Lawrence preserves unity

T.E. Lawrence, 1888-1935

In 1917, T.E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - was leading an attacking force of Bedouin Arabs drawn from different tribes to attack the town of Aqaba on the Red Sea. No attack was expected from the landward side because of the terrible uncrossable desert behind it, but Lawrence had persuaded the Arabs to cross this stretch of desert - known as the Anvil of the Sun - and to make a surprise attack on the Turks in Aqaba.

They have to cross this terrible desert by travelling at night, a long and exhausting journey. When at dawn they reach the other side of the desert, they realise that they have lost a man. He must have fallen off his camel at night. Against everyone's advice. Lawrence rides back into the desert to look for him. Don't do it, says the leader of the Howeitat, his death is written. Lawrence does find the man and brings him back safely to the others, but that night there is a disturbance. The tribes are threatening to break up and go home before they have made the planned attack. A member of one tribe has been killed and by by the rigid code of vengeance - the lex talionis - the murderer must pay with his life, but that will then set up an endless round of killings.

As a way out of this dilemma, Lawrence offers to execute the murderer himself. He is not a member of any tribe and therefore that would stop the blood feud. Everyone agrees to this. Lawrence goes to carry out the execution, but then he finds that the murderer he has to execute is the man he has just saved. Is he right to shoot this man?

Lawrence of Arabia with his bodyguard at Aqaba

Unreal City: Economic Pressures in the Modern World

T.S.Eliot 1888-1965

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought that death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

(The Waste Land, lines 60-68)

Work is everything in an industrial society. If you don't have a job you lack not just money but also an assured future for yourself and your family. You do not have a place in society and therefore no status and no entitlement to self-respect. That at least is how most people feel today. It is hard to maintain your own high estimation of yourself if the rest of the world around you regards you as less than a fully self-supporting citizen. The pressure is very considerable: you have to find employment to have any claim to self-respect and the self-respect that you feel you are entitled to will probably be proportionate to your salary, security and assets. We live in the unvoiced estimation of others.

This modern situation draws attention to our need to find a place and function in society. Our imagined graduate who has been offered a job in a prestigious weapons research establishment will find it difficult to refuse the offer in a world where appropriate jobs are in short supply. Why then should he or she feel any embarrassment at all about accepting what is a very good offer? Clearly our graduate feels unhappy about working for an organisation that produces chemical or biological weapons that might have immense destructive power. Like Jim in South America, he or she feels that his or her own interests and happiness must be weighed against those of people in general. This person feels that other people - including people unmet and unknown, possibly people in hostile foreign countries - have a claim to influence her decisions. 

How could this person resolve this conflict within herself? There are a number of outcomes. We might look first at how things might actually work out in practice in what we call 'the real world'. If it was you or I that had to make this decision to take or not to take the job we might just decide that my responsibility is to provide for ourselves and our families and that it was absurd to take into account distant and unforeseeable consequences of our work in the weapons establishment. That's the job of others and relies in part on the decisions and attitudes of foreign powers. We start to distance ourselves from responsibility for the manufacture and use of these weapons. We start in other words to deceive ourselves by editing and suppressing what we think and feel.

But imagine that we are not like that. Imagine that we take these distant possibilities seriously and feel that we would be responsible in some measure for what might happen in the future. Such a person might turn to the intellectual or religious tradition and look for support for her disquiet. She might turn to the British utilitarian tradition which urges us to pursue only those actions that would maximize the happiness (or minimize the unhappiness) of all those who might be affected by the consequences of our actions. If more happiness or less unhappiness would be produced by our not taking up this kind of work then, according to people like Mill and Bentham, we should not do it. It is, says these thinkers, a kind of calculation. This numerical calculation of happiness-consequences - even if it is a calculation of imaginary events - gives us a clear answer about what we should do. The fear that many people might die as a result of weapons I had helped to develop would be enough to make us feel a great aversion to being associated with the research that had produced those weapons. I would hate to think that I had been part of their death just because I needed money for myself and my family. I would have to walk away from the job. 

