Tag Archives: Human Rights

Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July Speech at Rochester, NY’s Old Corinthian Hall, 1852

Posted on by
Drawing of Corinthian Hall, image credit Rochester Public Library Local History Division (note it's also called The Atheaneum in the subtitle)

Drawing of Corinthian Hall, image credit Rochester Public Library Local History Division (note that it’s still titled The Athenaeum)

Excerpt from Frederick Douglass Rochester NY Sites, Day 1 published May 23, 2016

I head east on Main… to the site of the old Corinthian Hall, which, according to a couple of sources, was near the end of Corinthian Street behind the Reynolds Arcade, where the parking garage is now. Originally called The Athenaeum, as were so many public halls of the time, it was renamed Corinthian Hall after the style of the classical columns on its stage, and the building was widely famed for its beauty. Corinthian Street was also renamed, and most internet sources I find say it was originally named Exchange Place.  However, I discover that these two pieces of received internet wisdom appear to be a bit off. Poring over old maps in Rochester Library’s online images database, I find one published in 1851, two years after the hall was built in 1849. For one, I find that while the street was named Exchange Place before it was named Corinthian, it was named Work Street at the time the hall was built. Secondly, I find that it was not actually under the parking garage at the end of the street. It was actually directly across from the back entrance of the Reynolds Arcade, where a parking lot and a glassy midcentury office building now stand. The 1851 map was a little behind the times: Corinthian Hall and Exchange Place had already received their new names in 1850, but the map retains their original designations.

Douglass spoke frequently at what he referred to as ‘the beautiful Corinthian Hall’ in the 1850’s. In fact, he  ‘lectured [there] every Sunday evening during an entire winter’ as he wrote in his Life and Times. He delivered a speech here on Aug 21, 1852 at the Fugitive Slave Convention, in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act. Then in July 1853, Douglass presided over the National Convention of Colored Men in Rochester, which became a center for the antislavery movement; his biographer Philip S. Foner called this convention ‘the most important’. This is where the pressing problem of lack of unification between various factions of the antislavery movement were identified and discussed, as well as the relative lack of black leadership. Though this Rochester convention still failed to bring about a unified black political movement, like the previous one in Troy discussed in an earlier account, it sent a powerful message that all black Americans had a powerful champion in Douglass.

Corinthian St, north of Main, around the site of old Corinthian Hall

The rear of the Reynolds Arcade facing onto Corinthian St, north of Main, across from the site of old Corinthian Hall

View from west end of Corinthian St, showing site of old Corinthian Hall at right where the glassy midcentury building now stands, photo 2016 by Paige Sloan

View from west end of Corinthian St, showing site of old Corinthian Hall at right where the glassy midcentury building now stands, photo 2016 courtesy of Paige Sloan. Note the Corinthian columns on the First National Bank of Rochester-Old Monroe County Savings Bank Building, built in 1924, in the rear of the photo.

But the single most important Douglass moment in this hall happened on July 5, 1852, when he delivered his powerful ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?‘ speech for the first time. He delivered it on the 5th instead of the 4th, he said, because the latter was a day of mourning for himself and his people. This speech was Douglass’ Gettysburg Address, his Second Inaugural, his ‘To Be or Not to Be?’, where his powers of oratory and his eloquence were in full force. The speech is long, opening with a reflection on the history of the United States’ founding and its promise of renewed freedom for all. Then he pours out his lament:

‘I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn….

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.’

If what he had to say that day didn’t make people ashamed to celebrate liberty for themselves while denying it to others, no words could.

* Read the full story of this day following the life and ideas of Frederick Douglass here

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!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sources and Inspiration

‘33. Corinthian Hall / Academy of Music‘, The Freethought Trail website

‘Corinthian Hall (venue)‘, under ‘Charter Inductees’, Rochester Music Hall of Fame website

Cornell, Silas, ‘Map of the City of Rochester‘, 1863. From Rochester Library Digital Collections, Monroe County Library System website.

Douglass, Frederick. Autobiographies (includes Narrative…, My Freedom and my Bondage, and Life and Times). With notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Volume compilation by Literary Classics of the United States. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, July 5, 1852. Teaching American History (website)

‘The Era of Academies in Monroe County‘, From Rochester Library Digital Collections, Monroe County Library System website.

First National Bank of Rochester-Old Monroe County Savings Bank Building. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Foner, Philip S. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 1-4. New York: International Publishers, 1950.

McFeely, William. Frederick Douglass. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.

McKelvey, Blake. ‘Historic Antecedents from the Crossroads Project‘. From the Rochester History Journal, Oct 1864, Vol. 26, No. 4.

