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Philosophy Now ISSUE 123 Dec 17/Jan 18
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road, 4 The False Mirror Anja Steinbauer
Telegraph Hill,
London SE14 5NQ 5 News
United Kingdom
Tel. 020 7639 7314 PREJUDICE & PERCEPTION
editors@philosophynow.org 6 Xenos: Jacques Derrida on Hospitality
philosophynow.org Peter Benson considers Jacques Derrida’s ideas about migrants
Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis 8 Perfectionism & Hate Speech Law
Editors Anja Steinbauer, Grant Bartley Shaun O’Dwyer turns to a Japanese way of fighting hate speech
Digital Editor Bora Dogan
Graphic Design Grant Bartley, Katy
11 Homelessness & the Limits of Hospitality
Baker, Anja Steinbauer Anya Daly shares her ideas and her first-hand experiences
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton 14 Prostitution & Instrumentalisation
Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg
Marketing Manager Sue Roberts Rob Lovering critiques one argument against prostitution
Administration Ewa Stacey, Katy Baker 18 An Education In Diversity?
Advertising Team
Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
Christina Easton asks if liberal values can be forced on people
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org GENERAL ARTICLES
UK Editorial Board
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley Anti-Prejudice 20 What’s So Bad About Smugness?
Emrys Westacott is pleased to have avoided being smug
US Editorial Board Challenging ideas, Pages 6-19 22 The Rise of the Intelligent Authors
Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher
College), Prof. Charles Echelbarger, Lochlan Bloom asks if computers will conquer creativity
Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo 24 Santa Claus and the Problem of Evil
Pigliucci (CUNY - City College), Prof.
Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.) Jimmy Alfonso Licon says, “Merry Christmas, ho ho ho!”
Contributing Editors 26 Kant and the Human Subject
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.)
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) Brian Morris looks at the results of Kant’s attending to humanity
David Boersema (Pacific University) 31 Defending Humanistic Reasoning
UK Editorial Advisors Paul Giladi, Alexis Papazoglou & Giuseppina D’Oro explain
KANT & FRIEND © RON SCHEPPER 2017

Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon

Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood why physical science doesn’t have a monopoly on explanation
US Editorial Advisors 34 Seeing the Future in the Present Past
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Vogel Carey, Prof. Walter Sinnott-
Siobhan Lyons looks at how we see the future through the present
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December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 3
 The False Mirror
Editorial A brief history of prejudice.
M
en can’t multitask; women can’t resist shopping; the
English have a sense of humour; the Germans
don’t; philosophers spend their lives navel gazing;
politicians can’t be trusted; and civil servants are boring.
Stereotypes, preconceived ideas, prejudices: they are
ubiquitous. Sometimes they are annoying, sometimes funny,
sometimes devastating. To philosophers they are the ultimate
challenge.
Philosophy has its demons to fight. Having always put an
emphasis on a commitment to truth, philosophers have been
quick to identify the obstacles that stood in their way of
honouring this obligation. Though they couldn’t always agree
on the origins, scope and definition of prejudice, it, in all its
forms, emerges as one of their archenemies.
The first philosophical musings about prejudice started in
the classical age. Cicero talks about prejudice (praeiusticium) as
the opposite of truth, associated with error. However, he
makes clear that rather than being the result of ignorance,
prejudice is born out of manipulation. In a legal context he
explains that it means that jurors have listened to a particular
account of a case over and over again, so that once a trial
happens the lawyer who is arguing that version of the case has
very little work to do to convince them of the veracity of his
words.
The Enlightenment put particular emphasis on the
problem of prejudice. Unfortunately, it lost sight of Cicero’s
valuable insight into the connection between manipulation
and prejudice. Prejudice came to include a whole range of
erroneously acquired positions. Francis Bacon went so far as
to argue that our natural understanding is a “false mirror”of
the world, as prejudice is a natural condition to which we are
all prone: “The human understanding when it has once
adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as
being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and
agree with it. And though there be a greater number and
weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it
either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets
aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious
predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may
remain inviolate.”
“Prejudice” (préjugé) became a fashionable term before and
during the French Revolution, a tool for condemning both
religious tradition and the socio-political status quo. Voltaire
illustrated the difference between prejudice and mature
judgement: “But it is through prejudice that you will respect a
man dressed in certain clothes, walking gravely, and talking at
the same time. Your parents have told you that you must
bend to this man; you respect him before you know whether
4 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
he merits your respect; you grow in age and knowledge; you
perceive that this man is a quack, made up of pride, interest,
and artifice; you despise that which you revered, and prejudice
yields to judgment.” The French revolutionaries did not share
this optimism that we will outgrow prejudice as we mature.
They took ‘prejudice’ to denote all kinds of errors of the
mind, which, in the worst cases, could only be eradicated by
means of the guillotine!
Most Enlightenment thinkers, you will be relieved to learn,
favoured less bloody ways of dealing with prejudice.
Immanuel Kant distinguished between preliminary opinions
and prejudice. Both are purely subjective, but there is nothing
wrong with forming a preliminary view of an issue as long it is
recognised as such, as a kind of work in progress. The
problem with prejudices is that they are preliminary opinions
that are mistaken for final conclusions. However, prejudice is
not just an intellectual mistake; it has a serious moral
component as well. Kant tells us that prejudice is a position
that we take with respect to a ‘generalised other’, a moral
client who needs to be taken into account in our thinking.
Through imagination we need to be able to understand the
perspective of this ‘other’. To be free of prejudice is thus only
possible for someone who “can easily regard the matter from
a very different point of view”, who can overcome her ‘logical
egoism’ and relativise her self interest.
If prejudice can be overcome, can it not be avoided
altogether? Following Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg
Gadamer showed that all understanding is ‘permanently
determined’ by what he calls pre-understanding. In the end, he
says, all understanding is always “reflection of a given pre-
understanding.” This means that whenever I need to under-
stand someone or something I approach it with a certain pre-
understanding. Why is this so unavoidable? The reason lies
not in some genetic disposition but in our own past.
Prejudices are based on our ‘historical reality’; in other words,
if you have a past, you also have prejudices.
This issue of Philosophy Now starts with a collection of
articles which examine prejudice, hospitality towards
strangers, and the different ways in which we as human beings
perceive one another. So, what are the lessons to be learned
here? Most, though not all, philosophers seem to believe that
prejudice is cognitively impossible to avoid but that it can be
rationally and/or morally overcome – although this may be
trickier than we realise. As always, critical thinking is
required. And once we properly apply critical thinking, we
soon see that while it is true that men can’t multitask, women
can resist shopping. … Prejudiced, moi?
Anja Steinbauer
• Human brains to connect to cloud storage!
• Mini human brains implanted in rodents!
• Psychologists study moral intuition
News reports by Anja Steinbauer.
Brain organoid
Merger 1: human brains & animals
Four years ago scientists first developed a
method of growing stem cells into minia-
ture versions of human brains called brain
organoids. These ‘mini brains’, until now
grown in the lab, have many of the same
characteristics as living human brains at an
early developmental stage. Their structural
similarity and the fact that they react in a
similar way to stimuli such as drugs means
that they are extremely useful for research
into (for instance) Alzheimer’s Disease,
since opportunities for empirical studies of
living, fully-developed, human brains are
obviously very restricted for ethical
reasons. A new development has now
given rise to moral reservations concern-
ing organoids. Two teams of scientists
have experimented with inserting these
mini brains into the brains of rodents. The
team of Professor Fred ‘Rusty’ Gage at the
Salk Institute in California has successfully
implanted human brain organoids into
mature mouse brains, where they survived
for up to two months. Meanwhile Dr Isaac
Chen and his researchers at the University
of Pennsylvania have implanted human
organoids into the secondary visual
cortices of eleven mature rats. The mini
brains, which measured 2 mm across,
again survived for around two months and
formed numerous axons linking them-
selves to the rat brains, some up to 1.5 mm
long. Cells in the organoids showed activ-
ity when the scientists shone light into the
rats’ eyes, suggesting that the mini brains
became functional within the rats brains.
Both teams reported their work at a Soci-
ety for Neuroscience meeting in Washing-
ton, DC in November. One moral
concern is that the human cerebral
organoids could grow in size and complex-
ity within lab animals, to the point where
we need to seriously talk about mini-brain
consciousness.
Merger 2: human brains & machines
At a recent session of the Council on
Foreign Relations on the future of Artifi-
cial Intelligence, the author, inventor and
futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that
“medical robots will go inside our brains
and connect our neo-cortex to the smart
cloud” by the year 2029. This prediction is
part of Kurzweil’s conviction, shared by
other experts in the field, that no part of
our lives will remain unaffected by AI.
Kurzweil is the main prophet of the Singu-
larity – the idea that self-improving artifi-
cial intelligence will create a situation
within the next few decades in which expo-
nentially accelerating technological change
becomes almost too fast to comprehend.
Rather than AI endangering human
survival as Stephen Hawking recently
warned, Kurzweil envisages a merger of
humans and AI: “My view is not that AI is
going to displace us. It’s going to enhance
us. It does already.”
(Im)moral Intuitions
Is gut feeling a good guide to moral evalu-
ation and decision-making? A new study
compared the effect of relying on intuition
rather than deliberation on the resulting
moral outcomes. Research psychologists
Sarah Ward and Laura King of the
University of Missouri presented study
participants with a series of scenarios and
in each case asked them to judge whether
the action described was wrong. The
researchers found that people who mostly
relied on their moral intuitions tended to
make harsher moral judgements and be
less likely to reconsider their views, even if
the behaviour under consideration caused
no actual harm to anybody. Then they
investigated whether asking people to
reason about the scenarios at greater
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 5
News
length would reduce the individual differ-
ences in the judgments they made. Ward
explains: “We consistently found that
people who are more prone to rely on
intuition condemned these actions …and
what we found is that after people deliber-
ated, in general they did condemn these
actions less, but people who strongly
relied on their intuitive instincts
condemned these actions more harshly
than others.”
The Third Sex
In Germany the Federal Constitutional
Court decided in November that in future
it will be possible for new parents to offi-
cially register the sex of their baby (and
for individuals to register their own sex) as
either “female”, “male” or… “X”. A
further legal option will be to omit an
entry concerning sex from the birth regis-
tration form altogether. This decision
reflects the view of the German constitu-
tional judges that persons who consis-
tently do not feel themselves as belonging
to either gender should not be disadvan-
taged in their fundamental rights. Austria
is also considering the question and is due
to announce its decision in 2018.
Philosopher István Mészáros Dies
Marxist philosopher István Mészáros died
on 1 October 2017 aged 86. In Budapest,
the young Mészáros was a student of
Georg Lukács and an opponent of Stalin-
ism. After the end of the Hungarian
Uprising in 1956, Mészáros fled his home
country and subsequently accepted
lectureships at universities in Italy,
Canada and the UK. He was professor of
philosophy at the University of Sussex for
15 years. In his influential work Marx’
Theory of Alienation (1970) he argued that
distinguishing between an earlier and a
later Marx was a mistake. After the
collapse of the Soviet bloc, Mészáros
believed capitalism could still be over-
come and his book Beyond Marx (1995)
made an important contribution to the
discussion of the future of socialism.
Prejudice &
Xenos: Jacques Derrida on Hospitality
Peter Benson tackles xenophobia with the help of Jacques Derrida and Plato.
J
acques Derrida knew a thing or two about being an out-
sider. He was born of Jewish parents in 1930 in Algeria,
at that time a French colony. Hence he was from birth a
French citizen, although he did not set foot in France
until he was nineteen. In 1942, by a decree of the wartime Vichy
government, his citizenship was revoked because he was Jewish
– without him being made a citizen of any other country. The
major effect of this was his expulsion from the school he had
previously been attending. So he was an Algerian who couldn’t
speak Arabic; a Jew who was not a religious practitioner (nor
could he read Hebrew); and an eventual immigrant to France
as a pied-noir (the derogatory phrase used for the French from
Algeria). These circumstances provided him with no solid sense
of national identity. His subsequent academic career was pur-
sued largely in unconventional institutions, and, in his later years,
involved a great deal of travelling abroad. As a result, he was
often the appreciative recipient of hospitality. American univer-
sities, in particular, frequently provided him with opportunities
to teach and conduct research. He often spoke warmly of their
welcoming environment. His books were read more widely in
their English translations than they were in France.
Hard thought is always necessary to distinguish, from within a
particular situation, factors of universal relevance. But the state of
being an outsider, far from being a deterrent to philosophy, can
be the very place from which philosophical questions are most
readily raised. Furthermore, perhaps all of us today are immi-
grants of one kind or another. I have lived in Britain all my life
and yet, with the substantial changes in society over that period,
it is no longer the same country I was born into. I have thus, even
by staying in one place, become a kind of immigrant – a bemused
entrant into a new country just as surely as those who have physi-
cally moved from their own land. All of us need to make the best
we can of such changing circumstances. The countries we have
lost had numerous faults, along with their admirable qualities.
Only those with very selective memories could deny this.
The Philosophy of the Stranger
In his 1996 seminar Of Hospitality, Derrida discusses Plato’s dia-
logue The Sophist. This opens with Socrates being introduced
to a visitor to Athens from Elea in southern Italy, the residence
of several famous thinkers, such as Parmenides. Socrates
expresses great pleasure in meeting this stranger. The Greek
word for ‘stranger’ is xenos, also meaning ‘foreigner’. From this
we get our word xenophobia. Socrates, by contrast, expresses a
strong sense of xenophilia. He wishes to hear the stranger’s views,
in the hope that they might open new perspectives on philo-
sophical questions.
To facilitate this, Socrates steps back from his usual central
role in Plato’s dialogues and hands his place over to the stranger,
who then talks with Socrates’ friend Theaetetus. This stranger
is never named in the dialogue; he remains simply a representa-
6 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
tive of foreign ideas. Having stepped back, Socrates does not speak
again for the entire dialogue. In becoming silent Socrates reveals
that the place from which he usually speaks is one appropriately
occupied by a stranger. That is, when he is acting as the philo-
sophical enquirer, Socrates himself speaks as a stranger in his own
world, questioning those things that others take for granted.
Although not all strangers are philosophers, any viewpoint
alien to our own can help us become aware of the perspectives
we habitually and unthinkingly adopt. Obviously this doesn’t
mean that we should immediately change our opinions to those
of the stranger; but the more diverse perspectives we are able to
comprehend, the less narrow and dogmatic our views will be. This
interaction is a two stage process: first, an opening up to the other
person in order to understand what they are saying; and only then
considering the criticisms that might be made of this new view-
point. A too rapid jump to this second stage is a common fault.
This process is why Plato found dialogue to be the most appro-
priate form for philosophy, since dialogue cannot take place unless
one first invites a stranger in, showing them hospitality rather
than hostility. They may or may not bring us something of intel-
lectual value, but without that initial hospitality we will never
know. In the New Testament ‘Letter to the Hebrews’ (13.2) we
are reminded: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for
thereby some have entertained angels unaware.”
Derrida’s Hospitality
Raising these issues today, over ten years after Derrida’s death,
we will all be aware of their relevance to events and circum-
stances filling our newspapers. In 1996, in his essay On Cos-
mopolitanism, Derrida wrote about the rights of asylum-seekers,
refugees, and immigrants, paying attention to practical propos-
als as well as general principles. In particular, he discussed a pro-
posal, current at that time, to establish cities of refuge that would
be open to all, of any nationality or none. Here too he evoked a
Biblical precedent (from Numbers 35:9-32) advocating cities to
which anyone could flee from persecution.
Nothing came of this idea, and today the sheer magnitude of
the flow of refugees from the chaos of the Middle East would
make such an approach impractical. Politics, diplomacy, charity,
and hard work will all be necessary, and philosophy has only a
small contribution to make to this crisis. But that contribution
can still provide guidance to the other efforts, and it is in this that
Derrida’s discussions of hospitality are of particular value. What’s
more, they exemplify a general feature of Derrida’s political
thought whose significance has not always been recognized.
There’s a dilemma which Derrida asserts to be an inescapable
feature of the concept of hospitality, which we see vividly revived
in each successive refugee crisis, and in every discussion about
immigration. On the one hand, there is a moral imperative to
show hospitality, especially to people in distress or fleeing from
danger; and on the other hand, the total abandonment of bor-

Jacques Derrida,
Gail Campbell
2017
ders would obliterate the home into which they are being
invited. All borders have some degree of permeability; but if it
becomes absolutely open, then the border itself is abolished,
and there is no longer any place of safety – any home – to enter.
Derrida sets this dilemma out clearly in Of Hospitality: “How
can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite? In principle,
the difference is straightforward, but for that you need a law;
hospitality, reception, the welcome offered, have to be submit-
ted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction” (p.59). ‘Hospitality’
assumes the ability to provide a safe haven, a shelter from storms,
and like a biological membrane, the border must inevitably be
selective when allowing itself to be crossed. If refugees fleeing
from persecutors find their way through an opening, it cannot
be equally open to those pursuing them. Every opening to others
implies associated closings. As Derrida explains: “Between an
unconditional law or an absolute desire for hospitality on the
one hand and, on the other, a law, a politics, a conditional ethics,
there is a distinction, radical heterogeneity, but also indissocia-
bility. One calls forth, involves, or prescribes the other” (p.147).
The particular balance between these two indissociable aspects
of the notion of hospitality, openness and closedness, will depend
Perception
of course on particularities of circumstance. There is
no simple calculus we can apply to resolve each
dilemma, no one definitive way to respond appropri-
ately in each particular case. However, both sides of
the dilemma must always be kept in mind. The ide-
alistic claims of an unrestrained hospitality, though
impossible to follow as a law, must never be com-
pletely silenced by claims of impracticality.
Derrida on Political Dilemmas
In his later writings Derrida repeatedly uncovers
similar dilemmas inherent in the central terms of
our contemporary political thinking, such as Justice,
Democracy, and Human Rights. He does this not
to dismiss these concepts, but to show the doubled
attention that each requires of us. Failures in these
fields occur when one side of the dilemma tem-
porarily obliterates our awareness of the other.
Another common contemporary example is in the
dilemma between freedom and public safety. Unfor-
tunately, Derrida’s mode of analysing these con-
cepts, through the process of ‘deconstruction’, does
not provide immediate answers to urgent questions.
Nevertheless, it yields a more clear-sighted aware-
ness of how responsive action must begin, and shows
that we cannot evade our responsibility by the use
of general formulaic solutions.
Take the case of Democracy, for example: the
value of this notion begins to deteriorate as soon as
people imagine that they have achieved a fully-func-
tioning democracy in the institutions they have estab-
lished. For it is under the cloak of this complacency
that factions begin to utilize those same democratic
institutions as the means for attaining and maintain-
ing their own power. There is no fixed solution which
will permanently eradicate this problem. Rather, our
laws and institutions need to be continually modi-
fied towards greater and greater democratic inclusiveness and
transparency, without imagining that this process can ever reach
perfection. We can only commit ourselves to a ‘democracy to
come’, to use Derrida’s phrase, rather than to any current inad-
equate approximation of democracy.
And so it is with hospitality too. We should never plump our-
selves up with the bland conviction that we are a hospitable people.
Rather, we must be constantly alert as to how we can become
more hospitable, whilst avoiding a catastrophic collapse of the
region of safety we envisage in the word ‘home’. So Derrida’s is
not a philosophy that offers definitive answers to these dilem-
mas, since such an answer would necessarily be wrong, if we are
dealing with a true dilemma. Rather, it alerts us to the fact that
we are always in the situation of never having done enough. The
hospitable person or country should be seeking at all times to be
more hospitable, alert to any opportunities to move in this direc-
tion, never saying, “we’ve done enough, we can’t do more,” rather,
always seeking practical ways to do more than we have.
© PETER BENSON 2017
Peter Benson is no stranger to philosophy, having studied it at
Cambridge University.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 7
Prejudice &
Perfectionism &
Hate Speech Law
Shaun O’Dwyer on reconciling free speech with protection against hate speech.
n this era of growing ethno-nationalism and xenophobia
I in Europe and America, and indeed, worldwide, debates
over hate speech are intensifying. Decent people argue
that the terrifying rhetoric of extreme right wing groups
online and on the streets – and escalating confrontations –
demonstrate the necessity of hate speech laws.
Supporters of freedom of speech have responded that the
non-coercive speech of all should be protected – including the
free speech of racists, neo-Nazis, and bigots. In diverse liberal
societies, they argue, it is inconsistent for the state, or even pow-
erful social media platforms such as Facebook, to protect some
expressions of ideas while banning others merely because some
groups object to it. It is also likely, they argue, that hate speech
laws or bans can be weaponized against their advocates, such
that polemical ideas by minority activists or leftist radicals can
also be prohibited when their right-wing or authoritarian ene-
mies turn hate speech prohibitions to their own advantage.
The stalemated debate between these two positions suggests
a sort of ‘incommensurability of values’ that Isaiah Berlin once
wrote about – between liberty on the one side and human dig-
nity and civic equality on the other. They’re all prized and rec-
ognized to have tremendously beneficial consequences when
realized in law and in custom. Yet an increase in free speech
often involves some diminishing of dignity. Freedom for the
swaggering bully takes away equality and dignity for those at
the bottom of the playground pecking order. Conversely,
enforcing equality and respect for dignity involves some dimin-
ishment in liberty. The would-be bully keeps his thoughts and
urges to himself, but perhaps so do many others, as the vigilant
headmistress casts her shadow over a quieter, seemingly more
egalitarian playground.
I want to suggest that a compromise between freedom and
dignity over the problem of hate speech might be possible. My
approach is inspired by a philosophy called perfectionism. Perfec-
tionists typically hold that there are objective values or goods
whose promotion contributes to morally valuable ways of life,
nurturing the ‘better angels’ of human nature; and also that objec-
tive moral value means some ways of life are more valuable than
others. Many (but not all) moral perfectionists think that the state
has a role in promoting the better ways of life by passing legisla-
tion and distributing resources to enhance different goods or pro-
mote different values, in areas such as welfare, education, the arts
and sciences, employment, and civic morality. For such perfec-
tionists, laws against hate speech make sense in terms of promot-
ing more mutually-respectful ways of living in diverse societies.
A New Way Of Opposing Hate Speech
Perfectionism has a respectable pedigree in liberal thought
extending back to John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant; but
this pedigree is not enough to save it from the objections of free
8 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
speech advocates whenever perfectionism is invoked to promote
hate speech law. The free speech advocates will complain that
hate speech law is itself unacceptably coercive and paternalistic
– that it requires the state to abandon the value-neutrality that
it ought to occupy in a diverse liberal society, in order to play
favorites with values or ideas of the good life that are the sub-
ject of reasonable disagreement between citizens. One such point
of disagreement concerns whose idea of the good life should be
considered so detrimental for the overall good of society that
its expression must be regulated or prohibited.
However, I have in mind a mild liberal perfectionist approach
to hate speech – call it ‘perfectionism lite’ – which envisages a
non-coercive role for the state in encouraging the good life of
its citizens. So rather than criminalizing hate speech, doing which
impinges upon another good the state also regards itself as bound
to uphold – the freedom of speech – the state passes laws exhort-
ing citizens to stand up to hate speech.
As a free speech liberal I have my own qualms about perfec-
tionism lite, but I think it worthwhile to explore how it could
both justify hate speech law whilst also opposing criminalizing
hate speech.
As it turns out, there is an example of non-coercive hate
speech law to hand which can help us think through this ques-
tion, for in 2016 the government of Japan passed just such a law.
Two to three years ago racist demonstrations against resi-
dent ethnic Koreans (Zainichi) had become almost daily occur-
rences in Japan. The rage behind these demonstrations was
stoked by a combination of political issues, including Japanese
disagreements with South Korea over colonial and wartime his-
tory, growing diplomatic tensions with North Korea, and resent-
ments over the perceived ‘special rights’ given to Zainichi. Ultra-
right-wing organizations demonstrated outside Zainichi schools
or in the Korea Towns of Tokyo and Osaka, displaying or shout-
ing slogans such as “Exterminate all Koreans!”; “We came here
to kill North Koreans!”; “Cockroaches!”; “Kick these low-life
Korean maggots out of Japan!”, while similar abuse proliferated
on internet forums. A former leader of one such ultra-rightist
outfit stood in Tokyo’s 2016 gubernatorial election, attracting
1.74 percent of the vote – a still unnerving total of 114,000 votes
– on an anti-immigration ‘Japan First’ platform.
Subsequently, debates about the criminalization of hate
speech took place amongst politicians, scholars and media com-
mentators, especially since international organizations such as
the United Nations urged Japan to pass such laws. However,
these debates were framed by a strong awareness of speech free-
doms, since Articles 19 to 21 of Japan’s post-war constitution
provide robust protections for freedom of conscience, speech,
and religion. Judicial experts and politicians cited these articles
to highlight the difficulties of criminalizing hate speech.
The hate speech law that was finally passed in 2016 reflected