That is how a modern British liberal might be tempted to think about these things. It is certainly the way people in this country are encouraged to think about such events. But the result would be much the same if instead our graduate had looked to Kantianism or Christianity. Christianity still makes us think in terms of the absolute commands of the Decalogue. Of the ten commandments none carries greater resonance than 'Thou shalt not kill' (Exodus 20: 1-17 & Deuteronomy 5: 4-21) For people brought up in or close to these traditions - and perhaps our graduate is one of them -this command still carries great force. Or our graduate might be drawn to Kant's categorical imperatives. These are secular versions of the Christian commandments supposedly arrived at by reason alone without the influence of religious teachings. A categorical imperative

Odysseus didn't worry about commandments or maximizing happiness!

Let us try to summarize. We are imagining that our graduate already has some serious doubts about taking up the post she has been offered. She wants the job and she needs the money for very good purposes, but something in her is unhappy with this way of life. This is the basic given in the situation. From this base-camp as it were we have imagined her reaching out to religious and philosophical traditions that give some intellectual substance to her doubts. Surely this is how we respond. We do not think through things for ourselves or rather we do so but with enormous debts to others around us who have thought more deeply about these things. Few of us are able to give fully thought-out expression to the passions that obscurely drive our lives. We borrow our thoughts from others. We feel that we have to just get on with our lives.

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” So wrote John Maynard Keynes. His remarks apply to all of us and not just as regards practical matters. We are all to some degree bricoleurs - that's to say, odd-job men - of the spirit, borrowing magpie-fashion from here and there, without the leisure or inclination to examine our intellectual assumptions very carefully. The pressures of economics if nothing else stop us from going too far down that path, much as they might stop our graduate from thinking too hard about the job she has been offered.

People have often imagined an ideal world, one that does not constrain us in the way this world so obviously does. 'The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion', said Keynes, rather optimistically. It is now almost a hundred years since Keynes imagined that day of freedom and more than a hundred-and-fifty years since Karl Marx tried to scare the middle classes into an egalitarian paradise with his claim that 'the spectre of communism is haunting Europe'. We seem as far as ever from the day when people would be free to devote themselves to the problems of human relations. Our graduate's wish not to have to be involved in weapons production does her much credit, but she is likely to end up telling herself that someone has to do this job and that it might as well be her.

Arguably we are likely to end up muddling through, thinking with remnants of other people's thoughts, and thinking that these moral imperatives have some kind of life of their own when they are nothing but the odds and ends of other people's passions.

Some days at the office are worse than others

  

Final Thoughts

(1) Our graduate seems to have generous thoughts but is caught in a material dilemma that is likely to skew her thoughts about what she is doing if she does go ahead and take the job at the Weapons Establishment. If she does take the job she will probably tell herself that she had no choice, that it is a necessary job given the world we live in, etc.

(2) We will imagine that our graduate has generous instincts. We would probably think less highly of her if she had devoted herself to her work in the Research Establishment either because of a passion for technological innovation  or because she had some ideological commitment to the Nation or Communism or Capitalism or Islam. We admire rather those people whose lives reflect that fundamental concern for problems Keynes described as basic, 'the problems of life and human relations.' There are no reasons for her choice, or, if there are, they come second, and she choose them as afterthoughts. It is that fact that she is the generous person she is that comes first. Her thoughts reflect her character and that is the way it is for most of us, most of the time.

(3) She and we regard the products of other people's thinking - categorical imperatives, biblical commandments, liberal notions of universal well-being - as floating in the intellectual air as if they had an independent existence. We do not manage to make these ideas completely or genuinely our own. It is as if they bully us into accepting them rather than what we are ourselves. We need an intellectual currency in order to be able to talk to each other, but we should ideally put our own stamp on our coins.