Remembering Margaret Fell

Posted on by
Margaret Fell, with George Fox before the judges, from a painting by J. Pettie 1663, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Margaret Fell with George Fox before the judges, from a painting by J. Pettie, 1663

Margaret Fell was born on some unknown date in 1614, so let’s take this occasion to remember her on the date of her death, April 23rd, 1702.

Fell’s lived a life as passionate as it was long. She was an unconventional thinker for her time, a zealous and progressive religious activist at times imprisoned for her beliefs, a prolific writer, well-traveled, a mother of eight children and a wife twice.

An early adherent and eloquent promoter of Quakerism, Fell is now considered one of its founders. She converted to Quakerism after hearing a sermon by one of its most charismatic preachers, George Fox, and almost immediately launched into a lifetime of hosting Quaker meetings and speaking out on behalf of her new religion. After her husband died some years later, Fell married Fox, probably more as a co-missionary than as a romantic partner since their work, travels, and imprisonments kept them apart for much of their marriage.

As I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the history of human rights, I’ve long admired the Quakers because, along with Unitarians and Deists, so many have been leaders in the struggle to expand, establish, and promote them. That’s because these faiths emphasize the importance of individual conscience, the primacy of the human mind, God’s rational nature, and the moral equality of all human beings.

Fell believed in the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light which God has caused to shine equally in the hearts of all beings; all we need do is heed it. Therefore, one does not need ministers, priests, or any other authorities or intercessors to achieve salvation. And because God has created everyone for the same purpose and gave everyone that light, everyone is spiritually equal and capable of understanding and proclaiming the Truth. We can see how this doctrine, central to Quakerism, readily aligns with human rights movements centered on a belief human spiritual and intellectual equality. The right of women to speak in church and write religious texts, in her time limited to men, was a cause particularly dear to Fell’s heart. While Fell’s belief in the equality of women was limited to their role as spiritual beings, Quakerism tended to encourage ever-more progressive beliefs in its adherents. Over time, Quakers came to be leaders in the abolitionist and pacifist movements, promoting the right of all to receive equal and universal education and for women’s rights in social and political spheres as well.

In light of her achievements as a female religious pioneer, and the human rights advances facilitated by the Quaker faith she helped found, Fell’s contributions should continue to be remembered and celebrated.

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

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sources and inspiration

Broad, Jacqueline, ‘Margaret Fell‘, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Jacoby, Susan. Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion. New York: Pantheon, 2016 (see chapter on Margaret Fell)

Are Human Rights Anything More than Legal Conventions? by John Tasioulas

Posted on by

Eleanor Roosevelt and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

We live in an age of human rights. The language of human rights has become ubiquitous, a lingua franca used for expressing the most basic demands of justice. Some are old demands, such as the prohibition of torture and slavery. Others are newer, such as claims to internet access or same-sex marriage. But what are human rights, and where do they come from? This question is made urgent by a disquieting thought. Perhaps people with clashing values and convictions can so easily appeal to ‘human rights’ only because, ultimately, they don’t agree on what they are talking about? Maybe the apparently widespread consensus on the significance of human rights depends on the emptiness of that very notion? If this is true, then talk of human rights is rhetorical window-dressing, masking deeper ethical and political divisions.

Philosophers have debated the nature of human rights since at least the 12th century, often under the name of ‘natural rights’. These natural rights were supposed to be possessed by everyone and discoverable with the aid of our ordinary powers of reason (our ‘natural reason’), as opposed to rights established by law or disclosed through divine revelation. Wherever there are philosophers, however, there is disagreement. Belief in human rights left open how we go about making the case for them – are they, for example, protections of human needs generally or only of freedom of choice? There were also disagreements about the correct list of human rights – should it include socio-economic rights, like the rights to health or work, in addition to civil and political rights, such as the rights to a fair trial and political participation?

But many now argue that we should set aside philosophical wrangles over the nature and origins of human rights. In the 21st century, they contend, human rights exist not in the nebulous ether of philosophical speculation, but in the black letter of law. Human rights are those laid down in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the various international and domestic laws that implement it. Some who adopt this line of thought might even invoke the 18th-century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who contemptuously dismissed the idea of natural rights existing independently of human-made laws as ‘rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts’.

Now, it is true that since the middle of the previous century an elaborate architecture of human rights law has emerged at the international, regional and domestic levels, one that is effective to wildly varying degrees. And for most practical purposes, it might be that we can simply appeal to these laws when we talk about human rights. But, ultimately, this legalistic approach is unsatisfactory.

