It all depends on what you take seriously...

... I shall not cease to practise philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to anyone of you whom I happen to meet: 'Good Sir, you are a Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?' -Socrates, at his trial in 399 BC. 

Here by way of revision are a few thumbnail definitions. You shouldn't take them too literally nor imagine that knowing the definitions is going to be enough. It's about discussing, talking through or cross-examining these notions of what we should take most seriously in life, about, in other words, what we ought to do. Plato's term for this process of getting at the truth by a process of discussion and logical analysis was called the elenchus (ἔλεγχος). That's what you've got to do - put notions in the dock and cross examine them to see what stands up to close inspection. Examples are a favorite way to discover the logical fault lines of different concepts. So always try to construct examples and counterexamples in order to see how your notion works out in different situations.

Consequentialism: This says that the status of actions is determined by their contribution to the general welfare of human society. Utiliarianism is a variety of consequentialism which calculates welfare as the sum total of 'pleasure' or more vaguely 'happiness'. I shouldn't do something if it isn't likely to increase the common stock of 'good'. One of many arguments against utilitarianism is that it leaves unsolved how you are going to get people to desire 'better' things - how are you going to get them to prefer gardening programmes on TV to rape and pillage in the town? The problem here becomes, how do you know these things are 'better'? Mill relied on the experience of the more educated people in society to decide these issues, which is honest of him, but which seems to be sneaking in philosopher-rulers by the back door. These varieties of ethics assess moral worth by looking at the consequences of actions.

Deontological Ethics: This view of ethics claims that being a good person - the sort of person one ought to be - is a matter of obeying a set of laws or moral rules. These rules may have religious backing - 'God tells us to obey these rules' - or they may have some sort of rational argument to support the particular rules chosen. This is the case with Immanuel Kant's ethics which rely on his distinction between things that we do because they benefit us and things which we do because we can see that they are things that everyone ought to do, like telling the truth, keeping your promises and loving your neighbour. These things are absolute rules for our lives and involve no contradictions if put into operation. This high-minded ethic also saved the German bourgeoisie from having to do any thinking for themselves. You just had to obey the basic moral law. Deontological ethics sees moral worth as a matter of obeying fundamental rules or laws.

Virtue Ethics: A third variety of moral theory has become popular in recent decades because people have become increasingly disenchanted with Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. Virtue ethics assesses actions as the successful or unsuccessful expression of desirable personal qualities or virtues. A virtue ethicist would approve of an action because it is, say, charitable or generous or courageous. Virtue ethics believes that people can and should strive to become good by developing these qualities or virtues. All of this is essentially a revised and weaker version of Aristotle's analysis of moral behaviour as we see it in the Nicomachean Ethics. The constellation of virtues or personal excellences that Aristotle picks out is designed to produce young men who will be able to take leading roles in the state in their maturity. To be able to exercise these virtues you will need a good sense of judgement which is central to this view. Only then would your life have any chance of being successful in the larger sense, what the Greek sense of what they called eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). Our translation of this as happiness fails to catch the sense of a life that flourishes and goes well because you are a fully developed person playing a full role in society and managing to avoid the pitfalls that chance puts in our way. The Star Wars greeting - 'May the Force be with you' – that’s to say the daimon - comes about as close as we can get today and is probably a translation of the Ancient Greek word eudaimonia, made by some drop-out acid-head who wrote science fiction.


(In very broad terms, Deontological Ethics looks at the actions a person does. It asks, 'Does this action conform to the basic rules? Christians and Kantians are certainly much concerned about a person's fundamental attitudes to others, but they look first and foremost towards the actions that a person does. Consequentialists, especially Utilitarians, are to a even greater extent concerned with actions. Virtue Ethicists, in contrast, have their focus on the sort of person one should be if one is to have any chance of a humanly successful life. They tend to use the  word 'flourishing', as if we were well-watered plants. Good actions would be the natural expression of such a person, they claim. Do you agree that this would seem to assume that the demands of private and public life coincide? The basic contrast outlined in this paragraph is between act-centered and agent-centered theories.)