(4) In Albert Camus' novel The Fall, the narrator says, 'Do you know that in my little village, in the course of some reprisals, a German officer politely asked an old woman to choose which of her two sons was to be shot as a hostage? Can you imagine choosing like that? This one? That one? No, the other. And seeing him leave.' Mercifully, nothing like this happens in most of our lives, but there is a sense in which something like this happens in everybody's life. We all have to choose between having all of our life or surrendering some part of it in order to survive. We do not succeed in becoming the people we might have been if the world had been kinder or we ourselves more courageous. 

If you don't agree with this - and that may well be the case - try thinking through your own answer. That is really what is needed. Go and write down what you think.

Working in the Weapons Research Establishment

Otto Dix telling it like it was

 

You are the hero of this story. You have the opportunity to get a great job in a weapons research establishment. Should you take the job that has been offered to you? The money is good, the facilities excellent and the prospects second to none. You have to bear in mind that you are a research chemist who has been unable to find a job and who is finding it a great strain having to provide for his wife and young child and mortgage. 

He feels reluctant to take the job because he will be involved in developing chemical weapons. He also knows that there is another candidate apart from himself who is eager to take the job because he has a great interest in chemical weapons and believes that they present no moral problem.

What would you do and why? Should your personal feelings against chemical weapons win out over your need to find employment and to support your young family?

If you are a woman, then rephrase the dilemma by imagining that you have a burning desire to succeed and also an aged mother who needs expensive convalescent care.

Her mother needs expensive nursing care

What would a utilitarian do in this situation? Would the utilitarian be able to give an adequate answer?  What would you do? 

Comments will be posted in a couple of days.

Sorting Jim Out

Well what did you make of Jim? Was there a solution for his dilemma? It's a problem, but there may not be a solution. That's to say, there may not be a solution that you or he is happy with. He has to do something but he may not like what he has to do.

Enter your inner jungle!

Imagine that you are in his shoes and wearing his hat. You might tell yourself that that the best thing to do would be to take the pistol and shoot one of the Indians. We will assume in this fictional world that the police captain will keep his word and that Jim knows this and that once he has shot that one Indian the other nineteen captives will be released and allowed to go back to their villages. How would Jim justify his action when he gets back to his own home and he has to talk to the press and his mother about what he has done? Well, he would probably say that saving nineteen lives at the cost of losing or sacrificing one was the right thing to do in the circumstances. Imagine a similar situation where you are a helicopter pilot rescuing men from an upturned fishing vessel. You can only take some of them and have to leave one behind so as not to overload the helicopter. Surely you would upload the nineteen and leave the last one behind, wouldn't you? You wouldn't refuse to take any of them just because you couldn't take all of them, would you? That would be not just inhuman, but also absurd. You would save as many as you could.

Surely then Jim should shoot the one Indian? You might not be entirely happy with this argument. You might have your doubts about the supposed similarity of these two situations. There is a basic similarity between the two, but there is also an important difference. What is that difference? Well, surely the difference is that in our actual situation Jim is being forced to take the captain's pistol and shoot one of the Indians himself. He would then feel - and surely to some extent be - directly responsible for that one man's death. It is this sense of personal responsibility that makes Jim's situation so difficult. It is made much worse by the fact that if he does not kill one man the others will also die. He must choose between being responsible for the death of one man or the deaths of twenty. The helicopter pilot does not face the same dilemma. He will save the greatest number of people that he can.

What is obvious is not always obvious!

So what holds Jim back from just shooting the one and thereby saving the lives of the other nineteen? We must assume that it is the same thing that would make us profoundly unwilling to take the pistol and shoot the innocent man we select at random for death. We're not the sort of people who do that sort of thing. Jim probably thinks of himself as someone who does not go around the world shooting people. It goes against the grain of the person he feels himself to be. He feels a revulsion against this kind of thing which he probably sees as murder. He doesn't want to think of himself as a murderer.