To begin with, the law does not always bind all those we believe should abide by human rights. For example, some states have not ratified human-rights treaties, or have ratified them subject to wide-ranging exceptions (‘reservations’) that blunt their critical edge. A country such as Saudi Arabia can have a seat on the UN Human Rights Council yet persist in severe forms of gender discrimination – for example, prohibiting women from driving – because it made its acceptance of human-rights treaties subject to an override in the case of conflict with Islamic law.

Moreover, the international law of human rights, like international law generally, almost exclusively binds states. Yet many believe that non-state agents, such as corporations, whose revenues in some instances exceed the GDP of all but the wealthiest nations, also bear grave human-rights responsibilities. When manufacturers such as Nike use 12-year-olds to stitch soccer balls in Pakistan, or internet service providers such as Yahoo secretly hand over the emails of dissidents to the Chinese government, many critics decry not just corporate malfeasance but human-rights violations. And this is so even if the corporation has complied with the laws of the country in which it is operating.

It is precisely in response to the threat to human rights posed by corporations that the ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ (2011), the brainchild of the Harvard political scientist John Ruggie, were established. Endorsed by the UN, the principles are not legally binding either on states or corporations. Instead, they aim to provide an authoritative statement of human-rights responsibilities that apply directly to corporations, quite apart from any legal obligations they might also bear. Ruggie’s ambition is that the principles will eventually inform corporate decision-making at all levels, illustrating the fact that human rights go beyond law and its enforcement.

Yet there is a deeper problem with identifying human rights with existing laws. Laws are the creations of fallible human beings. They might be good or bad, and so are always subject to interpretation and criticism in terms of independent moral principles. The international law of human rights, on this view, does not establish which human rights exist; instead, its goal is to implement moral rights we already possess, simply by virtue of our humanity. Slavery, torture and racial discrimination did not suddenly become human-rights violations only when they were legally prohibited. It is the other way round: we have human-rights law in order to give force to human rights that in some sense pre-exist their legal recognition. Unfortunately, no consensus has yet emerged among philosophers or anyone else on how human rights are to be defended as objective truths, independent of law.

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty sought a way out of this impasse. Although a staunch liberal, he turned his back on the philosophical enterprise of attempting to give a rational justification for human rights. He judged that activity to be pointless now that human rights are a deeply embedded fact of our culture, not just our law. How can we justify human rights when they seem more compelling to us liberal Westerners than any other idea we might use to justify them? The real task that confronts us, Rorty thought, was the practical one of enhancing compliance with human rights worldwide, not the intellectual one of grounding rights in the fabric of reality.

A similarly dismissive attitude is adopted by Ruggie, who conceives of his Guiding Principles not as reflecting ‘true’ moral demands, but as rooted in empirically measurable ‘social norms and expectations’. At a more sophisticated level, the late American political philosopher John Rawls, in his last work The Law of Peoples (1999), insisted that in a pluralistic world we cannot build our public commitment to human rights on any controversial account of the ‘truth’ about humanity or the good. We have to return, instead, to shared ideas embedded in the culture of a liberal democracy.

But is it enough to rely on the supposed fact that human rights are embedded in a liberal democratic culture? Or do we need to be able to step back from that culture and offer an objective justification for the principles embedded in it, as the philosophers have long supposed? The problem is that social expectations and cultural assumptions not only vary significantly across societies, but that they are fragile: various forces ranging from globalisation to propaganda can cause them to change dramatically or even wither away. Would rights against gender or racial discrimination disappear if sexist or racist attitudes come to predominate?

The question is not fanciful. Once apparently settled beliefs about the impermissibility of torture or the rights of refugees have recently suffered a backlash. There can be backsliding as well as progress, with no guarantees either way. Social expectations and deep cultural assumptions are no more a sufficient basis for human rights than the law is. There is a fatal contradiction in defending human rights against the rising authoritarianism of a ‘post-truth’ era while simultaneously abandoning the belief that our commitment to those rights is itself grounded in the truth, and being prepared to defend it on that basis.

My own view is that human rights are rooted in the universal interests of human beings, each and every one of whom possesses an equal moral status arising from their common humanity. In other words, in defending human rights, we will need to appeal to the inherent value of being a member of the human species and, in addition, the interests shared by all human beings in things like friendship, knowledge, achievement, play, and so on. And we will need to ask whether these considerations generate duties that are owed to each and every human being. This proposal is hardly uncontroversial. The appeal to the inherent value of humanity will be contested by some as a brute prejudice – a ‘speciesism’ on a par with racism. Similarly, the appeal to universal interests will be contested by those who think that human rights are ultimately about respecting individual freedom regardless of whether it advances the right-holder’s well-being.