Of course, these are theories. Nobody's life is a perfect expression of any one of these theories, but still, there are broad brush claims we might make about who embodies which theory. Deontological ethics is the realm of the European Bourgeoisie, especially in the nineteenth century. Consequentialist Ethics is the philosophical theory of the English-speaking liberal intelligentsia and forms the basis of economic theory (thanks to John Stuart Mill). Virtue Ethics is a modern intellectual revival responsible for the proliferation of the word 'excellence' everywhere in the country, but it was a theory that once in a rough sort of way found expression in our better public schools. Today people are all at sea as regards moral questions. Our confusion is illustrated by the sort of people who are praised, or who at least have their day in the sun - Top Shop's Philip Green, Barclay's Bob Diamond and Lehman Brothers Dick Fuld. These are hardly models of human excellence in the Aristotelian or any other sense. Valdimir Putin also has a certain following, at least in among some sections of Russian youth who call him Vozhd, that's to say, Leader of the Nation. What is happening in Russia? And in America and Europe? 

Well, that's it. There don't seem to have been many or perhaps any takers for this little series of posts. If you are about to have an interview for PPE, PPP, Philosophy or Classics, you should go through these examples carefully for yourself before you get to the interview. Philosophy is meant to throw light on life, but sometimes it doesn't seem to be like that. When that happens and it is bound to happen we should persevere until things do start to make some sense, at least until the next difficulty. In the meantime you might like to look at this old Monty Python sketch: Socrates scores! Enjoy the game!  

Ω

All power corrupts...

Joseph Stalin (Mr Steel), 1879-1953

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

This famous quotation was made by John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). Lord Acton, historian and moralist, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. 

There are many so-called 'great men' whose picture would sit neatly here but I've chosen Joe Stalin, one of the most notorious dictators in the twentieth century, a century that could almost be defined as the century of great dictators. In the same club belong Franco, Hitler, Mussolini,  Mao Zedong, Joseph Tito, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi, Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jung-Il. Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Hosni Mubarak, Lukashenko, Khamenei, Robert Mugabe.... The list might be much longer and of course it is not only dictators who are corrupted by power. That stain extends all the way down the line to headmasters, scoutmasters and the men who put clamps on cars.


But is it necessarily the case that if you had unlimited power you would start to do whatever you wanted regardless of how other people might be affected or wronged? Well, there is a strong empirical case for this view as the list of dictators given above would seem to suggest. Maybe you wouldn't behave like that, but then you do not have absolute power over others. What would do if you had a magic ring like that of Gyges? 


There are, I think, at least two different sorts of people here. The first group is the one we probably all belong to if we come close to having the chance. There are a lot of people who in big ways and small will as we say 'stop at nothing' to get what they want. The men who cheat, deceive, politick and gamble to get on in their careers. They are the men - they're usually men -  that Philip Larkin mentions in his poem Toads, the ones who go out and get 'the girl and the fame and the money'. The ambition of these captains of industry and the like can scarcely be held in check. They frequently break the law, but they get away with it. In a world without laws and without the threat of exposure, prosecution and punishment, things might be a great deal worse than they are. 


There is another sort of person who doesn't just want the good things in life like the men in the first group. No, these people want raw power, power to directly control the lives of others. They are, like Muammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabe, unmistakably bad people. There does seem to be a strong empirical case for thinking - as Plato suggested through the mouth of Glaucon in the Republic - that it is only fear than makes people behave and stops them from behaving like wolves towards their fellow citizens. 


What does hold us back from behaving like these people? Is it simply the lack of opportunity? Or the lack of courage? Are we just gutless wimps? We are in practice held in check by the fear of discovery and punishment. The policeman on the street and the High Court judges investigating fraud stop our imaginations from taking control of our lives. But there is also the internal policeman, the father figure, the stern teacher and the priest who coalesce in our minds as the voice of conscience, telling us not to do that, to wash your hands and not to play with those rough boys. This is what Sigmund Freud called the superego, a kind of social control mechanism that we have made our very own - our conscience. This makes it look as if it's just external threat and internal conscience that keep us in line as 'good' law-abiding citizens - and if that is true then Glaucon is right: there is nothing that keeps us from behaving like pirates of the Caribbean. All that Stalin or Mao has to do is to make us afraid, very afraid, and then their own power will be unassailable. Commentators reporting the Arab Spring have said many times that what makes these uprisings a 'spring' is that the people lost their fear of the dictators.