Should we accept Jim's reluctance to act in this case? One way to test this notion is to imagine another man who does not share Jim's qualms about shooting one man to save the other nineteen. This second man just takes the gun and shoots the nearest Indian at point blank range. What would he say to the press and his mother when he gets back to London? We can imagine what he might say and we would probably sympathise with him and even feel that Jim was a bit of a wimp for not going ahead with the shooting. But we might also think that the second man was not the sort of person you wanted to invite home or make friends with; something in us makes us avoid people who we know have committed murder. We would prefer not to have blood on our hands.

We seem to be left with two contrasting attitudes. We might be happy to accept the justification of the man who shoots the one Indian in order to save the others. This would seem to imply that what we do in life is simply a matter of reckoning consequences. If more lives are saved then that is the right thing to do. You might in a similar way defend animal experiments by claiming that this kind of work will save many lives that are currently lost each year through disease and the like. You might add that we have to find ways to deal with evil police captains and life-threatening bacteria. We did not make the world, but we do have to do what we can if we are going to survive in it. 

Socrates drinking the hemlock (Jacques-Louis David)

Back to Jim. His attitude - as we'll assume it to be his - proclaims in effect that he does not want to be the sort of person who does things of that kind. Like Jim, something in us rejects murder. This visceral reaction may stem from an image of the person we imagine we are  and which perhaps owes a lot to our upbringing or it might come from some some more deep-seated fear of contagion involved in bloodshed and murder mentioned in the last paragraph. Whatever the motivation - and we can hardly hope to determine which it is in practice - we must surely respect the fact that people have pictures of themselves as people who do not go around killing others. It would, however, be fair to question this belief. Are these people just separating themselves from the world in order to maintain a good opinion of themselves? The ultimate test of such a belief would be to ask if they are prepared to suffer evil rather than to inflict it on others. That was Socrates' opinion, but few of us are made of the same stuff as him!

Final thoughts 

(1) Jim experiences his situation as a dilemma. The fact that he does probably raises him in our estimation. We would surely be worried if he had no qualms at all about taking the gun and shooting some hapless person at random. We somehow feel that it belongs to our lives as human beings to be at odds with ourselves when we meet new or unusual situations. We have to stop and make a decision about what would be the best thing to do. Moral philosophers are people who believe they know how we should go about making these decisions. We'll look at their recommendations later, though only in brief.

(2) But is this perhaps just some ancient prejudice, like the fear that makes us avoid the dead and even the lifeless bodies of badgers on the road. A fear of pollution, like the ancient Greek fear of miasma or the aversion Orthodox Jews have for women who've just given birth and who are regarded as ritually impure. 

(3) Perhaps a really modern rational man would be more like the coroners we see on TV, people who can examine things in a cool objective manner, while we weaker creatures shudder in the comfort of our armchairs? Such a man would just assess the situation and shoot one to save nineteen. End of story, as they say. Perhaps a modern rational man would not or should not be swayed by such qualms. Medical students start as nervous novices but they soon become quite blasé, happily throwing body parts around the room when nobody is watching. Maybe we should be more like them or more like those celluloid robots R2D2 and Judge Dred, who simply make their cybernetic decisions, solving the problem and moving on to the next. Once they know that the consequences are positive, they act without any hesitation or doubt.

(4) But perhaps you don't see life as just a set of problems that demand solutions? How then should we see it? Who do you want to be? How do you want to live? Can you give a reason for your choice? Should everyone make the same choice?

Ω
  

That is my response written on the hoof at my computer. I cannot write a generic response that everyone should come up with because there isn't such a thing, but there are aspects and attitudes in this example that we have to account for. Your job is to recognise these and to say something about them. I hope that you agree with me that the more you think about these things the less clear they become. Only prejudice is black and white.

There are some general procedural points that are worth keeping in mind and using in your own discussions. The most useful is the construction of other examples that are like the one you are thinking about. Construct the similarity, then try to see how it is different from the original case. This is what I tried to do with the helicopter example. Never stop with the similarity - that would turn your example into mere rhetoric - always follow through and look for the differences as well. They are always more instructive. That way you get to the fine grain of the logic.