Whether I’m right or not, I am convinced that we cannot sustain our commitment to human rights on the cheap, by invoking only the law or the assumptions of our liberal democratic culture. Only a deeper justification can explain why we are right to embody them in the law, or maintain a liberal democratic culture, in the first place. This has precisely been the aim of philosophical defences of human rights from the 12th century up until very recent times. To keep our human rights culture in good order, we cannot avoid engaging with the question of justification. And we should think of this not as the exclusive domain of professional philosophers, but as a process of public reasoning to which all citizens are called to contribute.Aeon counter – do not remove

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

John Tasioulas is the inaugural Chair of Politics, Philosophy and Law, and director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law at King’s College London. He is working on his latest book, Human Rights: From Morality to Law (forthcoming, OUP). (Bio credit: Aeon)

~ Ordinary Philosophy is a labor of love and ad-free, supported by patrons and readers like you. Any support you can offer will be deeply appreciated!

*All views and opinions expressed by guest writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ordinary Philosophy’s editors and publishers

O.P. Recommends: A Conversation With Michael Ignatieff on Universal Human Rights, Localism, and the Ordinary Virtues at Philosophy 247

Posted on by

President Obama meets with Michael Ignatieff in Ottawa, Canada on Feb. 19, 2009 (from White House photo by Pete Souza)Ignatieff speaking of people he worked with on his travels to uncover people’s actual and expressed beliefs about human rights:

I first heard about Michael Ignatieff on the Philosophy Bites podcast a few years ago, and found his story of transforming himself from an intellectual to a politician and back again very intriguing. Just last week, I was very interested to hear a discussion between him and David Edmonds, co-host of Philosophy Bites and now host of his own podcast Philosophy 24/7.

This time, Ignatieff talks about human rights, a topic he’s been working on deeply for many years. As part of his preparation and research, he traveled the world to uncover people’s actual and expressed beliefs about human rights. What he says about what he learned really struck me:

‘The Human Rights edifice created since 1945 has had a huge effect on the world in the sense of powering the democratic revolution, the self-determination revolution, the civil rights revolution… On the one hand, you get people saying ‘my voice should be heard’… [The idea of] human rights has been influential in creating the tacit presumption… that their voice mattered… I don’t think without the human rights revolution that would have anchored itself in their souls and conscience as much as it is.

On the other hand… human rights is a form of universalism. It says that all human beings matter, and that we have duties to human beings outside our borders, and that it is the human identity that counts in moral judgment. What struck me very much is that people thought they wanted to make a claim of equality for themselves as citizens but not for other people, so equality of voice within the nation state, but no very strong or increased development of a universalist obligation to people beyond states. And that I think is a surprising result, because if human rights means anything, it is, we have this idea of transnational solidarity to people who are not fellow citizens, and so equality for us, not so much equality for strangers.

And this has, needless to say, huge political implications for a whole range of issues, notably refugees and migration…’

Igniateff then goes on to discuss how this great moral innovation, the idea of universal human rights, squares with what Ignatieff calls ‘ordinary virtues’: those interpersonal moral instincts which impel us to deal justly and kindly with those nearest to us, with those we encounter directly and those who share our culture, our language, our belief system, and our family and local community ties. Ignatieff believes that the ordinary virtues are not only compatible with, but necessary for realizing the ideal of human rights in the world. That’s because localism and the ordinary virtues provide us with a key element, that of triage, which makes these great human rights projects scalable, manageable, and effective within localities in a way that the application of universalist principles can’t on their own.

Does Ignatieff succeed in his attempt to reconcile the universalist conception of human rights with localism and the ordinary virtues? What do you think? Find out by listening to this fascinating and informative discussion at Philosophy 24/7

And learn more about the widely accomplished and ever-energetic Michael Ignatieff at:

Michael Ignatieff: Biography – at his website

Michael Ignatieff – by Michael Ray for Encyclopædia Britannica

Michael Ignatieff on Political Theory and Political Practice – discussion at Philosophy Bites podcast

“I Don’t See the President As An Intellectual at All”: A Q&A with Michael Ignatieff – by Isaac Chotiner for  The New Republic, February 20, 2014

Michael Ignatieff, The Intellectual Who Wanted to Be a Politician – by Jordan Michael Smith

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!