this awareness. Although this legislation admits the “tremen-
dous pain and suffering” that “unfair discriminatory speech and
behavior” inflicts upon resident foreigners and their descen-
dants in Japan, it provides no criminal law remedies: instead it
directs national and local governments to use publicity cam-
paigns and education to “increase public awareness of the neces-
sity of eliminating unfair, discriminatory speech.” I wonder if
such legislation could provide inspiration for perfectionist-
minded hate speech statutes in nations which, like Japan, have
strong constitutional protections for freedom of speech?
Difficulties with Criminalizing Hate Speech
Many Japanese progressives want hate speech to be criminal-
ized, and are not satisfied with the hate speech law as it cur-
rently stands. I’m inclined to think it should be left as it is, since
the strongest arguments in favour of criminalizing hate speech
do not stand up to scrutiny, as I intend to show.
One way to define and justify hate speech law which some legal
philosophers recommend, is through comparison with defama-
tion and libel law. Defamation involves publically making untrue
statements calculated to harm a person’s reputation and dignity.
Hate speech, according to these legal philosophers, can be under-
stood as a group libel or defamation – that is, as untrue, abusive,
dehumanizing, threatening and insulting speech calculated to
damage the social standing and dignity of people as members of a
particular group, and thus stir up hatred against them. The degree
of damage this inflicts upon the collective dignity of a group, and
the damage such speech does to civic order through the accumu-
lation of public statements asserting, directly or indirectly, that
members of that group do not deserve equal status as citizens or
as human beings, warrants a criminal law remedy, they argue.
One objection to this idea of hate speech as a ‘group libel’ is
that claims about damage to collective dignity and standing can
be used to criminalize many kinds of group criticism, as a means
to shutting down freedom of speech. These include ‘defama-
tion of religion’ laws to protect religious groups from insults
against their faith, including satire or criticism; and Turkey’s
Article 301, which proscribes ‘insults to the Turkish nation’ –
such as public statements asserting the truth of the Armenian
Genocide.
Defenders argue that hate speech laws are different because
they are intended to protect vulnerable minorities. Such
minorities have long memories of discrimination, subjugation,
or even genocide, and are historically vulnerable to speech that
diminishes their social standing, rendering them insecure and
fearful for their survival.
This response will not satisfy critics, who may point out that
such a rationale could be reverse-engineered by white nation-
alists and religious sectarians eager to present themselves as
minorities vulnerable to persecution. This might appear to be
an absurd objection, but it is unwise to consider ‘absurdity’ only
from the point of view of a philosophy discussion, rather than,
say, a national election campaign harnessing populist, ethno-
nationalist resentments.
Another sophisticated way to define hate speech is to think
of it as what linguists and philosophers of language call a ‘speech
act’. Speech acts do not simply describe: they are meant to do
something or have an intended effect. A classic example of a
Perception
speech act is the one uttered by marriage celebrants who, in
pronouncing a couple to be married, make it so. In the 1980s
and 90s, some feminist philosophers argued that pornography
is a speech act that subjugates and silences women; and since
that time, race and gender theorists have explored how hate
speech works (or fails to work) as a speech act to subordinate
people of colour and sexual minorities.
Although not all of these theorists favour criminal law reme-
dies for hate speech, there is some consensus on how hate speech
works as a speech act. Imagine a white man outside a segregated
swimming pool in the South of the United States in the mid-
twentieth century, looking menacingly at some black people
passing ‘too close’ to him and snarling “no n-----s allowed.” He
is doing something in saying this: he is enforcing a legal ban
against black people entering the pool. In doing this he is sup-
posedly ‘putting them in their place’ as an inferior class of per-
sons. Such statements also have the intended effects of intimi-
dating people into deferential obedience and pre-emptively
silencing opposition. We need not even imagine the white man
there: a sign bearing the same message will do a similar job.
On this understanding hate speech is a speech act which
oppresses vulnerable minorities, puts them in an inferior place,
inflicts fear, humiliation, and insecurity on them, and silences
them. So the argument here is that hate speech should be crim-
inalized in recognition of the harms that it does and causes, and
to prevent the subjection of minority groups.
Obviously, substantial institutional and social props need to
be present for hate speech acts to work so effectively. Imagine a
white man pulling that same stunt outside a public pool today.
Without the backing of racist institutions, conventions and laws
– and lynch mobs – such speech acts can no longer work as they
were intended to. There may still be intimidation and fear; but
more overwhelmingly, there will be defiance, outrage, condem-
nation of the incident on national and social media, public denun-
PROTEST © FIBONACCI BLUE 2016
Protest against hate speech
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 9
Prejudice &
ciations by government officials, and, possibly, arrests of the per-
petrators under anti-intimidation statutes.
Although these are good and necessary developments, it
makes a problem for describing hate speech as an oppressive
speech act in modern liberal democracies, in that it’s difficult to
prove that minority groups are so homogeneous that hate speech
will uniformly work against them, forcing them into the infe-
rior, subjugated and injured status that warrants criminal sanc-
tion against their abusers. That is, under defamation law, or
criminal laws covering threat and intimidation, it is in principle
relatively straightforward for individuals to go to court and pre-
sent their case that they have suffered injury to their reputations,
or been intimidated by prejudiced abuse and threats. Things are
less straightforward for groups comprising hundreds of thou-
sands, or millions, of people, perhaps definable as a historically
vulnerable minority, but divided by opinion, values, wealth, occu-
pation, and social status. Compare the case of a tenured African-
American professor at a leading American university who is sub-
jected to a racial slur by a white student, but is backed up by col-
lege anti-racism codes, and supported by colleagues, adminis-
trators, and the student body, with that of an impoverished work-
ing-class African-American teenager subjected to the same slur
by a white policeman confronting him on a street.
Many contextual factors, beginning with differences or sim-
ilarities in social and legal power between abusers and the
abused, can influence how much hate speech actually works as
intended, or backfires on the abusers. In light of such doubts,
liberal opponents of hate speech law can mobilize the ‘harm
principle’ to reject criminalization of hate speech. The harm
principle says that the state is only warranted in using coercion
against citizens to prevent the citizens from coercing or harm-
ing their fellow citizens. But it is often not clear how much hate
speech harms on a collective scale.
Yet even if it’s hard to identify a common denominator for
the harms hate speech does to internally diverse minorities, surely
things will be much worse if governments do nothing to ban it.
Hate speech acts may not always work as intended; but their
malignant intent remains, and will be recognized as such, con-
tributing to fear and insecurity amongst minority groups, espe-
cially when those speech acts escalate into violent physical acts.
However, in our era of renewed nationalism, there are signs
that criminal hate speech laws are not working as intended. For
instance, Canada’s criminal hate speech laws are stringently
defined yet rarely enforced, and there have been modest
increases in hate crimes there in the past three years, especially
against Muslims. France has more frequently enforced crimi-
nal hate speech laws, but anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic hate
crimes and xenophobic political movements have all sharply
increased there in recent years. Germany has ‘incitement to
hatred laws’, but it has struggled to cope with rises in violent
hate crimes and hate speech in the 1990s and in more recent
years, and it too has witnessed a rise in xenophobic and anti-
immigration political movements.
The Japanese Way
Both free speech advocates and perfectionist promoters of non-
criminal hate speech laws can agree that hate speech does not
represent a clear enough case of collective harm or oppression
10 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
to justify coercive state intervention, and that there are also pru-
dential reasons for opposing such laws, because of their ques-
tionable efficacy, and because they can be abused. They will
also likely agree that given its malignant, discriminatory intent,
which conflicts with important values such as the dignity and
equality of all citizens irrespective of creed or ethnicity, etc,
hate speech is a serious moral problem for liberal societies. But
they will still disagree on how to deal with it.
So I will conclude with some cautious remarks in favour of
Japan’s hate speech legislation, and summarize some objec-
tions that free speech advocates like myself might still have to
it. In the year since its passage, this law has proven effective in
incentivizing local government and police authorities to use
existing statutes against more menacing hate speech, online or
on the street. Moreover, in sending a signal to wider society
that hate speech is officially condemned, it is encouraging civil
society activists, including from minority groups, to organize
counter-protests and impose moral penalties on those who
express hate. Coincidentally or not, anti-Korean demonstra-
tions have halved in the past year, and so has the intensity of
the language used in them.
Substantial objections remain, however. First there is the prob-
lem of paternalism, implicit in the sort of hate speech law that
perfectionism lite supports. For instance, in declaring that the
public needs to undergo education and consciousness-raising
campaigns to help eliminate hate speech, Japan’s hate speech law
appears to judge citizens incapable by themselves of conducting
their lives in a morally upright fashion, instead assuming that they
need to be educated to do the right thing. Liberal critics of per-
fectionism argue that such judgements are unacceptable, since
they deny to citizens what Jonathan Quong has described as “their
moral status as free and equal citizens.”
Second, the strong language used to denounce hate speech
in the Japanese legislation – “unfair speech and action… will
not be tolerated” and “tolerating (its existence) is impermissi-
ble” – may leave the door open for mission creep towards coer-
cive measures to eliminate free speech that is argued to be hate
speech, generating the sort of problems we’ve looked at.
Third, the formulation of any hate speech law puts in the
hands of the state the power to define which minority groups
are affected by it. In the case of Japan’s hate speech law, they
are defined as “persons originating exclusively from a country
or region other than Japan or their descendants” and this defi-
nition refers most obviously to Japan’s Zainichi minority. Such
a definition can provoke objections over who it excludes, such
as indigenous people, or religious minorities, and whether there
are convincing reasons for such exclusions.
These objections may not be decisive, although they do moti-
vate my own wariness about even perfectionist lite justifications
for hate speech law. Still, I remain open-minded that these
objections could be neutralized by carefully formulated, non-
coercive hate speech statutes proposed wherever there is robust
constitutional and social support for speech freedoms.
© SHAUN O’DWYER 2017
Shaun O’Dwyer is an associate professor in the Faculty of Languages
and Cultures at Kyushu University, Japan. He has published widely
on topics such as pragmatist philosophy and modern Confucian
thought, and moonlights as a journalist in his spare time.

Homelessness
& the Limits of
Anya Daly says we’ll solve homelessness only when we see it as our problem.
“No face can be approached with empty hands and closed home.”
“The need of the other is my spiritual need.”
Emmanuel Levinas
oming home on the tram my gaze met that of a young
C man shouldering a carry-all – heavy, and torn in
parts. I looked away quickly. Clearly that carry-all
carried all his belongings, and, I hoped, food for the
wet, icy night ahead under the bridge. I knew I was going home
to company and a hearty soup. Part of me wanted to suggest he
come back and share soup with us; but the greater part was fear-
ful: he could be dangerous, perhaps a drug user, and even if nei-
ther of these, how could we then turn him out into the cold
again? The limits of my hospitality – my fear.
This article explores the issue of homelessness from the per-
spective of someone who has experienced homelessness, as
someone who has worked with the homeless and heard the sto-
ries of ‘our friends on the street’, as a mother distressed to see
other mothers’ children, no matter their age, in such dire cir-
cumstances, and as a philosopher driven to interrogate the
hidden assumptions and beliefs motivating our choices, judg-
ments, and behavior. I wish to stress that homelessness must be
addressed from the philosophical perspective not only with
regard to the individual, but also with regard to the individual
as belonging to the ‘we’. This ‘we’ must include all the people
involved, from the homeless person laying out her swag under
the bridge, to the policy-makers earning fabulous salaries. I’ll
propose that a deeper understanding of what’s called ‘double
incorporation’ is a crucial step towards galvanizing political will
to implement solutions that have already been identified.
The first part of this article will relate my experience with
regard to homelessness to provide context. The second part will
examine some philosophical considerations around the notion
of ‘home’. I am taking a phenomenological approach to this
discussion, not an analytic approach which depends predomi-
Perception
Hospitality
nantly on arguments. For phenomenology, the world is not
reducible to propositions, and so it depends on a wide reper-
toire of philosophical methods – detailed descriptive analysis
and evocations as well as arguments. Philosophical understand-
ing, for phenomenology, is as much a ‘showing’ as a ‘telling’.
The Lived Experience of Homelessness
The problem of homelessness first hit me when I was living in
Paris when there was a huge housing crisis. At one point there
were tents all along the Canal Saint Martin and filling the Place
de la République. There were many, many beggars on the streets.
I remember for the last months of one winter I would cross the
canal at a small bridge under which lived an old man and a young
woman. In the morning I would regularly see her preparing her-
self for her work day – doing her hair, putting on her make-up,
and tidying away her bedding. Clearly, she had a job but the
salary could not cover rent. That was shocking for me, espe-
cially when I learnt of the rich people who had many vacant
apartments they did not want to rent, either because they were
waiting for the rental market to give higher returns or because
it was more advantageous for them to just keep the apartments
empty, solely as investments.
In my fifth year in France I moved to Toulouse and there
suffered a life-threatening accident. On my return to Australia
I was homeless because I was unable to work. Fortunately for
me, I had family and friends who ensured I always had a roof
over my head. That year I lived in six different situations before
gaining affordable housing. Even in the comparatively favor-
able situation of being cared for, I was deeply shaken in my sense
of self because of the loss of independence, because I had no
base that was mine. So once I had regained my health I volun-
teered with the Salvation Army, raising funds, and also with the
Orange Sky Laundry, a mobile laundry service for the home-
less established by two young Brisbane men and run entirely
with volunteers. It now operates in fourteen cities in Australia.
The service is as much about the conversations as getting the
laundry done. The site I worked at in Melbourne was in the posh
part of the central city, in what is known as the Paris end of Collins
Street. In fact we parked the van and set up our chairs directly
outside Dior, adjacent to a small terrace area that the homeless
people had taken over. They called it ‘the community kitchen’,
since from there they organised collections of food donations
from the various cafés around the inner city. Of course the busi-
nesses were not happy about this – these destitute people were
occupying prime real estate – and eventually the city council
cleared out all their belongings, removed the seats, and installed
plant boxes. So what had been effectively the equivalent of a home-
base for them was destroyed. Some were given emergency accom-
modation, but most had to find another place to doss.
It felt good to be doing something. The practical aid, the sol-
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 11
Prejudice &
idarity, and the sympathy were clearly appreciated; and, I must
confess, it did help to somewhat relieve my own distress and
guilt about their desperate and, more often than not, deterio-
by Melissa Felder
rating lives. To an extent, we are all complicit in this terrible
injustice. We have allowed the neoliberal agenda to override
our consciences, to override our fellow-feeling, and to allow us
to conveniently ignore the core value of ‘fair play’. Most cer-
tainly we can say that some of these people have contributed,

PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM

sometimes significantly, to their own wretched situations; but
nonetheless, the systemic injustices are pervasive and perni-
cious. The paths to sleeping rough are numerous: domestic vio-
lence; sexual abuse; debt; psychiatric problems; unemployment;
underemployment; the bank foreclosing on the home or farm;
PTSD following military service; incapacitating accidents; drug
and alcohol addiction; not having the means to get back to a

SIMON + FINN CARTOON © MELISSA FELDER 2017

home country; having relied on the support of friends and family
one time too many; family break-up; housing which is danger-
ous because of drugs and violence, etc. This is clearly not a ‘one
size fits all’ problem; it is various and multifaceted.
In August 2016 I participated in a one-day workshop titled
‘Homelessness and Housing Insecurity’. One observation from
the only participating anthropologist was the need to consider
factors upstream from the outcome of homelessness: nothing less
than critiquing the economic system which has without question
set the stage for it, and for many other social injustices which in
turn feed into the injustice of homelessness. But in my view we
need to go even further upstream to look for causes in our con-
ceptions of ourselves; specifically, in the persisting delusion of our
radical separateness from others. This individualistic view of self
underpins the sense of entitlement of many (not all) of the wealthy,
who refuse to help. While the opposing view of interdependency is
slowly gaining currency, it has yet to filter through to tangible
outcomes with policy-makers, politicians, the big end of town,
and the general public. Homelessness is not just a problem for
the individual enduring it. It has direct consequences for the wider
society, including for you and me. And simply, we must ask our-
selves, what kind of society do we want to live in?
So with this in mind, in the next part of this article I wish to
venture into the philosophical questions concerning the nature
of the self with regard to this issue of homelessness. I will do so
by drawing on the work of key figures in the phenomenologi-
cal tradition – notably Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Scheler. gathering the self, thus providing our launching place for our activ-
ity in the world. Finally, home is a place of interiority – of safety,
Self, Place, Belonging & Hospitality intimacy, and welcome. It is home in these last two senses that I
In his book Totality and Infinity (1961, trans 1969), in the chapter wish to explore: home as the shelter from external threats, and as
titled ‘Dwelling’, Emmanuel Levinas offers an extended medita- a place to recollect the self – to revive and to gather resources
tion on the notions of ‘dwelling, habitation, home and hospital- needed to venture into the world and contribute to society.
ity’. For Levinas, hospitality operates in two domains – the ethi- As Levinas writes: “To dwell, is not the simple fact of the
cal and the political. Within the ethical domain, the individual anonymous reality of a being cast into existence, as a stone one
has a moral obligation to give shelter under their own roof. In casts behind oneself; it is recollection, a coming to oneself, a
the political domain, as citizens of a country, to be hospitable we retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers
must welcome all those who truly seek refuge into our homeland. to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome” (p.156). Here
Levinas sets out various conceptions of ‘home’. Home is an we can see Levinas expressing a view common to many philo-
implement which offers protection from the elements and enemies; sophical and psychological traditions, of home as being a symbol
as an implement it may also be a source of pleasure, such as when for the self. And there is an inside and an outside to this self.
using a good tool can provide immense satisfaction. Home may He says: “Man abides in the world as having come to it from a
also be considered a possession which is convertible into money. private domain, from being at home with himself, to which at
Levinas also describes home as the place of recollection – a place of each moment he can retire… he goes forth outside from an

12 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018


inwardness. Yet this inwardness opens up in a home which is
situated in the outside – for the home, as a building, belongs to
a world of objects” (p.152).
Like the embodied self, the home has both an interior and an
exterior; and as there are doors and windows for the home, so
too there are also the self’s expressive doors of face, gesture and
language. Neither the home nor the self are impenetrable inte-
riorities, entirely separate from others and the outside world.
These challenges to the interiority and exteriority divide are
also key to the thought of another French phenomenologist,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argues for an intrinsic interde-
pendence between self and other.in his book The Phenomenology
of Perception (1962). For Merleau-Ponty, subjectivity is an inter-
subjectivity, and otherness is a category both internal to and con-
stitutive of the self. It is due to this self-alienation internal to the
subject that other selves, alter egos, and all interactions with
other people, become possible.
This way of thinking about our intersubjectivity can provide
a useful means of inquiring into homelessness. It is clear that
something philosophically interesting is going on in our pro-
found distress with regard to the plight of the homeless. I pro-
pose it is because the sight of homeless people challenges our
sense of entitlement and also our sense of self and belonging.
It makes us recognise how fragile these things in fact are; that
we too could potentially become victim to any number of the
misfortunes, such as have been visited on those living under
bridges and on streets.
There is also the fear of those living an unrooted life, without
community and therefore without the demands and constraints
of social belonging. The homeless person becomes truly alien.
As philosopher Anthony Steinbock has proposed in his article
‘Homelessness and the Homeless Movement’ (Human Studies,
17 (2), 1994), drawing on the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl,
our own ‘homeworlds’ are co-constituted by the ‘alienworld’ of
the homeless. The homeless do not belong to our community;
they do not share our culture, our values, our social etiquette,
our ways of eating and urinating. This is why our efforts are usu-
ally inadequate to addressing the problems of homelessness: one
of the dangers for any intervention is that the homeless person
becomes a project of the helper intervening; and then what
inevitably comes into play is an almost coercive normalizing of
the homeless person. The challenge is to offer support in a way
that does not violate their autonomy, nor render them predictable,
controllable, and acceptable according to our own standards.
The Double Incorporation
Here I want to engage with the key phenomenological idea that,
just as Merleau-Ponty asserted, subjectivity is an intersubjec-
tivity; or as the German phenomenologist Max Scheler describes
the double incorporation of the ‘I’ within the ‘we’ and the ‘we’
within the ‘I’ in The Nature of Sympathy (1913, trans 2009): “com-
munity is in some sense implicit in every individual, and that
man is not only part of society, but that society and the social
bond are an essential part of himself: that not only is the ‘I’ a
member of the ‘we’, but also that the ‘we’ is a necessary member
of the ‘I’” (pps.229, 230).
This view rejects the idea of the isolated, atomistic subject,
and instead says that in the core of our subjectivity is both the
Perception
‘I’ perspective and the ‘we’ perspective. When identification
centers solely on the ‘I’, the person is dominated by individual-
ism and competition. However, when the sense of self embraces
the ‘we’, the values become collective ones and the orientation
is characterized by cooperation. The more the circle of ‘we’ is
widened, the more the subject is available to others. The sub-
ject with the ‘we’ orientation identifies as being one among
others, as belonging – whether at the level of family, commu-
nity, species, or at its most expanded, as one sentient being
among others. Empathic responsiveness is not guaranteed, how-
ever, because if the ‘we’ is defined narrowly and constrained
only to certain others – to family, race, the religious commu-
nity, etc – the excluded do not arouse any sense of fellow-feel-
ing, and in fact they may rather incite fear, aversion, hatred and
aggression. We see this also with the stigmatization of the home-
less. Despite their tragic circumstances, they are not recognized
as deserving of a place, of belonging: they are excluded. And it
is this alienation even more than the physical discomforts of
sleeping rough and the challenges of survival that leads to the
psychological deterioration of the homeless. They are living
within a society to which they do not belong, and from which
there is no welcome. This, I propose, because of the double
incorporation, is a violence towards them at the most basic level
of their sense of self. And this is why so many homeless people
display symptoms of compounded trauma, combining the
impacts of whatever led them to the streets in the first place
with their rejection and exclusion from the wider society.
So the question is, how can we get especially the politicians
and the big end of town to expand their sense of ‘we’? Albert
Einstein captures exactly the core of the issue when he writes:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’ – a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings, as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for
us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
(Letter from Einstein to a father on the death of his son, 12/02/50.)
Homeless people are citizens with rights to vote; but their
other basic human rights are not being respected: the right to a
home, a shelter from the elements and from external threat, a
base from which to carve out a place in the working world and
the social world. Homelessness is my problem and your prob-
lem. Solutions to homelessness lie not just in social action,
policy, or economics, but most fundamentally in our concep-
tions of ourselves and our society. When we can break out of
the prison of the delusion of our separateness, and meet these
others in solidarity, then the political will to address homeless-
ness, and many other social injustices, will be found.
© DR ANYA DALY 2017
Anya Daly has recently published Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics
of Intersubjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She currently
holds an Irish Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at University
College Dublin, and is working on a project concerning the subjective
bases of violence, destructiveness and ethical failure.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 13
Prejudice &
Prostitution & Instrumentalization
Rob Lovering argues that a popular argument against prostitution doesn’t work
s you are undoubtedly aware, prostitution is illegal
A throughout much of the world. You might also be
aware that opposition to its criminalization is on the
rise. Amnesty International endorsed its decriminal-
ization not long ago, followed by numerous organizations such
as the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, Human Rights
Watch and, particularly noteworthy for us, philosophers such
as Peter Singer, Philip Pettit, and Patricia Marino. Recent
cover stories for New York Magazine and The New York Times
Magazine have asked: ‘Is Prostitution Just Another Job?’ and
‘Should Prostitution Be a Crime?’
So how strong are the reasons for treating prostitution as a
crime? Some people advocate the continued prosecution of
prostitution on grounds to do with the safety or well-being of
its participants, or its effects on the wider community. How-
ever, another reason also frequently given is that prostitution
is immoral. As Donna Hughes, a professor of women’s stud-
ies, puts it, “Most existing laws concerning prostitution were
formulated on the assumption that prostitution is immoral
activity, with women being the most immoral participants.”
(Making the Harm Visible, 1999). The question naturally arises:
Is prostitution immoral? Various philosophers have put for-
ward arguments for thinking so, one of the most notable being
that by engaging in sexual activity with someone for payment,
the prostitute instrumentalizes himself or herself. (Henceforth
in this article I’ll limit myself to a single set of gender-specific
pronouns: she, her, and herself). Let’s call this the instrumen-
talization argument for the immorality of prostitution. But
what does this even mean? Well, here are two main under-
standings of what it means to instrumentalize oneself:
(i) To use oneself, or to allow oneself to be used, as a mere
means to an end; or
(ii) To block, damage, or destroy one’s self-integration.
Let’s examine these two understandings of instrumentaliz-
ing oneself more closely, and in the process examine the ver-
sion of the instrumentalization argument that goes with each.
Being Used as a Mere Means to an End
The version of the argument that relies upon the first under-
standing of instrumentalizing oneself has its roots in the ethi-
cal theories of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s famous Categorical
Imperative says that it is wrong to use a person purely or merely
as a means to an end, since to do so is to treat them not as a
person but as an object. This is so, Kant adds, even if the person
in question is yourself. What exactly is meant by using oneself
or allowing oneself to be used as a mere means to an end is an
issue over which much ink has been spilled, but one common
understanding of it is for oneself to agree to ends to which one
cannot in principle agree (by coercion, manipulation or for any
14 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
other reason). More specifically, to be used as a mere means to
an end is to agree to behavior – be it one’s own or another’s –
to which one, as a rational moral agent, cannot rationally agree.
(‘Rational moral agent’ – hereafter just ‘agent’ – is an ethical
jargon term for someone who is capable of making, and acting
on the basis of, moral and nonmoral judgments.) On this under-
standing, to use oneself or to allow oneself to be used as a mere
means to an end is to agree to behavior to which one, as an
agent, cannot rationally agree.
The mere is important, because we all use people as a means
to our ends; by letting them do us any service – cook us a meal,
for instance. The question is whether that is all we’re treating
them as. I should also reiterate those final three words, empha-
sizing the second: cannot rationally agree. Whether one is using
oneself or allowing oneself to be used as a mere means to an
end turns on whether one can rationally agree to the use to
which one is being put. If not, then one is thereby instrumen-
talizing oneself.
For example, suppose someone sincerely desires that others
always, invariably tell her the truth. In doing so, she cannot
rationally agree to behavior that prevents others from telling
her the truth. For were she to agree to that, then she would be
desiring contradictory things which, in virtually any sense of
the word, is not rational. So were she to agree to behavior that
prevents others from telling her the truth, then she would be
allowing something that contradicts one of her own most fun-
damental ends; so she would be allowing herself to be used as
a mere means to an end, and thus instrumentalizing herself by
denying her own nature as a rational agent.
Given this understanding of instrumentalizing oneself, the
first instrumentalization argument against prostitution may be
understood as claiming that by engaging in sexual activity with
someone for payment, the prostitute agrees to behavior to
which she, as an agent, cannot rationally agree. Whether this
version of the instrumentalization argument is sound turns on
whether this claim is true.
So is it? Not at first glance. After all, in agreeing to engage
in sexual activity with someone for payment, the prostitute is
not, at the same time and in the same respect, also not agree-
ing to engage in sexual activity with someone for payment,
which would be a contradiction and hence irrational.
But perhaps the prostitute necessarily desires something else
that engaging in sexual activity with someone for payment pre-
vents, which would also be irrational. If so, then this version of
the instrumentalization argument could be sound.
A number of potentially necessarily desirable things could
be proposed here, but for the sake of space let’s consider just
one, which might however be thought fundamental to the issue
at hand. It might be that the prostitute necessarily desires that
her agency be respected. It’s possible that engaging in sexual
activity with someone for payment prevents respect for one’s
Stop Violence Against Women, Farshaad Razmjouie, 2017
agency. With that in mind, two more questions arise: Does a
prostitute necessarily desire that her agency be respected? And,
if she does, does prostitution deny respect for her agency?
Addressing the first question would involve a complex dis-
cussion of the nature of agency; so for the sake of argument,
let’s just assume that a prostitute does necessarily desire that
her agency be respected. This brings us to the second ques-
tion: Does engaging in prostitution prevent respect for one’s
agency?
Not necessarily. An effective way of demonstrating this is
in steps: the first step being determining whether in general
engaging in an activity with someone for payment prevents
respect for one’s agency; and the second step being that of
determining whether engaging particularily in sexual activity
for payment prevents respect for one’s agency.
Arguably, engaging in an activity with someone for payment
does not in general prevent respect for one’s agency. On the
contrary, engaging in an activity with someone for payment,
instead of, say, for free or because one is coerced, seems partly
to arise out of one’s own respect for one’s agency. The pur-
chasing of one’s services also confers respect upon one’s agency.
When, say, a professional musician requires that she will be
paid for her work, she does so in part out of respect her own
agency. Indeed, a requirement to be paid would be bewilder-
ing (to say the least) if it were not rooted in any way in respect
Perception
for her agency! And by paying the musician for her work, her
employer accepts her chosen conditions of cooperation and
thereby respects her agency. Engaging in an activity with or
for someone for payment, then, does not appear to prevent
respect for one’s agency in principle.
As for whether engaging specifically in sexual activity with
someone for payment prevents respect for one’s agency, once
again, arguably it does not. To begin with, given that in gen-
eral, engaging in an activity with someone for payment does
not prevent respect for one’s agency then neither does engag-
ing in sexual activity with someone for payment if all else is
equal. But it might be argued that all else is not in fact equal.
But why think this? What is it about sexual activity that pre-
cludes the prostitute from preserving respect for her agency
when she engaging in it with someone for payment?
One argument here starts with the claim that when the pros-
titute engages in sexual activity with someone for payment she
(temporarily) sells her body, and ends with the claim that she
thereby treats herself as if she were an object rather than an agent.
Although there’s a lot more to this argument than meets the
eye, let’s keep things simple and ask, is it true that when some-
one engages in prostitution, she temporarily sells her body?
To determine whether it is, let’s first consider what selling
things other than one’s body usually involves.
Ordinarily, when someone sells something – say, a bicycle
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 15
Prejudice &
– she requires payment in exchange for the transfer of owner-
ship of the bicycle from herself to the purchaser. Perhaps what
the selling of the prostitute’s body involves, then, is the (tem-
porary) transfer of ownership of her body. I’m confident you
will agree that this is scarcely credible. As countless philoso-
phers have argued, people, and with them their bodies, do not
seem to be the sorts of beings that can be sold or owned, morally
speaking at any rate. Whatever else the use of the prostitute’s
body for prostitution might involve, then, the transfer of own-
ership of her body is not a part of it, ostensibly. To be sure,
the client might end up treating the prostitute as if he owns
her body. But that he might do so is no indication of, nor does
it accord him, actual ownership of the prostitute’s body.
Perhaps, then, what the selling of the prostitute’s body
involves is not the temporary transfer of ownership of her body,
but the temporary transfer of command over her body.
This transfer of command might be limited or unlimited.
Beginning with the latter, instead of arguing the issue let’s cut
to the chase and suppose that the transfer of unlimited com-
mand over the prostitute’s body does prevent respect for her
agency. However, this does not commit us to holding that pros-
titution prevents respect for a prostitute’s agency, since pros-
titution (usually) does not involve the transfer of unlimited
command over the prostitute’s body. For instance, it is stan-
dard practice for a prostitute to forbid her client from engag-
ing in certain acts – for example, condom-free intercourse –
and to require the client to agree to terminate sexual activity
at her discretion (Women Working, Eileen McLeod, 1982,
pp.38-42). Of course, as before, the client might end up treat-
ing the prostitute as if he has unlimited command over her
body. But once again, that he might do so is no indication of,
nor does it accord him, actual unlimited command over the
prostitute’s body.
So does limited command over the prostitute’s body prevent
respect for her agency? Seemingly not. Firstly, limited com-
mands are limited. Accordingly, the client can, and often does,
respect the prostitute’s agency by regulating his command over
the prostitute’s body in accordance with the limits put forward
by the prostitute herself. Failing to do so would be assault.
Moreover, requesting that somebody perform certain
actions or services in return for payment does not in itself pre-
vent respect for the seller’s agency, if we disregard for a moment
the nature of those actions. If it did then, implausibly, virtu-
ally every kind of service would prevent respect for the seller’s
agency. Beauticians, accountants, decorators, surgeons, none
could sell their services without preventing respect for their
agency. But that is very hard to believe.
Much more could be said about this version of the instru-
mentalization argument: for instance, might engaging in sexual
activity with someone for payment be immoral even if one can
rationally agree to do so? But this will have to suffice.
Prostitution As Self-Disintegration
Let’s turn now to the second version of the instrumentaliza-
tion argument, which relies upon understanding ‘instrumen-
talizing oneself’ as being to block, damage, or destroy (here-
after, simply to ‘block’) one’s self-integration.
This version of the instrumentalization argument is
16 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
advanced by some ‘new natural lawyers’ (these are ethicists who
believe in ‘new natural law theory’ rather than practitioners of
the law). These philosophers contend that by engaging in sexual
activity with someone for payment, the prostitute reduces her
bodily self to the level of an instrument for her conscious self,
and thereby blocks her self-integration (what this blocking
might involve will be addressed shortly).
To provide empirical support for the contention that the
prostitute reduces her bodily self to the level of an instrument,
consider the following description of prostitution provided by
former prostitute and retired philosophy professor, Yolanda
Estes. Writing of sexual activity between a prostitute and her
client, Estes remarks:
“[The prostitute’s] yielding to any sensations that might arise in
their sexual activity, responding either with frank displeasure or
with genuine arousal to what is happening in and to her body, jeop-
ardizes the integrity of her relationship with the client, others, and
herself. To avoid this danger … she must detach herself from the
bodily events without, for all that, losing control over her body.”
(The Philosophy of Sex, ed. Alan Soble and Nicolas Power, 2008, p.357)
In other words, the prostitute renders her own body an
instrument separate from her inner self in order to preserve
the necessarily limited, tightly defined nature of her relation-
ship with her client as well as to protect herself. But is it true
that she thereby blocks her self-integration? And even if she
does, is prostitution thereby immoral?
In order to answer the first question, clearly we need to know
what self-integration involves. Consider the following exam-
ple of a self-integrated act provided by new natural lawyers
Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen (written, allow me
to stipulate, from George’s perspective):
“When I wish to eat an apple, I reach out and take it; I then take a
bite. Thus, I see, reach for, touch, and taste the apple. In all these
actions, consciousness – mind – and body are fully integrated. My
seeing is not like the inner presentation of a picture. My reaching
out does not consist of an inner attempt, and then an external reach.
Nor do touch and taste consist of an external sensation and then an
internal one. Internal and external are integrated in all these hap-
penings.”
(Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, 2008, p.71)
According to George, then, his eating this apple involves
his desiring (conscious component) to eat (bodily component)
an apple, which gives rise to his eating (bodily component) and
tasting (conscious component) an apple, thereby fulfilling his
desire (conscious component) to do so. In this his conscious
and bodily components are fully integrated because they func-
tion as an interrelated, harmonious whole: in short, they func-
tion as one.
Now consider, instead of the eating of an apple, the actions
that a prostitute performs during sex with a client. Each con-
sists, surely, of a conscious desire to act (conscious component),
followed by the physical action itself (bodily component), fol-
lowed by experiencing (conscious component) and so on. Again,
the conscious and the physical components of the act are inter-