You would never be able or expected to say as much as this in an interview, but we're not writing scripts. We are simply trying to think things through, like trying to get people up on their own legs. It says somewhere in Beowulf that God helps the warrior who struggles to stand up and continue the fight. That would have to be you.

Friedrich Nietzsche said in his book 'Human, All too human' that convictions are more dangerous than lies. Imagine that the interviewer asks you if this is true. What might you say? How might you use Jim's situation to analyse this claim? You could start with that and work towards your own example situations.

There will be another interview problem in a couple of days.

Jim and the Indians

In the wilds of South America, Jim is caught in a dilemma. The unsavoury police captain (immortalized in celluloid cliché) has caught some Indios and intends to shoot them all as guerrillas, but he will give Jim the opportunity to save their lives if and only if Jim chooses one of the captives and shoots him dead. What should Jim do? 

We are meant to see this situation as a conflict. He feels compelled to act in order to save the lives of 19 people, but the price is for him to murder one innocent person. Some people might see this as a reasonable proposition, a simple matter of numbers, but others will feel the horror that Jim might feel if he had to pull the trigger and murder that innocent person. 

Should Jim surrender to the force and necessity of the situation or should he preserve his personal integrity – his sense of himself as a good guy who doesn’t do things like that – and watch as the captain shoots all 20 Indians?

Steve Jobbs' lonely country road

Well, this is your first problem. Imagine that this is the situation that the interviewer presents to you. What are you going to say when she asks you, 'What should Jim do?' 

We'll talk about this in a day or two. That will give you a chance to write down your own responses. Think what that basically might be and how you might develop or justify your opinion when challenged.

The photo has nothing and everything to do with the case. What is more important than struggling to become the person you feel you really are? That was what philosophy was all about in the early days.

What is the interviewer looking for?

Crossing the bridge ...

If you are going for an interview for PPE at Oxford, you will have at least three interviews - one for each of your three subjects. This blog offers some help with the sort of questions you might be asked by your prospective philosophy tutors. You should use these questions as exercises for thinking about what these questions are about. You do that in the first place by trying to express your views in a clear and straightforward manner. As you do this you should find that there are more and more things to say. The problem then becomes how to marshall your opinions in a way that is coherent and to the point. This can only be done by practicing with a variety of questions. This blog is designed to give you the opportunity to do just that. It is intended for students who in all probability have had no experience with philosophy. You shouldn't see that as a disadvantage at all. Nobody expects you to know about these things and many tutors are probably not too keen on the kind of pigeonholing approach encouraged by the A Level examination in Philosophy. What people want to see is some personal ability to analyse these problems and that can only be assessed by the way you express yourself. This kind of ability can be improved greatly with some practice.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but some approaches will be more or less appropriate than others. Much will depend on your own ability to phrase things well and clearly. Good candidates will be able to develop their answers in relevant or interesting ways. The one thing you should avoid is being dismissive or giving dogmatic answers. Don't say, 'That's ridiculous! Of course he would do X or Y'. You have to be able to take a certain distance from the situations outlined in these example questions making it clear how one might look at things in either this or some other way. It's good if you can argue a case for different points of view. You can in the end come down on one side and reject the other, but the conclusion is not the most important thing. That as we've said is showing that you have an ability to give a clear analysis of some of the issues raised by the question you have been asked to consider.

Get a place for your bike

Over the next few weeks I'll publish a few questions of the kind that the interviewers might ask. I'll post one problem at a time and give you a chance to think about it for a couple of days. Then a little later I'll post some comments of my own about each. You can join the site and get emails of each new post sent to you so that you don't have to check back all the time. I hope you get some enjoyment out of thinking about these problems. That would be a good indication that you might enjoy the subject at Oxford or wherever you end up studying. They're all good places. It's more what you make of them.

For the next post, click on Blog Archive which you should find above on the right with the earliest first.