New Podcast Episode: Margaret Sanger and Race

Posted on by
Dr Dorothy Ferebee - Planned Parenthood as a Public Health Measure for the Negro Race, speech for Birth Control Federation of America, 1942

Dr Dorothy Ferebee – Planned Parenthood as a Public Health Measure for the Negro Race, speech for Birth Control Federation of America, 1942

Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

Since the earliest days of her birth control activism, Margaret Sanger has been often accused of being a racist, among other things. To many of her critics, her birth control advocacy must be understood as a nefarious plot to undermine human morals and decency, and any means of twisting her message to convey this are fair game. As I discuss in an earlier piece, a favored method of attack, which persists to this day, is to present a sentence or phrase of Sanger’s out of context to ‘prove’ her ‘true’ beliefs about people of other races. Her detractors even claim that she was on a genocidal mission to reduce or even exterminate black people, Jews, and other immigrant groups by destroying future generations. Never mind that Martin Luther King, Jr. praised her work on behalf of his beleaguered people. Never mind that she worked closely with civil rights leaders such as Mary McLeod Bethune and W.E.B. DuBois. Never mind that she opened clinics to serve black and other minority women because so many existing clinics refused to serve anyone but whites. Never mind that she wrote in 1944:

‘We must protect tomorrow’s Chinese baby and Hindu baby, English and Russian baby, Puerto Rican, Negro and white American babies who will stand side by side… to bring promise of a better future’

Read the written version here

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!

New Podcast Episode: Margaret Sanger NYC Sites, Day 4

Posted on by
Planned Parenthood Clinic at Margaret Sanger Square, Mott and Bleeker Streets, NYC

Planned Parenthood Clinic at Margaret Sanger Square, Mott and Bleeker Streets, NYC

Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

Friday, October 21st, 2016

It’s cold and rainy, so I spend a long morning with my coffee as I do more research. Try as I might, I just can’t identify, with any certainty, the exact site of the Queens County Penitentiary, Long Island City, where Margaret Sanger was imprisoned for thirty days in 1917 for operating her Brownsville birth control clinic. Nor do I locate the site of the original White Plains Hospital where Sanger trained as a nurse. I had pored over the atlases of that town, from that time, in the New York Public Library map division, and I searched assiduously in their digitized records this morning. No luck.

So I finish my account of the first site I visited on Tuesday and publish it, then head out. It keeps raining, but oh well, it’s not a terribly long walk and besides, I welcome a walk in the rain, under my umbrella, of course. The drought back home had been mostly unrelenting for ages and it’s nice to experience a good rain again.

My first destination is Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Center at Mott and Bleecker Streets… Read the written version here

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!

 

Happy Birthday, Jeremy Bentham!

Posted on by
Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon at University College London, 2003 by Michael Reeve, GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2

Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon at University College London, photo 2003 by Michael Reeve

Jeremy Bentham, the great English moral and legal philosopher born on February 15, 1748, was a very strange man. A brilliant one, but strange nonetheless. He was a precocious child and advanced in his studies very early, finding Westminster and Queen’s College at Oxford too easy and therefore rather boring. He was trained as a lawyer but decided not to practice law after hearing William Blackstone’s lectures. Blackstone’s treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England is still considered one of the most authoritative and foundational works on English law, so for a guy to consider them so flawed that he’d want to give up his career seems a bit… well, presumptuous. But he demonstrated his own great intellectual capacities through his lifetime of prolific writing, mostly on legal theory, moral philosophy, and social reform. In the end, he earned the right to a certain degree of arrogance.

Bentham is generally considered the father of utilitarianism, the moral philosophy which judges anything that can be judged as right or wrong, good or evil, according to how conducive it is to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ Utilitarianism, then, is a type of consequentialism, which holds that a thing is right or wrong based on its consequent harms or benefits. Bentham did not invent the principles of utilitarianism; he discovered them in the writings of Cesare Beccaria (who authored the ‘greatest happiness’ axiom), David Hume, Claude Helvétius, and Joseph Priestley. But he spent a lifetime synthesizing these principles into a cohesive, fleshed-out moral philosophy founded on utility, whether a law or action increases or decreases pleasure or happiness. This principle can seem too subjective to apply to matters of law or public policy; after all, what makes one happy can make another less so, and how can we determine whether the happiness of one is greater, or more important, than the happiness of another? Bentham, careful and systematic in his approach to this as he was to everything else, devised his ‘Felicific Calculus’ to solve this problem. Bentham believed that pleasure, a natural phenomenon like everything else in the world, was likewise quantifiable. He hoped his method of assigning unitary measurements to pleasure, then determining their relative values through mathematics, was a way to make his moral philosophy practicable, conducive to real social reform.

To many, the idea that pleasure and happiness could be reduced to mathematical formulas seems very strange; some think he may have had Asperger’s syndrome or another cognitive feature that caused Bentham to view emotion with such scientific detachment. But as socially awkward as he and his ideas often were, his utilitarian philosophy led to him to some moral conclusions that we now consider extremely progressive and much more caring than those typical of his times. For example, he was an early proponent of racial equality, women’s rights, and animal rights. As to animal rights, just as for all classes of human beings, considering only the pleasure and pain of some sentient beings and not others when it comes to morals is unscientific and therefore unjustifiably biased. After all, animals, like all human beings, have feelings too, and their feelings are just as important to them as ours are to us. So, a moral system based on feelings must consider all equally important, so that one unit of pig happiness, for example, is just as morally significant as one unit of human happiness. The only correct way to balance them out in matters of morals and public policy is to apply the Felicific Calculus to determine how much pleasure or pain each experience in any given situation.