twined and integrated into a seamless whole.
Naturally you might object that, appearances aside, the pros-
titute does not, in fact, desire to perform those actions at all;
she does so only because she desires the payment that comes
from doing it. But George and Tollefsen’s example of a self-
integrated act says nothing about the strength of or the reason
for George’s desire to eat an apple. Nor should it, I submit, as
neither aspect seems to bear upon whether an act blocks one’s
self-integration.
Regarding the strength of George’s desire to eat an apple,
let’s take the worst-case scenario: that, contrary to the narra-
tive; it’s not just that George has no desire to eat an apple,
George strongly desires not to eat an apple. Does George block
his self-integration if he goes ahead and eats one anyway? Not
necessarily. If, for example, George desires something that
eating an apple provides, such as nourishment, and he eats an
apple in order to fulfil that desire, then it seems his doing so
does not block his self-integration, despite the fact that he
strongly desires not to eat an apple, as it were for its own sake.
After all, his bodily activity (eating an apple) is a response to
his conscious state (the desire for nourishment), performed for
the purpose of fulfilling that conscious state and producing
other bodily and conscious states (to be nourished and to expe-
rience the effects of being so). Indeed, if his eating an apple
under such conditions did block his self-integration, then many
other everyday activities would suddenly turn out to be prob-
lematic for the same reason. For example, many people exer-
cise because they desire something that doing so provides –
namely, physical health – despite the fact that they otherwise
strongly desire not to exercise. But the idea that exercising under
these conditions blocks one’s self-integration is implausible.
As for George’s reason for eating an apple, this, too, seems
not to bear upon his self-integration. Whether he does so to
acquire nourishment, experience pleasure, or even appease a
coercer, his doing so does not appear to block his self-integra-
tion. Let’s consider just the most extreme of these, to appease
a coercer: a fruitarian extremist with a gun who orders George
to eat an apple. George’s bodily activity (eating an apple) is a
response to his conscious state (the desire to appease his coercer),
Perception
performed for the purpose of fulfilling that conscious state and
producing other bodily and conscious states (to appease and to
experience the effects of doing so). So even reluctantly eating
an apple in order to appease a coercer, then, involves conscious
and bodily components that are ostensibly integrated. To be
sure, George’s eating of an apple under such conditions is not
fully voluntary. But this does not seem to block his self-inte-
gration, since an act that is not fully voluntary is not one and
the same as an act that is unfree or disharmonious.
And even if engaging in sexual activity with someone for
payment did block one’s self-integration, it is arguably not
thereby immoral. Or rather, if reducing one’s bodily self to the
level of an instrument for one’s conscious self and thereby
blocking one’s self-integration were immoral, then many activ-
ities we previously believed to be morally permissible would
(implausibly) be immoral too. Take being on the receiving end
of a (non-sexual) massage. Many people do so for the sheer
feeling of it, thus reducing their bodily selves to the level of
instruments for their conscious selves. Is being on the receiv-
ing end of a massage thus immoral? If it is, so much the worse
for this version of the instrumentalization argument, I say.
Of course, the individual on the receiving end of a massage
may not have to combat responding to it with either “genuine
arousal” or “frank displeasure” and, in turn, be forced to “detach
herself from the bodily events without, for all that, losing con-
trol over her body,” as Estes contends the prostitute does. So
perhaps it is the specific way in which the prostitute reduces
her bodily self to the level of an instrument that renders pros-
titution immoral. But this, too, is implausible, because this spe-
cific way of instrumentalizing oneself is not unique to prosti-
tution. Consider mind-numbingly boring jobs such as paper-
filing, or horribly disgusting jobs such as cleaning portable toi-
lets. If those who perform such work are to avoid responding
“with frank displeasure” they must, paraphrasing Estes, detach
themselves from the bodily events without losing control over
her bodies. Yet there nevertheless seems to be nothing immoral
about performing either job. And as for responding with gen-
uine arousal, consider that some theater productions contain
scenes involving simulated sexual activity. If the actors are to
avoid responding with genuine arousal (and they should, as a
marvelous scene from the movie Birdman illustrates) they must
detach themselves from the bodily events without losing con-
trol over their bodies. Again, there seems to be nothing immoral
about their doing so.
A Modest Conclusion
Much more can be and has been said about the instrumental-
ization argument for the immorality of prostitution, and there
are many other arguments for the immorality of prostitution.
I’ll conclude, then, on a modest note: To the extent that oppo-
sition to prostitution is rooted in the above versions of the
instrumentalization argument for the immorality of prostitu-
tion, to that extent we have reasons to be wary of it.
© DR R. LOVERING 2017
Rob Lovering is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of
Staten Island, City University of New York. His book A Moral
Defense of Recreational Drug Use is available from Palgrave
Macmillan.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 17
Prejudice &
An Education In Diversity?
Christina Easton asks if a liberal education can be forced on non-liberal communities.
he great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-
T 1873) declared it “almost a self-evident axiom” that
all children must be educated. Modern liberals tend
to agree that education should be compulsory for
minors in some form. However, here the agreement stops and
some seemingly intractable problems arise. Education is seen
as a means to liberty in later life; but what, for instance, should
we say or do when imposing education conflicts with someone’s
present liberties? And how can the liberal be consistent in valu-
ing a diversity of views while advocating compulsory education,
since the moment we state which education must be compul-
sory, we bring in a controversial vision of ‘the good education’,
which may not be agreed upon by all who are forced into it?
These issues came to a head in the famous court case of Wis-
consin v. Yoder (1972). A number of Amish parents, represented
by Yoder, objected to the Wisconsin state law that requires
school attendance until age sixteen. The Amish did not object
to schooling up until fourteen, as this could take place in local
Amish schools. But the further two years entailed attending
non-Amish High School, exposing the children to an ethos in
conflict with Amish values. Instead of High School, Amish
teenagers continued their education informally within the com-
munity in agricultural work for men and domestic work for
women. The court ruled in favour of Yoder, arguing that the
Wisconsin law violated the parents’ right to freedom of reli-
gion by preventing them bringing up their children in the sep-
aration and simplicity essential to Amish life.
Liberal Differences Of Opinion
Many liberals think that the court judgment should have gone
the other way. In their view it is justifiable for the state to impose
a law requiring that Amish children be exposed to diverse values
and ways of living. In On Liberty (1859), Mill extols the value
of diversity in contributing to society’s long-term happiness:
just as different environmental conditions are required for the
optimal growth of different plants, so will a variety of ‘experi-
ments of living’ enable different people to be the best that they
can be. Modern liberals use a similar idea to argue that it would
be wrong to assume that Amish children are all the same, and
so they need to encounter a variety of options and decide what
best suits their character. A similar opinion was voiced by Jus-
tice Douglas, delivering the dissenting opinion in court. He
appealed to “the right of students to be masters of their own
destiny,” and argued that to keep an Amish child from experi-
encing High School means “the child will be forever barred
from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we
have today.” More recently, the legal philosopher Joel Fein-
berg has also argued in favour of the Wisconsin law on the basis
that the liberal state should be neutral, meaning that it “would
act to let all influences, or the largest and most random possi-
ble assortment of influences, work equally on the child, to open
up all possibilities to him” (Freedom and Fulfillment, 1992, p.85).
18 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
BEACHED AMISH © PASTEUR 2007
Amish at the beach
The trouble with these views is that whilst they are liberal in
the sense of being open to a variety of views of the good life, in
another sense they are deeply illiberal. Although they recognize
that there is disagreement in society about which view of the
good life to accept, they ignore the fact that there is also dis-
agreement on the more fundamental question of whether we
should be valuing autonomy and diversity. So Feinberg justifies
a diverse education by appealing to people maximising their
chances for self-fulfilment, but he assumes that this requires the
exercise of autonomy to pursue diversity. Yet from an Amish per-
spective, exposure to diversity could lead to moral compromise
and even rule out eternal fulfilment in the afterlife, and so would
thereby not maximise self-fulfilment. Feinberg’s view is there-
fore far less neutral than he believes. Indeed, Mill’s vision of nur-
turing “open, fearless characters” is no doubt anathema to Amish
parents, who generally value submission and meekness. So whilst
it may be clear to some liberals that exposure to diversity will
benefit Amish children by enriching their available options, this
justification will have little appeal to the Amish themselves. It
may even appear to them that forced exposure to diversity
amounts to indoctrination into liberal values.
Public Agreement
The political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) argued that
if liberals are really concerned with respecting people in the face
of disagreement, then any coercive education policy should be
justified with public reasons – reasons which are acceptable to
the public as a whole, and which therefore do not refer to con-
troversial views of the good life. He criticised Mill for resting
his liberalism “in a large part on ideals and values that are not
generally…shared” (‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’,
Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 1987, p.6). So can liberals, in the
spirit of Rawls, justify exposing children to diversity against the
will of their parents in a way that appeals only to public reasons?
Firstly, they might say that if citizens are to get along in spite
of their disagreements, there needs to be exposure to diversity.
In order to see disagreement as reasonable – or at least, to see
that those with whom you disagree are not entirely irrational –

you need to engage with those with whom you disagree. Such
encounters also provide opportunities for the cultivation of
mutual respect and solidarity. This appeal to peaceful co-exis-
tence could be seen as a ‘public reason’, for peaceful co-exis-
tence seems to be something that every reasonable person would
want, regardless of their specific views of the good life.
Secondly, Rawls argued that education should develop one’s
ability to “participate in [society’s] institutions”. Being an active
citizen in the democratic process requires at least some basic skills
of rational deliberation; and one important way that these skills are
gained is by engaging thoughtfully with different points of view
and people with different values and backgrounds.
Given public reasons such as these, perhaps Rawls would
argue that the state should override the wishes of Amish par-
ents for their childrens’ educational isolation. That his view
could have such implications is indicated when he writes that
“The unavoidable consequences of reasonable requirements for
children’s education may have to be accepted, often with regret”
(Political Liberalism, 2005, p.200).
Rawls versus Mill
Liberals today often prefer this Rawlsian-type justification, since
by appealing to what all reasonable citizens value it is ‘more
neutral’ than justifications appealing to autonomy and diver-
sity, and is therefore better able to cope with the disagreement
that is a feature of modern democracies.
“Hold on!” says the defender of Mill: “When Rawls says that
his liberalism ‘requires far less’ for education than Mill’s liberal-
ism, this implies that Mill has a more demanding view of edu-
cation. Yet this simply doesn’t fit with what Mill said.” In fact,
Mill didn’t have a precise view of what type of education was
necessary. Rather, he wanted the state to “leave to parents to
obtain the education where and how they pleased” (On Liberty,
1859, Ch. V, para 13). He wanted diversity of education, not the
education in diversity suggested by the above justifications. Indeed,
he argued that “A general State education is a mere contrivance
for moulding people to be exactly like another” (ibid).
One might respond by saying that this isn’t what Mill should
have said if he is to be consistent. Indeed, some of Mill’s own
comments lead us to think that his minimum education require-
ments would not be fulfilled by the Amish education in agricul-
tural, carpentry and home-making skills, since he says that chil-
dren should be taught the knowledge required to draw conclu-
sions on matters of controversy, and even suggests that such
PARKING AMISH © JUHA_JOUSI 2012
Amish shopping trip
Perception
TWO WAYS TO GET THERE © GADJOBOY
Amish school run
knowledge be monitored by public examinations. Elsewhere,
Mill talks about the need for a meaningful right of exit from
Mormon communities – which might lead us to think that he
would want Amish children to have an similarily informed aware-
ness of alternatives. This might perhaps be fulfilled by the Rum-
springa, a practice in many Amish communities whereby older
teenagers are allowed to leave temporarily to experience alter-
native ways of life before making a decision about their future.
Whatever the verdict on Mill, we can still press the point
against Rawls by arguing that the public reason defence for impos-
ing liberal education can hardly be called ‘neutral’. For the public
reason defence to work, exposure to diversity must be generally
viewed as more important than values that necessitate a life of
separation. Yet this is precisely what the Amish want to resist.
They may accept the public reasons, but believe these to be out-
weighed by their religious reasons. So justifying the Wisconsin
state law by appeal to public reasons might be neutral in avoid-
ing relying on controversial views, but it fails to be fully neutral,
since it requires rejecting some important Amish beliefs.
Changing The Culture
Whatever view we take, reflecting on this case helps us realise
that liberals need to be more cautious in making claims to neu-
trality, and more honest about where they fail in this aspiration.
We must also make sure that our arguments attend to the real-
ity of the situation. Both the Millian and Rawlsian arguments
invoked the importance of diversity, yet the modern High
School is not simply a melting pot of different ways of life and
an impartial reflector of all values. Rather – as Chief Justice
Burgerpointed out – High Schools tend “to emphasize intel-
lectual and scientific accomplishments, self-distinction, com-
petitiveness, worldly success, and social life.” Moreover, peer
pressure, and, particularly amongst teenagers, the need to con-
form, are likely to promote homogenisation of views. So if lib-
erals are to be able to consistently defend compulsory atten-
dance in state-provided education, school culture would itself
first have to undergo some dramatic changes. Schools would
need to both exhibit and actively promote a diverse range of
ways of life, as well as provide opportunities for majority values,
such as individual self-achievement, to be questioned. The chal-
lenge for head teachers and policy-makers is to implement
strategies that protect minorities from extraordinary pressure
to conform without them having to resort to separation.
© CHRISTINA EASTON 2017
Christina Easton is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the
London School of Economics. Visit personal.lse.ac.uk/davisce2/ or
follow her @ChrEaston.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 19
 What’s So Bad About
Smugness?
Emrys Westacott asks whether it really is a terrible moral failing.
Elaine: “I hate smugness. Don’t you hate smugness?”
Cabdriver: “Smugness is not a good quality.”
o goes a popular snippet from Seinfeld. In a 2014 arti-
S cle in The Guardian titled ‘Smug: The most toxic insult
of them all?’ Mark Hooper opined that “there can be
few more damning labels in modern Britain than
‘smug’.” And CBS journalist Will Rahn declared, in the wake
of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, that “modern jour-
nalism’s great moral and intellectual failing [is] its unbearable
smugness.”
But what is smugness? What, exactly, do people find objec-
tionable about it? And is it really such a terrible moral failing,
worthy of being described as “unbearable”?
What is Smugness?
The best way to get an initial handle on a concept like smug-
ness is to bring forward a few concrete examples. Here are four:
• Someone on a very high income says, “Yes, I am well com-
pensated, but I like to think I’ve earned it, and that I’m
worth it. As a general rule, I think it’s fair to assume that
pay reflects merit.”
• A parent whose children have been admitted to prestigious
universities, talking to one whose child is at a less selective
college, says, “It’s nice to know that one’s kids will be taught
by real experts in the field, and that their classmates will be
at their intellectual level.”
• A punter who has won $500 at the race track backing a rank
outside can’t help smirking at the crestfallen faces of his
friends who all backed the favorite.
• A couple regularly preen themselves on their healthy and
ecologically responsible eating habits.
Smugness is not arrogance. Arrogant people typically dis-
play a sense of their own importance and superiority with little
subtlety: they strut; they are dogmatic; they are dismissive of
others. Smugness shares with arrogance a high degree of self-
satisfaction and a sense of some kind of superiority over others,
but it typically manifests itself quietly and indirectly, without
brashness. Muhammad Ali, who called himself ‘The Greatest’,
was undeniably sure about his own superiority as a boxer, and
he was called many things – arrogant, loud-mouthed, lippy –
but I don’t recall anyone describing him as smug.
Nor need smugness involve contempt for others. When Will
Rahn sets about describing the “unbearable smugness” of the
20 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
liberal media, he does not, in fact, really describe smugness.
What he describes, and what he finds objectionable, isn’t the
self-satisfaction of liberals who are convinced they are right on
issues like climate change, or gay rights. Rather, it’s the con-
tempt they show toward Trump supporters whom they dismiss
as racist, sexist, ignorant, and backward. It is possible, of course,
to be smug and arrogant, or smug and contemptuous. But it’s a
mistake to assume that smugness necessarily entails these atti-
tudes. The successful punter described above is smug, but he
needn’t display arrogance or feel contempt for those less fortu-
nate.
Why Do People Find Smugness Objectionable?
Self-satisfaction and feeling superior to others in some respect
are not in themselves objectionable. In fact, for most of us they
are often unavoidable. Presumably Einstein felt pretty pleased
with himself when he learned that observations made during
an eclipse in 1919 had vindicated his general theory of relativ-
ity. And ordinary mortals typically feel self-satisfied and supe-
rior when they win a game of Scrabble, earn a promotion, receive
an award, or are proved right about some disputed piece of trivia.
It would be a stern moralist who would send us to hell for har-
boring such feelings.
Yet ‘smugness’ is clearly a pejorative term. So just what is it
about smugness that people find objectionable? This is surpris-
ingly hard to pin down.
One might think that smugness is especially unbearable when
it is unjustified. The proverbial case of the privileged scion born
on third base and thinking he’s hit a triple comes to mind. But
is it really the lack of warrant that galls us here? Consider the
smug crank who smiles sadly at our blindness to the fact that
the end of the world is nigh. He, too, is deluded; but we are
more likely to return his pity than view him with moral disfa-
vor. In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, justified smugness
may be harder to take than the kind that rests on self-deception
and illusion. For in the latter case, we have the consolation, or
at least the hope, that history or reality will eventually vindi-
cate us and pop the smugster’s bubble.
Smugness is perhaps most objectionable when it is episte-
mologically justified but morally inappropriate – in less techni-
cal language, when it involves an “I was right and you were
wrong and now you’re screwed!” situation. Trivial examples of
such situations punctuate the interactions of every normal
household (“I did tell you that you were too old for that kind
of dancing.”) But it becomes distasteful if the misfortune suf-
fered is severe (“I gave up smoking, he didn’t; now he’s got lung
cancer and I’m running half-marathons.”) I would say, though,
that in such cases it is not so much the smugness that is repre-
hensible as the lack of that sympathetic concern which ought,

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BEARING CHILDREN IMAGE © BOFY 2017
in a morally healthy individual, to check any inclination to be
smug.
Smugness, as we have said, involves self-satisfaction and
some sense of superiority. This may well be accompanied by,
and can certainly foster, other failings: most obviously, a lack
of humility, and an unwillingness to be self-critical. Here we
approach familiar moral ground. Thomas Aquinas argued that
pride is the original sin, the worst sin, and the source of all other
sins, and numerous theologians have taken the same line. Yet
smugness, while it is at odds with humility, surely falls far short
of overweening pride. (And we might observe, in passing, that
it is hard to imagine a form of smugness more extreme than that
of those religious believers who are utterly convinced that they
number among the blessed while everyone else is damned.)
Another reason we might object to smugness is that we just
plain don’t like someone else either being or feeling superior
to us. This is understandable. It probably has an evolutionary
basis. But notice, it isn’t a moral argument against smugness;
it’s just an explanation of a psychological fact. The accompany-
ing moral argument would be that smugness is objectionable
because it causes others to feel inferior, and feeling inferior is
an unpleasant experience. This is essentially a utilitarian argu-
ment (utilitarians assign a negative value to displeasure) and it
can perhaps be given some weight – although I suspect most
people will actually deny that encountering smugness excites
feelings of inferiority in them.
One could also argue that the smug individual simply pre-
sents us with a displeasing spectacle. I’m inclined to think that
this is closest to what most of us find objectionable about smug-
ness. We simply don’t like that self-satisfied smirk, that self-
congratulatory inflection in the voice, that self-assured com-
placency in the body language. Note, though, that this is closer
to an aesthetic objection than to a moral criticism, more like a
complaint about the dorkiness and bad connotations of plus
fours and tweeds rather than an ethical critique of grouse shoot-
ing.
Note, further, just how weak all the above objections to smug-
ness are. Even if the smugness is unjustified, is accompanied by
a dose of sinful pride, triggers a few feelings of inadequacy, and
offends our taste, it still seems to be a vice without teeth, doing
no-one any great harm. Indeed, one could go further. What
does it say about me that I am displeased, even angered, by the
mere spectacle of someone enjoying the relatively harmless plea-
sure known as smugness? Wouldn’t I be a better person if this
didn’t upset me, just as I’d be more admirable and happier if I
was free from envy? Better, surely, to be the kind of person who
takes pleasure in the happiness of others so long as it does not
come at another’s expense.
Is Smugness Really So Bad?
These reflections lead naturally to the question: Is smugness
ever really so awful as to be ‘unbearable’ (the adjective to which
it is commonly yoked)? After all, it doesn’t usually do those who
encounter it any actual harm. Nor are smug people prevented
by their smugness from achieving happiness. On the contrary,
happiness surely requires a certain degree of self-satisfaction. A
Woody Allen type, whose only regret in life is that he isn’t some-
body else, will always be discontented.
Imagine this. At your beautiful daughter’s first birthday party
there are many guests, including twelve good fairies who arrive
bearing wonderful gifts. Suddenly a thirteenth fairy shows up,
angry that she was not invited, and curses your daughter. “She
may be beautiful,” she cries, “but when she is fifteen she will
prick her finger on a spindle and become thoroughly evil!” You
are horrified. For one’s child to turn out evil is the worst fate
imaginable, worse even than their death. But the twelfth fairy,
who has not yet bestowed her gift, steps forward and says, “I
cannot negate the curse entirely, but I can modify it. Your
daughter will not become evil; but she will acquire one moral
failing that she will have her whole life long. You must choose
which it is to be from the following list: cruelty, callousness,
dishonesty, insincerity, cowardice, ungenerosity, unkindness,
bigotry, greed, avarice, sloth, lecherousness, gluttony, or smug-
ness.”
Who wouldn’t choose smugness as the least toxic and the
most bearable of all these evils?
I am not defending smugness. It may be a minor failing, but
it is, admittedly, often an undesirable trait. We should distin-
guish, though between actions and feelings. We can work at
not exhibiting smugness in our words and deeds; it is much
harder to avoid feeling smug in some situations, just as it can be
hard not to feel envy or jealousy. Still, over time even our feel-
ings can to some extent be trained. And those of us who do suc-
ceed in avoiding smugness are surely entitled to feel quite
pleased with ourselves.
© EMRYS WESTACOTT 2017
Emrys Westacott is Professor of Philosophy at Alfred University in
Western New York. His most recent book is The Wisdom of Fru-
gality (Princeton University Press, 2016).
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 21
 The Rise of the Intelligent Authors
Lochlan Bloom wonders what writers will do when
computers become better writers than humans.
ver the past century the pursuit of facts has come
O to be the central goal of human progresss, with the
dominant perception being that facts are important
while fiction is at best superfluous. Yet there is
increasing evidence that we as humans live our lives in a realm
of fictions. It seems we are preconditioned to accept stories and
embed them in the deepest fabric of our societies – for exam-
ple, stories of nationhood, society, economics, or religion. And
yet the ability to determine facts is now normally seen as the
more vital human trait: facts are important, fiction is superflu-
ous. Reading a book or watching a film of an evening is some-
thing to do to relax after a hard day of productivity, a hard day
discerning the facts in whatever area of work you are engaged.
But as the philosopher-historian Yuval Noah Harari claims
in an interview, “We cooperate with millions of strangers if and
only if we all believe in the same fictional stories. The human
superpower is really based on fiction. As far we know we are
the only animal that can create and believe in fictional stories.
And all large scale human cooperation is based on fiction”
(youtube.com/watch?v=JJ1yS9JIJKs).
Here I want to argue that the coming rise of artificial intel-
ligence presents a threat to our way of life not only because it
is very likely we will become much worse than machines at
determining facts, but also because we will, in all likelihood,
become worse than machines at creating fictions.
Recommendations for the Useless
Machine learning algorithms connected to global networks of
sensors and data sources will increasingly outperform us when
it comes to assessing what is factually correct, whether that relates
to stock market movements, the best way to run a company, or
the emotional state of a person. At present it takes professionals
years of training to identify facts within their profession, and to
understand what is a real issue and what is not. So if in the future
nobody is trained because machines can analyse the information
better than any human, how then could anyone sensibly discuss
what is fact and what not?In relation to this Yuval Noah Harari
talks about the rise of a ‘useless class’ incapable of doing any-
thing better than machines; and although there is no certainty
how technology will play out, it seems undeniable that in future
a huge majority of people, from radiographers to economists,
will not be needed to do the sort of fact-based jobs we do today.
This shift is also likely to be radical when it comes to the most
commonly accepted form of fiction, the novel.
Already we are approaching a state where a machine’s under-
standing of what we read is beyond that of the author in many
areas. Amazon can already collect data from millions of Kin-
dles and analyse how a particular reader interacts with a text
in terms of which bits we read quickly and where we slow down
or stop, and extrapolate this data to provide recommendations
based on our personality.
22 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
This analysis of the interaction between a reader and a text
will only get more finessed as we add more readers and more
computing power into the system. As Harari writes in a Finan-
cial Times article, “Soon, books will read you while you are read-
ing them. And whereas you quickly forget most of what you
read, computer programs need never forget” (August 26th,
2016). Soon the algorithms will know exactly which tracts push
your buttons. They will know what you enjoy reading better
than you do. Whether you want a thrilling yarn about swords
and sorcery, or a enlightening philosophical novel, developed
AI will understand precisely which stories you will react to, and
will be able to tailor recommendations to you personally.
The Next Step for Authorship
If we take this thought even further, we can see it is not unlikely
that once these machine learning tools become available we will
then set about re-engineering them so that the machines become
the authors themselves. The algorithms may not ‘understand’
what they are writing, but they will be able to calculate exactly
what to write to engage our interest, and will construct person-
alised novels accordingly.
In November 2016 Google announced upgrades to its Trans-
late service which bring it closer than ever to the way humans
use language – analyzing text at the phrase level rather than word
by word. As Barak Turovsky, product lead at Google Translate,
wrote in a blog post, “Neural translation is a lot better than our
previous technology, because we translate whole sentences at a
time, instead of pieces of a sentence… This makes for transla-
tions that are usually more accurate and sound closer to the way
people speak the language.”
Once this approach is refined and improved it is certainly not
implausible that a machine would be able to produce a whole
book. What’s more, a machine could write a book virtually instan-
taneously. It could write a hundred books. Millions. One for
every customer on demand. An endless series of sequels tailored
just for you. A made-to-measure novel for your individual per-
sonality right now; your ideal read for your mood at the time.
In these circumstances it would be impossible for any human
author to compete commercially. What author could possibly
make a living? How would a human author produce a best-seller,
when a machine can produce a million perfectly designed per-
sonalised novels in a fraction of the time? The algorithm will
know what you have already read, what you yearn for, what will
appear new and fresh to you, and what will appear stale. Who
would even bother reading the less personalised work? Well,
there may be a sub-culture that enjoys artisanal books, hand-
crafted by a human author; but ultimately those books will just
not be as enjoyable to read. What then would be the purpose of
writing fiction in a world where machines can do it so much
better? Will that bring an end to the human desire to create fic-
tion through the act of writing?

