here, hopefully on a bike tour.

The last of the David Hume-related sites I visit today is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It’s even more beautiful than I expected, inside and out. Sculptures of Hume and his friend Adam Smith, philosopher and economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, adorn the southeast tower.

Allan Ramsey as a young man

Allan Ramsey’s famous portrait of Hume is here, the portrait where’s he’s facing the artist, wearing a gold-lace-trimmed red jacket. Here’s the artist and some info about him. First, the artist as a young man:

Allan Ramsey as an older man

Here’s a little more about Allan Ramsey, David Hume, and the Scottish Enlightenment….

And about David Hume and his portrait..

David Hume by Allan Ramsey, 1766, oil on canvas

Definitely a guy I’d like to have dinner and drinks with, and hours of conversation! A genial man who’s seen the world and knows how to eat well, aside from his intellectual achievements.

What I hadn’t been expecting to find, when coming here to see this portrait was the sheer number of portraits I’d find of friends, associates, and other people whose lives intersected with Hume’s.

Here’s a series of portraits of these people, preceded by the plaques identifying the subject and the artist, and/or telling the story of their relation to Hume. I’ll start with Adam Smith, a good friend of Hume’s, who was influenced by him, supported him in the difficulties he faced due to his unorthodox views, and can be credited most with providing us the account of his last days:

The Author of the Wealth of Nations [Adam Smith] by John Kaye

This next guy shares the same name that Hume was born with; Hume changed the spelling of his last name from ‘Home’ because he was writing for an international audience, most of whom would not know from the spelling that the name is pronounced ‘Hume’ in Scotch-English.

And here’s a last little portrait, a miniature in cameo by this guy…

James Tassie, miniaturist who created the cameo portrait of David Hume below

Cameo portrait of David Hume by James Tassie

It’s hard to take a good photo if it because it’s in a glass case high above my head with many other cameo portraits by Tassie. This cameo was completed a few years after Hume’s death.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery ends up being one of my favorite museums I visit, not only because of the beautiful artwork and fascinating stories I discover, but because the whole building is lovely, the lighting is perfect, and the feel of the place makes you want to linger. I spend much more time here than I planned, the time just flies by….

So I think my Sites and Monuments series will end here; the last couple days I’ll spend researching, writing, and just wandering and admiring. Soon to come: more ponderings on various subjects, inspired by my man Hume.

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The Tale of the Magic Toe – Superstition? Or What?

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Amy M Cools

I attended a meeting of the Humanist Society of Scotland the other day, and some of us were chatting about my David Hume project. They recommended sites to see and people and ideas to add to my research, and I was telling them what I had seen and discovered so far. They also regaled me with some Hume anecdotes. Such a friendly group of people, so engaged with important issues of the day, and so welcoming and ready to chat and have a good time!

One thing that came up was the classical statue of Hume on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh’s Old Town. I noticed that the left toe of the statue is polished to a bright brassy shine, from the tradition of students and others rubbing it for luck, so as to absorb some of his wisdom.

Some who I was talking to laughed, as if at a friendly little joke, while others took it a little more seriously. What would Hume, the greatest philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, skeptic, naturalist, and pragmatist, think about this seemingly superstitious practice? Some thought he would very much disapprove, as Richard Wiseman does.

That’s a very good question, I thought. Although he did not approve of superstitious thinking generally, would he consider the toe-rubbing an example of real superstition? Would he take it seriously?

A few days later, standing in the square across from the statue, I watched the crowd go by as I was waiting. Many paused and looked a little wonderingly at the big shiny toe, while others stopped, usually people who were in groups, and rubbed it, laughing and chatting. There was an Asian couple who did this more solemnly and almost ritualistically, rubbing the toe and than their heads, as if to physically rub in the absorbed knowledge like a salve. The scene, to anyone who is not just a little too grouchy for their own good (I think), was a charming and friendly one.

In thinking it over, I recalled another Hume story recounted, for my benefit, at the HSS meeing. One day, Hume was crossing the bog created by the recent draining of the Nor Loch; he was going from his house in Old Town to check on the progress of the house he was having built in New Town. On the way, he slipped in the mud, and partially because it was slippery and partly because he was a fat man, he couldn’t get up. He asked a passing sturdy fishseller for help, but she knew who he was: a reputed atheist. She refused to help, unless he recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. He obliged, she offered him her hand, and they went on their way. For some time afterwards, this was a favorite funny anecdote of Hume’s, and he referred to her as the most astute theologian that he had ever met.

So I was thinking: would Hume, who recognized the humor, even charm, in the story of the fishseller, really disapprove of the toe-rubbing? He was such a sociable person; he thought that the most virtuous people were the charming, friendly, conversational, generous people. Sharing a happy time and a laugh is among the best things one person can do for another.

My conclusion: Hume himself would look on the toe-rubbers, smile and laugh, and probably join in, getting great satisfaction out of the joke. I think that sometimes, in the pursuit of reason, some of us can forget the role that the little rituals and talismans we create are a sort of game or story that we engage in to facilitate friendly communication, and play. This can go for astrology, tarot cards, knocking on wood, whatever. I’m not talking about those who sell their services, hoodwinking people into believing that if they pay enough money, their fortunes can be changed. I’m talking about how most people actually engage in these practices. They might say sometimes that they believe, maybe a little, in the magic power of these practices and objects.

But if you observe people closely, most carry on as if they didn’t believe in actual magic. They still go to work, study hard, pay for insurance, and go about the business of life as if it’s up to them to take responsibility for as much of their future as they have control over, whether or not they had just read the tarot or rubbed a brass toe.

People need stories and games, rituals and talismans, and some need these things more than others. it’s as ancient a part of our nature as just about anything else. By taking it all too seriously, committed rational thinkers run the danger of giving so-called magical thinking too much credit, and too much power. All of these things are human creations, and we should use them only insofar as they help our lives, as opportunities for fun and human bonding.

So as long as your life is not hindered by superstition, play with those cards with the mysterious and pretty pictures, splash around the ‘holy’ water, and touch the ‘lucky’ statue! Chill out, and have a good time, people! I believe this philosopher wouldn’t mind a bit.

~ Ordinary Philosophy and its Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas series is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Please offer your support today!

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