At the end of his long and productive life, the committed naturalist arranged to have his body publicly dissected, both for scientific inquiry and to provide an example to others; he believed that a perfectly good body should never go to waste and that everyone should donate their body to science. He also arranged to have his head and skeleton preserved, dressed in his clothes and stuffed to look as lifelike as possible, to be displayed in some public place. The preservation of Bentham’s head, with its glass eyes he had purchased some years before, left much to be desired; the expression it ended up with creeped people out. So his Auto-Icon, as he called it, sits today in its glass case at University College, London with a nice lifelike wax head in its place. His real head is safely stored away where students, prone to stealing over the years in a series of pranks, can no longer get to it.

Read more about the brilliant and eccentric Bentham at:

Jeremy Bentham – by James E. Crimmins for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Jeremy Bentham – University College London website

Jeremy Bentham on the Suffering of Non-Human Animals – Utilitarianism.com

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!

The Right to Be Poor, by Peter Adamson

Posted on by
St Francis of Assisi by Giotto

St Francis of Assisi by Giotto

Peter Adamson just published a most fascinating and insightful essay in Philosophy Now about an aspect of the property rights debate that we rarely address: the right to own nothing. It’s an important question, especially in this culture of hyper-consumerism and the conviction that property ownership is essential to personal and political freedom. But as a certain innovative and humble friar realized in the early 13th century, property ownership can also be a burden, alienating us from one another and from the unencumbered pursuit of spiritual perfection. Perhaps Thomas Jefferson, when writing the Declaration of Independence, had a similar insight as St Francis of Assisi and his mendicants when he adapted John Locke’s principle of ‘life, liberty, and property’ as essential human rights as ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.

Adamson writes:

‘One of my favorite things about the history of philosophy is finding out that ideas we now take for granted originally emerged in surprising ways. I can think of no better example than the notion of a right to own property. Not that we can take it for granted that we have such a right, if we consider the history of communism in the Twentieth Century. Still, it seems such an obvious concept that it must surely always have been with us. But you can make a good case that it was first explicitly articulated in the later Middle Ages. And here’s the surprising part: the thinkers who first explored this notion were actually concerned with their right to own nothing.

They were members of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans. Following the example of their founder, Francis of Assisi, Franciscans argued that spiritual perfection requires the voluntary embrace of poverty. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, they depended on the kindness of strangers, living on charitable donations. Hence the term ‘mendicant’, meaning, ‘given to begging’. Christ and his Apostles, the Franciscans argued, had shown the way by giving up all their possessions. Furthermore, ownership of property is a consequence of the Fall. In a state of innocence there would be no need for possessions, since by generosity of spirit all things would be shared. However, as well as an individual religious commitment, the embrace of poverty amounted to an implicit and sometimes explicit political critique, since the medieval church as an institution most certainly did not embrace poverty. The mendicants’ very existence was a rebuke to the opulence and worldliness of the papal court and the rest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy….’

Read the full article in Philosophy Now

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!

The Key is Activism, Not Persuasion, by Massimo Pigliucci

Posted on by

Here’s a passionate and well-reasoned call to action by one of my favorite philosophers in the public square, Massimo Pigliucci.

Footnotes to Plato

Two kids at the recent women's march in New York (photo by the Author) Two kids at the recent women’s march in New York (photo by the Author)

I’ve been giving a lot of thought about the rise of Trump, and even though I rarely write about explicitly political matters on this blog, this will be one of the exceptions. I think it is necessary. WARNING: unusually strong language ahead, either deal with it or go somewhere else for the day, we’ll be back to normal programming later in the week.

View original post 2,002 more words

Making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good

Posted on by

richard-and-mildred-lovingIt’s not generally a very wise thing to do, but I entered into a little dispute on Facebook a little while ago. It was about Mildred and Richard Loving of Virginia. A friend shared a discussion thread which was mostly very critical of the way that the Lovings are portrayed in their recent namesake movie. The Lovings’ marriage was illegal in 1950’s Virginia because Mildred was a woman of color and Richard was white. They knew this, so a pregnant, 19-year-old Mildred and 25-year-old Richard traveled to Washington, D.C. to be married. But this didn’t help them when it came to state law: marrying out-of-state to avoid Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, then returning to live as husband and wife, was also illegal.