An Axe for the Frozen Sea Within
“The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library... Poetry is the
encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Poetry (1977)
One possibility is that we will utilize the tools provided by
AI to forge a new form of writing. After all, the writing process
is not about becoming better at typing, or copy-editing, or learn-
ing a series of plot rules or character development concepts. It
is (or should be) about precisely those things that machines are
now improving at – pushing our emotional buttons. The ques-
tion is not whether the machines will become better than
humans at eliciting a given response, which we assume they will,
but which responses we choose the machines to elicit; and so I
suggest that the job of the author in the AI age will be determin-
ing the best sets of responses to aim to create. For some the novels
they choose will be potboilers, containing formulaic, unchal-
lenging thrills; but for others – those seeking an epiphany or a
deeper consciousness of the world – the tools to create machine
written fiction will be a core part of literature and their explo-
ration of consciousness.
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab
us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the
PLEASE VISIT WWW.STEVELILLIE.BIZ
AUTHORS OLD & NEW © STEVE LILLIE 2017
head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you
write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books,
and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write
ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disas-
ter, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
That is my belief.”
Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, 27th January 1904
The technology will soon have the power to enable the more
adventurous readers to craft their own path through a con-
stantly evolving literature. With the aid of computer tools,
people could even write their own sacred texts, their own books
of awakenings. Imagine if every book you read gave you a
moment of awakening – provided the axe to the frozen sea
inside – instead of spending hours ploughing through books
that you realize too late are a waste of time. This can happen
if our reading habits themselves became part of the act of cre-
ation – an organic never-ending exploration of the possibility
of language.
© LOCHLAN BLOOM 2017
Lochlan Bloom is a British novelist, screenwriter and short story
writer. His debut novel The Wave is out now.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 23
 Santa Claus & the Problem of Evil
Jimmy Alfonso Licon engages in a little Santodicy for Christmas.
here are many profound philosophical issues involv-
T ing Santa. For example, we might wonder how we
know that Santa doesn’t exist. That is, although it
seems obvious that there is no Santa, the reasons
usually given for this disbelief are less sound than is often appre-
ciated. In this article I want to explore an argument against
Santa that shares a number of features with the problem of evil
that has long troubled theologians. This argument against Santa
is one way we can know that he doesn’t exist, but without the
same vulnerabilities that the usual reasons have.
Bad Arguments Against Santa
First let’s survey some of the usual reasons people give for think-
ing that there is no Santa.
Some say that disproving the Santa belief is a simple matter
of visiting the North Pole and looking for him. There would
be no Santa to be found. However, it could be that Santa’s work-
shop is disguised to avoid detection, even by the most sophisti-
cated methods; after all, Santa is supposedly capable of doing
all sorts of other extraordinary things. So, even if Santa resided
there, he might not be easily detected.
Others say that it would be impossible for Santa to deliver
gifts to children around the globe within the space of a single
night. This is only a difficulty if we think that Santa is an ordi-
nary human. But that can’t be right. Santa cannot be merely
human; after all, he relies on flying reindeer for transportation!
If Santa had extraordinary powers, then he might be able deliver
gifts, the world over, in such a short time. We might for exam-
ple suppose that Santa has the ability to slow down time.
Other people might object that clearly, guardians and family
members provide the gifts come Christmas time. Unfortunately,
while they’re often responsible for buying the gifts, this is insuf-
ficient to prove that all gifts come from them. However, the
claim is not that Santa is the only source of gifts at Christmas.
Rather, Santa is only supposed to be the source of some gifts.
So, although we know that there is no Santa, it is less obvi-
ous how we know this is so. This situation of not knowing how
you know is quite common. For example, you might know that
it’s going to rain in the morning, but without having any idea
why it’s going to rain. But after reviewing the problem of evil,
I’ll argue that a similar problem provides a good reason for how
we know there is no Santa.
The Problem of Evil
Philosophers right back to Epicurus (341-270 BC) have grap-
pled with the problem of whether it’s possible to reconcile the
existence of widespread and horrendous evil (plagues, torture,
genocide...) with the existence of an all-powerful, perfectly
benevolent God.
Atheists hold that needless suffering is good reason to doubt
that there is an all-powerful, perfectly good God. But theists
have a number of responses to the problem of evil. Some argue
24 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
that suffering is the product of people exercising their free will;
after all, if humans have the ability to choose between good and
evil actions, then some of them will choose to do evil. And
because the ability to choose, even if the choice is evil, is
supremely valuable, God must not interfere; if He did, then it
would undermine the value of freely making good choices. For
example, we think that people who are compelled to do the right
thing are not morally praiseworthy; they are only praiseworthy
if they could have chosen to do evil, but chose the good instead.
The main thrust of the problem involves there being many
instances of suffering that don’t seem to do a bit of good for
anyone. The philosopher William Rowe famously gave this
example: “Suppose that in a forest somewhere, there is a fawn
that has been struck by lightning. She lies on the forest floor for
a couple of days in agony, until death relieves her suffering”
(‘The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism’, Ameri-
can Philosophical Quarterly 16 (4), 1979). If there is a perfectly
good God, then it would be in His nature to prevent needless
suffering; and if He is all-powerful, then He would be able to
prevent it. So why doesn’t He?
The problem of evil is only a mystery if there really is such a
person as God. The problem we explore in the next section has a
similar structure: it is only a mystery why there are vast num-
bers of good children who receive no gifts whatsoever if there
really is such a person as Santa.
Santa and the Problem of Moral Desert
We should start with the essential nature of Santa; that is, the prop-
erties that an individual must have if they are to qualify as Santa.
One plausible essential property of Santa is that he distributes
gifts on the basis of moral desert. When philosophers use the term
‘moral desert’, they mean what people deserve based on their
actions. For example, it is plausible that someone who robs a bank
deserves to be punished: there is a sense in which they’ve earned
their punishment. So it is also plausible to suppose that an essen-
tial property of Santa is that he rewards good children with gifts,
but doesn’t so reward naughty children. There’s some evidence
for this suggestion in popular culture, for example, in the lyrics
from the song ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’:
“He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”
So Santa is essentially someone who delivers gifts to children
based on whether they deserve them. Thus we should expect that
the distribution of gifts come Christmas morning would respect
the moral desert of the recipient if there were a Santa. Suppose then
that only bad children received gifts. This unfair pattern of gift
distribution would then itself be good reason to suppose that
there was no Santa.
However, there’s a catch. If you recall, I said that part of our
conception of Santa is that he’s responsible only for some of the
gifts that children receive. Children on the naughty list don’t such a prediction is false.
receive gifts from him; and yet many of them receive gifts
anyway. So, with respect to the distribution of gifts among chil- The appeal to mystery and magic, even if correct, shouldn’t
dren, there is a confounding factor: parents who give their give do much to shake our confidence in either (1) or (2).
their children gifts even if they are naughty. Second, if the appeal to mystery and magic were compelling
To correct for this factor, we have to focus on whether there enough to overcome our evidence for (1) and (2), then it would
are good children who don’t receive any gifts whatsoever. That is, also be compelling enough to defeat nearly any claim we could
we would predict that if Santa exists, then good children would at make about Santa. That is, if he is so mysterious that his reasons
least receive gifts from him. But instead we find that there are mil- are beyond comprehension, then nearly all Santa-talk would be
lions of good children around the world who receive nothing. unfounded: in other words, if we don’t understand Santa’s moti-
We might formulate the argument as follows: vations at all, then it’s difficult to say anything about him with-
out the possibility that it be contradicted by something we don’t
A. If there is a Santa, then all deserving children would receive know. But we seem to say all kinds of things about Santa. So
something for Christmas. there isn’t much reason to take this kind of objection seriously.
B. But there are plenty of deserving children who receive noth- In conclusion, although there are a number of reasons people
ing for Christmas. So, give for how they know there is no Santa, many of these rea-
C. There is no such person as Santa. sons are not as convincing as they first appear. However, if we
put the issue in terms similar to the problem of evil, then there
So the pattern of distribution of gifts among good children is a more fruitful way to think about how we can know that there
is a serious evidential challenge to Santa’s existential status. is no Santa. Hopefully, this exercise is also a reminder that issues
which we think are mundane or obvious, are often less so upon
Problems with the Problem closer examination.
Someone might respond that around the holiday season it is © JIMMY ALFONSO LICON 2017
common to find in a shopping mall a Santa asking children what Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy doctoral student at the Univer-
they want for Christmas, without regard for whether they have sity of Maryland, College Park. He works primarily in epistemology,
been bad or good. This could imply that delivering gifts to chil- metaethics, and Santology.
dren because they’re children might instead be central to our con-
ception of Santa. If so, this would be a difficulty for the argu- • Thanks to Glen Licon (my brother) for helpful feedback on
ment against Santa from moral desert. If part of our concep- an earlier draft.
tion of Santa is that he delivers gifts indiscriminately, then the
fact that Santa doesn’t appear to be responsive to moral desert
does not count against the existence of Santa.
However, another feature of our shared conception of Santa
is that, just as in the mall case, he indiscriminately inquires of
every child what they want for Christmas. Santa is fair to every
child that he meets, in that he gives them each a chance to feel
that they’ve been heard, and perhaps it is also an opportunity
to remind them that they should be good if they are to expect
any gifts from him. But notice that asking children what they
want, and actually delivering it, are very different.
Perhaps someone else might object that there’s so much
about Santa that we don’t understand, and he might have com-
pelling reasons for not delivering gifts to some good children.
That is, although he usually delivers gifts to good children, there
are other mitigating reasons that might override him doing so;
however, because Santa is so mysterious, we would be unable
to comprehend those reasons (some theists say similar things
about God in response to the problem of evil).
There are a couple of problems with this objection.
First, while aspects of our modern conception of Santa allow
that he is mysterious and magical, this doesn’t seem relevant to
evaluating the problem of moral desert.
That problem is comprised of two components:

(1) The prediction we would make if Santa were real as to the

pattern of Christmas gift distribution among good children
based on Santa’s desert-respecting nature.
(2) The empirical evidence from our everyday experience that

December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 25

 Kant &
The Human
Subject
Brian Morris compares the ways
Kant’s question “What is the human
being?” has been answered by
philosophers and anthropologists.
ccording to many recent texts, anthropology is the
A study of ‘what it means to be human’. This was
Immanuel Kant’s definition of anthropology, and
Kant (1724-1804) was one of the founding ancestors
of the discipline, along with Rousseau, Herder, and Ferguson.
Drawing on the insights of both the Enlightenment and
romanticism, anthropology has since its birth had a ‘dual her-
itage’ (Maurice Bloch) combining humanism and naturalism. In
terms of method, it combines scientific explanations of social and
cultural phenomena with hermeneutics or biosemiotics. Yet
although certain people write of some great divide or schism
within anthropology, it has always had, in spite of its diversity, a
certain unity of vision and purpose. It employs a universal per-
spective that places humans firmly within nature. Anthropology
has therefore always placed itself at the interface between the
humanities and the natural sciences, especially evolutionary biol-
ogy. In many ways it is an inter-discipline, held together by plac-
ing an emphasis on ethnographic studies, which involve a close
experiential encounter with a particular way of life or culture.
Both Karl Popper and Mario Bunge described anthropology as
the key social science, for it is unique among the human sciences
in putting an emphasis on cultural differences (Herder). This
means it can offer a cultural critique of much of Western culture
and philosophy, while at the same time emphasizing our shared
humanity (Kant), thus enlarging our sense of moral community.
Kant suggested that the most important question in philoso-
phy was not that of truth (epistemology), goodness (ethics), or
beauty (aesthetics) – the topics which so fascinate academic
philosophers – but rather the anthropological question, ‘What is
the human being?’ He also suggested that this question could
only be answered empirically, and not by resorting to, say, meta-
physics. This implies, of course, that we can learn more about
26 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
RON SCHEPPER 2017 (YOU CAN CONTACT HIM AT EDITOR@TEXTURA.ORG)
COVER ART BY
KANT & SKULL: PHILOSOPHY NOW
the human subject by studying anthropology, (ethnography),
sociology, psychology, ethology, and now evolutionary biology,
than by engaging in speculative academic philosophy about
human beingness, in the style of Husserl, Heidegger, or Derrida.
Throughout history, and in all cultures, people have
responded to Kant’s fundamental question ‘What is the human
being?’ in very diverse ways; even denying that humans have
any relation with the material world, as extreme gnostics do.
Or Hare Krishna devotees exclaim, ‘You are not your body’.
Indeed, there has been a long tradition in Western philosophy
that identifies the subject/self with consciousness. Anthropolo-
gists have long emphasized and illustrated the diversity of cul-
tural conceptions of the human subject (see my Anthropology of
the Self, Pluto, 1994); but even within the Western intellectual
tradition there exists an absolute welter of studies that have
attempted to define or conceptualize the human subject in dif-
ferent ways. Western responses to Kant’s fundamental ques-
tion have been extremely diverse and contrasting, and I want
to briefly discuss three approaches: the essentialist, the dualist,
and the Kantian triadic ontology of the subject.
The Human Essence
The first approach tends to define the human subject or self in
terms of a single essential attribute. The following essentialist
characterizations of humanity are well known: Homo economicus
(‘economic man’), Homo faber (‘the tool-making primate’), Homo
sapiens (‘wise man’), and Homo ludens (‘man the player’). Aristo-
tle famously defined humanity as Zoon logon echon – ‘the animal
endowed with reason’. (The tendency to group Aristotle
together with the likes of Descartes, Kant and Heidegger as an
advocate of a dualistic metaphysic is, however, somewhat mis-
placed, because Aristotle, as Ernst Mayr always insisted, was
fundamentally a biological thinker. Aristotle certainly knew a
lot more about the diversity of animal life than did the preten-
tious Jacques Derrida and his cat.) Robert Ardrey, in contrast,
defined humanity as the ‘killer ape’; while Julien La Mettrie
and Richard Dawkins seem to envisage the human person as
simply a biological machine. A more recent controversial
account of humans depicts them in rather Hobbesian fashion
as a wholly predatory and destructive animal: Homo rapiens (John
Gray). Such misanthropy is debatable, and is simply an update
of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion that humans are a ‘pox’ on a
beautiful earth. Many twentieth century deep ecologists have
expressed the same negative sentiments, that humans are ‘aliens’
or ‘parasites’ on the rest of the biosphere; and thus famines, the
AIDS epidemic, and malaria, were extolled as a way of reduc-
ing the human population. Such anti-humanism was long ago
critiqued by the social ecologist Murray Bookchin.
The list of what is deemed to be the essential characteristic
of the human species seems virtually endless. But significantly,
such interpretations based on a single essential characteristic
tend to gravitate to two extremes. On the one hand, there are
those scholars who firmly believe in the existence of a univer-
sal human nature or essence. Generally adopting a highly indi-
vidual-centered approach, the human subject is thus defined
either as a purely rational ego (as with rational choice theo-
rists), or as having innate tendencies and dispositions – as having
a universal nature that was forged through natural selection
processes during the Palaeolithic, when humans were hunter-
gatherers. Thus humans have a nature, and it is fundamentally
tribal, as Robin Fox puts it.
On the other hand, many other scholars, particularly cul-
tural anthropologists, existentialists and postmodernists, deny
that humans have an essence or nature. Such scholars often
suggest that in becoming human beings, through the develop-
ment of language, symbolic thought, self-consciousness, and
complex sociality, we have moved beyond nature to become
free of the chains of our instincts. We have become, in Ernst
Cassirer’s term, Homo symbolicum. Such a conception has often
been critiqued (by, for instance, Steven Pinker), as it implies
that the human mind is simply a ‘blank slate’ which has com-
pletely effaced human biological history and the inherited spe-
cific faculties of the human brain, and therefore, mind.

Homo Duplex
It has also long been recognized that humans are fundamen-
tally both natural and cultural beings, and that language, self-
identity, and social existence are interconnected, and have been
throughout human history. As Kenan Malik emphasized,
human nature is as much a product of our historical develop-
ment as it is of our biological heritage. Emile Durkheim
famously expressed this dualistic conception of human subjec-
tivity as Homo duplex when he wrote:

“Man is double. There are two beings in him; an individual being

which has its foundation in the organism, and a social being which
represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order”
(The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1915).