Unchecked desires for sex or property or power can lead to horrible situations for the people who lose out or suffer as a result of these predatory activities. We cannot rely on the individuals concerned - which is probably all of us at some time to some extent - having an 'Achilles' moment': that moment when he recognized his common humanity with Priam and the dead Hector. Few people experience anything like that and it's noticeable that Achilles was himself the one hero at Troy who came closest to doubting the system of heroic values by which he and the others lived. Plato, centuries after Homer, claimed that people whose lives were dominated by material desires for wealth and the like were unfit for political power. He feared the kind of state that this would produce. Plato also drew attention to the smaller number of people whose lives were driven by a desire for political power. These were the people who produced tyrannies and military dictatorships. The big problem for Plato was how to keep these two destabilizing forces from dominating the state. In modern terms, how do you keep  the worst aspects of consumerism and political tyranny out of the state?

Don't be misled by pictures - it's complicated!

Plato sketched out a sort of map of the human soul, one that whatever its shortcomings, has been enormously influential. Human beings have three distinguishable parts or aspects that make up their conscious sensuous lives. The most obvious aspect covers all those bodily desires whose satisfaction gives pleasure. Another type of impulse that put us into competition with others, all those things that make us touchy and quick to pick an argument. These are the desires that produce the old military temperament with its sense of honour that demands duels and blood. Unchecked they produce the bullies, mafia bosses, Rockefellers and tyrants like Robert Mugabe and Muammar Qaddafi. The third aspect of our human existence is what is broadly called 'reason'. It is this alone which has the capacity to assess, check and make judgments about these more basic impulses. In Plato's vision of things, reason must exercise the controlling and examining role in the individual and in the state.


So what should poor Gyges have done? In Herodotus' version of the story Caudaules, the king, treats Gyges as his favourite and telling him time and again how beautiful the queen is, until the king finally persuades Gyges against his own better judgement to watch the queen undressing as she goes to bed. (See the picture in the previous post!) The queen's honour compromised, she insists that Gyges kills the king and take the throne. In Plato's version, Gyges is led by a simple greed for the power to satisfy all his wishes. As so often in life, one unchecked desire leads to another. Well, Gyges might have paid more attention to the doubts of his own conscience and ideally he should have stopped and thought the whole thing through, but foresight like that is in short supply. Plato believes that if you yourself don't have these rational abilities - that practical capacity for judgement and restraint - then there should be political mechanisms in the state to keep our desires and ambitions under rational control. That's where his philosopher rulers come in, though few of us today would want to be governed by a Committee of Public Safety that put Hegel, Rousseau, Karl Marx and Wittgenstein in charge of our lives. (Wittgenstein couldn't teach primary kids without losing his temper like a mad man!) On the other hand, Plato was right to draw attention to this - the rational management of desire - as the most fundamental problem in human life. 

The Ring of Gyges

Herodotus tells a story about how Gyges took over the throne from Caudaules, king of Lydia in what is today western Turkey. It is a story of shame suppressed and a queen seduced. Gyges by these devious means replaced Caudaules and married his wife. Plato tells another more fantastical version of this story. His version was designed as a philosophical example, rather like Philippa Foot's Trolley problem. Your task is to read Plato's version and work out an answer for the problem it poses or at any rate to discuss it intelligently.

This painting shows Herodotus' version of the story (Book 1.7)

A shepherd came a cross a cleft in the mountains. He looked down inside and saw that there was an enormous coffin there. He went down and examined it and inside he discovered the body of a giant. There was a ring on the giant's finger which the shepherd took and played with as he went back to the village. When he got there the men were all outside talking together as they always did in the evenings. He was surprised to hear them talking about himself as if he was not there. 


Still playing with the ring on his finger, one of them suddenly addresses him and welcomes him into the group. The shepherd realizes that he has a magic ring that he can twist to make himself invisible or visible again. At once he sets out for the city, and, now invisible, walks past the guards into the private apartments of the queen, whom he seduces. She the demands that for the sake of her honour, he must now kill her husband the king and marry her. he agrees and murders the king and marries the queen.


If you had power like Gyges, is there anything that might hold you back from doing exactly what you wanted? Remember that are in the story we are imagining you are free to do and get whatever you want without any possibility of being identifies, discovered or punished. So, what's holding you back? Anything?