The young man who initiated the Facebook thread (I won’t name names here, since this piece is only about the ideas expressed) invited a discussion of this fact stated in Mildred Loving’s 2008 obituary in Legacy.com:  “Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting“. My friend who shared the thread, an African-American scholar, was also particularly concerned with another aspect of this story, as many others were: Mildred identified herself at the time of her marriage and for the rest of her life as ‘Indian’, not ‘Black’ or ‘Negro’.

The outrage generated by the very young age of Mildred at the beginning of their relationship resulted in the longest string of angry and shocked responses in the thread. One person wrote ‘Look…are we honestly gonna sit here and act like this white man didn’t see a vulnerable young girl and prey on her specifically because she was too young to know better and too Black for anyone to care otherwise? Like come on y’all. This is gross.‘; ‘Why are we pivoting away from it just being predatory behavior for 17yr old young adults to be romantically interested in 11yr old children?; and ‘He was a fucking child molester. It’s starting to make sense to me of why they were allowed to marry…’

Some took the trouble to establish essential facts before passing judgment, asking such important questions as: ‘I’m trying to understand. Do we know if they had sex when she was a child?’ One person quickly responded ‘Does that matter? He began courting her with those intentions at 11, when most girls have yet to even start puberty. He was grooming her, so it doesn’t matter whether he touched her or not, give the psychological implications.’ An even more excitable person cited the marriage itself as evidence that Richard’s interest in Mildred was sexual from the very beginning. And when a particularly fair-minded young man asked people to pause and consider whether the assumption was correct that the ‘courting’ referred to by the obituary necessarily implied sexual interest, such as the way we use the term ‘dating’ today, he was soon accused of  ‘excus[ing] this predatory behavior’ and even lumped in with ‘rape deniers and apologists‘.

But the issue of Mildred’s denying her black ancestry (which, according to the sources I’ve read did exist, however much she denied or downplayed it) generated the most hurt and personal anger: ‘…Mildred Loving was extremely anti-black. Her entire argument was that she was Native American Not black and she never self-identified as black.‘ and from the initiator of the post: ‘…this film looks like and all the press surrounding it has undoubtedly been “post-racial”, white partner fetishist, anti-black trash.’

As I read this thread, I became more and more upset, and more and more defensive of the Lovings. I responded, impetuously, to my friend who shared the thread on Facebook:

‘This thread is awful. The character assassination of these two is unconscionable, especially given the fact that they did so much to give us freedoms we now take so much for granted, and because they are not here to defend themselves. If the obituary is correct in that they started dating [here, I made the same initial mistake as many others by conflating ‘courting’ with ‘dating’] when Mildred was very young, that was another time and place when early dating and marriage was both socially and legally acceptable, and we have no evidence that they had sex before the age of consent at the time. It’s unjust to impose our current laws and standards on them and to pretend we know whatever else was going on. She professed love for him for the rest of her life, and this is evidence that she did not feel that he abused or took advantage of her in any way. In this case, I look to Mildred for the evidence: she, the woman, gets to tell us whether she was sexually abused or harassed. The other issue is Mildred’s self-identification as a Native American. We can assume, to satisfy our own self-righteous feelings, that her motives were ‘anti-black’, and again, it’s an assumption we should be careful in making since she’s not here to ask. But if her grandson is right, she had more Native American ancestors than black ones, so identifying herself as a Native American would make sense. Would she be ‘anti-Native American’, then, if she identified as black, rejecting her predominantly Native American ancestry? The people in this thread are setting her up, in a case of identity politics gone awry, for failure no matter what. Perhaps she identified more with her Native American ancestry, perhaps her chosen self-identity was a method of survival in a society that so oppressed black people, perhaps she thought she was more likely to be able to share a life with Richard if she was Native American rather than black. Again, we can only guess. This thread is one of the most unjust, unfair, intellectually dishonest, anti-woman, anti-Native American, and I argue anti-black verbal-character-lynchings I’ve read in a long time.‘

Why did I (and do) feel so defensive towards the Lovings? My closing sentence went over the top, I suppose. But I think my instinctive reaction was so strong because I’ve admired them and been fascinated by them for so long. I took an avid interest in civil rights history in the sixth grade and this interest has never left me. I’m a bit of a romantic and an optimist, and it’s always been heroes such as the Lovings and other civil rights activists and leaders who have redeemed the human race for me since so many have acted cruelly and unjustly throughout history. But part of my reaction against so many of the things said in this post was the blind ingratitude and self-righteousness I perceived, as I do in so many similar discussions. There’s a distinct and I believe worrying trend of reconsidering all of our social heroes in light of their flaws and to take them down a peg or two, even to the point of destroying their historical reputations. With the exception of a particularly honest few, who also defended the Lovings on consideration of the circumstances and social pressures of their time, so many were ready and even eager to insist that because the Lovings were not perfect, we have the right to assume the worst about their motives and their characters, and therefore, to denigrate their efforts.