Like his mentor, Auguste Comte, Durkheim allowed little

scope for a science of psychology, let
alone any existentialist thought.
It has long been recognized, by
thinkers as diverse as Edmund Husserl,
Erich Fromm, and Lewis Mumford, that
there is an essential ‘paradox’ or ‘contra-
diction’ at the heart of human life. For
humans as organisms are an intrinsic part
of nature, while at the same time, through
our conscious experience, symbolic life,
and above all, our culture, we are also in
a sense separate from nature. In this light
humans have been described by Ray-
mond Tallis as an ‘explicit animal’. We
have what Cicero described as a ‘second
nature’. This duality or dialectic is well
expressed in the famous painting in the
Vatican by Raphael, The School of Athens,
which depicts Plato pointing up to the
heavens while Aristotle points down to
the earth.
Human duality is also reflected in the
fact that the human brain is composed of
two distinct hemispheres, with distinct
functions, and two very different ways of
being in the world. The left hemisphere
is associated with language, symbolic
thought, analysis, facts or things in iso-
lation, focussed attention, and the non-
living aspects of the world; while the right
hemisphere is associated with visual
“
Human duality is
also reflected in
the fact that the
human brain is
composed of two
distinct hemi-
spheres, with
distinct functions,
and different
ways of being in
the world.
28 Philosophy Now
”  December 2017/January 2018
Plato and Aristotle by Raphael
imagery, pre-linguistic thought, synthe-
sis, patterns and relations, things in con-
text, and organic life. Reason, science,
creativity and selfhood all involve both
sides of the brain, and there is no simple
relationship between the hemispherical
differences and ethnic, class or gender
affiliations. It is significant however that
if the right side of the brain is severely
damaged, the left side becomes overac-
tive, and an ultra-rationalist sensibility
may develop. This sensibility is mani-
fested in a predilection for abstraction
and geometric patterns, a flight from the
body, a feeling of fragmentation, a lack
of empathy for others (egoism), and
alienation from the natural world – the
postmodern condition, or the
schizophrenic personality lauded by
Gilles Deleuze?
What tends to be downplayed or even
ignored in dualistic conceptions of the
human subject is human uniqueness and
agency. It might therefore be helpful to
return to Kant and his more complex tri-
adic conception of the human subject.
A Triadic Ontology
Through his philosophical writings and
with regard to his profound influence on
subsequent scholarship, Immanuel Kant
has rightly been acclaimed as one of the
key figures in the history of Western
thought. He had a deep interest in the
natural sciences, particularly physical
geography, but what is less well known
is that he also gave lectures in anthropol-
ogy for more than twenty years. We are
told by his student Johann Herder that
the lectures were in the nature of hugely
entertaining talks. At the age of seventy-
four Kant published Anthropology from a
ALLAN AJIFO / CREATIVE COMMONS (CC BY 2.0)
Pragmatic Point of View (1798). (By ‘pragmatic’, he meant the
use of knowledge to widen the scope of human freedom and to
advance the dignity of humankind.)
In this seminal text Kant suggested that there were three dis-
tinct, but interrelated, ways of understanding the human sub-
ject: firstly as a universal species-being (mensch) – the “earthly
being endowed with reason” on which Kant’s anthropological
work was mainly focussed; secondly as a unique self (selbst); and
thirdly as part of a people – as a member of a particular social
group (volk). (Notwithstanding the last element, Herder always
insisted that Kant, with his emphasis on universal human fac-
ulties such as imagination, perception, memory, feelings, desires
and understanding, tended to downplay the importance of lan-
guage, poetry and cultural diversity in understanding human
life. But as a pioneer anthropologist, Herder also emphasized
that anthropology, not speculative metaphysics or logic, was
the key to understanding humans and their life-world, that is,
their culture.)
Long ago the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, following
Kant, made a statement that is in some ways rather banal but
which has always seemed to me to encompass an important
truth. Critical of dualistic nature-culture conceptions of the
human subject, Kluckhohn, along with the pioneer psycholo-
gist Henry Murray, suggested that every person is, as a species-
being (a human) in some respects like every other person; but
they are also all like no other human being in having a unique
personality (or self); and, finally, that they have affinities with
some other humans in being a social and cultural being (or
person). These three categories relate to three levels or pro-
cesses in which all humans are embedded; namely, the phylo-
genetic, pertaining to the evolution of humans as a species-
being; the ontogenetic, which relates to the life history of the
person within a specific familial and biological setting; and,
finally, the socio-historical, which situates the person in a spe-
cific social-cultural context. So Kluckholm, not unlike Kant,
thought human beings need to be conceptualized in terms of
three interconnected aspects: as a species-being characterized by
biopsychological dispositions and complex sociality; as a unique
individual self; and finally, as a social being or person, enacting
social identities or subjectivities – which in all human societies
are multiple, shifting and relational. For an anthropologist like
Kluckhohn the distinction between being a human individual
and being a person was important, for many tribal people rec-
ognize non-human persons, while under chattel slavery, the
law treated human slaves not as persons, but rather as things
or commodities.
Conclusion
Anthropologists within different cultural configurations tend
to highlight one of three aspects of human subjectivity. Neo-
Darwinian scholars, for example – particularly evolutionary
psychologists and sociobiologists – invariably focus on the
human subject as a species-being. Emphasizing genetic or bio-
logical factors, they tend to downplay or ignore existential and
social factors in understanding the human subject. In contrast,
existentialists, radical phenomenologists, and literary anthro-
pologists, put a fundamental emphasis on the unique self and
subjective experience – Derrida’s ‘autobiographical animal’ –
Photography In The 18th Century
Kant, that austere, stay-at-home philosopher
from back in his eighteenth century enlightenment
would really have liked cameras,
and not just because they demonstrate
how our kit, biological and mechanical,
determines if we see the flower petals in his matrix of
a world
as luminescent symbols of god or grainy sets of
washed out flakes.
No, it would have shaken him
from the slumber of his circumscribed ways,
so predicable town clocks were set to his daily walk.
Imagine him with a new interest in photography
playfully dancing out at any time of day
hiding behind some flowering shrub
in knee-length hosiery and buckled shoes,
digital Canon or Nikon in hand,
happily snapping startled passersby;
or sneaking up on shopkeepers,
shiny goods piled high behind them,
detecting and then revealing with candid shots
their cheating ways and hidden dodgy fruit,
all their secretest secrets,
shutter sound loud, flash bright
to get the full paparazzi effect.
Every month on forays far beyond his home town
he’d trade in a lens or two for some higher spec:
faster, wider, longer.
Once in a while there’d be a brand new body
with more pixels to its sensor
because, like you and me, he greedily craves
the lure of an ever-greater approximation to reality,
whatever that may be.
But after a while perhaps the Königsberg aldermen
would tire of seeing their moles and deformities
magnified around town in posters churned out for our
moralist by the local apothecary.
With not a wisp of understanding the irony
that they’d caught him out in some illogical anomaly,
they’d arraign him on charges of behaving in ways
that treated others as mere images
for his own selfish pleasure;
and at the end of the lawsuit
the judge in exasperation would intone,
“Immanuel, where would we be if everyone spent
their time in such a useless pursuit?”
Then in response to furtive clickings
from behind the philosopher’s gown
he’d shout with cold command and withering frown
“For God’s sake man, put that camera down!”
© PETER KEEBLE 2017
Peter is a retired local government research officer and
teacher, much of whose poetry makes use of philosophy.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 29
 Philosophical Haiku
LAOZI
(Pre-Fourth Century BCE)
Going with the flow
Being at one with nature
The way of the Dao
L
aozi, often written Lao Tzu – the name simply means ‘Old
Master’ – has the distinction amongst great philosophers of
probably never having existed. Still, having an uncertain exis-
tence hasn't prevented his being revered by many as a deity
(which is pretty much the case with God). Laozi is reputedly the author
of the great text of Daoism, the Dao De Ching or Tao Te Ching (Treatise
on the Way and Its Power). Tradition holds that Laozi lived in the sixth
century BCE; but it might’ve been the fifth century… or the fourth (it’s
a moot point, really, when you’re talking about someone who possibly
didn’t live at all). Whenever it was he did or didn’t live, he was certainly
esteemed, and given the title of ‘Supreme Mysterious and Primordial
Emperor’, idolised by both nobility and the ordinary riff-raff. Clearly,
having an uncertain existence doesn’t prevent his being revered by
many as a deity (that’s also pretty much the case with God). All sorts of
legends surround the legendary Old Master, including the story that he
gave the Buddha a few hints on how to live.
Laozi (supposedly) taught that the world consists of opposites – light
and dark, hot and cold, male and female – and that the underlying princi-
ple of the natural world is reversion: if things go too far to one extreme,
they’ll swing back the other in due course, like a pendulum (possibly flat-
tening you along the way past). The best way for us to live is to be in accor-
dance with this natural order, that is, in accordance with the Dao, which is
the natural flow of the universe, merging ourselves as fully as we can with
nature. Time and effort shouldn’t be wasted in pursuing worldly posses-
sions – inevitably these lead only to loss and suffering. Instead we should
endeavour to be meek, mild, and have as few desires as possible.
For reasons which escape me, this is not a philosophy that appeals
much to the current Western mind.
© TERENCE GREEN 2017
Terence is a writer, historian and lecturer, and lives with his wife
and their dog in Paekakariki, NZ. hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz
30 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
and thus tend to completely ignore the important insights to
be derived from evolutionary biology and historical sociol-
ogy. Finally there is a group of scholars who emphasize to an
extreme that the human person is fundamentally a socio-cul-
tural being. This kind of approach is exemplified by
Durkheimian sociology, American cultural anthropology –
well reflected in the writings of Leslie White, who famously
suggested that we should study culture as if human beings did
not exist – as well as the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss
and Louis Althusser. It’s a current of thought that interprets
human cognition as largely determined by sociocultural fac-
tors; or, as with the postmodernists, as simply an effect of dis-
courses. It thus downplays the relevance of biological and eco-
logical factors in human life, with some scholars virtually deny-
ing human agency. They have what Dennis Wrong long ago
described as an “oversocialized conception of man.” How-
ever, each of the three approaches to the human subject – the
biological, the psychological, and the sociocultural – have a
certain validity, and a fundamental part to play in answering
the question ‘What is the human being?’ They are of limited
effectiveness, however, if interpreted in an exclusive fashion.
What is needed is an approach that integrates all three per-
spectives, since a host of causal mechanisms and generative
processes – biological, ecological, psychological, social and
cultural – go into making up a human being.
Throughout the twentieth century, many scholars, within
diverse intellectual traditions, did develop a more integrated
approach to the understanding of the human subject, recog-
nizing, like Kant, the need to develop a more complex model
of the subject. The sociologist Marcel Mauss, for example, in
contrast to Durkheim’s concept of Homo duplex, conceptual-
ized the human subject as l’homme total, conceived as a biolog-
ical, psychological and social being; a living being with inher-
ent capacities and powers and a unique self constituted through
diverse social relationships. Likewise, within the pragmatist
tradition, George Herbert Mead and C. Wright Mills empha-
sized that the human being was simultaneously a biological
organism, a self with a fundamentally social psychic structure,
and a person embedded within a specific historical context.
The Marxist phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Herbert Marcuse, the Neo-Freudian scholars Erich Fromm
and Erik Erikson (who attempted a synthesis between psycho-
analysis and, respectively, Marxism or anthropology), and the
cultural anthropologists Clyde Kluckhohn, Irving Hallowell
and Melford Spiro, have all attempted, in various ways, to
convey the complex triadic nature of human subjectivity. The
postmodernist mantra that with the developments in biotech-
nology and computer science (the web) we are ‘humans no
more’ – the title of a recent text – is pure reverie [dream], to
use a term of that rather neglected French scholar Gaston
Bachelard.
Rest assured, humans are still around, and anthropology is
still a flourishing (inter-)discipline.
© PROF. BRIAN MORRIS 2017
Brian Morris is emeritus professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths,
University of London. His latest book is An Environmental History
of Southern Malawi.
 Defending Humanistic Reasoning
Paul Giladi, Alexis Papazoglou, & Giuseppina D’Oro say we need to recognise
that science and the humanities are asking and answering different questions.
he year is 399 BCE. Socrates has just been sentenced
T to death by his fellow Athenians for allegedly cor-
rupting the youth of Athens. Sitting in his cell,
Socrates is asked by his friends to explain why he
remains in prison instead of escaping to exile.
How should Socrates’ explain it? Should he provide a phys-
ical explanation; that is, an account of his bodily movements?
Or should he provide a different kind of explanation – one that
makes reference not to his physiology, but to his reasons for
acting? Let’s have a look at the following passage from Plato’s
Phaedo to see Socrates explain the difference between the two
kinds of explanation:
“in trying to give the causes of the particular thing I do, I should say
first that I am now sitting here because my body is composed of
bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints which divide
them and the sinews can be contracted and relaxed and so... make
me able to bend my limbs now, and that is the cause of my sitting
here with my legs bent… [But then I] should fail to mention the real
causes, which are, that the Athenians decided that it was best to con-
demn me, and therefore I have decided that it was best for me to sit
here and that it is right for me to stay and undergo whatever penalty
they order.” (98c-e)
Or to use another example: Why did Caesar cross the Rubi-
con? Because of his leg movements? Or because he wanted to
assert his authority in Rome over his rivals?
When we seek to interpret the actions of Caesar and Socrates,
and ask what reasons they had for acting so, we do not usually
want their actions to be explained as we might explain the rise
of the tides or the motion of the planets; that is, as physical
Caesar Crossing the Rubicon by Granacci. But why?
events dictated by natural laws. Our curiosity is satisfied when,
rather than treating them as simply another material entity, the
explanation enables us to see the purpose of their action. Pro-
viding an account of their physiology here would not adequately
make sense of their actions.
The two varieties of explanation appear to compete, because
both give rival explanations of the same action. But there is a
way in which scientific explanations such as bodily movements
and humanistic explanations such as motives and goals need not
compete. Our aim in this article is to introduce you to a highly
neglected tradition in the philosophy of mind, which we’ll call
epistemological idealism, to see how scientific and humanistic
explanations can co-exist. This form of idealism is called ‘epis-
temological’ to highlight that it has nothing to do with meta-
physical idealism, the claim that reality is made of ‘mental stuff’.
Instead, epistemological idealism recognises that when it comes
to our explanations of reality, the aims and methods we apply
reflect something about our minds, rather than simply being
about the way the world is independently of us.
Scientific Naturalisms
Since the late nineteenth century, Western philosophy has
adopted increasingly naturalistic views. In current Anglo-Ameri-
can philosophy, the norm is to assume a reductive form of this
naturalism which claims that everything can be explained just in
physical terms. This position is usually called physicalism or mate-
rialism. According to this version of scientific naturalism, the
image of the world provided by the physical sciences (basically,
physics, chemistry, and biology) is all the world there is. And
philosophy must conform to science. To quote Paul Boghossian,
“We take science to be the only good way to arrive at reasonable
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 31
beliefs about what is true... Hence, we defer to science” (Fear
of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, 2006). In
this view, the task of philosophy is first to assume the method-
ological superiority of natural science, and then to develop posi-
tions which do not disagree with or upset certain background
assumptions of science. The most important of these back-
ground assumptions are that: (1) there exists a theory-indepen-
dent, external world; (2) the world investigated by physics is a
knowable world; and (3) the explanations of physics provide
complete explanations of reality.
One reason physicalist forms of scientific naturalism have
become so widely accepted is that many philosophers tend to
find it difficult to make room for complex phenomena such as
consciousness within the world presented to us by the natural
sciences. Because of this, some physicalist philosophers reduce
complex psychological phenomena down to their component
material parts – things such neural mechanisms – or even to the
very components of matter itself. They do this to easily accom-
modate complex phenomena within the natural world. To quote
Thomas Nagel, with the reductive physicalists, “there is the
hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic
level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology”
(Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concep-
tion Is Almost Certainly False, 2012).
However, more recently, philosophers such as John McDow-
ell, Jennifer Hornsby, Hilary Putnam and Nagel himself have
taken a different approach: a non-reductive scientific naturalism.
These philosophers argue that while the mind is indeed part of
the world presented to us by the natural sciences, the complex
mental states involved in consciousness cannot be simply scaled
down to physical processes. To quote Nagel again: “There are
doubts about whether the reality of features of our world such
as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and
value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at the most
basic level only of physical facts – facts, however sophisticated,
of the kind revealed by the physical sciences.” (ibid).
Because it is a naturalism, and hence limited to natural phe-
nomena, non-reductive naturalism holds that there is nothing
‘occult’ or ‘spooky’ about consciousness, thoughts, and feelings.
However, there are (at least) two main concerns with this
approach. Firstly, if these phenomena are regarded as natural just
because they are not supernatural, what should count as natural
and supernatural now? Secondly if we deny that such phenom-
ena as consciousness are exhaustively accounted for by physical
science, the problem arises of explaining how they relate to the
rest of nature – the nature that is fully described by that science.
But wait. There is a way out of this difficulty: we drop the
question about how mind and the rest of nature relate, and focus
instead on the question of what must be assumed for certain
forms of knowledge to be possible. Then once we have uncov-
ered the background assumptions to our forms of knowledge,
we can show how different forms of explanations can co-exist.
Investigating Knowledge Itself
This approach has been pre-shadowed by certain historical
philosophers we three are researching. Explaining the place of
mind within nature in this way started with the attempts by
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-
32 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
1884), and Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) to defend the
independence of the human sciences from the natural sciences.
This approach is also found in the work of British idealists such
as R.G.Collingwood (1889-1943) and Michael Oakeshott
(1901-1990). They started with the claim that all knowledge
rests on presuppositions, and defined philosophy as the task of
uncovering and making explicit the assumptions which govern
all forms of inquiry, from which they then hoped to show the
compatibility of different forms of explanation. It is the task of
natural scientists to investigate nature. But it is the task of
philosophers to investigate what we must assume to make the sci-
entific investigation of nature possible. Philosophers are not inter-
ested in starting with the results of natural science, but with
their presuppositions. To quote Wilhelm Windelband here:
“It is permissible for the other sciences to regard... general perspec-
tives and principles as given and established. This assumption is
sufficiently reliable for the purposes of specialised research within
the discipline in question. The essential feature of philosophy, how-
ever, is the following: its real object of investigation is actually these
[general perspectives and principles] themselves.”
(History and Natural Science, p.169, 1894).
Now this is not to say that scientists themselves cannot
engage in reflection on the background assumptions of science
and the concept of nature. But it is to say that when scientists
do so, they are doing philosophy, not science. This is because this
sort of investigation cannot itself be carried out using the meth-
ods of natural science.
Therefore, this approach is committed to two tiers of inves-
tigation: a ‘primary tier’ of empirical investigation, which is the
work of scientists; and a ‘secondary tier’, looking into the assump-
tions behind the empirical investigation, which is the work of
philosophers. In this context, the philosopher is whoever engages in
reflection on the background assumptions of primary tier enquiries.
Under this view, philosophy is a separate discipline whose dis-
tinctive subject-matter is the background assumptions of (say)
natural scientific inquiry. This is an epistemological idealist phi-
losophy because it recognises that the assumptions made by dif-
ferent forms of inquiry reflect human interests and cognitive
capacities. But this approach’s distinctive idealist tinge aims not
to compete with natural science in telling us what exists. Rather,
it aims to spell out what we must assume for certain forms of
knowledge to be possible, and to argue that these assumptions
are a reflection of our cognitive interests and capacities. For
example, physical scientists are interested in prediction. Such an
interest is well served by the formulation of inductive generali-
sations, which rely on the principle that natural laws apply uni-
formly so that unobserved cases will resemble previously
observed cases. Cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, are
interested in uncovering the logic behind the apparent random-
ness or irrationality of human societies and customs. The assump-
tion of the uniformity of nature which serves the physical scien-
tist so well in predicting the course of impersonal nature will
therefore be of no use to the cultural anthropologist, whose goal
is rather to unlock the hidden logic behind actions which they
struggle to comprehend in the light of their own cultural norms.
Understanding philosophy as being concerned with reflect-
ing on and disclosing what we must assume for certain forms
of knowledge to be possible enables one to defend the auton-
omy of humanistic explanations better than any attempt to
defend the distinctiveness of the mental from a naturalistic
standpoint. Why? Because by carefully unpacking the back-
ground assumptions of the different forms of inquiry we can
lay bare the most important difference between the natural
sciences and the human sciences. For example, natural science
presupposes a uniform universe governed by universal laws;
on the other hand, a historian does not approach history in
such a way. Another difference between the natural sciences
and the human sciences amounts to the natural sciences aspir-
ing to grasp the universal, the general, whereas a human sci-
ence such as history aspires to make sense of the particular, of
unique events.
Understood as an inquiry into the presuppositions of knowl-
edge rather than as a claim about the nature of reality, episte-
mological idealism succeeds in showing how it is possible for
different and apparently incompatible explanations to peace-
fully co-exist. For example, the question ‘Why did JFK die?’
would no doubt receive very different answers from a physi-
cian and from a political historian. The physician might say
that JFK died because his cranium was pierced by two bullets
which caused fatal damage to his brain; while the political his-
torian may argue that JFK’s death was the result of a political
conspiracy. These answers do not compete because they do
not address the same why-question: the political historian looks
for motives, whereas the physician looks for antecedent con-
ditions. Although JFK died only once, his death can be
explained in multiple ways which are not incompatible if the
explanations provide answers to different kinds of why-ques-
tions.The claim that these explanations compete arises only
when we fail to see that the explanatory goals of the political
historian and those of the physician are not the same. In a sim-
ilar way, once it is acknowledged that different forms of inquiry
rest on different presuppositions and have different explana-
tory goals, the alleged conflict between the human and the nat-
ural sciences is deflated.
This relatively forgotten philosophical tradition not only
manages to make sense of how different forms of explanation,
such as the physical and the psychological, can co-exist. It also
has the advantage of offering us a conception of philosophy as
a more independent and reflective activity, rather than merely
an afterthought to an already fully formed natural scientific
world picture. Thus a defence of the independence of human-
istic explanations goes hand-in-hand with an understanding
of philosophy as being tasked with unearthing the background
assumptions which govern different forms of investigation.
Philosophy Is Indispensable
Philosophy and the human sciences will never be able to tell us
the age of the universe or whether silver dissolves in nitric acid.
Because philosophy and the human sciences can’t give us answers
to those sorts of questions, physical scientists such as Stephen
Hawking have presumed to dismiss philosophy: “Philosophy is
dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments
in science. Particularly physics” (The Grand Design, 2010). Quite
aside from the irony that Hawking’s put-down of philosophy is
itself a philosophical argument, not one relying on any particu-
lar scientific evidence, we think there is a good reason for sci-
entists to think that philosophy is alive and well: philosophy tells
us the background assumptions which govern the sciences.
In light of the attacks on philosophy by Hawking and others,
a reminder of the arguments in defence of the independence
of philosophy by Daniel Dennett is both needed and timely:
“Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philo-
sophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commen-
taries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they them-
selves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their
lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free
science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken
on board without examination.”
(Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1996)
In epistemological idealism, a defence of the human sciences
goes hand in hand with an understanding of philosophy as dis-
tinct in kind from natural science. Epistemological idealism,
then, provides a powerful defence of the autonomy of philoso-
phy against the recent attempts to see it as subordinate to the
natural sciences. Reports of the death of philosophy rely on a
misunderstanding of its nature. Rather, philosophy itself is
needed in order to make sense of the human, as well as the nat-
ural, sciences.
© DR PAUL GILADI, DR ALEXIS PAPAZOGLOU & DR GIUSEPPINA D’ORO 2017
Paul Giladi is a teaching and research fellow in Philosophy at Uni-
versity College Dublin and honorary research fellow at the University
of Sheffield. Alexis Papazoglou is Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Hol-
loway, University of London, and secretary of the Hegel Society of
Great Britain. Giuseppina D’Oro is Reader in Philosophy at Keele
University and principal investigator, with Paul and Alexis, on a
Templeton-funded project ‘Idealism and the Philosophy of Mind’.
• This article was made possible through the support of a grant from the John
Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in it are those of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 33
Seeing the Future in the Present Past
Siobhan Lyons perceives the flow of history in terms of organic growth and decay.
“This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.”
Gertrude Stein
own the end of the street where I used to live in
D Melbourne there was an old house that became
abandoned. For the longest time the house went
through varying stages of decay, with boards put up
over the windows, graffiti on the walls, and weeds obscuring
the litter left behind by the teenagers who would frequently
loiter inside the abandoned structure.
Our contemporary obsession with modern ruins, ambigu-
ously dubbed ‘ruin porn’, has a tendency to trivialise the impor-
tance of such sites, which appear out of phase with our normal
experience of the present. In her book Dispatches from Dystopia:
Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), historian Kate Brown
talks instead of ‘rustalgia’ (cf nostalgia). For Brown, while some
people speak of their ‘lustful’ attraction to such sites, “others
will speak in mournful tones of what is lost, what I call rustal-
gia” (p.149). Rustalgia both transforms and transports us, under-
pinning the more philosophical elements of these places, while
‘ruin porn’ makes them into nothing more than objects to gape
at. She thinks her term and what it draws attention to will help
us understand how “sketchy is the longstanding faith in the
necessity of perpetual economic growth.”
Focusing On The Future
Contemporary ruins such as those found in Detroit or Cher-
nobyl attract thousands of ‘ruin tourists’, many of whom are
attempting to engage with the existential threat these sights
arouse. Modern ruins become a way of time travelling into the
future within the present, giving us insight into what life may
be like without us, and inspiring in us a kind of paranoia. Sig-
nalling the eventual decay to which we will all succumb, con-
temporary ruins inspire fascination and fear, a furious denial of
our immortality, and a wary flirtation with death. These sights
are fascinating to us because they prompt our asking about our
place in the overarching narrative of history.
Although a fascination with the future is not unique to our
time, we have increasingly focused on it; as Arthur C. Clarke
once remarked: “This is the first age that’s ever paid much atten-
tion to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have
one.” Modern ruins offer us a glimpse into our future. As scholar
Jason McGrath argues: “The posthuman gaze at modernist
ruins reminds us that, no matter how many new objects we pro-
duce, consume, and discard, those objects will in many cases far
outlive us and the purposes to which we put them.” Part of our
sense of denial and resistance to modern urban ruin is because
of its drastic implications regarding our everyday efforts. Thus
sights of decay and abandonment provoke strong resistance in
us not so much because we have a fear of death, but because we
have a fear of insignificance – they remind us that we will not be
34 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
remembered in the long term, especially once decay becomes a
permanent feature of the global landscape. As author Alan Weis-
man notes in his book The World Without Us (2012), we have an
“obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually
occur” (p.3). Writer Roy Scranton makes a similar claim when
he says that “we are predisposed to avoid, ignore, flee, and fight
[death] till the very last hour”, so that “much of our energy is
spent in denial” (Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene, 2015,
p.90). Hence denial is very much a part of our relations with
ruins. We find ourselves moved by these sites almost in an effort
to make peace with what they ultimately signify. This is partic-
ularly true when visiting modern ruins that have been ruined
by disaster or by economic downturn.
The Poignancy of Abandoned Theme Parks
Abandoned amusement parks are even more poignant and dis-
concerting in the absence of the lights and sound that once sig-
nalled their life. America’s Land of Oz, Germany’s Cold War-
era Spreepark, and Japan’s Takakanonuma Greenland in the
Fukushima district, have all been abandoned and have subse-
quently decayed; but in their ruin they continue to attract a
growing number of visitors. Why, exactly, is this the case? Why
does the abandoned amusement park become a more powerful
image in its sparseness?
Firstly, there is a modest mythology that encircles the amuse-
ment park, constructed to be a modern dreamscape, epitomis-
ing human enjoyment. Its abandonment, therefore, signals a
reversal of this dynamic, becoming a site of radical anachronism,
and thus perfectly symbolising the natural process of human
death and decay. Secondly, whether operational or not, amuse-
ment parks resonate on a nostalgic level, and this nostalgia is
amplified in the amusement park’s decay since that nostalgia no
longer has an outlet. Australian writer and blogger Vanessa Berry
wrote of touring around Sydney’s abandoned Magic Kingdom
theme park, “In these abandoned places it is easy to imagine
oneself to be one of the last humans alive, picking over the
remains of a civilisation. Modern ruins are the delight of urban
explorers, who enjoy the sense of finding value in what others
have discarded. Abandoned theme parks are particularly reso-
nant places” (‘Magic Kingdom’, Mirror Sydney, 2012). She also
observes that amusement parks were “dreamlike from their con-
ception… To explore the rusting rides, bright paint faded, is to
be inside a metaphor of lost childhood innocence.” American
scholar Mark Pendergrast, moreover, speaks of the separation
from reality that amusement parks provide, noting that Coney
Island, the New York City neighbourhood with its own amuse-
ment area, “revelled in illusion. In the distorting mirrors of its
funhouse, everyday reality was suspended” (Mirror Mirror, 2003,
p.253). When we visit decaying amusement parks, however, real-
ity comes rushing back with unrestrainable force.
When such places are closed down and left to ruin we can no
ABANDONED RIDE © P.J.L. LAURENS 2009
Abandoned Dadipark ride
longer take solace in the illusion of immortality that these parks
strive to promote when operative. But more than our engage-
ment with our own mortality, again, these ruins disrupt our stan-
dard conventions of time and history. They work to dislocate
the relationship between the past and the present, incorporat-
ing both the past and the future, the dead past existing simulta-
neously alongside living architecture. While authors, artists,
directors and poets have always attempted to depict the aesthetic
nature of the future and the possibilities of apocalypse, modern
ruins show that we may already be there. As artist Tong Lam
beautifully but simply notes, “In a way, we are already post-apoc-
alyptic.” (Abandoned Futures, 2013). Indeed, when we talk of
social destruction, we almost always do so hypothetically, situ-
ating the end within the future rather than in the present time;
but as environmentalist David Suzuki put it in a 2007 interview:
“The future doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is now and
our memory of what happened in the past. But because we
invented the idea of a future, we’re the only animal that realized
we can affect the future by what we do today.” (Canada.com).
Progressing the Idea of Progress
If we as a global civilisation are already in the midst of our own
ruin, what does this tell us about progress? For one, that progress
is not, as is widely believed, irretrievably linked to the future,
or to newness.
According to ‘technological determinists’, not only does tech-
nology supposedly drive history, but what’s new is better than
preceding technologies, thus linking newness to progress. By
this logic, digital downloads are superior to vinyl records; word
processors are better than typewriters; and digital cameras are
better than film-based analogue ones. Yet although an object
may be technically improved, this is not necessarily an improve-
ment in terms of its creative capabilities. In fact, the more tech-
nologically improved the gadget, the less effort required on our
part to create art, meaning human creativity is often actually
compromised. So what we are seeing is rather newness mas-
querading as progress. Yet typewriter usage – alongside that of
vinyl and analogue photography – is on the rise, while some
people and organisations never relinquished them, defying the
logic of technological progress. While the image of a hipster
sitting with a typewriter in Starbucks might appear chronolog-
ically inaccurate, the fact that many people continue to use type-
writers does not, I believe, signal a regression, but in fact
reframes the argument to favour the notion of intellectual rather
than technological progress, showing that technology and intel-
ligence are not one and the same. Yet the general narrative about
the continued use of typewriters and other supposedly ‘anachro-
nistic’ technologies is that this is backward, outdated, and
strange, just like our obsession with ruins. But for a number of
authors, a typewriter is actually superior to digital technologies.
British author Will Self, for instance, says that the typewriter
forces his mind to slow down and to process thought more effi-
ciently, rather than having his thoughts scattered by the PC. As
journalist Neil Hallows writes, “the computer user does their
thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled,
because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more
thinking in the head” (‘Why Typewriters Beat Computers’,
2008). Such thoughts give credence to William Faulkner’s idea
that “the past is not dead; it’s not even past.” Certain memora-
bilia can have a present function, defying the logic of linking
objects to a certain time and place and discarding them with the
momentum of history.
The Organic Nature of History
For many, history follows a linear development: there is to all
things a beginning, middle, and end, and we can differentiate
between each period.The plethora of ruins and the widespread
use of old technology paints a picture of society not retreat-
ing into an antiquated era, but rather, proceeding nonlinearly.
They show us that progress is not straightforward, and can be
seen less as historical, and more as intellectual.
Instead of a linear pattern of history, what we actually see is
that it has what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) calls
a rhizomatic (rootlike) structure. With typewriters and decay exist-
ing alongside digitisation and growth, our understanding of
progress becomes more about intellectual linearity, so that our
ideas define and shape progress, rather than technologies and
events in sequential time. That is, while we can’t conclusively say
what history is, we can at least say what history is not: that it is not
technological, and not straightforwardly chronological. Or if we
talk about chronology, we need to do so through the lens of intel-
lectual history rather than the history of objects.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 35
 But as Gertrude Stein points out, if history (not the chrono-
logical phenomenon, but our knowledge of that phenomenon)
teaches us anything, it is that, paradoxically, repetition is almost a
necessary aspect of cultural evolution. Of course, this makes it dif-
ficult to tell whether our own woes and complaints about the times
differ in any meaningful way from those of earlier generations:
whether there is more truth to our own fears for the future than
to theirs – especially when we consider the similarities of discon-
tent across centuries. Perhaps the only constant in the history of
life is disillusionment with change. As Pyotr Voyd, the central
Entrance to the abandoned Dadipark in Belgium
character of Victor Pelevin’s novel Buddha’s Little Finger (1999)
says, “we are descendants of the past. The word signifies movement
downwards, not upwards. We are not ascendants” (1999, p.34).
This seems to be a manner in which we constantly frame his-
tory. For instance, we constantly ask of our society: are we get-
ting stupider? Worried researchers tells us so; but then Socrates
is said by Plato to have stated 2,400 years ago: “Our youth now
love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority;
they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of
exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they
contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their
food, and tyrannize their teachers.” We have more or less the
same concern in the twenty-first century about the younger gen-
erations and their poor grammar, flagrant antisocial behaviour,
and obsessive use of technology. We are also told to prepare for
the book’s demise at the hands of the internet; but then, Victor
Hugo expressed the same fears for the demise of architecture at
the hands of the book; while Samuel Taylor Coleridge criticised
the novel for impairing memory. As Jill Lepore puts it, “Every
age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of
bloom and wilt: a theory of nature.” (‘The Disruption Machine’,
The New Yorker, June 2014).
So is there any particular importance to our own cultural
anxieties, or are they merely part of an inevitably repeating pat-
tern? Is it simply that our own fears have been more easily voiced
and disseminated via more efficient technologies? Is there any
truth to our discontent that separates us from earlier centuries
– thereby legitimising our fears – or is it simply part of one con-
sistent, shared concern that is part of the same evolutionary
matrix, in which history is not a thing divided but a continu-
ous, uninterrupted stream of sameness – in which a distinction
between time periods is all but illusory?
36 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
Historical Deleuzion
Gilles Deleuze is a particularly useful philosopher to employ
here. Deleuze discusses a phenomenon he calls ‘difference
within repetition’. For Deleuze, “life itself is described as a
dynamic and active force of repetition producing difference”
(Adrian Parr, Deleuze Dictionary, 2010, p.225), and in repetition
there is the ‘possibility of reinvention’, for although we repeat,
we do not uniformly repeat. Thus within a cycle of occurrences
we can see subtle deviations emerging in a pattern perhaps mis-
taken as pure monotony. For instance, we still show all our fears
regarding the state of our intellects – but in slightly different
ways as our concerns move from one technology to another.
Hence we should not worry that many are returning to type-
writers in lieu of their supposedly more sophisticated alterna-
tives, because this demonstrates a rebellion against the rigid
order of time; that is, with the expectations of behaviour and
actions supposedly befitting one’s time. Perhaps we should laud
those who retreat into such ‘anachronistic’ technologies, and
ridicule those who unthinkingly pursue novelty. As Friedrich
Nietzsche pointed out, the philosopher needs to be out of phase
and at odds with their own time, and should ideally be “a person
of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow… his enemy has
always been the ideal of today” (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886,
p.106). For Nietzsche, the philosopher’s task lies in “being the
bad conscience of their age.” In this sense, the philosopher, the
writer, the artist, and the poet, are called to be women and men
outside their time. For Victor Pelevin, there are those who
adapt to change – those who essentially change with the times;
those who anticipate change, adapting to it more quickly as a
result; and those who make change “by creeping across to
occupy the quarter from which they think the wind will blow.
Following which, the wind has no option but to blow from that
very quarter” (Generation P, 1999, p.36). Our task is to occupy
that quarter.
When I think of the dilapidated house on my old street, the
very concept of economy, or of culture, evaporates. On the face
of it there appears to be a clear and discernable difference
between the decaying house and the vibrant one next to it. But
they belong to the same matrix of existence, because all things
that are made are always already in the process of ruin. Progress
is falsely understood as a resistance to ruin; but in that we
neglect the fact that progress exists alongside ruin – that all the
contradictory forces of time are occurring simultaneously. Just
as this house sinks into the earth, so too will the one beside it,
eventually. This recognition helps us disobey the conventions
of time – hence our blatant engagement with modern ruins;
hence our continued use of objects and phenomena some con-
sider obsolete. These anachronistic elements force us to engage
with phenomena before and beyond our own time in an effort
to challenge the present. We may then be invited to see his-
tory as something chaotically overwhelmed by the struggle
between the past, present and future, all within the same space.
And only once we understand how time really operates and
how to use elements outside of our own time effectively will
we begin to understand the true nature of progress.
© SIOBHAN LYONS 2017
Siobhan Lyons is a media scholar at Macquarie University, where she
earned her PhD in media and cultural studies.
 Question of the Month
How Can I Know Right From Wrong?
The following responses to this basic ethical question each win a random book.
T o understand how acquire have moral knowledge, we first
need to understand what sort of thing we are talking about
when we speak of right and wrong. I want to propose a non-nat-
uralist account of morality as first put forth by G.E. Moore in his
Principia Ethica (1903). Following Moore, we can conceive of
morality as a sort of universal dimension. All actions fall some-
where in this moral dimension, from extremely good to extremely
bad and a neutral middle.
Let me now liken morality to time. There is no physical aspect
of reality to which we can point that shows time itself. But we
don’t need something physical to point at to know that the passage
of time occurs. Rather, time seems to impress itself upon us
because our mental faculties are designed to experience its pass-
ing. This seems true of morality too. When we witness a murder
and say that it’s wrong, we aren’t pointing to a physical entity of
‘wrongness’; instead we are highlighting a value that is inherent
in the witnessed action. The moral dimension impresses itself on
us in such a way that we can perceive moral properties.
One may wonder how, if we can apprehend moral facts in this
way, that there is still widespread disagreement on moral matters.
But moral facts aren’t all as simple as ‘killing is bad’ and ‘being
helpful is good’. Killing can’t be absolutely wrong, since someone
may rightly kill a person to stop the detonation of a bomb in a
school. Actions have a range of different motivations and unseen
background facts. To know if something complex is moral, we
need to know not only the action but the cause, the mind-set of
the person taking the action, and the intended effect. Moral
knowledge can be derived from measuring the impressions a per-
son has about an action, and investigating the thinking of the per-
son who made the action. Some people are better at receiving
these impressions and thus turning them into knowledge. This
isn’t to turn ethicists into priests of morality. It is, as my
metaethics professor said, like space: someone may constantly
bump their head due to a lack of spatial awareness. We can all
gain better knowledge of morality by learning how to better read
our moral impressions.
JULIAN SHIELDS, MANLY, AUCKLAND, NZ
T here is no magic formula, but there is a pathway which may
help in situations of doubt. First, ascertain the facts of a sit-
uation. Ignorance never promotes good decisions. Let others
thrust on you facts you would rather overlook. Second, and more
difficult, try to predict the consequences of the actions you might
take. Unfortunately even correctly predicted consequences them-
selves cause unforeseeable consequences. But even the most ded-
icated non-consequentialist must consider consequences because
actually conferring benefit on others is an important moral prin-
ciple, if not an overriding one. Third, look at the moral principles
which tell you to do one thing or the other. Those principles must
be both valid and relevant, which is often arguable. Catholics
think that divorce is wrong, but Islam makes divorce easy for men.
You think that we must respect the sanctity of even a murderer’s
???
life; I think the principle of sanctity of life has been forsaken by
murderers. Finally take the decision.
Unfortunately valid and relevant moral principles clash, and
we may have to decide which one we should follow of two equally
pertinent claims. My utilitarian approach is that the most impor-
tant objective is usually the one that brings the most good into
the world; but that is not always the case. I have a greater duty to
some than to others, which clashes with the duty to save more
lives than fewer: but I will save my own child rather than ten
strangers. Morality started as care of kin and we should not stray
too far from its roots. Also some principles may be intrinsically
more important than others. Perhaps it is more important not to
take life than to save it, so I should refuse to kill one to save two.
But what if I can save fifty by killing one? Morality can be relative
to circumstances, not absolute, and at some point the utilitarian
principle wins. Analysing analogous situations where the answer
is clear is useful; seeing how they differ from the current situation
clarifies thinking. And always discuss problems both with those
you respect and with those who disagree with you. When you get
it wrong, forgive yourself, and try to do better next time.
ALLEN SHAW, HAREWOOD, LEEDS
P erhaps the best way to answer this question is to take com-
monly accepted ethical notions and appraise them for the
case at hand, as accordance to a central ethical principle often
appears a sound basis of ethical action. One such principles is the
Golden Rule (‘do unto others as you would have them do unto
you’), variously occurring in many religious and belief systems.
The idea that notions such as this one are reliable indicators of
‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ is persuasive. Some moralists believe ethical
action arises from a sense of duty, and not from a natural predis-
position to good behaviour. Recognising responsibilities to oth-
ers, not self-interest, does seem morally positive. Furthermore,
following Kant, some theorists believe we must not treat others
‘merely as a means to an end’ but rather as ‘ends in themselves’,
acknowledging their capacity for ethical thought. Treating peo-
ple as merely an end not a means seems ethically sound: it is altru-
istic and respectful of others; arguably very important qualities
in right ethical behaviour.
However, rigid application of ethical rules may have seemingly
unethical conclusions. The majority of people would believe it
wrong to lie in most circumstances yet right to lie in specific situ-
ations, such as to save a life. Secondly, an emphasis upon the impor-
tance of duty can give the impression that ethics is demanding and
counter-intuitive, which is not entirely convincing: it seems difficult
to criticise a naturally generous person for not being truly ethical
because they do not act out of a sense of duty. Finally, although
most would agree we should respect and value others persons, we
may accept treating others as a means if the end is liable to have
significantly more favourable consequences. For example, many
people would agree it is right to sacrifice the life of one person if it
saves many lives, and in fact wrong not to do so. So it seems that
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 37
?? although people often have clear sentiments which tell them when
behaviour is right or wrong, they also accept that there are times
when rigid adherence to the same principles is problematic and/or
unethical, making ethics as uncertain as any other branch of phi-
losophy. This means absolute ethical judgements on right and
wrong are difficult, so important ethical debates remain unresolved.
JONATHAN TIPTON, PRESTON, LANCASHIRE
P hilosophers can quibble over many different theories, but in
the end I would advocate a simple boo-hurrah approach to
discerning right from wrong. Okay, I’m not accounting for psy-
chopaths. Nevertheless, I would argue that the majority of
human beings have an innate sense of disgust at immoral acts,
stemming from empathy. If you want to know if your actions
towards another individual are right or wrong, just ask yourself
if that’s how you would want to be treated. That’s the objectivity:
we’re living, aware creatures. Why complicate it more than that?
MORGAN MILLARD, URMSTON, MANCHESTER
I t might be inferred from the question that discerning right from
wrong is essentially cognitive. Thus, employing the terminology
of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives in the
cognitive domain, I am able to recall things deemed right or wrong
and I can understand why they are so. I can apply my recall and
understanding of right and wrong to act appropriately in specific
circumstances; I can analyse behaviours and determine which are
right and wrong; I can evaluate why some are right or wrong; and
I can create more finely nuanced conceptions of rightness or
wrongness. This learning is acquired by trial and error, and
inferred from the reactions of other people to what I do or say.
But, it is an affective issue too: the reactions of others to what I
say or do evoke feelings in me. To use Bloom in this domain: ini-
tially, I attend to or note particular actions that evoke responses
from others or feelings in me. I learn to respond to some actions in
some circumstances by others. I feel, too, that some responses are
more valued by others or by myself. I organise some of these valued
responses according to some principles. Eventually, these princi-
ples interlink so that my conduct is characterised by them.
For example, when my mother first put me to her breast I fol-
lowed an innate need for sustenance. However, I felt pleasures of
satiation, of warmth, of security. I cried when I felt hunger, or cold
and, later, fear. I learned that this woman provided for these needs,
PLEASE VISIT WWW.CGILLCARTOONS.COM FOR MORE.
CARTOON © CHRIS GILL 2017
“No daddy, not what is the time; what is Time?”
38 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
on demand. Then, without intent, my toothless gums squeezed the
nipple too hard. My mother flinched, drew away, withdrawing
food. I cried, and supply was restored. I attended to those things
and remembered: I responded to maternal actions, noted that for
some of my actions she would provide things which gave pleasure
and for others her response provided less pleasure. I learned which
things my mother valued and led to her supply of pleasure to me.
She was thus defining right and wrong. As I acquired language, I
conceptualised these ideas and, in dialogue with her, and, increas-
ingly, with others, refined these concepts. Right and wrong are
defined socially by interactions amongst other people and me.
They are learned. My desire for acceptance into society made me
learn and conform to its ideas of rightness or wrongness.
ALASDAIR MACDONALD, GLASGOW
A s an individual I am born into a society requiring adherence
to a set of rules and values by which I did not choose to be
bound. I am expected to behave in a certain way and live by certain
rules in order to live in harmony with my fellow citizens. Assuming
I have no psychological disorder, I begin to learn these societal
expectations from an early age, from associations with groups,
which form my cultural identity. As a member of a family, a reli-
gion, a country, a school, a workplace, I am taught the practices,
values and rules of those associations. For example, as a young
family member, I learn through guidance by parents that it is bad
to be spiteful to siblings, and that the right behaviour sets a good
example to younger siblings who may learn right from wrong from
me. As an adult, I am bound by an employment contract, losing
my job if I breach it. As an autonomous being, I take responsibility
for my actions regarding my choice of associations. With exposure
to other cultures, moralities and belief systems, I may start to ques-
tion my learned behaviours and morals, reasoning as to whether
or not I wish to maintain those associations, weighing up the con-
sequences of discontinuing with what I know, and attaching myself
to new associations and groups – for example, changing religion
and the effect this may have on my family and friends. But in gen-
eral, I can know right from wrong through my identity associa-
tions, sanctioning any resultant punishment concerning the
choices I make as an adult. There may be conflicts: for example,
some cultures advocate honour killings, whereas others maintain
it is never right to kill another person. So what to do if you associate
with a culture that advocates honour killings, but the laws of the
society in which you live do not allow this? Choosing to stray from
your original associations may result in penal punishment.
SHARON PAINTER, RUGELEY, STAFFS
B asically, I can’t. Not in any definitive way. Unlike laws of
physics, which govern regardless of human understanding,
concepts of right and wrong are constructions, products of a devel-
oping self-awareness. Reason, as Nietzsche suggests, was a late
addition to our animal instincts. To highlight the implications of
this, look at attitudes towards killing. For early humans, the crime
of ‘murder’ would be a nonsensical idea. One had to kill to survive,
making ‘murder’ an accepted hazard of daily life. Only the move
from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to settled communities lessened the
need to slaughter in self-defence, thus beginning the slow march
to recognising murder as immoral. However, there is a problem.
Many believe killing can be justified in some circumstances. Such
ambiguities mean that knowing right from wrong in any absolute
sense is impossible, even in seemingly clear-cut instances. But the
same applies in other areas. No matter how abhorrent and objec-
How Can I Know Right From Wrong?
tionably wrong I believe various crimes to be, an example of his-
torical permissibility can be found. Humans, at some point, have
accepted rape, theft and persecution without question.
As right and wrong do not exist outside the collective conscious-
ness of the planet’s population at a particular moment, it is only
possible to pass judgement in hindsight. We could argue that
changing attitudes are evidence of an inherent ‘wrongness’ in cer-
tain acts, perhaps pointing to a natural order of right and wrong
similar to discovering laws of physics. But such convictions have
proved false before. For millennia it was thought that religious texts
gave definitive answers; yet if a Creator were to reveal themselves
and say, ‘Same sex marriage is wrong’, or ‘Capital punishment is
right’, a lot of people, including me, would have tremendous diffi-
culty accepting it. Suddenly, we’d irrefutably know right and wrong,
but feel that many ‘right’ things were ‘wrong’, and vice versa.
Some aspects of right and wrong may seem given, but for the
most part we have to follow our conscience. For this reason, noth-
ing is certain. I simply have to do my best.
GLENN BRADFORD, SUTTON IN ASHFIELD, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
T he short answer is, I can’t. Dr Oliver Scott Curry of Oxford
University has essentially cracked the problem of morality,
based on empirical evidence from sixty cultures, present and his-
torical. What follows is my take on his original thoughts, so the
random book should go to him.
Like Rome and its hills, morality is built on seven naturally
evolved values, held to varying degrees, whose functions are pro-
moting cooperation or resolving conflict. The greatest of these is
Possession, held sacrosanct by nine tenths of cultures and the law.
Next come Kinship, Loyalty and Reciprocity, espoused by three
quarters. Over half of cultures rate Respect (for the powerful) and
Humility (of the powerless). Last and least comes Fairness, valued
by only 15%. So dosvidanya socialism, and never give a sucker an
even break. The punch line is, there are no other moral values. Each
individual can claim their peculiar principle, plus aesthetic judg-
ment; but only these seven values can be truly shared.
Cultures and societies differ in the scope and priority they
ascribe to these seven pillars of morality. Right is what helps
achieve some conscious or unconscious goal, be it reproduction,
social cohesion, long life, prosperity, or conquest. Wrong is what
obstructs the goal, and evil is interpreted as doing so intention-
ally. Values may be incompatible, one negating another with
traumatic results. What if the goal is to wield absolute domina-
tion over absolute submission, forever?
DR NICHOLAS B. TAYLOR, LITTLE SANDHURST
W hat can we say about the question? First, we must already
to an extent know the answer: we must already have some
idea what ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ mean. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t
understand the question. But at the same time, we disagree with
others about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. But surely, if we know ourselves
what is right and wrong, all we need to do is explain what those
words refer to when we use them, others can explain what they
are referring to, and our apparent disagreement will be resolved?
Yet we cannot do this. We can all look at an action, be in total
agreement about the facts, about what the action consists of, about
what effects it has, yet still disagree about whether or not it is right.
If that is the case, then we cannot be arguing about the nature of
that action. Our disagreement – and thus what we each mean by
‘right’ – must lie elsewhere. This helps explain why we sometimes
cannot agree about the rightness of an action: its degree of right-
How Can I Know Right From Wrong?
ness can only be judged comparatively, against other actions.
Then which actions? If we could name the property that distin-
guished ‘right’ actions from the rest, we would have also named
what we meant by rightness and wrongness. But if we could do
that, then we would be back to rightness and wrongness referring
to some fact, and any apparent disputes would be revealed as sim-
ply misunderstandings. But again, our failure to agree suggests
this is cannot be the case. If right and wrong are graduations of a
??
single system, and if we cannot place boundaries on that system,
then that system must contain everything. What sorts of systems
contain everything, or try to? Philosophical ones. So I would argue
that our individual understanding of right and wrong is deter-
mined by our own philosophy. In so far as we have such a general
philosophy, then we already know right and wrong. If we are
unsure of them, it is because our philosophy remains unformed
in our own minds.
JOHN WHITE, LONDON
W hy should we expect to be able to know right from wrong?
Morality isn’t written into the universe the way facts of
nature seem to be: it’s a matter of human choice, and people
choose to respond to moral issues in different ways. Systems such
as Bentham’s utilitarianism or Kant’s deontology have important
insights but they all have drawbacks – the first for its wilful disre-
gard of innocent people’s (assumed) rights, the second for its dis-
regard of consequences. But what is the yardstick against which
we judge the apparent failings of these two systems? For posi-
tivists, it’s a matter of psychology based on evolution and upbring-
ing. Does this lead to relativism, with its apparent contradiction
that we should never intervene in another culture or criticise a
psychopath? I don’t think so. Within most polities the idea of
inflicting unnecessary pain on the innocent is abhorrent. Through
some inner instinct or psychological preference, we know (or is it
believe?) that such cruelty is wrong. And we know if we follow
certain rules that our society will give us outcomes that more or
less accord with our moral preferences. In many countries enough
people share enough of these values to give a sense of common
purpose in pursuit of morality. Why shouldn’t we seek to convince
others, that ours is a way of life that suits human psychological
preferences, both theirs and ours?
However, that cohesive set of common instincts breaks down
in more problematic cases such as abortion or various versions of
Phillipa Foot’s ‘trolley problem’. For these there may be no
agreement on what is right and we don’t have a method of decid-
ing in some formulaic way what the correct action is. Any solution
will cut across someone’s inner instinct, and there is no other way
of testing the decision-making process. We agonise over these
difficult problems. Perhaps the important question is not Did we
get the morally right solution? – where there may be none – but Did
we agonise enough? Did we grapple and make sure we looked at
the problem from all possible sides?
PETER KEEBLE, HARROW, LONDON
The next question is: W hy Is There Something Rather
Than Nothing?
Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words.
The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain.
Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and
must be received by 12th February 2018. If you want a
chance of getting a book, please include your physical
address. Submission is permission to reproduce your answer.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 39
Brief Lives
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)
In Thoreau’s bicentenary, Martin Jenkins looks at the famous American eccentric.
A
few years ago I went into a bookshop to buy a copy of
Thoreau’s Walden (1854). I couldn’t find one, but the
assistant could: in the fiction section. This may reflect
the difficulty of classifying Thoreau. Was he a nature
writer, a poet, a travel writer, a political thinker, even a philoso-
pher – even all of these? Perhaps; but not, I am certain, a novelist!
Thoreau’s works do not help to classify him. He wrote widely
on a range of subjects. He only published three full-length books,
but wrote numerous essays and lectures, and he kept a journal
which ran to two million words. However, two works stand out
philosophically: Walden and the essay Civil Disobedience (1849).
Life
David Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in
1817. (He called himself Henry David from 1837, the year he
started his journal. Both may be seen as expressions of his individ-
uality.) His father was at first a farmer; but also ran a grocery
store, worked as a teacher in Boston, and then returned to Con-
cord to run the family’s pencil factory.
Thoreau was sent to Harvard in 1833. He undertook more
than the required curriculum, and graduated in 1837. Returning
to Concord, he took a job in his old primary school, but resigned
rather than flog his pupils. Subsequently he opened a secondary
school with his brother John.
About this time Henry was attending meetings of the group
loosely known as ‘The New England Transcendentalists’ at
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord. This group was
united more by interests than by ideas: the one thing that they
agreed on was opposition to slavery. However, they managed to
create a magazine, The Dial, in which they expressed their various
ideas, and to which Thoreau contributed more than thirty essays
and other works.
In 1839 both John and Henry Thoreau fell in love with Ellen
Sewell. She rejected both their proposals. This is the only known
romantic attachment in Thoreau’s life. In 1841, John’s ill health
resulted in the closure of the school; and in 1842 John died of
tetanus after cutting himself shaving. Henry was devastated and
for a while suffered a psychosomatic paralysis.
As early as 1837, Henry Thoreau had improved the graphite
used in the family firm’s pencils. In 1844 he developed an
improved drilling machine for the pencils, as well as pioneering
shades of graphite. In the same year, when Emerson could not get
a single Concord church to offer him space for an anti-slavery
lecture, Thoreau organised the use of the courthouse. In 1850,
when someone was needed to go to recover the body and
manuscripts of Margaret Fuller after she drowned in a shipwreck,
it was Thoreau who undertook the job. So Thoreau was an emi-
nently practical man, and could have been a commercial success.
But he chose a different road, and spent most of the rest of his life
relying on odd surveying jobs and work as a handyman.
In 1845 Thoreau began to construct a cabin in the woods by
Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from Concord. He moved
40 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
in on July 4th, and remained there until 1849. He was not a her-
mit, nor did he set out to be self-sufficient: by his own admission
he spent a lot of time with friends, and at his family home, and
often had meals there. Indeed, the most famous incident of his life
occurred because he went into town to collect a shoe repair from
the cobbler, whereupon he was arrested for non-payment of his
poll tax and imprisoned for a night, being released after a friend
paid it for him. Thoreau refused to pay the tax in protest at the
state’s collusion with slavery in the Southern states.
Anarchy In The USA
The outcome of this experience was Civil Disobedience, which
opens with a statement of his political philosophy:
“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs
least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systemat-
ically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe – ‘That
government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are pre-
pared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”
This is, of course, anarchism; but, as the last phrase shows,
Thoreau believed that human beings had to become worthy of it.
In the meantime, how should those who are worthy of it act
towards the state as it exists?
Thoreau’s answer is in one sense complex but in another sense
simple: the individual must follow their own conscience, and refuse
loyalty and obedience to the state which lacks moral virtue. Slavery,
he says, is not maintained by Southern slave-owners, but by North-
erners who tolerate it in the interests of maintaining the state.
However, Thoreau is not a rampant individualist. Having
refused to pay his poll tax, he writes: “I have never declined paying
the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neigh-
bour as I am of being a bad subject.” He insists on being a good
member of the community – just not of the state. After being
released from prison, he joined a party who were going out to pick
huckleberries (“who were impatient to put themselves under my
conduct”), and two miles outside Concord “the State was
nowhere to be seen.”
Civil Disobedience is arguably the most influential of Thoreau’s
writings. Reading it convinced Gandhi to develop his theory and
practice; and maybe Gandhi, in naming his method satyagraha, or
‘truth-force’, came close to summarising Thoreau’s philosophy.
Into The Woods
If Thoreau’s stay in the woods was not an exercise in self-suffi-
ciency, what was it?
It was an exercise in self-exploration. “Be a Columbus,” Thoreau
wrote, “to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening
new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” If Civil Disobedience
explores the proper relationship of the individual and the state,
Walden asks how the individual should properly relate to himself,
others, and the world in general. How do we perfect ourselves, and

thus become worthy of the ideal state? And to answer that question
for yourself, you need to know who you are as an individual.
In Walden’s long opening chapter Thoreau mounts a critique
of modern life and how it generates ‘needs’ (for ‘better’ shelter,
clothing, food, etc) which are not needs at all. He memorably
describes modern heating as being “cooked, of course à la mode.”
He also has no time for the “need for speed” and is unimpressed
by the railroad. He writes:
“Our inventions… are but improved means to an unimproved end… We
are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas;
but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communi-
Henry David Thoreau
Portrait by Darren McAndrew 2017
cate… As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.”
Having expressed his dissatisfaction with the contemporary
world, Thoreau moves on to put forward the alternative he dis-
covered by living at Walden.
Thoreau was not living there to avoid human company. He
begins the chapter ‘Visitors’ thus: “I think that I love society as
much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a blood-
sucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my
way.” He claims to have had up to thirty people in his hut at one
time; his circle included thinkers such as Emerson, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. But most of the ‘Visitor’ chap-
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 41
Brief Lives
ter is concerned with one man, a Canadian woodcutter. Thoreau
clearly enjoyed his company, and “did not know whether he was
as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child.” The
woodcutter did not want to change the world but knew how to
live contentedly in it; he had some thoughts, but not great ones:
he was, Thoreau says, humble without knowing what humility
was. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast to the high think-
ing of the Transcendentalists; but not hard to understand why
Thoreau might have preferred the woodcutter.
This theme of company is continued in the chapter ‘Former
Inhabitants’, in which Thoreau communes with the memory of
people who formerly lived nearby: two slaves, a coloured woman,
a potter, a ditcher, a tavern-keeper. This is Thoreau’s history of
Concord: not its great men, nor “the shot heard round the world”
but the humble people forgotten except in folk memory.
Thoreau had a great deal of solitude at his hut. Perhaps living
there enabled him to ration his human contact, giving him time
to explore himself, to encounter nature more directly, to meet
and talk with people outside his usual circles, and most impor-
tantly, to think. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give
me truth,” he writes, recognising that truth is what human beings
often do not want. On that note he creates a brilliant simile for
how his book will be received by comparing it with the ice from
Walden Pond: “Southern customers objected to its blue colour,
which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, and pre-
ferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but tastes of weeds.”
For Thoreau, the truth is discovered by looking beyond appear-
ance and testing reality.
Thoreau is often regarded as a ‘spiritual’ writer. But as has
been shown, he was a practical man, and towards the end of
Walden he brings together the search for truth and practicality:
“Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than
make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was
asked if he had anything to say. ‘Tell the tailors,’ said he, ‘to remember
to make a knot in their thread before they take their first stitch.’ His
companion’s prayer is forgotten.”
(The last sentence reminds us that Thoreau was possessed of
a dry humour. For another example, “Some circumstantial evi-
dence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”)
CABIN PIC © RYTHMICQUIETUDE 2010
Replica of Thoreau’s cabin in the woods
42 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
Out Of The Woods
Thoreau left the woods perhaps because Emerson wanted him to
look after his house while he was on a lecture tour; but his own expla-
nation is that “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there”
(Walden); or, “I do not know what made me leave the pond. I left it
as unaccountably as I went to it. To speak sincerely, I went there
because I had got ready to go; I left it for the same reason” (Journal).
This comes close to “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
From this point on Thoreau seems to have distanced himself
somewhat from the Transcendentalists. He was outraged by the
1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required free states to return
escaped slaves to their owners in the South. He took an active part
in the underground railroad smuggling slaves out of the South:
on at least one occasion he provided shelter and a route to Canada
for a fugitive slave. Thoreau continued to think, as his writings
prove; but he was becoming more of an activist.
The most controversial episode of Thoreau’s life occurred in
1857, when he met John Brown of Kansas, an abolitionist who
promoted armed insurrection on behalf of that cause, and gave
him the fullest support, even writing and publishing ‘A Plea for
John Brown’ after Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
Thoreau’s father died in 1859, which left Henry head of the
family and responsible for his mother and sister. In 1860 he
developed bronchitis and travelled to Minnesota for a cure. Here
he met members of the Sioux Nation, and was concerned about
their treatment by the federal government – an activist to the last.
The cure did not work. Thoreau returned to Concord, made
arrangements for the posthumous publication of The Maine
Woods (1864), and died of tuberculosis on May 6th 1862.
Assessments
One tendency within Thoreau scholarship has been to divert
attention from what he says by calling its context into question.
He has been criticised for not being economically self-sufficient
(when he did not set out to be); and Carl Bode has put forward a
psychoanalytic explanation which sees Thoreau’s hostility to the
state as linked to an Oedipal hatred of his father and John Brown
as a father figure. Anything rather than acknowledge that
Thoreau’s (admittedly threatening) ideas might be worth consid-
ering in their own right!
It seems more likely that what Thoreau saw in John Brown was
a reflection of his own development. He had moved from being
a thinker to being an activist. Emerson and his circle may have
spoken and written against slavery, but they were not recorded as
sheltering runaway slaves, as Thoreau did. Thoreau recognised
in Brown someone who not only believed in a cause, but did
something about it.
Thoreau can be presented as an outsider, but that does not
appear to be how his Concord neighbours viewed him. Small
communities can be intolerant of difference; but Thoreau was
accepted as a member of his community. He was eccentric, per-
haps: one of that increasingly rare breed, the Yankee individual-
ist. Yet he got on with people; he gave freely of his time and
thoughts to lecture in the Concord Lyceum (and was allowed to
do so); and he kept getting hired. After all, he was a damn good
surveyor, and knew how to make a good pencil.
© MARTIN JENKINS 2017
Martin Jenkins is a retired community worker and Quaker in London.

Panpsychic Ricochets
DEAR EDITOR: Issue 121 contained four
articles on radical theories of conscious-
ness. The guest editor, Dr Philip Goff, is
one of the four authors. It might have
been better if an editor had been invited
who was more detached from the debate,
as all four contributors, to varying
degrees, are sympathetic to panpsychism.
To describe panpsychism as counterin-
tuitive is a considerable understatement.
The only example of consciousness to
which we have direct access is that of
humans, and this we can confidently
assert is dependent upon the activity of
our brains. By analogy, on observing the
behaviour of higher animals we accept
them as being conscious too. How far
down the animal kingdom this goes is
debatable. Most of us would be comfort-
able accrediting mice with some level of
consciousness, but would draw the line at,
say, an amoeba. But panpsychists regard
all physical entities as possessing conscious-
ness. This extraordinary claim is founded
upon our inability to give a detailed
account of how consciousness emerges in
objects made up of quarks, electrons etc.
Presumably if quarks and electrons have
some rudimentary consciousness, then a
uranium atom, say, which is much more
complex, has a considerably enhanced
level of consciousness. What about a
pebble on the beach? What kind of inner
life does it possess? By the time we get to
the Rock of Gibraltar it must have a very
substantial conscious mental life indeed! I
confidently assert that no one has, or ever
will have, any evidence that it has.
I’m not arguing that consciousness
could only exist in biological entities. In
the vastness of the universe who can say
what might have emerged? I also have an
open mind regarding man-made
conscious systems. That some computer-
based systems exhibit at least some
aspects of intelligence is indisputable.
We must be careful not to set the level
of intelligence demanded too high for
consciousness or we will disqualify most
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
animals, and indeed many humans.
The mysteriousness of all mental
processes generally, and consciousness in
particular, is reminiscent of the earlier
debate between mechanists and vitalists.
Virtually nobody now defends the notion
of the élan vital as a necessity for life. I
believe that panpsychism will suffer the
same fate. I don’t know whether science
will ever wholly understand conscious-
ness, but no doubt much will be learnt in
the endeavour. It is certainly much too
early to give up on the enterprise.
JOHN RADCLIFFE, WELWYN GDN CITY
DEAR EDITOR: While agnostic on the
issue, I would offer a couple of points in
support of Phillip Goff’s panpsychism in
Issue 121. I condition this on downplay-
ing the term ‘consciousness’ and turn,
rather, to a suggestion made by Camilla
Martin in the PN podcast, ‘Free Will and
the Brain’ [available at
philosophynow.org/podcasts, Ed]: What
we experience as consciousness is a
composite effect of data.
First, I would ask the reader to think
about the act of reading this, then think
about their selves reading this, then
think about their selves thinking about
their selves reading this... We could go
on like that forever. But what we’ll never
see is what is looking out: the perceiving
thing. And how is our basic perception
any different to that of, say, a gnat? The
only difference, as Douglas Hofstadter
points out in I Am A Strange Loop, is the
symbolic filters we use. And why stop with
a gnat? Plants, as recent research suggests,
communicate. How far of a jump would
it be to basic elements containing data?
D.E. TARKINGTON, BELLEVUE, NE
DEAR EDITOR: The idea of panpsychism
is that awareness is inherent in every
aspect of matter, even though normally
we only recognise it in the animal king-
dom. The argument seems to be that
because particles have consciousness, we
are also able to have consciousness. But
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 43
no explanation is given of how this may
work. It’s a ‘just so’ story.
Our consciousness however means
that we are aware of ourselves, and of
ourselves in relation to our surroundings.
So in what way are the physical proper-
ties of sub-atomic particles – mass, spin,
charge, etc – in their intrinsic nature
forms of awareness, as Dr Goff asserts?
Yes, they interact with other particles in
precise ways, but that’s not awareness.
Panpsychists argue that it’s a question
of degree. So we don’t ascribe human-
like awareness to mice or spiders. And so
just as we find it difficult to imagine
having a spider’s form of awareness, we
find it even more difficult to understand
the awareness enjoyed by a subatomic
particle. And this, they say, leaves open
the possibility that it has awareness in
some way. This is, however, argument by
analogy, which has no logical value. And,
more importantly, if the argument is to
have any persuasive power, consciousness
must be recognisably the same at what-
ever level it is said to exist. Unless we
want to be in Humpty Dumpty land,
‘consciousness’ cannot completely change
meaning as it shrinks. Indeed, if panpsy-
chism is the best explanation currently
available, I think I shall get out my self-
aware Ouija board to see what’s next in
line to ‘explain’ consciousness.
THOMAS JEFFREYS, WARWICKSHIRE
DEAR EDITOR: As a reason for disbeliev-
ing panpsychism, Raymond Tallis, in
‘Against Panpsychism’ (PN 121), asks
how the macroscopic consciousness of
organisms can be built up out of elemen-
tary constituents and why such building
up happens in some things but not others
– in brains, for example, and not pebbles.
The answer is found in the organiza-
tion of the elementary constituents. If
everything has an inside or subjective
aspect as panpsychism suggests, as well as
an outside or objective aspect, then the
organization of the outside should have
some bearing on the richness of the
Letters
inside. There is something unique about
how matter is organized in living beings,
as opposed to non-living things, that can
account for the emergence of our
complex and vivid form of consciousness.
Living things are strikingly different
from inanimate objects. The matter that
composes living things is constantly
changing through metabolism, the
process by which matter is ingested,
transformed and excreted. What persists
is not the matter itself but the form in
which that matter is organized. I follow
Hans Jonas here (pp.64-67 in Mortality
and Morality, ed. Lawrence Vogel, 1996),
when he says that the sense of being a
whole conscious entity emerges with the
ability of a simple organism to maintain
its structure through time by exchanging
matter with its environment. Thus a
changing material process that has a
unity of form over time gives rise to a
unity of experience over time which is of
a higher order than the micro-experi-
ences of the constituent elements.
This higher order depends on the abil-
ity of mentality to bleed through, so to
speak, from one event to another. Anecdo-
tal evidence of telepathy suggests that
mentality does indeed have such an ability.
Given this account of how the
mentalities of constituents can combine
to form a single richer mentality,
panpsychism does indeed make sense. I
discuss the argument for panpsychism in
detail at bmeacham.com/blog/?p=568
BILL MEACHAM, USA
DEAR EDITOR: As a means to understand
consciousness, I believe that panexperien-
tialism (a term coined by the Whitehea-
dian David Ray Griffin) is to be preferred
to panpsychism. It has the advantage of
being entirely consistent with the Inte-
grated Information Theory of Conscious-
ness. In panexperientialism, a fleeting
experience is generated whenever physical
systems exchange energy-information,
since they’re equivalent. How this might
happen can be understood by considering
the simplest stable atomic system, the
hydrogen atom. In its lowest energy state,
it consists of a positively charged proton
orbited by a single negatively charged
electron. Here we have a system of sub-
atomic particles forming a dynamic yet
self-contained physical system with no
consciousness. When, however, this
system interacts with an externally
sourced photon, the electron jumps to a
44 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
higher energy orbital. From the informa-
tion perspective, the system has
responded to a specific input of datum,
which for the panexperientialist is a fleet-
ing experience of something outside itself.
Consciousness is a result of the evolution-
ary process when organisms are selected
that are able to integrate, attenuate or
amplify trillions of such data. As a result,
the organism experiences the build-up of
emotional states. These emotions produce
actions which, as required by evolution,
must be directed towards the organism’s
survival and reproduction. In this way, the
process of evolution ensures that simple
experiences become sophisticated presen-
tations of the world.
DR STEVE BREWER, ST IVES
DEAR EDITOR: Philip Goff suggests that
physicalists might object to panpsychist
claims by arguing that “We just need a
‘Darwin of consciousness’ to come along”
(p.7). I suggest that physicalists already
have Darwin[s] of consciousness. One was
Gerald Edelman (1929-2014), who shared
a 1972 Nobel Prize with Rodney Robert
Porter and wrote Bright Air, Brilliant Fire
(1992). The neurologist Oliver Sacks
called his ideas “a radically biological
global evolutionary theory of mind”.
An interesting example of how Edel-
man’s major contributions to our under-
standing of consciousness have been
extended is Giulio Tononi’s Integrated
Information Theory, as discussed by
Hedda Hassel Mørch in Issue 121.
Tononi was a young member of Edel-
man’s team of researchers back in the
1990s, and with Edelman co-authored
Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagi-
nation in 2000. Tononi’s AI ‘conscious
machine’, engineered by “mimicking the
natural selection by which the human
brain was created” as Mørch says (p.15),
is significantly reminiscent of Edelman’s
team’s ‘neurally organised mobile adap-
tive device’ (NOMAD). Edelman also
reminds us that “the conscious life [that
science] describes will always remain
richer than its description” (Ibid, p.209).
COLIN BROOKES, LEICESTERSHIRE
DEAR EDITOR: The concept of panpsy-
chism (Issue 121) has made me see that
invoking the existence of a hitherto unde-
tected-as-universal property to explain the
unexplained can be extended to other
mysteries. For instance, we are all too
ready to believe that our DNA codes give
us two legs and two arms. But why? No-
one has ever shown in complete detail the
biochemical processes by which this
happens. Our acceptance of a DNA-based
explanation is just another example of a
misplaced reliance on physicalism. And in
the absence of a complete physical expla-
nation, the origin of our limbs remains
unexplained and so should obviously be
referred to as the hard problem of limbs.
For a philosopher, however, this prob-
lem is simple to resolve. We need only
postulate a panlimbist world. Specifically,
the reason we humans normally have four
limbs is that everything has four limbs,
down to and including the smallest sub-
atomic particle. Of course we might have
to modify our definition of limbs a little
bit, and also the meaning of the number
4, in view of the absence of anything
actually like limbs forming part of moun-
tains or oceans, or indeed electrons and
protons. We can instead say that they
have an inherent quality much like, say,
mass or spin or the electro-weak force,
which we could simply name ‘limb’. We
may then assert that this is fundamental
to enabling us to have what we would
normally describe as limbs – just like the
assertion by panpsychists that the exis-
tence of consciousness in all matter,
although not in a form that fits the defi-
nition of consciousness, is the source of
human consciousness. Problem solved.
PAUL BUCKINGHAM, ANNECY, FRANCE
A Solace of Quantum
DEAR EDITOR: Reading about the funda-
mental laws of quantum mechanics
(deterministic and probabilistic) in Issue
121 brought to mind the contrast
between when we are experiencing ‘flow’
and when we are painfully self-aware. In
flow it can feel that we lose consciousness
and are merely acting through learned
memories, completely absorbed and
confident (deterministic). While self-
conscious, however, our behaviour can
feel and appear to ourselves and others as
erratic, inconsistent, and unlike ourselves.
When self-consciousness is causing us to
‘measure’ our performance against
perceived expectations (that we believe we
cannot meet), it seems that our behaviour
changes compared with presenting to an
empty room or when experiencing flow,
therefore the outcome is more uncertain
(so probabilistic), with a greater probabil-
ity that we will appear ridiculous.
FELICITY WILLIAMS, MILTON KEYNES

In Praise of Brain Hats
DEAR EDITOR: I am writing to tell you
how much I enjoyed the cover photo on
#121. The brain hats are so imaginative
and inventive! I’m seriously considering
how to make one for myself. It might be
of some help when I am thinking about
philosophical problems. Sometimes all
you need is a little extra confidence.
D. N. DIMMITT, LAWRENCE, KANSAS
Serious Baby Talk
DEAR EDITOR: I would argue that Quinn
Rivet, in commenting in Letters, Issue
121 on my dialog ‘Are Designer Babies
Our Future?’ in Issue 119, is actually in
the same camp as I. In the case of the
exchange between my two acquain-
tances, Pat simply served as my dialog’s
convenient foil in alluding to the puta-
tive downsides of genetic manipulation,
especially of so-called ‘designer babies’.
My position on genetic engineering and
designer babies should have been clear
from the arguments presented by Sally
in order to push back against Pat – argu-
ments that I made stronger than Pat’s.
For instance, the dialog opens with Sally
saying, “I want to decide my baby’s
traits. Genetic engineering is making
that possible” and ends with her saying,
even more forcefully, “I believe it’s just a
matter of time. Eventually people will
iron out the scientific, ethical, and social
wrinkles, and be selecting their babies’
preferred traits. What’s seen as accept-
able will change dramatically over the
next twenty or thirty years, and gene
editing can’t be uninvented! Personally, I
intend to embrace it as far as the means
are available. I think not only do I have a
right to give birth to a healthy, smart,
capable, competitive child if I can, I have
an obligation to do so.” I think Sally’s
point of view and way forward – that she
‘intends to embrace [having a designer
baby]’ and that the choice is both her
‘right’ and ‘obligation’ (both words orig-
inally italicized) – are unequivocal.
KEITH TIDMAN, MARYLAND
Serious Misrepresentations
DEAR EDITOR: I notice that Vincent di
Norcia refers to my book Environmental
Philosophy: An Introduction (Polity, 2015)
in his review of Patrick Curry’s Ecological
Ethics in Issue 122 of Philosophy Now. I am
grateful to Professor di Norcia for
mentioning my book; however, I must
point out that he has misrepresented my
view on the issue of population control.
He claims that I argue that we must not
just limit population growth, we must
reduce our numbers to sustainable levels,
and, in support of this claim, he refers the
reader to p.54 and pp.144 ff of my book.
Yet I argue no such thing. On p.54, I
maintain that it would be appalling to
suggest we should welcome such events
as droughts and famines, which reduce
the global population of human beings.
On pp.144 ff, I do not argue that we must
reduce the global population of human
beings; I suggest that rates of population
growth in some of the world’s poorer
countries could be reduced by such
measures as alleviating poverty and
enacting social reforms to give women
more control over their lives.
SIMON JAMES, DURHAM UNIVERSITY
DEAR EDITOR: Issue 122 of PN has just
arrived, excellent as ever. I question,
however, whether the portrait purport-
edly of Michael Oakeshott (whom I
knew) is really of Oakeshott and not of
his colleague, Maurice Cranston, whom
I also knew. A quick check on the Inter-
net shows the resemblance of the
portrait to Cranston. [Ed.: You’re right, it
is Cranston. Very sorry about that!]
DR GEOFFREY THOMAS, FORMERLY
RESEARCH FELLOW, BIRKBECK COLLEGE,
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Philosophy as Pattern Recognition
DEAR EDITOR: Knowing nothing about
philosophy, I was introduced to your
journal some eighteen months ago and I
now feel in a position to offer an obser-
vation on the nature of the discipline:
1. Philosophy studies how patterns of
symbols interact to form new patterns.
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 45
Letters
2. The relationship between these symbols
and reality is contested. They have no
meaning except by reference to other
symbols and are ultimately self-referential.
3. The mechanisms by which new patterns
of symbols emerge are not understood.
4. There is no convergence between the
patterns that emerge.
5. The relationship between these
processes and the structure of their
claimed target is not known.
Er... that’s it. Should I cancel my
subscription? [No. Why resort to merely
symbolic gestures? – Ed]
DAVID KERNICK, EXETER, DEVON
Poet’s Corner
DEAR EDITOR: Interviewed in Issue 120,
Raymond Tallis mentioned his disagree-
ment with D.H. Mellor’s notion that
time is a causal dimension of space-time.
This got me to wondering:
were time to cease –
would strings cease their singing?
spheres cease their song?
K.O. SMITH, ASHEVILLE, NC
DEAR EDITOR: A haiku response to 118’s
‘Hens, Ducks & Human Rights in China’:
China/West memo:
‘We’ is not a plural ‘I’.
Hens and ducks talking.
ALASDAIR MACDONALD, GLASGOW
Wittgenstein
Numbers are better than words he said,
For numbers exist outside our heads.
But words are made up by you and me,
And do not exist in reality.
JEFFREY WALD, FALCON HEIGHTS, MN
DEAR EDITOR: From Russell’s quote in
120, “To be happy, one must first not be
unhappy” I was inspired by a Rodgers
and Hart standard, and by Lord Byron:
Glad To Be Unhappy
Fools rush in, so here I am
Very glad to be unhappy
I can’t win, but here I am
More than glad to be unhappy
Unrequited love’s a bore
And I’ve got it pretty bad
But for someone you adore
It’s a pleasure to be sad
Like a straying baby lamb
With no mammy and no pappy
I’m so unhappy
But oh so glad!
RAY SHERMAN, USA

Books
Ultimate Questions
by Bryan Magee
BRYAN MAGEE’S ULTIMATE
Questions (2016) is a
thought-provoking and
interesting book with some strong passages,
but in the end we still have many questions,
and fewer answers.
Magee apparently wishes to be known as
the great agnostic philosopher. The flavor
of his agnosticism can be seen in this passage,
which provides a good summary of this book:
“The unknowable and unconceptualizable
spill over into our empirical world. We live
amongst them all the time. We are mysteries
to ourselves, and to one another. In our sex-
ual relationships the miraculous happens,
and happens again in the creation of new
life. We do not understand life or death.
Nor do we understand time. . . ‘What is it
about our empirical world that convinces
you that there must be something else?’ I am
tempted to say, ‘Everything.’” (pp.56-7).
Magee repeatedly emphasizes this idea
that reality is, or is likely to be, far greater and
deeper than the physical world we perceive.
For example, we know some moral truths;
and morality, he thinks, cannot be reduced
to a social convention. We perceive the phys-
ical world; and yet our own consciousness
cannot be understood by what we know
about the physical world. Music cannot be
explained in words, and yet it offers insights
into reality that words could never convey.
We see other people, but what we know
about them, how we understand them, and
how we relate to them, is so much more than
with the perception of other physical objects.
When we have sex, especially, we can
encounter something that is so much more
than the physical interaction of two objects.
Magee rejects all attempts at reduction-
ism, and all attempts to confine reality to the
boundaries of the empirical realm. After all,
he argues, we happen to have five major
senses, but we know that some other animals
have fewer, and some have senses that we
don’t have, such as echolocation in bats. So
we know that there are aspects of reality that
we cannot sense, because we don’t have the
46 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
Grant Sterling asks some immediate questions about
Ultimate Questions, and John Greenbank asks if science
can ultimately tell us anything about artistic experience.
proper organs. Moreover, it is overwhelm-
ingly likely that there are countless aspects of
reality that no living being can possibly expe-
rience, because the necessary organs cannot
exist. This means that not only are there
countless truths that we do not know, there
are entire realms of truth that we cannot even
“
An interesting read, and a good antidote to
the widespread modern tendency of people
to naïvely assume that modern science
knows all and sees all.
begin to conceptualize. Combine this with
the fact that even what we do experience is
only the tiniest fraction of what exists in the
world right now; and that the world right now
represents only an instant in the history of a
species that has existed for hundreds of thou-
sands of years and that Magee confidently
assumes is likely to continue to exist for
hundreds of thousands or even millions of
years, and the sheer volume of the unknown
and unknowable should give us pause.
So this is the great theme of Ultimate Ques-
tions: our ignorance is astoundingly vast.
Unknowable Unknowables
Having spent a great deal of time trying to
show how reality spills over the boundaries
of the natural world as studied by scientists,
Magee turns to a discussion of those philoso-
phers who attempt to solve the problem of
the vast unknowability of it all. Ignorance,
especially inescapable ignorance, is distress-
ing, so it is no surprise that many people look
for doctrines which avoid the possibility.
One way to do this, which Magee primar-
ily associates with Hegel’s idealism, would be
to narrow the concept of ‘truth’ by holding
that it is grounded in our consciousness. In
this way, all the alleged unknowables would
be swept away: ‘truths unknowable by
humans’ would be, by definition, impossible
– a self-contradiction. Magee rejects this
position: no matter how comforting the idea
that truth is what is knowable by humanity
might be, there are simply no arguments that
can prove that it’s true, and it is unacceptable
to believe in such a doctrine without proof.
A popular way to escape the limits of our
ignorance is to hold that we can have knowl-
edge about a supernatural realm. If we
cannot eliminate the unknowables by
”
reducing them to the physical or by restrict-
ing truth to what can be in our conscious-
ness, then why not simply accept that the
supernatural exists, and find a way to know
it? And if our senses and consciousnesses are
inadequate to know it, why not just accept
that there is a being greater than us who can
impart some knowledge of it to us – the most
important parts, no doubt? In short, why
not turn to religion? But Magee has the
same view of religion that he has of Hegelian
Book Reviews

idealism: of course there could be a deity, just
as “it could also be true that my living room
is full of silent, invisible, intangible
monkeys” (p. 22); but there is no proof avail-
able for such a belief, and so this strategy
must also be rejected.
This, however, is the part of the book that
most needs our attention. Magee repeatedly
treats religious beliefs as if they’re all trans-
parently nothing more than wish-fulfill-
ment, so that there is no need to respond to
them with arguments. He writes, “Religious
discourse has this general characteristic. It is
a form of unjustified evasion, a failure to face
up to the reality of ignorance as our natural
and inevitable starting point.” (p.31). This
conclusion might be justified if it were
supported with arguments; but here it is
Magee who offers none. Certainly, though,
this vision of religious thought does little
justice to thoughtful writers such as Aquinas
or Augustine.
Ultimate Questions is an interesting read,
and a good antidote to the widespread
modern tendency of people to naïvely
assume that modern science knows all and
sees all – the sort of people who, like Horatio
in Hamlet, refuse to allow that there may be
more things in Heaven and Earth than are
dreamt of in their empirical philosophies.
But the book seems to merely assert the
truth of inescapable agnosticism, rather than
supporting the assertion. In any case the
book is aptly titled: it does raise some of the
ultimate questions, whatever the reader may
think about the answers that are offered.
© DR GRANT STERLING 2017
Grant Sterling is a professor of Philosophy at
Eastern Illinois University.
• Ultimate Questions, Bryan Magee, Princeton,
2016, 144 pages, £14.95, ISBN: 0691170657
Aesthetics & The
Sciences of Mind
Editors Currie, Kieran,
Meskin, & Robson
THE NATURE OF BEAUTY
is one of the most endur-
ing and controversial themes in Western
philosophy, and along with the nature of art,
is one of the two fundamental issues in
aesthetics. Along with goodness, truth, and
justice, beauty has traditionally been
counted among the ultimate values. What
would life be like if we could not respond to
the beauty of sea and landscape, enjoy mind-
transporting novels, admire great architec-
Book Reviews
ture and paintings, or be uplifted by the
sound of words and music? Beauty was a
primary theme among ancient Hellenistic
and Medieval philosophers, and was central
to Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
thought, as represented in treatments by
such diverse thinkers as Shaftesbury, Hutch-
eson, Hume and Burke in Britain, and by
Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel and Schopen-
hauer in Germany.
Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762)
thought that the senses had their own rules
and their own perfection, differing from
logical rules and the knowledge generated
by logical thought-processing. The rules of
perception were to be studied by a science
of perception, which Baumgarten called
aesthetics, from the Greek for ‘to
sense/perceive’. In 1739 he claimed in §533
of his Metaphysica that, “The science of this
sensible knowledge and speaking is
AESTHETICS (the logic of the lower
cognitive faculty, the philosophy of the
graces and the muses, a lower doctrine of
knowledge, the art of thinking beautifully,
the art of analogy to reason)” (my transla-
tion). This formulation leaves us with a mix
of unassociated references: to science, logic,
a ‘lower cognitive faculty’, philosophy, and
to the ‘art of thinking beautifully’. ‘Logic’,
in the tradition to which Baumgarten (and
Kant) belonged, does not refer to a formal
discipline, but to how a given mental faculty
is to be exercised in the most efficient way –
thus there can be a logic of sensibility. Such
a logic must incorporate the findings of
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 47
Books
psychology, which for Baumgarten was a
discipline that investigates the depths of the
soul, that is, the source of our representa-
tions or experience. Baumgarten seems
thence to adopt the traditional idea of beauty
as ‘unity in variety’. Kant, who greatly
respected Baumgarten, failed to disentangle
these aspects.
Our sense of a breathtaking encounter is
not like a process of rational thought, but is
one of a significant disclosure, a sudden
breaking-in to our awareness. We are
inspired variously by feelings of devotion,
gratitude, identification, admiration, joy,
even of love. All such experience exemplifies
Kant’s idea of imaginative ‘play’, perhaps to
be interpreted as the human creative drive
or creative response to the world. Even the
more mundane aspects of our experience –
form and balance, symmetry and complete-
ness – are also component parts of aestheti-
cism. And yet as a species we seem to take
all this experience for granted; all as normal
as breathing and sleeping.
Art Under Science
But now our aesthetic sensibilities are being
brought under close ‘scientific’ scrutiny.
Psychoanalysts, particularly Freud and Jung,
delved into our deepest desires, and in doing
so exposed unexpected psychological mech-
anisms and motives. However, these findings
are being extended and transformed by
cognitive science and neurology. Can its
empirical findings be meaningfully related to
aesthetic awareness? When science gets so
St Georges Major At Dusk
by Claude Monet, 1908
 Books
involved, have aestheticians reason to feel
uneasy? Philosophical thinking about
aesthetics has been tied to the idea that
philosophy’s business is primarily to analyse
concepts. This approach contrasts with the
methods of psychologists, sociologists, and
even evolutionary theorists. How far should
philosophers be responsive to the results of
these studies? Should philosophers’ views on
aesthetic values, interpretation, imagination,
and the emotions of art, change in the light
of scientific understanding? Aesthetics & The
Sciences of Mind (2014) asks, “Are the tradi-
tional methods of philosophical aesthetics
adequate, or should we supplement – even
replace – them with some of the methods
employed by the natural and social sciences?”
Aesthetics and science have progressed as
separate fields of study for at least three
centuries, but there is an apparent danger
that academic ambition (hubris?) is
currently inspired to bring everything into
conformity with scientific methods. Neuro-
science might be able to help to answer
whether music and ballet are to be under-
stood as providing essentially different types
of aesthetic responses from, say, painting
and sculpture, or whether the senses of hear-
ing, seeing and touch provide aesthetically
equivalent experiences. But does a scientifi-
cally experimentable entity such as a mirror
neurone, or its activity, meaningfully match
to anything described as ‘aesthetic’?
For there to be any meaningful relation-
ship between aesthetics and the sciences of
mind, all terms and categories used in
comparing ideas between them must be at
least congruent – they must mean the same
thing in both domains. Congruency also
requires that any new knowledge found must
be consistent with whatever old knowledge
we want to retain. Scientific enquiry
contrasts with that of philosophical
48 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
discourse. In philosophy, reason or reflection
alone is used for deriving the truth or falsity
of propositions. Whilst language, letters,
words, truths, numbers, logic, and mathe-
matics, all exist only in the mind, the primary
source of scientific evidence is the senses.
Music is perhaps the most universal art
form. We can appreciate melody, rhythm,
harmonic texture and dynamic contrast as
separate but correlated attributes of a single
experience. Together they function as a
complex language – the foundational ‘song
without words’. From both a performer’s
and a listener’s perspective, understanding
of that language can certainly be deepened
by increasing familiarity. After attending a
concert we can discuss our experience with
other listeners, sharing with them quite
specific aspects of the performance, down
even to the effect of individual passages. For
this to be possible each person’s understand-
ing must be first hand, at the level of
personal disclosure; a direct, intimate expe-
rience, for which there can be no substitute.
So is it even conceivable that we could
account for – and so ‘explain’ – the arts in
terms of measurable responses, and
outcomes that can be summarised in charts
and graphs? And can the impact of a work
of art be reducible to its components?
The Authors’ Artistic Experiences
The contributors to this wide-ranging book
bring various points of view to the central
issues.
Dominic McIver Lopes sees social
psychology as supporting the idea that
reason plays no part in aesthetic judgement,
and further, that post hoc rationalisations
cause ‘distortion’ in that judgement. He
implies (correctly) that it is not reasoning
that provides aesthetic satisfaction, but he
seems muddled as to whether critics can
successfully rationalise their own experience
of artistic works. If aesthetic appreciation is
at least partly a matter of sufficient correct
perception, then a psychologist must deter-
mine both when correct perception has
occurred, and that it is in fact sufficient to
comprehend the piece. Few great works of
art necessarily make their effect on first
encounter, but over a period of exposure and
reflection. Conversation between two view-
ers of, say, the same painting, can result in a
deeper perception of aspects of the work for
both, without there being any resort to ratio-
nalising explanation. This is despite Lopes’
assertion that appreciation of a Monet paint-
ing involves ‘being aware’ of the features that
‘make it beautiful’. This is almost to replace,
say, a feeling of (aesthetic) happiness with an
assessment of the reasons for being happy.
In ‘Is Aesthetic Experience Possible?’,
Sherri Irvin asks “what if it turns out that we
don’t have introspective access to the
processes by which our aesthetic responses
are produced?” (p.37). Here again commen-
tary on aesthetics is seen only at the level of
post hoc rationalisation, as a scientific evalu-
ation of artistic experience. But experiments
on how consumers evaluate the quality of,
say, soft drinks, hardly compare with exper-
imentally analysing exposure to works of
human creative achievement in painting,
architecture or music. And one aspect of
aesthetic analysis that is not evaluated in
experiments is the transformative nature of
the experience. How does it change us? A
distinction is made between aesthetic expe-
rience and aesthetic appreciation, and a
further distinction between mere apprecia-
tion and deep appreciation, involving, in the
latter case, non-aesthetic components:
“Deep aesthetic appreciation involves
understanding of how the artwork achieves
its effects.” This is a fundamental misunder-
standing of the nature of aesthetic experi-
ence, for which no rational explanatory
components are directly contributory. It
also undermines Irvin’s strong appeal to
mindfulness as relevant to responding to
“aesthetically relevant features” (p49).
David Davies’ ‘“This is Your Brain on
Art”: What Can Philosophy of Art Learn
from Neuroscience?’ repeats the old ques-
tion of whether there is an aesthetic differ-
ence between a work of art and a forgery,
and queries our responses to literary fiction,
and the aesthetic significance of hearing old
music performed on contemporary instru-
ments. And can the intentions of an artist, a
writer or a composer be frustrated by the
unprepared reception of a work? Prepara-
Book Reviews