Trolleyed or just carried away?

You're the one with your hand on the switch!

In Philippa Foot's trolley problem, you are faced with a dilemma. Should you flick a switch to save the hurtling trolley from hitting the fives people bound to the track? Of course you should, but then you see that flicking that switch would mean diverting the trolley down another track where one fat man - as he's usually described - is tied up and is bound to die as a result of your saving the others, if in fact you do that. Should you save the first five at the expense of condemning one fat man or should you do nothing?

Let us take this second possibility first. Why should you do nothing? You might end up doing nothing in the very short space of time available simply because you were struck with horror at being involved in the death of another person, even if it just one fat man. Such a reaction is instantaneous, but it is an entirely understandable reaction. It may also be philosophically respectable. For who would want to be mixed up in such a mess. if we assume that it is not just a desire to avoid getting involved - which would be cowardice - but a genuine sense of horror at not wanting to be the cause of anybody's death, then this is surely an understandable reaction. 

Of course the Utilitarians would say, 'Hang on, you're getting a little sloppy and sentimental here; surely it is all very simple - you can surely see that the choice is between saving one life or saving five lives'. The Utilitarian's assumption is that five lives are in some arithmetical sense five times more valuable than one life. He certainly has a point. A pilot struggling to prevent his plane from crashing into a crowded built up area would be applauded for managing to steer it away to a less densely-populated area. No doubt he dies in the accident, but everyone praises him for his generous, altruistic concern for others, except perhaps the people who did in fact die as a result of the plane crashing onto their houses. 

What should we say? Should we say it's all simply a matter of arithmetic. Flick the switch and let the fat man die and learn to just live with it. Or should we do nothing? I myself think that one should flick the switch, but I think that I would go away desperately ashamed and shaken at having caused the death of the single fat man. And I think I would be right to feel like that because that fat man's life is not an arithmetical unit but something unique and irreplaceable. It is not a life like any other precisely because it is his life, because it is that strange once-in-a-lifetime experience that is being alive on the surface of the earth. In philosophical jargon, human lives are not commensurable. They are no more commensurable than rabbits and jokes, but they almost are, though there might be some weird market where so many jokes bought you one rabbit, but in the situation we are considering there is a loss in one life that makes it a loss that is like losing our own. The reticence we feel has something to do with the strength of the solidarity - the bond of human sympathy - that we feel for others of our kind. For some, like perhaps Indian Jains, that sympathy might well extend beyond humans to other species.

'Kill no flies, not even inadvertently'

It might be worth saying a word about the Jaina priests and monks. The one on the left has a fine cotton mesh over his mouth to prevent him inadvertently swallowing or killing some insect or bug. Care must be taken when walking to make sure that no living creature is injured by one's walking. He will not own a house and he probably left his wife once his family duties were complete. Only a single person could hope to live up to such a demanding ethic of mutual support for living creatures. There may be a kind of connection between this extreme moral universalism and the abandonment of particular loyalties. Only monks are expected to follow this path of extreme commitment. People recognize that it is not something for people caught up in the maelstrom of life. Perhaps a Jain monk would refuse to flick the switch. Utilitarians wouldn't hesitate. We might have the moral instinct of Jaina monks, but we know we belong to a more ordinary world where things and even people seem to be interchangeable. Where do you stand?

Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem

Philippa Foot, 1920-2010

Philippa Ruth Foot was an English moral philosopher. She died in 2010 at the age of ninety. Foot's original formulation of the problem ran as follows:

A  trolley, that's to say, in English English, a tram, is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher.

Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?

How would you respond to this situation? How do you think one ought to respond in this situation? 

These trolleys or trams are Viennese!

Torture is never justified...

Eliza Manningham-Buller, formerly head of Britain's MI5

Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Britain's MI5, said recently in her Reith Lectures that the use of torture is 'wrong and never justified'. Here is how the BBC reported her statements on their website: Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be "utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives".


Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would "raise widespread concerns". "No-one could justify what went on under Qaddafi's regime," she added.

Baroness Manningham-Buller's lectures examine the issues of terrorism and security on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a "profound mistake" and as a result America lost its "moral authority".