I was particularly interested in this response, I’ll call the writer S: ‘It is time that the reality of the lives of this seminal and historical case comes to light. Incidentally, Mildred also did not consider herself Black and did not want too much to do with Black people. I think we need to separate the legal aspects of this case from the personal lives of these people though, because it was critical in overturning the laws of miscegenation and was not just about white men being able to have their way with women of color. It was also critical for protecting Black men in mixed race marriages.‘ I think she’s right that the ‘incidents’ of the case, the details of the personal lives of the people involved, don’t really impact the historical importance of the Supreme Court’s decision in the lives of so many Americans at the time and for the future of the country. The Court’s decision rejected the underlying presumption of anti-miscegenation laws, that ‘blood’ can be ‘corrupted’ by marrying a person of another race, and it more firmly established the American ideal of marriage as a free and equal partnership between two free people, leading to the legalization of gay marriage half a century later. As Justice Earl Warren wrote in his decision in Loving vs. Virginia, ‘The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.’

Yet, by the way, ‘Loving’ the movie, which I thought was beautifully done, is all about the people involved in the case. So while I agree with S’s point that the importance of the case doesn’t hinge on the details of their lives, it’s also true that the movie isn’t about many of the details discussed in the thread, either. It’s not about the wider reality of a rural, impoverished, labor-intensive society in which work and starting a family were preoccupations from an early age, so that courting likewise started very early. It’s not about the myriad social pressures on Mildred that likely caused her to deny or de-emphasize her blackness in a time and place where being black meant she couldn’t have the life she wanted. It’s about the personal experience of Mildred and Richard of loving one another, and how this drove them to sustain a relationship for so many years despite public prejudice and opposition; to marry anyway; and then to become involved in a series of major court cases that so disrupted the peaceful life they desired so much. That’s why the movie is simply called ‘Loving’.

Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, June 12, 1967, by Bettmann/Corbis via New York Times, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, June 12, 1967, by Bettmann/Corbis via New York Times, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In doing research for this piece, I was struck again by the number of photos in which Richard is supported by Mildred, sometimes leaning an arm across her shoulder, sometimes laying his head on her lap. After all, the fight for their rights began with Mildred, who wrote of their plight to Robert Kennedy, which in turn gained the attention of the ACLU who took the case, and she was the driving force behind their continued fight. Richard’s leaning on Mildred also reminds me of the way we’re all held up by others. That’s true for all the people in the Facebook discussion thread, myself, for all Americans: we discuss these problematic issues from a relatively safe place because we’re raised up on the shoulders of so many giants. We have free speech rights, the right to marry who we love, the right to cohabitate freely with partners if marriage isn’t our thing, and so on, because of people like the Lovings. Thanks to them and others like them, we will never be arrested for marrying a person of the wrong race or sex, or for drinking from the wrong fountain, or for denying that we can be owned by another person. For the latter two, I myself would never have been arrested for those things in the United States, due to an unfair privilege I would have enjoyed by accident of birth. But there are other things I would have been arrested for at one time: for voting, for leaving an abusive relationship, or for trying to control my own reproduction.

And why do we get to take it for granted that we can talk and live relatively freely? Well, it’s because people like Mildred and Richard had the moral imagination to make a great leap beyond the mores, the legal strictures, the personal biases and learned behaviors of their time and in their own lives. I still love the Lovings, flaws and all, because I think they’re basically good people, and that’s what enabled them to become moral heroes. I think of a hero not as a perfect being, but one who does that rare and exceedingly difficult thing: not only transcend the time they’re in, but themselves in some important and essential way. In the attempt to see the world and our history honestly, it’s not necessary or desirable to whitewash our heroes or the complexity of the issues they face, as many of the arguers in this thread pointed out. But it’s also not necessary to tear them down as persons or hold their legacies hostage to the moral strictures of our time, moral strictures that their ideas and efforts helped us form in the first place.

*Listen to the podcast version here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

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!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sources and inspiration:

Coleman, Arica L. ‘What You Didn’t Know About Loving v. Virginia‘. June 10, 2016, Time.com

‘Loving v. Virginia‘, Supreme Court decision No. 395, Argued: April 10, 1967, Decided: June 12, 1967. Via Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute

‘Loving v. Virginia‘. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Martin, Douglas. ‘Mildred Loving, Who Battled Ban on Mixed-Race Marriage, Dies at 68‘. May 6, 2008, The New York Times

‘Mildred Loving Obituary‘. 2008, from Legacy.com