tion, by for example, reading up about a
painting or a piece of music before experi-
encing it, only facilitates the essential
aesthetic process or event: it does not
contribute to the aesthetic experience itself.
So far as aesthetic response occurs or devel-
ops over time, rather than immediately and
completely on initial exposure, any means of
focusing attention on the artistic experience
will be helpful; but this supplementary assis-
tance is not ‘of one substance with’ the
aesthetic experience itself.
A fundamental difference between the
aesthetic and the scientific is that aesthetic
phenomena should only be seen holistically –
we cannot reductively analyse a work of art –
whereas science breaks phenomena up into
elements that have significance in themselves.
This means that what science is looking for is
quite different from what the art appreciator
is looking for. So, whilst Davies explores the
role of mirror neurons in response to fiction,
he moderates his enthusiasm for experimen-
tal data by stating that “most of the significant
philosophical issues cannot be resolved by
appeal to this” (p.74).
In ‘The Limits of Aesthetic Empiricism’,
Fabian Dorsch refers to two kinds of aesthetic
principle: conceptual principles, such as
Book Reviews
balance; and what he calls default principles,
such as elegance always being beautiful. But
such aspects of beauty are not ‘components’
of art. Aesthetics is not atomistic. He’s mostly
right that “empirical evidence cannot provide
Rembrandt self-portrait, 1660
any non-inferential justification for aesthetic
judgements”, but wrong about there being a
parallel between an aesthetic response and,
say, estimating the size of a crowd.
In ‘Portrait of the Artist as an Aesthetic
Expert’, Christy Mag Uidhir and Cameron
Buckner try to reframe the aesthetic theory
of art (which refers to aesthetic features of an
artwork) by claiming that instead of the piece
of art holding any aesthetic quality in itself,
it attains the status of art by virtue of its
creation by an artist, who holds in mind an
‘aesthetic concept’. So we have a new pairing,
not between “artworks and their aesthetic
features but instead between artists and their
aesthetic concepts” (p.125). They also argue
that artists with training are more likely to
attain the status of ‘aesthetic experts’ and
have a better grasp of aesthetic concepts. The
outlook is naïve: “What kinds of training or
practice have expert artists received, and
what role do aesthetic concepts play in their
distinctive perceptual, motor, and concep-
tual abilities?” (p.130). Their conclusion puts
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 49
Books
the cart before the horse in demoting
‘aesthetic features’ of a work below a consid-
eration of its production.
Perhaps the most stimulating contribu-
tion is ‘Seeing with Feeling’, where Jesse
Prinz approvingly quotes C.I. Lewis’s idea
that “the beauty of the rose is its form and
colour.” This is a phenomenological viewpoint
on beauty: beauty is not conceptual, but it
can be seen. He considers such objections as
the ‘Puzzle of Manifest Beauty’, whereby we
do not (can not) register complexity
phenomenologically. His conclusion is that
“Beauty is not there to be seen, but there in
the seeing” (p.156).
Other contributors to this book address
relatively peripheral issues. So I would say
that although there is no doubting the
commitment and intellectual engagement
exhibited throughout this book, the lack of
secure critical foundations leads rather
quickly to confusion and a deepening
uncertainty, where explanations become
too reductive, and what is important about
the aesthetic experience gets explained
away.
The Way Forward?
We can say that philosophy is concerned
with ideas about ideas; science with ideas
about things in the world and their relations;
and aesthetics (along with ethics) with expe-
rienced emergent values.
We need a procedure to record, classify
and associate agreement in matters
aesthetic: the ‘greatness’ of art, the ‘beauty’
of a landscape, the ‘power’ of a musical
composition. These may be given quantifi-
able values through established procedures
of opinion polling and sampling. I propose
that we refer to any consensus achieved in
this process as ‘collective subjectivity’.
Though more extreme forms of art must
remain closed off to more people, I suggest,
nevertheless, that a collective subjective
evaluation can be used (with various degrees
of confidence) to make quantifiable value
judgements that are more than simply
ephemeral matters of taste.
Might we now begin to answer Baum-
garten’s concerns?
© JOHN GREENBANK 2017
John Greenbank graduated in Natural Sciences
and English from Clare College, Cambridge, and
in Mathematics from the Open University, and
is a trained concert singer.
• Aesthetics & The Sciences of Mind, Eds Greg
Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, Jon Robson,
OUP, 2014, 272 pages, £48 hb, ISBN: 0199669635
 THE BIG
LEBOWSKI
Film
M
aybe, just maybe, the mean-
ing of life is to live it: to leave
the worries to one side and,
as in The Big Lebowski, say,
“F**k it… let’s go bowling” – or whatever
pointless activity takes your fancy.
To assent to this idea, it must be said, is
not to assert that the philosophy of The Big
Lebowski (1998) can be reduced to a single
insight. Indeed, it is in the nature of the true
work of art that it contains many, often
contradictory, stands. This film is no excep-
tion. Still, it is above all a funny film, with a
perfectly cast Jeff Bridges as the antihero
Jeffrey Lebowski, who answers to ‘the
Dude’, or “his Dudeness, Duder, or El
Duderino if you’re not into the whole
brevity thing.” The film is not a treatise on
practical philosophy, but an exuberant
display of cinematographic playfulness,
showcasing the directors’ effortless comic
genius. Nor is this just a chronicle of the
unemployed Lebowski’s descent into the
underworld of early 1990s Los Angeles due
to a case of mistaken identity. It is also (and
perhaps even more so) a cacophony of small
and seemingly unrelated events woven into
a tapestry of the sublime and the ridiculous.
How many movies begin with the main
character writing a cheque for 69 cents?
50 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
Matt Qvortrup contemplates Dude philosophy.
The Big Lebowski might have lent itself to
a lazy rehash of the postmodern theories of
Jean Baudrillard, who wrote about “the end
of meta-narratives,” or what he saw as the
extinction in the late 20th century of any
grand overarching ideas about plans or
purposes for human life. To be sure there
are elements of this in the movie, as is
perhaps natural given that it was made at
the time when America was confronting
Saddam Hussein (who is irreverently
referred to as “that camel f**ker in Iraq” by
Walter Sobchak, a cantankerous Vietnam
vet played by John Goodman). But overall,
for those who watch this movie with a
philosophical eye, it is almost breath-taking
how many references there are to non-post-
modern thought; how the characters almost
go out of their way to insist on meta-narra-
tives, on purposes. For example, reflecting
on nihilism (a concept not much discussed
in other Hollywood blockbusters), Walter
– a convert to Judaism – dismisses this anti-
creed with characteristic bluntness:
“Nihilists? F**k me! National Socialism…
at least it’s an ethos.” And the self-same
Walter notes that “this is not Nam, there
are rules.” The Big Lebowski is not a movie
based on the stringent logic of a René
Descartes, still less one that portrays the
The Dude samples the good life
ideals of the Enlightenment. But for direc-
tors Joel and Ethan Coen, The Big Lebowski
was their first foray into Greco-Roman
philosophy. They would later direct a
remake of Homer’s Odysseus in the Deep
South in Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000),
and recently Hail Caesar (2016). Coen
Brothers movies often contain philosophi-
cal references. In Hail Caesar, there is even
a cameo appearance by Herbert Marcuse,
the German émigré Marxist Professor, who
talks about “Ze dialectic” to George
Clooney’s hapless and very impressionable
character. But The Big Lebowski is (perhaps
unwittingly) their most complete rehearsal
of philosophical themes.
The Big Stoic
Is it just coincidental that Ethan Coen, who
earned a BA in Philosophy at Princeton,
endowed the Dude with such a strong dose
of Socratic irony? If Socrates had lived in
L.A. in the early 1990s, would he not have
been a dude? A bearded, slightly overweight
character, well-liked by his friends, a medi-
tating ten-pin bowler with a resigned and
irreverent attitude to life, he shares many of
the characteristics of the Athenian sage
portrayed in Plato’s earlier dialogues. And
yet the Dude is not always a convincing
Socrates. His philosophy is not that the
unexamined life is not worth living, as
Socrates famously asserted in Plato’s Apol-
ogy. Rather, if this movie is anything philo-
sophical, it is Stoic.
Stoicism can be summed up as a philos-
ophy of how to face adversity with equanim-
ity. Founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium
in the Third Century BC, Stoicism taught
that to live the good life one has to under-
stand the natural order of things; that what
happens to you is often beyond your
control, but you can control how you
respond to it emotionally. Not merely a
practical philosophy, the Stoics were also
pioneers of a propositional logic which
some commentators consider to be close to
the logic of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). But
these considerations, as well as their dualist
metaphysics, were but means to an end – to
develop a philosophy of the good and
contented life. Having been established in
 The Dude’s
No.9 dream
BIG LEBOWSKI IMAGES © WORKING TITLE PRODUCTIONS 1998
Greece, where Epictetus further developed
it in the Second Century BC, Stoicism was
given a more popular form by Roman
philosophers including Seneca (4BC-65
AD) and Rome’s philosophising Emperor,
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD).
Like a good Stoic, the Dude is above all
calm in the face of adversity. When two
angry mobsters push his head into a toilet
bowl and demand “Where’s the money,
Lebowski?” he stoically responds, “It’s uh…
it’s down there somewhere, let me take
another look.” After the Dude has suffered
no end of misfortune, the narrator of the
movie, ‘the Stranger’ – a Texan with a Niet-
zschian moustache – observes that life goes
on, and that we can still look to him for
guidance: “Up and down, the Dude is out
there taking it easy for all us sinners.” ‘Us
sinners’ are caught up in a debilitating rat-
race and would do better to emulate a lazy
man – “and the Dude certainly was that.”
“True happiness”, as Seneca observed, “is to
enjoy the present, without anxious depen-
dence upon the future” (Letters From A
The Stranger with the moustache
Stoic). And what constitutes contentment
for the Dude is summed up in the words
“bowl, drive around, and the occasional acid
flashback” – in other words to live in the
present and to be content with his lot. In
this, the Dude is the very personification of
Seneca’s definition of ‘the wise man’, some-
one who “is content with his lot, whatever it
may be, without wishing for what he has
not” (Letters). This is a man whose life
centres around bowling; although he does
care a little about replacing a rug that “tied
the room together.”
Core Dudeism
To claim that the Dude is a Stoic is clearly
open to criticism (as all philosophy should
be!). Philosophical analogies are never
entirely accurate in works of art, and char-
acters in movies are by definition larger and
more multifaceted than the abstractions of
philosophy. It should also be noted that the
film has given rise to a semi-religious philos-
ophy of a Daoist nature, often referred to as
Dudeism. Jeff Bridges even co-authored a
book about the philosophy of the film
(Bernie Glassman and Jeff Bridges, The
Dude and the Zen Master, 2014). But it is not
the prerogative of the artist to interpret his
work. It is for the spectator, not the actor, to
draw lessons, find similarities, and take the
longer view.
All analysis can become uninspiring if
pushed too far. The beauty of art as a means
of representing philosophical truths is that
there are insights that can only be repre-
sented and understood in an artistic form;
perceptions that somehow go beyond ratio-
nal comprehension and scientific reduction-
ism. While the sciences generally seek to
break things down into their simplest parts,
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 51
Film
“ If Socrates had lived
in L.A. in the early
1990s, would he not
have been a dude?
the humanities and the arts insist on the
interplay of multiple perspectives, which can
only be experienced through artistic expres-
sion. The cinematic arts are no exception.
The Dude’s Stoicism is not of an abstract
nature, nor is it adhered to with unfailing
consistency. Greatness means to be so large
”
that there is room for contradictions. The
Dude is – if pressed – capable of anger,
though often in a resigned fashion: “You’re
not wrong Walter, you’re just an a**hole!”
And like Christ in the desert, the Dude is
tempted to depart from his true inner beliefs.
Egged on by Walter, he is lured by the
promise of easy money; but in its pursuit he
only finds himself at the mercy of nihilists
and the occasional pornographer.
According to the early Stoic Epictetus,
“Philosophy does not promise to secure
anything external for man, otherwise it would
be admitting something that lies beyond its
proper subject-matter. For as the material of
the carpenter is wood and that of the statuary
bronze, so the subject matter of the art of
living is each person’s own life”
(Discourses 1.15).
To be inspired by and follow the Dude’s
philosophy of life also does not promise to
secure anything external. Finally bereft of
both his friend Danny (played by Coen
Bros. regular Steve Buscemi) and his
beloved rug, the Dude returns to enjoying
the quiet life of drinking White Russians in
suburban L.A. and living in accordance with
Walter’s final philosophical insight: “F**k it
Dude, let’s go bowling.”
© DR MATT QVORTRUP 2017
Matt Qvortrup is a dude, and Professor of
Politics at Coventry University.
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December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 53


T allis
in
Wonderland
I
have recently been rereading Thomas
Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986).
In the more than thirty years since its
publication, the standing of this rela-
tively slim volume has grown steadily. To
borrow a metaphor that George Santayana
applied to Spinoza, “like a mountain
obscured at first by its foothills, he rises as he
recedes.” Yet it is dispiriting how many
contemporary intellectual trends – material-
ist theories of the mind and evolutionary
epistemology to name only the most fatuous
– have continued to flourish despite Nagel’s
demonstration of their inadequacy.
At the heart of The View from Nowhere is
one of the key issues in philosophy, and,
indeed, in our lives. It is that of reconciling
our necessarily local, even parochial, subjec-
tive viewpoints with the objective standpoint
whose most developed expression is science.
How do we square – or even connect – the
view from within, according to which we are
of overwhelming importance, with the view
from without, which sees us as insignificant
in a vast universe? Nagel pursues his
response to this existential challenge, that
“reality is not just objective reality” (p.87),
with consummate skill, imagination, and
much self-questioning.
That great physicist and subtle philoso-
pher Erwin Schrödinger anticipated some of
Nagel’s preoccupations. In What is Life?
(1944), Schrödinger pointed out that a
“moderately satisfying picture of the world
has only been reached at the high price of
taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping
back into the role of the non-concerned
observer”, adding that “While the stuff from
which our world picture is built is yielded
exclusively from the sense organs as organs
of the mind… yet the conscious mind itself
remains a stranger within that construct, it
has no living space in it” (p.119, in the 1967
edition). This gives rise to a paradox that
although “all scientific knowledge is based
on sense perception… the scientific views of
natural processes formed in this way lack all
sensual qualities and therefore cannot
account for the latter. In the picture, or
54 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
Death &
The Philosopher
Raymond Tallis on philosophical attitudes to non-being.
model we form we usually forget about
them” (p.163). In other words, if objective
reality, and the world seen through the glass
eye of mathematical physics, were really the
full story, there would be no physics. There
would be no world pictures, no ‘view from
nowhere’, or indeed, from anywhere.
The View From Now Not Here
Even if we admit the irreducible reality of
our subjective experiences of ourselves and
of what is beyond ourselves, the tension
between those experiences and the objective
view remains. It becomes a source of
anguish when we look at our lives from the
Archimedean point of our own death. It is
this to which Nagel devotes the final section
of his masterpiece. He writes:
“The ultimate subject-object gap is death. The
objective standpoint simply cannot accommo-
date at its full subjective value the fact that every-
one, oneself included, inevitably dies” (p.230).
Nothing could matter to us more than
our death, which brings all possibilities to an
end; and yet nothing, so far as the universe
is concerned, could be less important. As
Nagel puts it, “the vanishing of this individ-
ual [for example, your columnist] from this
world is no more remarkable or important
than his highly accidental appearance in it”
(p.229). Indeed, according to Anaximander,
in the first preserved written fragment of
Western philosophy, “Where things have
their origin, they must also pass away
according to necessity; for they must pay the
penalty and be judged for their injustice,
according to the ordinance of time.” It is our
lingering not our transience that is a scan-
dal. This scandal is expressed in the modern
acknowledgement that life, particularly the
complex life of human beings, exists in defi-
ance of the second law of thermodynamics.
Philosophers have often been preoccu-
pied with death. Acknowledging our fini-
tude is the mark of Heidegger’s authentic
consciousness, as being-towards-death. To
look at ourselves from the ultimate outside
of our non-existence may sometimes be
curiously exhilarating. The darkness of
death’s dateless (and dataless) night, the
undifferentiated Nothing that awaits us – or
rather, doesn’t even bother to await us –
highlights, by contrast, the multi-layered
richness of our ‘ordinary’ days. A glimpse of
our objective insignificance enhances our
awareness of the spaces, times, places, lights,
and shades, the joys and sorrows, the n-
dimensional complexity, of the life and
world we are living. And the very knowledge
that reveals itself as minute and short-lived
is itself deeply mysterious, being sustained
by unfathomable networks of concepts.
How did we wake out of ourselves suffi-
ciently to see what (objectively) we are?
The Deaths of Philosophers
Looking back from death towards life can,
alas, do little to ease the pain of bereavement.
The richness of a remembered shared life only
exacerbates our sense of actual or impending
loss. As for the miserable process of dying,
philosophy seems to have little to offer.
Of course, some philosophers have had
exemplary deaths. Socrates’ courage as the
hemlock worked its way through his body
has left a 2,500 year contrail of inspiration.
His final words “Crito, I owe a cock to
Asclepius; will you remember to pay the
debt?” expressed his wish that Asclepius, the
god of medicine, should be thanked for
curing him of the disease of life.
David Hume’s serene passing, beautifully
recorded in a long letter from his friend
Adam Smith, is even more impressive, given
that his last days were troubled by “an habit-
ual diarrhoea of a year’s standing.” While his
life drained away in this most unbecoming
fashion, and the very special ‘I am’ of David
Hume was squeezed to extinction by the
dysfunctioning ‘it is’ of his body, he received
his friends, discussed philosophy, worried
over the welfare of his family, and impressed
all who met him with his dignity and courage.
Even so, cultivating awareness of mortal-
ity and the habit of ‘living each day as if it
were thy last’, as the hymn exhorts us, tries to
 overlook the actual process of dying – that
time when, more than any other, “our flesh/
Surrounds us with its own decisions,” as
Philip Larkin put it in his wonderful poem
‘Ignorance’. To retain the metaphysical
purity of the idea of death, we naturally prefer
to think of the process of our extinction as a
simple, if total, cancellation; a painless, even
featureless, passage from RT to not-RT.
Some secular philosophers claim to find
reassurance rather than a validation of our
sense of tragedy in the thought that there
will be no afterlife. Images of eternity may
more often bring terror than consolation.
Why fear being dead, the Stoic philosopher
Lucretius famously argued, since there is
no-one to experience the state?:
“Since death forestalls [grief and pain] and
prevents any existence into which such mis-
fortunes might otherwise crowd, we may be
sure that we have nothing to fear in death,
and that he who is no more cannot be
wretched, and that there is not a scrap of
difference to him if had never at any time
been born, when once immortal death has
stolen away mortal life.”
(On the Nature of Things, translated by Cyril
Bailey, 1910)
Our non-existence after death, Lucretius
further asserts in an argument discussed by
Nagel, is a mirror image of our non-existence
before we were born, and the latter is hardly
something we regret. I am not concerned,
even less upset, by the fact that I was not
around when Shakespeare was writing his
HEIDEGGERIAN FISH © STEVE DELMONTE 2017 PLEASE VISIT WWW.STEVEDELMONTESTUDIO.COM
“I’m trying to live each day as if it’s my last”
plays or dinosaurs were walking the earth.
Unfortunately, this mirror image anal-
ogy does not hold up. In my pre-natal exis-
tence, I am not in a state of privation,
because there is not yet anything or anyone
to house my lack of being. Before I am born,
I am only a general possibility, not an indi-
vidual to whom any subtraction – never
mind the comprehensive subtraction of
death – can be applied. My pre-natal, unlike
like my post mortem, non-existence, is not
the result of loss.
Besides, if death does not matter, then
nor do our lives. And among those things
that do not matter must be included our
relationships with each other, most impor-
tantly, love and friendship. Lucretius, it
seems, forgets that death breaks off all our
connections with those who mean most to
us, and also that the world does not come to
an end as our participation in it does. While
each of us may adopt a non-tragic attitude
to our own death, and to the general fact of
mortality, tragedy is still alive in those we
have left behind. While I will not miss
myself after I have died, there will (I hope)
be others who will miss me.
After Death
If philosophers have sometimes guided us in
the art of living, and have occasionally
provided us with exemplars to inspire us in
the art of dying, they have little to offer us
on the art of outliving – on how to cope with
the loss of others. Dr Johnson reflects on
this in Rasselas (1759), the allegorical novel
he wrote at high speed in a state of over-
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 55
T allis
in
Wonderland
whelming grief after the death of his
mother, to pay for her funeral. Rasselas is
impressed by a philosopher preaching Stoic
values. Imlac his mentor warns him that
“they discourse like angels but they live like
men.” Rasselas soon discovers how true this
is when he finds the Stoic philosopher weep-
ing in a darkened room, poleaxed by the
death of his daughter.
A world in which none of us cared about
death would be one in which none of us
cared about each other. That would seem to
be a victory for death, not a victory over
death. And to fix our gaze on what a small
figure we cut in the world as a way of blunt-
ing our tragic sense is a kind of betrayal of
those to whom we matter. The sense of our
own objective insignificance, and that, in the
long run, nothing matters very much, even
if it conquered horror of death, can bring
only a Pyrrhic victory.
Lucretius offers another way of minimis-
ing death even for one whose life has been
favoured by fortune:
“Why groan and weep at death? For if the life
that is past and gone has been pleasant to you,
and all its blessings have not drained away
and not been enjoyed… why don’t you retire
like a guest sated with the banquet of life?”
In short, why not accept that all good
things must come to an end? Precisely
because one is not “sated with the banquet of
life”. Life is not a meal, and we who live are
not mere vessels to be filled. Yes, there are
some who are tired of life, and everyone may
feel this sometimes. But which of us, facing
the real and present prospect of extinction,
will not suddenly become aware of its
preciousness?
Living the truth about ourselves is not
easy. Or as Nagel put it with characteristic
lucidity and concision, “The objective
standpoint cannot be domesticated.”
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2017
Raymond Tallis’ latest book, Of Time and
Lamentation: Reflections on Transience is
out now.
Philosophy Then
When Your Favorite
Philosopher is a Bigot
Peter Adamson considers possible ways forward.
W
e seem to be living in a time
when people are willing to
overlook bigotry. Donald
Trump looks at a crowd of
white supremacists and sees the ‘very fine
people’ among them. Trump’s own sexist
remarks provoke nothing worse than exas-
perated sighs among his supporters. Across
Europe, the frank racism of far-right parties
doesn’t stop people from voting for them as
an expression of unhappiness with the gov-
ernment. No doubt genuine racism and
sexism play a role here, but it also seems that
people who would be horrified to be
accused of prejudice themselves are willing
to ignore or forgive prejudice in others. The
intelligentsia tends to be outraged by this,
but I wonder, are we really so much better?
Or rather, I wonder, am I myself so much
better? As a historian of philosophy, I
devote much of my life to the careful and
sympathetic exegesis of thinkers who were,
almost to a man (and they were mostly
men), outrageous bigots by today’s stan-
dards. Nearly everything Aristotle says
about women consists of unfavorable com-
parisons to men. His ‘natural slave’ theory
has been a historical bulwark of racism; and
it was echoed two millenia later by
Immanuel Kant, who was adamantly
opposed to interracial marriage, and who
claimed that “negroes cannot govern them-
selves, and can serve only as slaves.”
The usual way philosophers have of deal-
ing with this is akin to many Trump sup-
porters’ attitude towards his misogyny: they
don’t really approve of it, but also don’t
think it matters so much. Similarily, the
argument goes, Aristotle’s views on women
or Kant’s ideas on race can be detached from
the rest of their teachings, treated as a few
unfortunate sentences in the midst of an
otherwise valuable body of work. As histori-
ans, we usually take great pains to read var-
ious passages in light of one another; but
here we do the reverse, engaging in a kind of
interpretive quarantine by reading the rest
of the book as if the (mercifully brief) wince-
56 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
inducing bits weren’t there at all.
But is their bigotry so easy to contain?
Let’s have a closer look at that idea of natu-
ral slavery. Aristotle actually doesn’t invoke
the notion of ‘race’ at all. Instead he justifies
his idea that there are people who are natu-
rally slaves in part with reference to the
impact of environment on people’s bodies.
If you live in an imbalanced climate, this will
have an effect on your intelligence and
other traits, which is why the Greeks, who
live in an ideally balanced zone, are
uniquely capable of self-mastery. Climate is
meanwhile influenced by the movement of
the heavenly bodies. This conjunction of
ideas appears in later authors, as when the
Muslim thinker al-Kindi draws on the
ancient astronomer Ptolemy to explain that
people who live in a very hot climate – he
explicitly mentions people with black skin
and kinky hair – are characteristically dom-
inated by wrath and desire, whereas people
from further north are ‘strong thinkers’ and
ethically moderate. Thus were the full
resources of Aristotelian cosmology pressed
into the service of something resembling
modern racism. Can that really be irrele-
vant to our evaluation of that cosmology
and the motives underlying its invention?
The historian may protest that to be
interested in Aristotle, al-Kindi, or Kant, is
unlike voting for a politician: it need involve
no approval of the author’s worldview. I’ve
met many experts in Aristotelian cosmol-
ogy, and not one of them has thought that
the Sun orbits the Earth, as Aristotle did. So
we might treat the bigotry of the past the
way we treat the scientific mistakes of the
past. That is, rather than detaching hateful
remarks from the rest of the theory, we
detach ourselves, offering an objective anal-
ysis of these thinkers’ ideas without ever
adopting those ideas as our own. This will
often involve situating the thinkers in their
historical context. We might for example
note – as a historical observation, not as a
matter of praise or blame – that when Plato
argued in the Republic that women can do
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
everything men can do, but not so well, he
was being unusually ‘feminist’ for his time
– while simultaneously being sexist by
modern standards.
This seems a reasonable solution, but it
will not be enough for those philosophers
who do not see themselves as ‘mere’ histo-
rians, but seek truth in historical works.
Most notorious in this regard is the case of
Heidegger. There is an ongoing debate as
to whether his Nazism effectively poisons
his thought as a whole, making it off limits
as a source of philosophical inspiration.
Analogous threats also need to be taken
seriously by exegetes of other thinkers, and
have been, to some extent: good work has
been done on Kant and race, for example.
Some contributions in this direction
have used the ideas of historical thinkers
to challenge those thinkers’ prejudices.
Kant is an obvious example. The ethical
demand of his ‘categorical imperative’ to
treat other humans as having an irre-
ducible dignity, has been an important
source for ideas about equality and human
rights; and Kant himself was critical of
European imperialism. Likewise, one
could note the poor fit between Aristotle’s
commitment to the rationality of humans
as a species, his assumption that nature
broadly achieves its purposive aims, and
his elitist, racist and sexist claims that the
vast majority of humans are incapable of
the highest level of reasoning. The pur-
pose of this ‘immanent critique’ by
modern philosophers of their historical
counterparts is not to catch out famous
philosophers in self-contradiction.
Rather, it is to acknowledge the ugly, even
evil, aspects of historical writings while
finding in those very writings the
resources to challenge the bigotry of the
past, and, more urgently, the present.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2017
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
& 3, available from OUP. They’re based on
his popular History of Philosophy podcast.
 The Truth
Kaya York tries to comprehend Everything.
“In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was
that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Rigor in Science’
he night that Boonsri Amudee discovered The Truth
T she felt rather empty. After fervently writing down
her basic insight until the early hours, she brewed a
cup of sweet tea and watched the sun rise with no
thoughts in her head. “I finished my tea,” she said in a later
interview, “walked home, made normal love with my spouse,
and dreamed about a featureless sphere.”
Her findings were published five years later in the ten-thou-
sand-plus page tome The Truth. The first draft had been incom-
prehensible, as alien to any reader as the landscape of the Moon.
Amudee responded to this problem by releasing another book,
How to Interpret ‘The Truth’, alongside an additional sequel, How
to Interpret ‘How to Interpret “The Truth”’ just for good measure.
She left it at that, feeling that two levels of recursion were quite
enough. (Although later, gradually, debates grew, even outside
the usual literary circles, about how exactly to interpret How to
Interpret ‘How to Interpret “The Truth”’.)
The Truth was found, drawn and quartered, subjected to the
proper book-keeping, and available in the ‘T’ section of all major
bookstores (the ‘ค’ section in Thailand, of course, and so on:
translation into other languages was less difficult than expected).
The critical responses took years to emerge, and are
exemplified by William Jacobson’s brief review: “Yes, I think
that about sums it up.”
Once people could be persuaded to read the books, it was
clear that the game was up. Philosophy departments shut down.
The sciences were revised. Historians kept records that sounded
increasingly like dream-journals. Postmodernists continued as
before, unfettered by The Truth – not necessarily to their
discredit. Theocrats banned the book. Televangelists protested
the book’s existence despite (or because of) not having read it.
Trappists remained silent. Buddhists laughed. A few people
created a church dedicated to the book. After telling them that
such a church was unnecessary, Amudee herself was asked by
the congregation to kindly sod off. When she appeared on talk
shows, people asked her questions like, “Yes, but when writing
this incredible book, did you get a sense of beauty?” She would
December 2017/January 2018  Philosophy Now 57
frown back and say things like, “I got a sense of neutrality.”
Most politicians paid lip service to The Truth and showed
how their various positions were vindicated by it. A coalition
of right-wing parties avoided the whole mess by publishing their
own fifty-page book, titled The Alternative Truth.
After the first assassination attempt on Amudee, she moved
to an undisclosed rural location, unheard from again except for
an occasional poem.
The most understandable chapters of The Truth were
compiled into various abridgements. Those who read these
books did seem to change over time in subtle, almost non-
documentable ways. Some developed a habit of looking at the
ground as they walked so as to avoid stepping on insects.
Others found themselves unsatisfied with The Truth. People
complained online. One online poster wrote that reading The
Truth seemed not to provide “any sort of deep, existential (sic)
satisfaction.” “If this is the best Truth can give me,” another
commentator wrote, “then screw it.”
High school students were forced to read An Introduction To
The Truth, and most found it tedious. The suicide rate didn’t
go up; but it didn’t go down, either. In truth, most people just
didn’t care to read it.
Apocryphal stories arose that Amudee had withheld certain
devastating or beatific material from The Truth. In these myths,
commonly, the True, sexier version of The Truth would draw
the reader inevitably to suicide, or enlightenment, or catatonia.
These confident speculations about what Amundee had left out
of her book evolved into entire books of their own, eventually
together selling more copies than The Truth itself. Indeed, far,
far fewer read the original, unabridged book, as it was very
abstract. The book’s final thousand pages, which were dedicated
to issues arising from the book’s capacity to represent and
account for itself, were, like much self-referential writing, barely
readable. However, some chapters, particularly ‘Modera As
Quipt In NAWIA’, ‘Ormahian Reactions In An Ideal Context’,
and ‘The Real Reason That People Smile So Much When
They’re Around Each Other’, were surprisingly humane, and
prone to set the careful reader into fits of cathartic laughter: a
laughter of simultaneous discovery and recognition.
The Truth had some practical effects. Technology improved
– causing new problems, which technology then solved – causing
new problems. Wars and bombings continued, with greater
efficiency. Fashions changed. Art continued. James Bond
movies were still produced, although people familiar enough
with The Truth found themselves inexplicably embarrassed
while watching them. Social inequality continued.
Amundee was speculated to be anything from a Celestial
Being to the Antichrist – but only among those who had not
read her books.
Boonsri Amudee had been somewhat eccentric, but not
particularly remarkable. She wasn’t a former spelling bee
champion, a Macarthur Fellow, the recipient of any grant or
prize. The daughter of Thai rubber tree farmers, she worked
quietly as a statistical researcher at Kasetsart University,
publishing the odd Philosophy of Mathematics paper in her
free time. None of this seems to account for the book she is
best known for. Mathematics only amounts to a fragment of
The Truth. Amudee herself considered her sudden insight about
58 Philosophy Now  December 2017/January 2018
The Truth in all its completeness and totality as a matter of
“happening to be the right blip in the structured radio static of
statistical aberration, the right words coming together, the right
neurons happening to fire at the right time, to be a crest on
Fortuna’s rigorous waves.” No one quite knew what she meant,
but we nodded and scribbled it down.
ive hundred years later, when the Earth was much wetter,
F aliens visited.
The visit was pleasant, if awkward. The aliens were presented
with The Truth as a gift. They presented us with the same gift
– their own civilization’s version of The Truth. A superintelligent
supercomputer was taken out of a basement (where it had been
kept so as to cause no further trouble) to translate the alien
version of The Truth into human. It could not. A brief fight
ensued, followed by tense silence. Then, before it was shut off
by a much less intelligent computer, the superintelligent
computer announced that it had found a way to translate the
works into a common meta-language, but that this meta-
language required the invention of 84.217 intermediary
languages. The processing power necessary to produce these
other languages would require employing the total energy
capacities of human civilization plus those of the alien
civilization. The matter hardly seemed worth it. Both
civilizations decided that their own Truth was satisfying enough.
wo thousand years after this, a demon appeared on Earth.
T It was Japanese for some not very clear reason. The demon
offered to grant a wish to Earthlings.
Having already solved the problems of scarcity and mortality,
the humans, ravens, and octopuses talked, and soon decided to
ask the demon for a translation of the human, alien, and now
raven and octopus, versions of The Truth into a universal
language, understandable to all. The demon made a face that
was the demon equivalent of a smile, and disappeared. There
appeared in the sky a large book. It grew. It grew until the planets
were pressed between its pages like dried leaves. Earth would
have been the size of a period on the end of one of its sentences,
except that the sentences remained normal font sized. To read
one page would have taken centuries.
The book grew some more. Stars burned small holes in its
pages in final attacks of self-defense as it subsumed them. The
book stretched to the size of the observable universe, possibly
larger, before collapsing under its own weight.
At first it turned into a giant star, the heat tearing its atoms
apart. Its collapse continued until the book that was the universe
became a single point, infinitesimally small and infinitely dense.
Some say that for 10-43 seconds there was silence. Some say time
did not exist at all. In either case, there was the silence, the point,
the mysterious source of order in existence, and the ground of
being itself. And then, another Big Bang! The universe again:
another Earth, another sentient human life, another Boonsri
Amudee, another Truth, another contact, another demon. And
on and on it went, ad infinitum.
© KAYA YORK 2017
Kaya York is a graduate student in Philosophy and has taught English
and Western Culture in China. You can follow Kaya’s fiction at
kayayork.wordpress.com
 Professor Daniel Dennett
Visiting Professor of Philosophy at
New College of the Humanities

MA Philosophy
NCH London

Distinguished postgraduate study led by

extraordinary faculty.

Why study Philosophy anywhere else?

nchlondon.ac.uk