Allegations have recently emerged that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects, following the discovery of papers suggesting close ties between MI6, the CIA and the Gaddafi regime. (BBC Website)

Eliza Manningham-Buller clearly believes that torture is never justified. Her belief rests in part on the fact that it is against British and international law and partly on what is a clear aversion to doing anything of that kind, but what other grounds might she have for this assertion? If she were confronted with the terrorist's son situation would she be able to accept the prospective death of 200,000 people rather than authorizing the torture of the terrorist's four-year old son? The horror of torturing a child seems outmatched by the even greater horror of the terrible deaths of so many people as a result of the terrorist's dirty nuclear bomb. Or does it? It is hard - much more than hard - to give one's assent to either course of action, but the world might sometimes demand that you do unacceptable things, things that will undermine your sense of yourself as a civilised person. 

Manningham-Buller's position seems to fit into the deontological pattern of moral beliefs. It is simply wrong to torture or allow someone to be tortured. It is an absolute rule that should never be broken, like not killing or murdering people or breaking promises or dishonouring one's mother or father. But surely she is being a little disingenuous here. Doesn't being a civil servant in charge of Britain's internal security involve people in lies and deception in order to protect the greater community? Don't we have people - spies and double agents embedded in all kinds of organisations and don't some of these sometimes engage in activities and violence? We certainly allow killing in times of war or as say when the SAS gunned down three IRA members in Gibralter. We do not hear moral objections expressed so strongly when it comes to Afghanistan or Libya. What is it that makes torture so special, the thing that can never be allowed? It almost seems as though it has been picked out as being a moral prohibition stronger than other moral prohibitions. Could such a view ever be justified?


Torture does seem a particularly abhorrent activity, perhaps because it seems to be such a personal infliction of pain and suffering by one person on another. Killing four men in a tank with a precision bomb from the air somehow doesn't seem as bad as torturing that hapless person in front of you and who is utterly in your power. It is, I think, this image of one person having total power over another and using it in ways that so directly deny his common humanity that disturbs us most. Doing this to a child makes this even worse as the child must look to its elders for protection, not torture and suffering. If torture seems worse to us than killing, then, this may be because it presents us with an image of ourselves that shows the ugliness of what we might become. It is everything that we want to think that we are not and ever would be. More than anything else torturing another person goes against that sense of human sympathy and solidarity that we mentioned earlier in another post (Friends, Enemies and Morality). The activities of warfare seem quite rational and utilitarian in comparison. It is much easier to believe that the end justifies the means. It is much more difficult to believe i the rightness of torturing people. You can't really be under any illusion about what you doing. Nor can you be under any illusion about the sort of person you have become.


One last comment might be made here. Manningham-Buller does reckon things in consequences at least to the extent of placing value on the preservation of a country's 'moral capital'. The country's good reputation in the world as a civilising influence is something that - it might be argued - has intrinsic value and is also useful for good purposes in the longer run. Perhaps this is important enough to justify not torturing people. We should accept the consequences of not torturing terrorists (or anyone else) as this will in the long run help us to further the aims of a civilised world community.


You might like to hear Eliza Manningham-Buller talking about torture in her recent Reith Lectures: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14750998



Just two more problems - five more posts - to go. Remember, it's your ability to talk clearly and sensibly about these sorts of problems that is important and not the actual points or arguments presented here. 

Continue reading the main story

The Terrorist's Son

The word 'terrorism'  now makes us think of this man and this action

A popular example for students to discuss is usually referred to as the Terrorist's Son. It poses the problem of torture - when, if ever, is it justified to use torture? It goes like this... 


The Security Services have captured a terrorist who has planted a dirty nuclear bomb in the middle of London. If detonated, it will kill 200,000 people and maim and permanently ruin the lives of many more. His four-year old son was captured with him. The boy for complex personal reasons means everything to his terrorist father and is the only hope the security services have of discovering where the bomb has been hidden and when it is due to explode. All other means have been exhausted.


Should the security services now proceed to use torture on the four-year old in front of his father in order to extract the information that is so desperately needed?


If your answer is 'Yes', how would you justify this decision? If your answer is 'No', how would you justify this decision? What might we learn about morality from these two very different responses?

The crew of the Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima