Lo que sigue son notas comentadas al capítulo III titulado “Que el gobierno representativo es el modelo del gobierno ideal” de las Consideraciones sobre el gobierno representativo de John Stuart Mill. La traducción es la de Antonio Guzmán Balboa y la edición de Herrero hermanos Sucesores S.A, hecha en México D.F., en 1966.

***

Para mostrar la verdad de su tesis (de que el gobierno representativo es el modelo ideal de gobierno), Stuart Mill partirá de lo opuesto: lo que hará será llevar el despotismo absolutista hasta sus últimas consecuencias. El sentido común del cual se partirá es el que sostiene que si es que se tuviese un buen déspota, entonces la monarquía despótica sería la mejor forma de gobierno. Se cree que un buen monarca:

• Haría cumplir buenas leyes.
• Reformaría las malas leyes.
• Colocaría a los mejores en hombres en los puestos de confianza.
• Administraría bien la justicia.

Stuart Mill asume, en su experimento mental, que todas estas condiciones se cumpieran (sosteniendo, a su vez, que prácticamente imposible que se den), tendríamos un clarividente y sabio en todas las ramas del gobierno, una omnisciencia constante en el bienestar del pueblo y del gobierno.

Las facultades y las energías que se requieren para desempeñar esta tarea de un modo tolerable son tan extraordinarias que es muy difícil imaginar que el imaginario buen dictador consintiera en aceptarlas, salvo para refugiarse de males intolerables y como preparación transitoria para algún cambio futuro (46).

Lo interesante es que si asumimos seguir la hipótesis de la “monarquía despótica perfecta”, entonces tendremos el verdadero problema, según Stuart Mill:

¿Qué tendríamos entonces? Un hombre de una actividad mental sobrehumana que manejara todos los asuntos de un pueblo mentalmente pasivo, cuya pasividad estaría implícita en la misma idea del poder absoluto (46).

Mill considera imperativo, en cuanto al desarrollo humano, que el propio pueblo exprese su voluntad acerca de sus propios intereses colectivos. La opinión pública en materia de asuntos políticos sería nula bajo un despotismo, o restringida a una élite. Desde esta perspectiva Mill considera inverosímil que las personas se ejerciten intelectualmente, ya que saben de antemano que lo que piensen no tendrá repercusiones, ni oídos:

La persona que se toma el trabajo de pensar, cuando sus ideas no producirán ningún efecto trascendente, o que se considera a sí misma como apta para desempeñar funciones, pero que carece de toda oportunidad para llevarlas a cabo, debe tener una afición inusitada por el mero ejercicio intelectual (47).

Hay que añadir a esto el que el sentimiento nacional y los vinculos emocionales de pertenencia a la comunidad se verán sistemáticamente mutilados:

Y no sólo su inteligencia es la afectada; su capacidad moral está igualmente estancada. Siempre que el campo de acción de los seres humanos se circunscribe artificialmente, sus sentimientos se estrechan y empequeñecen en la misma proporción. Lo que nutre el sentimiento familiar es la acción; aun un afecto familiar se sustenta en los buenos servicios voluntarios. Si una persona no tiene nada que hacer por su país, éste no le importará (47).

Que el pueblo se abandona a la “providencia” del “buen déspota” lleva al conformismo, resignación o aceptación de lo que suceda, al punto de verse como premio o castigo de la propia naturaleza. Si el déspota no fuera absoluto y se sometiera a una regulación constitucional, donde lo que impere sea la ley y no su arbitrio, entonces tendríamos una monarquía constitucional y no un despotismo. Podría haber libertad de prensa, opinión pública, consejeros elegidos por el pueblo que terminasen siendo las autoridades supremas en lo legislativo y en lo ejecutivo. En este caso surgiría un nuevo problema: la opinión pública.

Esa opinión pública, independiente de la dictadura monárquica, debe estar con él o contra él; no puede ser más que una cosa o la otra (49-50).

Si el monarca de doblega con lo que piensa el pueblo, entonces deja de ser dictador y deviene rey constitucional. En este caso lo que se tendría sería una especie de “primer ministro vitalicio”. Si no se doblega tendrá que coaccionar a su pueblo y oponerse de manera antagónica a él. Para Stuart Mill, a la larga el pueblo se impondría y el déspota tendría que someterse a un régimen constitucional o ceder su lugar a alguien que lo hiciese.

Incluso si se sostuviera que el déspota tiene como función principal la educación de su pueblo con el fin de hacerlos mejores seres humanos o de enseñarles, en ese caso lo que tendríamos que preveer sería que el resultado de la educación tendería a hacer de los seres humanos lo contrario de máquinas: seres autoconcientes que reclaman el control de sus acciones. Desde esta perspectiva, Mill sostiene que la educación tiene como su máximo, y eminente fin, la libertad humana. Mill, sin embargo, sí considera que puede llegar a ser necesario concentrar el poder de manera absoluta en casos necesarios, como si de una medicina amarga se tratase:

Estoy lejos de condenar el establecimiento de una fuerza absoluta, en forma de dictadura temporal, en casos de extrema exigencia. Desde tiempos remotos, las naciones libres han conferido ese poder por su propia elección, como una medicina necesaria para curar las enfermedades del cuerpo político que no se pudieron evitar por medios menos violentos (51).

Creo que se podría interpretar aquí algo relacionado con el estado de excepción schmittiano, al mismo tiempo que pensemos esa dictadura temporal al modo de una decisión soberana. Sin embargo, para Stuart Mill lo ideal es que la sobernaía sea depositida en la totalidad de la comunidad.

No es difícil demostrar que la mejor forma de gobierno es aquella en que la soberanía, o suprema fuerza de control en último recurso, se deposita en el conglomerado total de la comunidad, y en la que cada ciudadano tiene no sólo voz en el ejercicio de esa soberanía fundamental, sino que, además, en ocasiones, es llamado para tomar parte activa en el gobierno, por medio del desempeño personal de alguna función pública, local o general (52).

]]> http://polswhisperer.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/democracy/ Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:41:12 +0000 Jason Morris http://polswhisperer.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/democracy/

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« Depuis l’origine de la philosophie, la question du « summum bonum », ou, en d’autres termes, du fondement de la morale, a été considéré comme le plus important des problèmes posés à la pensée spéculative »

John Stuart Mill, L’utilitarisme

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GRILLE DE LECTURE

L’utilitarisme de John Stuart Mill a été publié en 1863. Sa philosophie pratique y a acquis sa forme définitive. Ce disciple de Bentham, fidèle à la tradition empiriste anglaise, est un des tenants de la morale utilitariste. En consacrant sa réflexion à l’expérience morale, il s’est attelé à donner à la morale une conscience, le sentiment d’un devoir et d’une obligation morale. Car depuis l’origine de la philosophie, depuis le temps où le jeune Socrate écoutait le vieux Protagoras, le problème central de la pensée aura été la question du critérium du bien et du mal.

Mais la pensée spéculative lui paraît avoir été incapable de faire face adéquatement à ce problème axiologique, qui a divisé selon lui d’éminents penseurs en sectes et écoles dressées les unes contre les autres. Même si une situation analogue règne dans beaucoup d’autres sciences, il lui importe qu’un fondement soit fourni à la morale. Ce critérium du bien devrait permettre de déterminer avec certitude ce qui est bien ou mal. L’attachement de John Stuart Mill à la morale (au problème moral) s’explique par l’importance qu’elle revêt dans le champ de l’action humaine.

Comme Bergson, John Stuart Mill pensait qu’il fallait agir en homme de pensée et penser en homme d’action. Au sein du courant utilitariste, il était un révolutionnaire par rapport à son maître Bentham. Pour John Stuart Mill, il ne s’agissait pas seulement de chercher le bonheur du plus grand nombre en identifiant toujours l’intérêt de l’individu à l’intérêt universel, mais il était aussi convaincu qu’on trouve d’autant mieux le bonheur personnel qu’on le cherche moins, et que l’on le trouve en travaillant à l’amélioration de la condition humaine. Il s’est battu entre autres pour le suffrage des femmes, la représentation proportionnelle, les réformes de structure orientées vers le socialisme.

Emmanuel AVONYO, op

Pensée du 22 novembre

L’academos

Sommaire

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]]> http://twentysixh.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/john-stuart-mill-negro-cocaine-fiends-and-contemporary-drugs-policy/ Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:14:07 +0000 Jim http://twentysixh.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/john-stuart-mill-negro-cocaine-fiends-and-contemporary-drugs-policy/

The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. – John Stuart Mill. On Liberty.

Of the 1st of July 1908 a certain Dr. Hamilton Wright was appointed as the United States Opium Commissioner by the then U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Two years later Wright claimed that Black workers were being dosed with cocaine to increase their productivity[i]. These claims, or the practices they alluded to, were likely the cause of the reports of “cocaine crazed Negroes” misbehaving in Southern society. The New York Times published this distilled piece of racism in an article entitled “Negro Cocaine Fiends, New Southern Menace” in 1914[ii]. The article claimed that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of the ‘cocaine-crazed’ Negro brain” and that “Negro cocaine fiends are now a known Southern menace.” These delusional and racist claims coupled with the general apprehension regarding increasing narcotic consumption led to the Harisson Narcotic Act of 1914[iii]. Although the act was originally intended as a means of controlling the distribution of these drugs through physicians its wording eventually led to their legal prohibition in the United States. Now, of course, that a given policy was implemented for prejudicial reasons doesn’t mean it still is.

Prohibition, however, has been the orthodoxy in the western world since the early 20th century. Tens of thousands of people have been punished for the possession or distribution of drugs in the form of fines, incarceration and the associated cascading costs of being convicted. The execution and implementation of this policy also costs our governments tens of billions of dollars a year; an economic burden which is ultimately, and in its entirety, born by the normal citizen, you.

The net human and economic costs of these drug policies are immense. Of course, if our governments are right, this is just the cost of doing the right thing. Conversely, if they are wrong, not only would they be implicated in the considerable injustice of persecuting these individuals, but also in squandering your money in the process. Given the stakes, one might hope that there are better reasons for shouldering these costs than fearing ‘cocaine crazed rape fiends’ and other blatant demagoguery. In fact, it would not be optimistic to hope that the policy of destroying tens of thousands of people’s lives at an enormous fiscal cost to other members of that society would be shored up by implacable evidence and argument… We’ve got our best people on this right?

Unfortunately not. The people who have historically perpetuated these policies and those currently in charge of doing so are a collection of prejudiced, confused and epistemologically incompetent arseholes. Invectives aside, the arguments for the prohibition of drugs are premised upon principles most of us believe are false. Their conclusions are in direct tension with key tenets of individualism and, ipso facto, western liberalism. The main argument promulgated against the use of drugs is motivated by a paternalistic concern for citizen’s health.

1. The state has a responsibility to prevent its subjects from harming themselves.
2. The use of drugs causes direct and serious harm to the individual and is likely to cause others to also begin harming themselves.
3. Conclusion: Therefore, the government is morally required to place a prohibition on drugs and punish anyone involved in their consumption and distribution.

This is a basic form of the anti-drugs argument and as well intentioned and reasonable as it might seem at first glance it is a load of rot. Premise one is false and most of us already believe it so. The falsity of premise two is becoming increasingly clear with mounting empirical evidence.

Premise 1: The Legitimate Scope of State Action.

Most of us believe that the realm of state action and personal recreational activity are, to use one of Gould’s phrases, non-overlapping magisteria. The vast range of activities that we partake in including rock climbing, horse riding, scuba diving, boozing, smoking cigarettes (in a private place), butter eating, boxing, and cheese rolling are not legitimate targets of state intervention. This is despite the fact that each year thousands of people are seriously injured or die as a direct result. People do these activities because, despite the risks, they enjoy them. Drugs are no different. People take drugs, despite the risks, precisely because they enjoy them. Here it is often replied that the comparison is false, that drug use causes large swathes of collateral damage in the form of crime, poverty and homelessness. However, there is good evidence that these social problems are a product of the illegality itself. Government sponsored Heroin trials run across the world have found that supplying the addicts results in a decrease in crime, homelessness and addict mortality rate.

Government prohibition of the aforementioned practices would be unjust because, as Mill famously concluded:

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The liberty principle, the right to decide for one’s self what to do with their body (provided they refrain from harming others in the process), is why we believe that the state would be committing a serious injustice in prohibiting any of these activities. Furthermore, it is in direct contradiction to the first premise of the anti drugs argument. For a democratically elected representative to presume that they know what is best for you, what risks you should and should not take, and what goods you should and should not consume is nothing but bigotry. It is a pejorative and derogatory assessment of your abilities as a rational adult. The insult does not end there though, for not only are they perfectly qualified in deciding what is best for you, but they are also, funnily enough, capable of deciding what is best for them. Since we do not believe this nonsense is acceptable in any of the previous cases neither should we in the case of drugs.

This is not to claim that the state has no role here, it does. The state should provide non-partisan, empirical evidence on the dangers of these activities, including drugs, such that individuals can rationally weigh the benefits and risks. The government also has a job of regulating the drug industry. Industry would have to meet standards of quality, transparency and consistency. Currently illicit drugs would be government regulated like any other products on the pharmaceutical market.

Premise 2: Drugs, Harms and the Empirical Issues.

For those who have kept up with the recent scandal in Britain it is probably no surprise that the putative harms of taking these narcotics is minimal. The evidence is now widely available online and it won’t be rehashed here. The final interesting point though concerns the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, and his attitude towards the results of this empirical work, as espoused by the Chief Government Drugs Advisor David Nutt. Here he is on the issue:

Professor Nutt is indeed a reputable scientist whose views on drugs policy are well known. However, his role as my principal adviser was to (unsurprisingly) present advice. It is the job of the government to decide policy.

Professor Nutt was not sacked for his views, which I respect but disagree with (as does Professor Robin Murray, who wrote in your newspaper on Friday).

He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. This principle is well understood and long established.

Of course, this last paragraph is no surprise: If empirical evidence is in tension with party policy then your circulation of it will result in dismissal. This is brazen and unrepentant bigotry; the primacy of dogma over intellectual honesty.

Back in 1859 John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty got it right. Our systems of government generally reflect these ideals in allowing citizens to live free and autonomous lives. Maybe it is no great surprise that a few residual and surreptitious dogmas linger from more religious and unscientific times. And while a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a dogma enshrined in policy still emits an olfactory malaise.  

[i] David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control, 1973.

[ii] The New York Times, “Negro Cocaine Fiends, New Southern Menace” February 11, 1914.

[iii] http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cu8.html

La realidad y sus cambios, el “ser” y el “no ser” filosóficos, a veces dan oportunidades a la filosofía de demostrar su verdadero valor. El caso del pesquero Alakrana es un ejemplo palmario de esto:

• los kantianos, que quisieran que cada comportamiento fuera norma universal y ésta fuera el patrón de todas y cada una las decisiones, reconocen cariacontecidos que debe primar el Estado de Derecho (un derecho más, el del Estado, que contrasta con el de los mares) sobre el gran Derecho, el de la Vida y su preservación.

• Los benthamistas, los utilitaristas, y aún más, los seguidores del padre de la filosofía de la Libertad, John Stuart Mill, pensamos siempre en ese principio que no falla, que estará bien aquello que dé mayor felicidad a mayor número de personas, y mal lo que dé mayor dolor a un mayor número de personas.

Los posibilistas buscan conjugar ambas cosas.

Los sofistas se preguntan por qué trajeron a España a los piratas.

Los socráticos les responden que por fidelidad a la ley, que no a la justicia.

Y Nietzsche abogaría por ser más personas y abolir a tantos ídolos con pies de barro, por convertir al camello en león, y al león en niño. Por liberar a nuestros compatriotas.

En cualquier caso, apasionante dilema, con el contrapunto trágico del dolor de las familias. Un dilema ético, y también un dilema de gestión, de desmanagement puro, pues todas las opciones tienen un lado malo, y de management de calidad, pues todas las opciones tienen un lado bueno y mucha repercusión. Quizá haga falta un poquito de filosofía del management para sacar del atolladero a los que hayan de tomar la mejor decisión.

Kenn Nakata Steffensen

I am a member of the Broadcast, Entertainment, Communication and Theatre Union, BECTU. Like most people in this country BECTU understandably finds the BNP’s views abhorrent. Its policy of denying the party airtime is more difficult to understand, as it seems to contradict the union’s values as a democratic organisation committed to freedom of expression. Freedom of expression should be particularly important for a union of media workers, and it ought therefore to think about the meaning of the concept and its translation into policy.

Regardless of the fact that Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time looks like an unmitigated PR disaster for the BNP, was BECTU right in principle to argue for suppression of their views? Does calling for censorship not open up an intractable debate about who else should be censored and the criteria to be applied when making such a decision? And does it not represent a capitulation to the authoritarian values that BECTU sought to oppose? Should we fight fire with fire and thereby sacrifice a central principle? Do the ends justify the means? After some doubts I have come to believe that BECTU’s policy of “no platform for the BNP” is misguided.

In September the BBC decided to invite the BNP leader Nick Griffin to participate in its current affairs programme Question Time. This has been a matter of general political controversy, exposing some of the core contradictions of liberal democratic political theory and practice and posing a dilemma for all who believe in democracy, equality and freedom of expression. This is exemplified in the manner in which the issue has split the Labour Party with Jack Straw agreeing to appear on the programme and his cabinet colleague Peter Hain urging the BBC not to allow Mr. Griffin to appear. The Labour Party has previously had a policy of not sharing media platforms with the BNP. The party’s decision to be represented by the Justice Secretary therefore marks a significant change. The Prime Minister argued for the policy reversal by saying that, “If, on Question Time, they are asked about their racist and bigoted views that are damaging to good community relations, it will be a good opportunity to expose what they are about.”

In response to the BBC’s decision BECTU issued a press release on 28th September announcing the union’s support for members who chose on conscientious grounds “not to work on the broadcast because of the involvement of the BNP.” The day before the broadcast, BECTU announced that general secretary Gerry Morrisey would “speak at the Unite Against Fascism rally outside BBC Television Centre, London, on 22 October.” BECTU argued that “the party’s performance earlier this year in the European elections, does not justify inclusion in the programme, contrary to the BBC’s official view.” The day after the broadcast, BECTU issued another statement saying that “The BNP leader’s weak justifications for his extremist, far-Right beliefs will galvanise the political opposition to him and, most importantly, should encourage those voters who delivered a platform for the party in the European Parliament to think again about the further damage which the BNP would do to UK society.” The union also reiterated its belief that Nick Griffin should not have appeared on Question Time. Gerry Morrissey, general secretary, said, “We stand by our view, which is union policy, in arguing that the BBC should not have granted a platform to the BNP. Time will tell whether the BNP secures any electoral advantage from the broadcast.”

The BBC has justified its decision to include the BNP with reference to the organisation’s obligation “to treat all political parties registered with the Electoral Commission and operating within the law with due impartiality,” and with reference to the fact that the BNP has “demonstrated evidence of electoral support at a national level”. This electoral support should “be reflected in the amount of coverage the party received.” Although the legality of the BNP’s constitution is disputed, the reasoning of the BBC seems logically coherent and in line with its obligations. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the many well-intentioned people, including BECTU’s secretary general, who are, in effect, calling for censorship.

The BNP increased their share of votes in the European Parliament elections on 4th June by 1.3% on their 2004 results, thus winning two seats and representation at a national level for the first time. They won 6% of the vote nationally (943,598 votes) and “close to 10% in some regions”. This is a momentous event in British political history and a disturbing development for all egalitarians. What is heartening, on the other hand, is the general response by the public and the mainstream parties. Unlike in some other European countries, the political ideas of the BNP remain marginal and are consistently opposed by Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It does not enjoy as widespread support as the Dutch Party for Freedom (14.8%) or the Danish People’s Party (15.3%). And due to the higher thresholds for representation in the British first-past-the-post electoral system, this does not translate into parliamentary representation as directly as in proportional systems. In spite of its relative electoral success, the BNP is still considered beyond the pale by other parties, and unlike in Denmark its core ideas have not been adopted by the social democratic, liberal and conservative mainstream. Nick Griffin’s performance on Question Time clearly showed that his parasitical attempts to co-opt liberal democratic discourse and present a “New BNP” failed. The party cannot run from its fascist roots and is unlikely to have mass appeal or to change the orientations of the mainstream parties. However unpleasant a phenomenon it is, it does not represent as great a threat to pluralism as parties with similar values elsewhere in Europe.
It is right for BECTU to be concerned about the rise of the BNP and to act against it. There can be no doubt about that. But, as Lenin asked in another historical context and from a different perspective and with different objectives than mine, “what is to be done?” This is really one of the “burning questions of our movement.” To answer the tactical question of how to respond appropriately requires some theoretical reflection on a number of dilemmas and possibly irresolvable contradictions of modern politics. These tend to present themselves as paired conceptual oppositions, such as the limits of democracy and authoritarianism, procedural versus substantive democracy, freedom of speech versus harm to society and individuals, universalism versus relativism, and reason versus emotion.
Democracy as a political system has its origins in ancient Athens. It has two semantic components – demos (people) and kratia (rule). It was a system by which the people governed the city state (polis). The people were conceived of as all Athenian citizens, which meant native, male Athenians over the age of 18. Women, descendants of immigrants and slaves were excluded from the citizenry. Citizenship conferred a right to participation in the assembly (ekklesia), which would constitute an executive council (boule) of 500 paid government officials elected for a one-year term. Between 503 to 322 BCE, “Athens lived under a radically democratic government” where “in a very real sense, the People governed themselves, debating and voting individually on issues great and small, from matters of war and peace to the proper qualifications for ferry-boat captains “
After the enlightenment and the French revolution, classical Athenian democracy developed into representative liberal democracy and became the ideal form of government towards which European states strived. Hardly any political movements since Hitler have defined themselves as opposed to democracy. Even Stalinists and Maoists have claimed to be democrats, as terms like “people’s democracy”, the oxymoronic “people’s democratic dictatorship” and names like German Democratic Republic or Democratic People’s Republic of Korea show. What we generally refer to as democracy today is representative liberal democracy. Although it means different things to many people, democracy is so hegemonic that even Nick Griffin appeals to liberal democratic principles.
Liberalism and democracy coexist uneasily, and at times they come into conflict with each other. Unlike classical democracy, which was founded on fundamental gender and class discrimination, liberalism secularised the Christian doctrine that all human beings were equal before God. The principle of fundamental equality made exclusion from political participation based on first class and later gender and ethnicity untenable and resulted in the gradual extension of citizenship rights to more of the population. Today, all adults regardless of class, income, gender and ethnicity have a right to in principle equal participation in the political process. In most contemporary liberal democracies, immigrants do not have the right to vote in national elections, but all citizens do, including BNP members, voters and sympathisers.
As the name implies, liberalism is also centrally concerned with liberty, which is usually understood as the right of individuals and groups to freely live as they choose as long as their choices do not harm others. A distinction is often made between positive and negative freedoms – freedom to and freedom from. One of the questions faced by anti-racists is whether the BNP’s right to democratic participation infringes on the right of others, e.g. ethnic minorities, to live in freedom. If so, how should it be addressed and what should be the balance between positive and negative freedom? The union’s position is that the BNP’s rights should be curtailed because their views are in principle different from those of other political opponents. What distinguishes the BNP from others is, according to Gerry Morrissey, that their “policies are reprehensible, anti-democratic and racist”. Most members will probably agree with this. Many may also agree that the union should therefore support efforts to prevent them from spreading their views in the media. However honourable the intentions, such a policy is problematic because it means relativising and compromising principles, which should be consistently upheld by BECTU. Freedom of expression and the right to political participation applies to all, even to those we fundamentally disagree with. Censorship is fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic, and a consistently democratic position would therefore defend it as an absolute value under all circumstances. By seeking to keep the BNP off the airwaves, BECTU has given in to the authoritarianism that it finds reprehensible about the BNP. It is a self-contradiction to do what we condemn others for trying to do.  As Noam Chomsky once wrote,

“it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended. Advocacy of the right to express ideas that are generally approved is, quite obviously, a matter of no significance.”

Parties and movements like the BNP should be opposed on the principled grounds that their ideology is irrational and unethical. This opposition should take the form of reasoned debate true to the dialogic nature of democratic politics, not by making concessions to the very authoritarianism we oppose.
A further question raised by BECTU’s decision is which criteria to apply when deciding who should and who should not be censored. In this case, the argument for censorship is the anti-democratic and racist nature of the BNP. How should BECTU then respond to certain strands of Islamism or Zionism? Should it, as the Dutch and Danish far-right politician Geert Wilders and Søren Krarup, argue for the suppression of Islam itself on the grounds that it advocates authoritarianism and sexism? How should contemporary democratic liberal racists like Wilders be treated, and how should we assess historical democratic socialist racists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb? There are no easy answers to these questions, if any answers at all, once censorship and denial of political rights to one’s opponents has been embarked upon. A way of avoiding these questions in the first place is to consistently uphold the rights to freedom of expression and equal participation. This must, of course, be qualified by the harm principle, which John Stuart Mill defined as:

the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

This means that the BNP have a right to be heard, but that the exercise of that right is conditional on refraining from inflicting harm on other members of society. It also means that nobody is entitled to limit that right unless it is for the purpose of preventing harm to others.
It seems logically inconsistent for anti-racist democrats to wish to deny a racist party the right to be heard and scrutinised in public. Weyman Bennett of Unite Against Fascism said, Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time “will lead to the growth of a fascist party” . According to the BNP, this has been an immediate effect of the programme. The party claims that the BBC has acted as its recruitment agent, thus apparently confirming Peter Hain’s fears. But 9,000 inquiries out of 8 million viewers amounts to very little. Ken Livingstone has argued that it will result “in a surge in violence against people from ethnic minorities”. This remains to be seen. It seems impossible to establish any clear causal relationship even in the (unlikely) case that there is a correlation. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the case that all publicity is good publicity. As Gordon Brown has said, exposing the BNP may “make people see what they are really like.” On the contrary, silencing parties like the BNP may have the opposite of the desired effect by lending legitimacy to their bizarre claims that London has been “ethnically cleansed” and that they speak on behalf of an indigenous ethnic majority threatened by genocide. As with other radical movements, there is a risk that suppression will backfire and strengthen the movement.

What would be truly worrying would be if Jack Straw, like the then Social Democrat (now Liberal) Danish Home Secretary Karen Jespersen, began to speak of the need to keep “illiterate Somalis” out of Britain, promise that the Labour Party would ensure that Britain would “never become a multicultural society” where “Islam was considered equal to Christianity”, or propose building special detention centres for asylum seekers on uninhabited islands. Fortunately, the British political elite and the general public are firmly committed to multiculturalism, and the political poison of the BNP has not infected the mainstream parties like in Denmark. Although the BNP is parasitical on liberal discourse for tactical reasons, e.g. in its appeals to freedom, human rights and democracy, it has clear historical roots in European fascism. The same cannot be said about the Danish and Dutch parties with which it shares many points of view. The historical roots of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and the Danish People’s Party are not in pre-1945 fascism, although both parties have attracted members and supporters from more traditional fascist backgrounds. These examples illustrate that liberalism, ultra-nationalism and xenophobia are compatible with liberalism. In the same way, leading early 20th century socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb held views that are clearly racist.

Freedom of speech would have no meaning if it applied only to views found acceptable by most members of a polity at a given time in history. One’s commitment to freedom of speech is tested precisely when confronted with despicable views. Rather than following Hitler and Stalin in allowing the “free” expression of views BECTU agrees with, it should have followed Voltaire’s insistence on defending to the death Nick Griffin’s right to speak and be challenged. Freedom of speech has no meaning if it is relativised.

Notes

Recently I read Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech (edited by Jospheph Pearson, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles CA, 2001), based on lectures he gave in California about parrhesia in Ancient Greek philosophy, literature and politics.  Parrhesia is translated in my abridged Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1891) as ‘free speaking’.  It does not appear in Georg Autenrieth’s Homeric Dictionary (translated by Robert Keep, Duckworth, London, 1984), which is only to be expected, because as Foucault points out it’s a word that comes into use in Golden Age Athens.  It does appear in Alexander Souter’s Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1916) as ‘boldness, freedom, liberty, shown especially in speech’.  All of this, and more is incorporated into Foucault’s discussion of the negative and positive uses of the term in Euripides’ tragedies, commentary on Athenian democracy, Cynic philosophy, and so on.  In a rather indirect way Foucault himself develops a position on ethics, communication and liberty.  More of that on another occasion I hope.

Recently I was also listening to a podcast of Martha Nussbaum being interviewed  on Australian radio about Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, on the reissue of her recent classic The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (original edition: Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1994) with a new introduction.  Click here to go directly to the podcast. Click here to go to the relevant link at the podcast aggregator site earideas.

A great summary of her work in that area, and it is a great body of work.  Nussbaum has some grudging respect for Foucault, in contrast to her attacks on anyone else who might be regarded as influenced by, or adjacent to, Foucault’s approach.  Her somewhat prejudiced mindset gets the better of her in the podcast, when she shows some regard for Foucault’s work on antique ethics.  Nussbaum claims that Foucault ignores  truth in his discussion of self-formation through ethics in the ancient world.

The lectures in Fearless Speech focus in the importance of truth, the right fort he lower classes to speak truth in a vulgar manner in Athenian democracy, the value and danger Euripides sees in unrestrained truth telling.  There are ways in which Foucault would say that these truths are subjective not absolute, but that is not the same as devaluing truth.

In an approach reminiscent of Mill in On Liberty, Foucault emphasises the value of struggle for truth, the great agon.  No one condemns Mill as a dangerous sceptic, subjectivist etc, for emphasising the value of a permanent conflict over truth in which no one ever has a complete victory, so maybe there’s no need to condemn Foucault on the basis of such accusations.

• “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” –John Stuart Mill

• “A really great people, proud and high-spirited, would face all the disasters of war rather than purchase that base prosperity which is bought at the price of national honor.” –Theodore Roosevelt

• “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.” –George S. Patton

• “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” –Sir Winston S. Churchill

• “It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country … in wars far away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray-haired. But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives — the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for their country, for us. All we can do is remember.” –Ronald Reagan

ROCHESTER, MN – That our news media is busted will come as no surprise to consumers of vanishing newspapers, shoutfest TV “news shows” and the unchecked political soapbox called the Internet.

But the devolution of our news media has now reached a point that is in some ways so extreme, and with the stakes for democracy so high, it seems useful to take stock.

Larger and larger swaths of the news media now embrace sensation and celebrity, harshly partisan rhetoric and gossip, rumors and lies to beat the competition and grab market share.

Trusted sources of information are fading into irrelevance as we race into a new golden age for anarchists, demagogues and online pamphleteers.

The Web, to be sure, puts masses of indisputably proven facts at our disposal. Yet millions of people remain stubbornly faithful to discredited nonsense, conspiracy theories and urban legends.

Sometimes it’s not the content but simply the overwhelming bulk of news being delivered every minute to our fingertips (our dazed mindtips!) that grates. We can sicken on a sheer surplus of words, including well-intentioned ones.

Artists and writers saw the dangers of a dysfunctional mass media and news media long ago. But they also saw something else, which was a deep misunderstanding of the mass media itself.

They’ve often used metaphors depicting an idiot monster that’s simply too big and shape-shifting for logic and reason to spot.

For George Saunders the dysfunctional news media is “The Brain Dead Megaphone;” for John Cheever “The Enormous Radio;” for Jonathan Schell “The Uncertain Leviathan;” for Jeffrey Scheuer “The Sound Bite Society;” for Larry Beinhart “The Fog of Facts;” for Tony Schwartz “The Second God;” and for the jazzy word artist and media critic John Durham Peter’s it’s simply “The Abyss.”

But literary metaphors aside, what clear definitions and categories can we rely upon now that our news media is failing so badly in its mission to inform democratic society, and to model modes of conversation that create community and hasten social healing?

Take three recent examples:

• Two highly-skilled, well-respected Washington Post political reporters start an online web site devoted to covering inside-the-beltway news. Instead of raising the level of online journalism the web site, Politico.com, largely sinks to the blogosphere’s standards, touting stories about the sartorial habits of presidential candidates, hyping gossipy tidbits, and relying heavily on unnamed operatives, aides, and “sources close to the administration.”

• If any two facts of current and critical public importance qualify as being indisputably proven, they are the safety (if not the absolute efficacy) of the H1N1 vaccine, and where President Obama was born. Yet despite widespread dissemination of the facts and figures establishing both of these facts, millions of people believe that the H1N1 vaccine is deadly, and that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore is unqualified to be the U.S. president.

• The host of a popular TV “public affairs” show, ranting about the U.S. president, douses an actor with liquid from a fake gasoline can and lights a match while shouting bug-eyed: “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?” Later five teenage boys in Florida pour rubbing alcohol on another boy and light him on fire. No definitive link is made connecting the one incident to the other, yet what does your gut say? How is what this host performed on TV different from a cross burning carried out in a front yard?

Free speech doctrine, that cornerstone of our constitution and our journalism, says it’s our solemn and patriotic duty to suck it up, to grit our teeth and stomach whatever garbage comes along to safeguard everyone’s freedom.

But what happens when the news media itself — by distorting facts and dividing community — becomes a potential threat to public health, national safety, and to the very workings of democracy?

What’s our best response then?

II

A promising answer to that question is taking shape today in the work of a new breed of brain scientists who are studying the influence of emotions, instincts and other innate human traits on human reasoning and moral decision-making.

That’s significant because so many of our assumptions about how the news media works in a democracy are based on the premise of rational actors, i.e. the assumption that citizens act on the news primarily in a rational manner by sorting fact from fiction, weighing certain facts against other ones, and so on.

But what if reason is not the main cognitive mode by which citizens read, watch and act on the news? This possibility was flagged by the journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann in the 1920s and has been a theme of media criticism ever since.

And it’s mostly led to the depressing solution, embraced by Lippmann and many others, that basically journalism must act like propaganda, by distilling complex ideas into digestible symbols that manipulate more than inform.

That doesn’t sound like democracy. Yet until recently, no more promising answer has been found on which both producers and consumers of the news could depend.

Now, though, such an answer is taking shape in the work of these scientists who are objectively demonstrating how the true source of human wisdom is not pure reason, as in the Enlightenment view. Rather, it is rooted in an organic mind-body process in which genetics and morality, brain structure and subjective feeling, reason and emotion are enmeshed every moment in a never-ending dance.

Using technological devices capable of measuring the brain at incomparably closer levels than before, these scientists are demonstrating how decision-making and moral actions are not primarily the product of reasoning, but rather are largely emotion-based and hard-wired into the human genome.

The developmental psychologist Jonathan Haidt can predict if a person is liberal or conservative based on a few inherent and measurable personality traits such as “openness to new experience.”

The psychologist Drew Westen has proven how neuronal networks that stimulate strong emotions are expertly activated by political wordsmiths on the left and right. The cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman uses MRI techniques to show how human brains change in predictable ways when  their owners, across cultures, are persuaded by arguments in text and video form.

In terms of the news media, the promise of this new research is to make us more aware, as both producers and consumers of media, of what is actually transpiring in our minds and bodies when we make and consume the news, and act thereupon.

As a result of this research, a substantially new model will replace the “rational actor” model because reason, we are finding out, is not as pure as we thought it was. As we learn more about the real picture, which is based more on genetics and emotions than the old one, we’ll become more able to use it to our advantage.

In other words, these new findings highlight the need for a new decision-making template in democracies. They make clear the need, especially, for new ethical guidelines by which both individuals and society at large can make decisions that are rational and moral.

In the past, moral decision-making has generally meant recourse to an analytical framework such as those offered by Aristotle’s “virtue ethics,” Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” or John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.”

Besides being too complex and bookish for popular adoption, these ethical answer-machines all work mechanically: complex real-world conditions in, tidy morality out.

But what if, as the new neuroscientists are saying, morality works more like a subtle and intricate dance than a crank-turned machine?

What if the great swirl of emotions plays the primary role in moral decision-making? That’s where a new ethical approach is needed when it comes to the realm of the news media, for both producers and consumers. I can suggest one.

It’s not new, actually, but its application to modern-day conditions certainly would be. It’s the “Right Speech” ethic of the 5th century BC spiritual teacher and moral teacher Siddhartha Guatama, popularly known as the Buddha.

III

The Right Speech doctrine has much to commend it for application to our mass media and news media issues, I think.

Perhaps its very first qualification is how seamlessly it complements the findings of the new neuroscientists. As the Buddha himself preached not a religion but rather a practical psychology – centering on a meditation practice designed to reveal to each person the true workings of their own minds – Right Speech totally complements any scientific approach.

By the same token, its lack of political origin likewise commends Right Speech to contemporary application as, theoretically at least, its political neutrality would allow it to sidestep the distraction of political debates. The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ethical systems – of Kant, Mill, Rawls, etc. – can’t avoid those problems as our present free speech tradition, which largely guides ethical decision-making in the news media, is thoroughly grounded in political liberalism.

But what exactly is the Right Speech ethic? What does it say is “right speech”?

You could write down the Right Speech ethic on a matchbook cover.

Boiled down, it defines ethical speech in four ways, each way having a positive and a negative phrasing. The positive way defines the qualities that each speech act ideally will have; with the negative way defining types of speech to avoid.

The best-known Right Speech formulation offers four types of speech to avoid including speech that is 1) lying, 2) divisive, 3) hurtful, or 4) idle. Phrased positively, ethical speech is thus 1) true, 2) healing, 3) gentle, and 4) useful.

The timeliness of ethical speech is also greatly stressed. The Buddha many times reminded his monks that if delivered at the wrong moment even an absolutely true and useful statement can be divisive and hurtful. In addition, the intention behind every speech act is always determinative. Thus, a lie spoken with a genuine intention to heal, and in the genuine belief that it would cause the least amount of harm in a given situation, would be acceptable in the Right Speech code.

That’s about it. Beyond this core, though, exists a rich literature of parables, stories and commentaries on Right Speech that clarifies its meaning, describes its relation to underlying Buddhist psychology, and provides countless examples of skillful and unskillful daily life applications of the Right Speech ethic in personal, family, governmental and even political settings (6th century BCE Indian politics, that is).

At least three notable traits of the news media today also suggest the ready adaptability of the Right Speech ethic to contemporary conditions.

First is how the Internet has empowered millions of people to become not only consumers but also producers of news via personal blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts, cell phone photography, etc. Their dispatches may on most days be read or viewed by only a handful, but on other days they may get the attention of millions. More people than ever, ordinary citizens as well as news professionals thus need today to seriously consider issues of journalism ethics.

Second, any adequate speech ethic today must be equally adaptable to consumers of public speech, as well as its producers. There is increasing understanding that language, like food, is absorbed with both potential benefits and potentially serious harm ensuing to its consumers. Therefore, an ethic of speech consumption, similar perhaps to diets and nutrition regimes for food, is needed and which the Right Speech ethic provides.

Third, of all the challenges presented by today’s dysfunctional news media, the most serious perhaps are the deep social divisions that it creates, exacerbates and sustains. The increasing partisanship and rancorous tone of the national public dialog calls out for a speech ethic that explicitly addresses that problem and offers ready avenues for redress, which the Buddhist Right Speech ethic does.

How much would newspapers, TV news shows and the blogosphere be transformed if only these four injunctions – to avoid lies, harsh speech, divisive and idle speech — were honored? And if the urge to go to press or to air was  delayed until to the moment of maximum helpfulness and healing?

It’s perhaps a useful thought experiment, anyway.

Here’s another one, from a short discourse the Buddha used to remind his followers that words, so seemingly weightless and ephemeral, can actually be lethal:

 ”Every person who is born
  is born with an axe in his mouth.
  A fool who uses abusive language
  cuts himself and others with that axe. “

One huge obstacle, though, blocks Right Speech from being widely adopted as an ethical touchstone in western democracies and their news medias.

That is the idea that “Right Speech” and “Free Speech” are in conflict.

Next week, I’ll explain why they’re not.

Part 2 of a Three-Part Series
 Part 1: The Politico Paradox — Feeding the Media We Hate
 Part 3: Free Speech vs. Right Speech (Coming soon)

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

Une nation peut-elle en coloniser une autre, sans porter préjudice à sa liberté ? Est-il possible qu’une nation apporte la liberté à une autre nation, comme le prétendent les partisans de la colonisation ? Ou n’est-ce jamais là qu’une ruse, au demeurant : grossière et éculée, pour asservir un peuple ?

Les réflexions générales que Mill développera à ce sujet dans les Considérations sur le gouvernement représentatif de 1861 trouvent d’ores et déjà à s’appliquer, dès 1838, dans cet article concernant l’indépendance de ce qui allait s’appeler le Québec, demeuré inédit en français jusqu’à ce jour.

Traduction : Mathieu Gautier-Pilote & Olivier Gaiffe

(placée sous la licence libre CC BY-NC-ND)

John Stuart MILL, Le Parti radical & le Canada : lord Durham et les Canadiens (mp3)

Notes (mp3)

Télécharger l’audiolivre en intégralité

This post reviews Paul Theobald, Education Now: How Rethinking America’s Past Can Change Its Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).  [An article that summarizes many of the points made in the book is available here]

Theobald, Woods-Beals Chair of Urban and Rural Education at Buffalo State College and author of two other books on rural education and community revival, here presents a wide-ranging revisionist account of the economic, political, and educational history of Europe and the United States in an effort to suggest reforms that begin in schools and ultimately will transform the U.S. into a more populist and economically stable place.  In this review I’ll summarize his main argument and then explain what it means for homeschooling. 

Chapter one revisits the history of political thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Hobbes and Locke, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of James Harrington and Gerrard Winstanley.  Unlike Hobbes, Locke, and their American acolytes who framed the baleful and possibly illegal U.S. Constitution, Harrington and Winstanley did not reduce human beings to economic actors in a perpetual state of natural war against one another.  On the contrary, they envisioned a cooperative natural state.  Hence political deliberation, not economic activity, was the primary thing.  Their views lived on in the thought of Montesquieu, whose impact on the United States was significant for a time but ultimately eclipsed by Lockean individualist economic reductivism.

Chapter two revisits the history of economic thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Adam Smith, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of Francois Quesnay, Henry George, John Ruskin, and others.  Smith’s economic reductivism and belief in the inevitability of industrial growth was accepted by subsequent thinkers like Mill and Marx, who disagreed only about the pace at which reform would and should unfold.  But Theobald uncovers for us a third alternative to the poles of industrial laissez faire or industrial socialism.  Illustrated by the many communal experiments of mid-19^th century America, by Thomas Paine, and again by Gerrard Winstanley, who Theobald thinks should be listed “among the world’s great thinkers,” (62) agrarianism has always been available as a viable alternative to the human and environmental degradation that has followed from industrial “progress.”  But the agrarian option has been suppressed and eclipsed by entrenched business interests and the ideology of Social Darwinism.

Chapter three revisits the history of educational thought.  Here Theobald for the first time reverses things.  It turns out that the winners in the world of education, at least at first, were the good guys.  Jefferson’s egalitarian agrarianism provided the intellectual grounding for the common school movement.  Its emphasis on universal, free education, organized and governed by local communities, is one of the great achievements of the brief agrarian or “communitarian moment” in mid-19^th century America.  But it was not to last.  Business interests and Social Darwinism co-opted the common schools, re-defining them not as political but as economic engines that would sort and prepare students for future occupations.  Yet this did not occur without a fight.  Again, Theobald uncovers a tradition of dissent from the dominant trends.  This time it’s Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, George Counts, and Harold Rugg who tried but ultimately failed to rescue schooling from the economic reductivists.  The economic view has now achieved overwhelming dominance, as illustrated in the absurd Nation At Risk report of 1983 and, most recently, No Child Left Behind.

Such is Theobald’s historical account.  The last three chapters lay out a series of reform proposals that all in one way or another seek 1) to restore to public education a political dimension that will allow students to critique the media-industrial complex that seeks to control every aspect of life, and 2) to restore control of schooling, and ultimately the nation, to local communities.  His reforms range from the plausible but unlikely (John Goodlad’s restructuring of grades), to the highly unlikely (randomly selected local citizens serving as a school’s Board of Assessors), to the wildly fantastical (a new constitutional convention that will completely revise our form of government).  His basic idea is that since schools are historically the only beach-head for agrarian values, school reform is the best bet for eventually producing society-wide transformation.

Here’s what all of this means for homeschooling.  Theobald’s historical claim is that the common schools of the mid 19th century were qualitatively different than the public schools that emerged in the 20th.  It was of course these 20th century public schools against which critics both left and right railed in the 1960s and 70s, which critique led to the homeschooling movement.  If Theobald’s efforts to return the country to a mid-19th century agrarian society where local communities ran their own schools were successful, there would be little need for homeschooling.  It is interesting that in his three chapters dealing with school and social reform he never once mentions private education of any sort.  Theobald doesn’t want his agrarianism to be a minority alternative movement.  He wants it to take over the country.

There is an obvious problem with this communitarian utopianism.  Theobald’s historical account that celebrates mid 19th century agrarian values does not come to terms with the racial exclusivism and religious bigotry that were pervasive in those days.  Communal values work best when the population is homogeneous.  To have communion you must excommunicate dissenters.  This was the dilemma Robert Putnam never really solved in his famous book Bowling Alone, and it is not even addressed here.  Theobald’s exclusive attention to the intellectual history of American economic, political, and educational life ignores the social side of things and masks the fact that one reason progressivism did what it did in all three domains was to replace the provincialism of local communities with expertise based on scientific knowledge.  We may debate the degree to which this scientific expertise was actually non-partisan (in fact it proved in the early 20th century to be even more racist than the agrarian provincialism it replaced), but the ideal at least was to have objectivity rather than outright partisan bigotry.  Were we to return to Theobald’s idealized 19th century, the same dynamic would be with us.  Some locales would probably be homogeneous enough to create consensus for universal free schools for all.  Others though would have significant minority populations who would probably have to turn to private schools or homeschooling to escape what they would take to be the oppression of majoritarian populism.  Roman Catholics had to do this during the period Theobald celebrates.  Others would have to do it today.

Theobald is something of a dreamer.  What he really wants is a new country.  He thinks the Constitution was illegally imposed on the nation and would have us go back to something more like the Articles of Confederation (but with changes–he lays out his proposals in the final chapter).  A more realistic tack he might have taken but did not would be to seek to have his agrarian ideals realized in minority communities of the like-minded.  Were he to make this switch he would probably find no Americans more open to his ideals than homeschoolers.

Utilizando-se do cálculo de maximização do bem, de onde se  tira a ideia de que o benefício de uma maioria vence a derrota de uma minoria é um princípio seguido pela ética utilitarista, também muito usada no Jornalismo, o que seria, de forma resumida, “os fins justificam os meios”. Essa máxima foi trazida, pela primeira vez, por Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) e John Stuart Mill (1806—1873):

“Uma ação é moralmente correta quando produz (maximiza) o maior bem (felicidade – prazer) para o maior número e/ou produz o menor mal (infelicidade – dor) para o menor número”.

A prática da ética utilitarista é mais uma forma de as mídias, de um modo geral, conseguirem alcançar a tão almejada audiência, aliás, a audiência é o que as emissoras de comunicação mais querem, além de ser um dos objetivos principais no momento de idealizar um programa. Isso faz com que o desejo de “democratizar” ideais se volte para o egocentrismo presente no ser humano e, consequentemente, nos veículos de comunicação. Mas, não podemos e nem devemos generalizar.

É também uma maneira muito polêmica de denunciar, é o que podemos chamar de denuncismo e deve ser feito com muito cuidado para não ferir princípios e/ou denegrir imagens, o que significa dizer, muitas vezes, que a ética nem sempre é tão ética quanto deveria ser. Podemos dizer que nem sempre podemos considerar que uma determinada maioria traduz realmente a maioria que deveria, então,  a seguinte frase pode ilustrar bem: “a ética utilitarista justifica os meios quando os fins são expressos por usufrutos coletivos”.

Vale considerar aqui também que cada caso é um caso. É sempre bom usarmos de atitudes “Robinhoodianas”, desde que não quebremos as regras da sociedade como não roubar ou, até mesmo, matar. Um erro não justifica o outro. Acredito que, para tudo, vale uma atitude consciente. Todos possuem dentro de si uma voz capaz de definir o certo e o errado, também de acordo com a cultura de vida na qual esteja inserido, e isso deve ser utilizado muito bem, no momento de decidir o que é viável ou não em situações como essas. Quer exemplos?

Vejamos:

O acontecimento recente do vazamento das informações contidas na prova do Enem e a forma como isso virou notícia. Uma tentativa de venda da prova para uma jornalista do jornal O Estado de São Paulo, que agiu corretamente ao memorizar as questões, averiguar a veracidade do fato e divulgar, com furo de reportagem. Ela soube ser ética, apesar do utilitarismo.

Há fatos e fatos. O que não podemos esquecer jamais é de que somos jornalistas e devemos saber fazer o bom uso da prática dessa profissão, seguindo os princípios que dizem que somos os responsáveis por divulgar tudo o que é de interesse público e não de  interesse do público, o que é bastante diferente. Um diz respeito à utilidade pública e o outro diz respeito ao sensacionalismo.

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It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearble; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

-John Stuart Mill “Utilitarianism”

When you sit down and think about it…

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”

John Stuart Mill
English economist & philosopher (1806 – 1873)

…which is why I took the bold move of altering my “modes of thought” for the production of takoyaki (octopus balls) and my rather yummy sausage with puy lentils dish.

I will leave you to debate whether this will lead to any improvements in “the lot of mankind” (I am too humble and modest to judge such things), but feast your eyes on these bad-boys and tell me they’re not tasty…

Toulouse Sausages with Puy Lentils

Stuck to a more French feel with the sausages this time going with some lovely smoked Toulouse sausages from the butchers and a monstrous glug of red wine, but also chucked in some finely chopped chestnut mushrooms and sweet romano peppers…

Takoyaki (octopus balls)

Last weeks balls were very tasty, but this weeks balls were balls that would be hard to beat!

Nothing much different in the recipe, perhaps the pan was now a bit more used to be using, or it could have been to do with the gas for the camping stove running out and having to make them on the stove rather than in the middle of table, but either way, tell me these are some of the tastiest balls you’ve ever seen…

Die Menschenrechte fanden ihre Ontogenese im 16.Jhd. In Holland. Ihr bekanntester Verfechter war Hugo Grotius. Er war ein Kaufmann aus Antwerpen der sich über die willkürliche Zollpolitik der Fürsten beklagte. Er artikulierte Redefreiheit, Meinungsfreiheit und Versammlungsfreiheit als Notwendigkeiten für den freien Handel, den er propagierte. Damit formulierte er Grundrechte für seine eigenen wirtschaftliche n Interessen. Und implizit die Intressen seiner zeitgenössischen Gesellschaft. Das war die Geburtsstunde des Utilitarismus: Die Idee, dass die Mehrung von Eigeninteressen dem Wohle der Gemeinschaft dienlich sind.

Sind, sein können – das sind die Fragen, mit denen sich B. Und John Stuart Mill auseinander setzten: „…“ Ersterer formulierte ein allgemeingültiges Gesellschaftsprinzip, welches letzterer einschränkte: „…“ Die Auseinandersetzung widerspiegelt die Suche nach der Konstitution eines Staates. Wie legitimisiert sich die Souveränität in einer Demokratie? Wie grenzt sie sich ab von anderen Staaten?

Im 20.Jahrhundert war die Suche nach der Konsitution eines Staates annährend abgeschlossen. Dementsprechend unterscheidet seit Max Weber die Wissenschaft zwischen vier Motivationsebenen für politisches Handeln, nämlich die empirische (die keine ist), und die drei normativen: die rationale, die moralische und die ästhetische. Die Frage nach dem Utilitarismus kam aus dem Konstitutionalismus in die Domaine des Politischen.

Heutzutage scheint es akzeptiert, dass politisch Ziele nicht allein durch Idealismus, dem Willen oder Wunsch nach Veränderung, erreicht werden können. Er mag nötig sein, um Ziele zunächst einmal zu formulieren. Doch wenn es um die Umsetzung dieser Ziele geht, bedarf es handfester individueller (wirtschaftlicher) Interessen. Die jeweiligen Interessenvertreter feilschen dann um die Mehrung ihrer Interesssen, wobei das Ergebnis ein Vielfaches des größten gemeinsamen Teilers ist, also im Ganzen größer als die Summe der Teile, der Einzelinteressen.

Der Einfluß von trans-nationalen Kooperationen, der Medien und anderer wirft einen langen Schatten auf den Utilitarismus, wie ihn sich B. Und John Stuard Mill vorgestellt hatten. Trotzdem lebt er fort in dem Konservativismus, dem sich die CDU verschrieben hat, wenn sie diesen Konglomeraten größeren Raum zur Machtentfaltung geben.

“Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme’; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”

~ John Stuart Mill

I was on my way to Rutgers University this morning, taking the 8th Ave local from West 4th St to Penn Station, and I witnessed an improbable event that seems only possible within the dense urban heterotopia that is New York City. An elderly woman sitting across from me, who was in the midst of cleaning out her wallet of old business cards and scraps of paper, broke out into a chant-like speech which I can only describe as a performative soliloquy or a spoken word poem (complete with the socially aware consciousness of that genre). She began with a refrain (and here I can only approximate her forceful cadence):

TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity
TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity

I had a lot of trouble making out the middle of her poem, but it recounted, in the first person, an experience of being traumatized in Nazi Germany for being Jewish. And the poem concluded with the same refrain:

TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity
TAser GUN poLICE BruTAlity

I had a strong suspicion that the woman was addressing no one in particular (a man beside me was nonchalantly reading a book), that this was, to allude to John Stuart Mill’s famous distinction between eloquence and poetry, an example of “feeling, confessing itself to itself in [a] moment…of solitude.” But, at the same time, I felt utterly convinced that her poetic chant was meant only for me (and this is, in my opinion, one of the potent ways that poetry can interpellate an audience). The woman seemed to have been uncannily aware that I was thinking of institutionalized, state-sanctioned violence; earlier that morning, I was perusing the new “war” issue of PMLA, and while I was having my coffee, I was reading the Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit’s account of the utterly oppressive violence of the Pinochet era.

Before I rose to get off at 34th St, and as if she had anticipated this too, the woman lifted her head (was she looking at me? I don’t remember…) and added a kind of postscript to her poem—”Also MTA police brutality, also MTA police brutality”—which nicely gave her performance a site-specific resonance.

While I do, in certain respects, appreciate the MTA’s Poetry in Motion project (which seems now to be losing steam compared to the newer Train of Thought program which excerpts prose), these decontextualized snippets of verse have never struck me, or unsettled me, in the same way that this woman’s impromptu poem had.

This event also seemed to attest to the particular power of performance, and I am today very much looking forward to seeing Cecilia Vicuña’s performance.

*

Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Cecilia Vicuña, 2009-10 Estelle Lebowitz Artist-in-Residence
Public Lecture and Poetry Performance
“A Tongue Within Tongues”
Reception for the Artist: 6pm;
Performance: 6:30pm – 7:30 pm
Mabel Smith Douglass Room, Douglass Library
New Brunswick, NJ

“In her poetry performances Cecilia Vicuña creates a space for silence and transformation. Words, sounds and the audience are woven into new sensory perceptions. Playing with many languages as she reads and chants she transforms her texts as she goes, incorporating the present moment.”

Al seu capítol de l’original “Considerations on Representative Government”, al capítol “de la nacionalidad en sus relaciones con el Gobierno representativo”:

“Cuando existe el sentimiento de nacionalidad en los individuos disgregados de un pueblo, hay una razón prima facie para unirlos á todos bajo el mismo Gobierno y bajo un Gobierno adecuado; lo que significa que la cuestión de elegir la forma y naturaleza de dicho Gobierno, deberá ser resuelta por los gobernados. No es posible prever lo que un grupo de hombres deberá tener facultades para hacer, sin averiguar antes con cuál de las diversas colectividades de seres humanos le agrada asociarse. Pero cuando un pueblo ha alcanzado el grado de madurez necesario para las instituciones libres, hay otra consideración todavía más vital: las instituciones libres son casi imposibles en un país compuesto de nacionalidades diferentes, en un pueblo donde no hay lazos de unión, sobre todo si ese pueblo lee y habla distintos idiomas. No puede producirse en tales circunstancias la opinión pública indispensable para la obra del Gobierno representativo. Son diferentes en las diversas secciones del país las influencias que forman las opiniones y deciden de los actos políticos. Los jefes de partido que gozan de la confianza de una porción del pueblo, no se la inspiran a las demás. Cada uno interpreta de distinto modo los mismos libros, los mismos diarios, los mismos folletos, los mismos discursos. Los mismos incidentes, los mismos actos, el mismo sistema de Gobierno afectan desigualmente a todos, y cada sección tiene motivos para temer más a las otras que a su árbitro común, el Estado. Su odio natural es generalmente mucho más poderoso que sus celos del Gobierno. Basta que cualquiera de las nacionalidades se sienta herida por la política del Gobierno común para que las restantes se decidan a sostener esta política. Aun en el caso de verse todas igualmente lastimadas en sus derechos o intereses, cada una comprende que no puede contar con las demás para apoyar su resistencia: ninguna es bastante fuerte para resistir por sí sola, y todas creen razonablemente que es una ventaja para ella el obtener el favor del Gobierno contra las otras.”

* MILL, John Stuart; Considerations on Representative Government, capítol XVI.

LA CANÇÓ: Herois, de Élena.

Tonight’s episode seems more of a “staging” episode for future episodes. While I ponder the different sub-plots that went on tonight, I will provide a little bit of discussion on Black Swan Theory. Check in tomorrow for my synopsis of tonight’s episode.

Black Swan Theory

The Black Swan Theory (in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s version) concerns high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations. Unlike the philosophical “black swan problem“, the “Black Swan Theory” (capitalized) refers only to events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. “Black Swan” events are considered extreme outliers. Note that in his writings Taleb never uses the phrase “Black Swan Theory”; instead, he refers to “Black Swan Events” (capitalized).

The theory was described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as “black swans”—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.

The term Black Swan comes from the 17th century European assumption that ‘All swans are white‘. In that context, a black swan was a symbol for something that was impossible or could not exist. In the 18th Century, the discovery of black swans in Western Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that a perceived impossibility may actually come to pass. Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the Black Swan narrative to discuss falsification.

The main idea in Taleb’s book is not to attempt to predict Black Swan events, but to build robustness to the negative ones, while being able to exploit positive ones. Taleb contends that banks and trading firms are very vulnerable to hazardous Black Swan events and are exposed to losses beyond that predicted by their defective models.

Coping with Black Swan events

Taleb states that a Black Swan event depends on the observer—a Black Swan surprise for the turkey is not a Black Swan surprise for the butcher, hence his idea is to “avoid being the turkey” by finding out where one may be exposed to being a turkey and “turn the Black Swans white”.

Identifying a Black Swan event

 Based on the author’s criteria:

1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).

2. The event has a major impact.

3. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected.

Non-philosophical epistemological approach

Taleb’s black swan is different from the earlier (philosophical) versions of the problem as it concerns a phenomenon with specific empirical/statistical properties which he calls “the fourth quadrant”. Before Taleb, those who dealt with the notion of the improbable, like David Hume, John Stuart Mill and Karl Popper, focused on the problem of induction in logic, specifically that of drawing general conclusions from specific observations. Taleb’s Black Swan has a central and unique attribute: the high impact. His claim is that almost all consequential events in history come from the unexpected—while humans convince themselves that these events are explainable in hindsight (bias).

One problem, labeled the ludic fallacy by Taleb, is the belief that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games. This stems from the assumption that the unexpected can be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations, especially when these statistics are assumed to represent samples from a Bell Curve. These concerns are often highly relevant in financial markets, where major players use value at risk models (which imply normal distributions) but market return distributions have fat tails.

More generally, decision theory based on a fixed universe or model of possible outcomes ignores and minimizes the impact of events which are “outside model”. For instance, a simple model of daily stock market returns may include extreme moves such as Black Monday (1987) , but might not model the market breakdowns following the September 11 attacks. A fixed model considers the “known unknowns”, but ignores the “unknown unknowns”.

Taleb notes that other distributions are not usable with precision, but often more descriptive, such as the fractal, power law, or scalable distributions; awareness of these might help to temper expectations. Beyond this, he emphasizes that many events are simply without precedent, undercutting the basis of this type of reasoning altogether. Taleb also argues for the use of counterfactual reasoning when considering risk.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jeremy Bentham, lawyer and legal reformer, wrote a series of books and essays over the last quarter of the eighteenth century, arguing, in the unfortunate “geometric” (pseudo-deductive) style of the era, for active revision of existing English law according to principles of utility. Given the tenor of the times, he undertook the task under pretense of “first principles,” going so far as to declare utility the underlying justification for, not just law, but morality as well. Proceeding with about as much hubris as Ayn Rand in her own reformative/reductive project 200 years on, and about as little acquaintance with moral philosophy, Bentham managed to achieve (apparently) a greal deal of his legal agenda, as well as a lasting and baneful influence on moral thought—at least within the academy. (Whether today’s “vulgar ultilitarianism” really descends from its eighteenth-century promulgator is unclear.)

That influence came primarily through his protege, amanuensis, and unflagging champion, John Stuart Mill, the son of Bentham’s pal and catechumen, James Mill. Young Mill, arrogant and hectoring to Bentham’s pseudo-precise and pedantic, shifted utilitarianism’s emphasis from the law to ethics, thereby giving it wider significance but burdening it with greater philosophical difficulties (see below—though some might see those as inhering in Bentham’s original pretentions to rigor and universality). Mill, however, was so impressed with the Romanticism of the age as to modify Bentham’s thesis to accomodate its “higher” virtues: the “sense of honour and personal dignity…, the love of beauty…, of order…, of power…, of action…, of loving.”

The thought alone of providing a blow-by-blow account of the present collection enervates the mind and demoralizes the soul. Briefly, then:

The introduction is a wide-ranging and useful essay written by editor Allen Ryan in 1987. It’s followed by chapters 1-5 and 13-14 of Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, laying out the principle of utility (“that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question;….[i.e.,] to promote or to oppose happiness”), its vindication, its competitors (asceticism, sympathy/antipathy, and “pretended systems,” relying on a “moral sense” or common sense or etc.), its application to penal law, and an elaborate taxonomy of plearures and pains. This last manages, against all odds, to be the most edifying.

Next we find excerpts from Mill’s A System of Logic: “Of Liberty and Necessity,” espousing a compatibilism on free will (faintly presaging Ayer’s position) [note that this question appears to have become acute around the end of 18th century, when Boswell repeatedly raises it with Johnson in much the way as: culture in the "Indies," the existence of ghosts, and the phenomenon of "melancholy"]; and “Of the Logic of Practice, or Art; Including Morality and Policy,” arguing (1) against a purely deductive method (“the habitual error” of the “geometrical school…especially in France”), but (2) in favor of a quasi-deductive method exploiting where possible the results of “speculative science,” and relying on a fixed telos (his word)—in this case, the utility principle.

Mill’s eponymous essay on Bentham [1838; 1867] puts one in mind of Boswell’s observation of Johnson that he allowed only himself to criticize Garrick. Mill’s principal scruple with his old master was his failure to appreciate the Romantic virtues enumerated above. Otherwise, the essay is interesting for its tacit endorsement of the purportedly historical judicial activism in “English law, as in the Roman before it….” Mill comes across altogether as a proponent of increase in state power. [It also includes the curious contrast of "an essentially subjective people like the Germans" with the "essentially objective people... (of) Northern and Central Italy." I should like to find a book on changing national stereotypes since the Renaissance.]

Coleridge, in turn, is feted as the Acceptable Conservative: though he toiled to preserve the good in existing institutions, he was no reactionary! No: the establishment church was defended as chief promoter of civilization rather than on religious grounds; the Reform Bill (reorganization of representation in Parliament) opposed for defects in its drafting rather than for its intent; Tories disparaged; laissez-faire governance rejected [curious that this political philosophy appeared self-consciously at the turn of the 19th century]; limits conceded to (land-)property rights; Scripture endorsed only insofar as reason could, and its literal interpretation condemned.

With “Whewell on Moral Philosophy,” Mill’s writing style hits its peak of arrogance and boorishness. Dr. Whewell’s work is reproached for its tendency “to shape the whole of morality, physical as well as moral, into a form adapted to serve as a support and a justification to any opinions which happen to be established.” In the main, Mill’s criticisms appear sound, even if his manner is churlish. Nevertheless, the deficiencies of utilitarianism are on full display. I suppose a word or two on these is obligatory.

For implementing (discovering? inventing?) his method of deriving ethical claims, Mill credits Bentham with “a position in moral science analogous to that of Bacon in physical.” Obviously the very phrase “moral science” is emblematic of the hubristic Enlightenment scientism that mars much 19th-century thought. One only wonders whether Bacon himself is not overrated in his own role.

Whewell objects that our inability to calculate all the results of an action fatally undermines utilitarianism (or for that matter any purely consequentialist ethic), to which Mill responds that inability to calculate precisely is a feature of all human practices. (“[B]ecause we cannot foresee everything, is there no such thing as foresight?”) But this misses the more serious ramification: predicating rightness and wrongness on a calculation opens up the possibility that tomorrow we may have to radically—and all at once—reform our moral notions; making the sinner a saint and vice versa. And that’s really queer. Moral theories which take intentions into account avoid this problem. And to concede that the former saint’s actions were nevertheless “commendable” is to put utilitarianism in the following dilemma: either “commendable” is to be stripped of (most of?) its moral content—in which case the concession buys nothing—or the utility principle is trivialized: We should reform our ethics when they manifestly lead to great unhappiness. Oh, yes. (Note that the “great” is required, once again on account of calculation issues: since the calculation cannot attain precision, moral reforms based on them require more evidence.)

[Another historical curiosity appears in this essay: Whewell apparently classified the virtues under five types: benevolence, justice, truth, purity, and order. These bear a remarkable resemblance to J. Haidt's five "psychological foundations of morality": harm/care, fairness/justice, ingroup/loyalty, purity/sanctity, and authority/respect. Oops, Jonathan, I guess you forgot Truth! Well, maybe if you'd read Whewell....]

Finally, we have Mill’s famous “Utilitarianism.” Here Mill’s meliorist instincts are on full display: “The present wretched education, and wretched soicial arrangements, are the only real hindrance to happiness’s being attainable by all.” Is this the foundation for the modern liberal worldview?? Or is Mill merely articulating a view in the air in the mid-nineteeth century?

Here again the grotesque utilitarian conceit that motives are irrelevant to the right- or wrongness of an action is affirmed: “[U]tilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the actions, though much with the worth of the agent.” What work is the second clause supposed to do?? (See my remarks on “commendable” above.) For elaboration we look to the affixed footnote, in which one Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies submits that “Surely the rightness or wrongness of saving a man from drowning does depend very much upon the motive with which it is done. Suppose that a tyrant” saved his enemy from drowing so that he might torture him; etc.

Mill responds that the tyrant’s action as well as his motive differ from that of the Good Samaritan, apparently because he had not just a different “Motive”—“the feeling which makes him will so to do [something]”—but a different “Intention”—“what the agent wills to do” (“confound[ing] the very different ideas” being “an oversight too common not to be quite venial”). Presumably Intentions matter because good (happiness-oriented) Intentions usually eventuate in good actions. Still, then, the Intention plays second fiddle to the consequences: if someone consistently achieved good ends under the influence of bad Intentions, the utilitarian would have to endorse those bad Intentions.

But the more serious problem is that this way trivialization lies: The Motive is not supposed to matter, but can we think of a case in which Motives differ but Intentions do not? I give to the Rotary Club to receive the plaudits of my peers rather than to help the poor. Well, then I didn’t really will that the hungry be fed; I never even thought about it; I willed rather that I might be perceived as magnanimous. Or again: I share with my sister to avoid my parents’ punishment rather than out of love. The motive is not supposed to matter and hence my action is equally good—except that I Intended not that my sister have my toy, but that my parents not punish me.

The issue is quite serious—though not, apparently, enough to warrant inclusion in the text proper. Oh well!

Further on, Mill endorses what looks at first to be a kind of “rule utilitarianism”: “The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another.” But on second glance this appears to be a purely practical concern: such rules are useful, but they are not the ultimate criterion for moral action. So even in surely following the rules one is not sure that he has done right.

What this apparently odd view suggests is that Mill had—was perhaps pioneering—an unusual, “philosophical” notion of right and wrong, or
perhaps right- and wrong-making features; effectively divorcing them from everyday choices to do the right thing, from practices of moral censure and praise, etc. The former and latter maintain some connection, inasmuch as the utility principle, the real source of normativity, provides reformative guidance for the latter: e.g. if it turns out that blaming people for x leads on balance to a great deal of unhappiness, we ought to start accepting x. Now, this conclusion is not terribly contentious. But the strange thought is that the everyday choices, systems of blame, etc. derive their ethical content strictly through the utility principle; upshots of which, apparently, are that (1) motives don’t matter (although see above), and (2) our practices are susceptible to radical revision, and this on purely descriptive grounds (a calculation shows that…).

Was Mill making the queer claim or the uncontentious? Given the ambiguity about Motives sketched about (differences in Intentions = differences in Motives??) and his silence on radical revision, it’s not clear. Of course this possible reconciliation still leaves the other vexing utilitarian thesis: that happiness trumps all. But here Mill evinces—in the present essay—a casuistical streak, inclining him to bend his calculations so as to include his own fancied virtues (e.g. the list of romantic ones above) among the determinants of happiness.

Justification of the principle of utility is itself fraught. Mill’s argument of course runs afoul of the naturalistic fallacy: how can the apparent orientation of ethics toward maximizing social happiness imply that it ought to be thus? This is doubly problematic, in fact, for modern evolutionary thinking would suggest that the aim of a society’s ethics will be, on the contrary, the reproduction of that culture and perhaps (as a consequence) its bearers, i.e. a particular people. Such ethics will sometimes conform to its society’s happiness (hence Mill’s observation) and sometimes not. How could Mill and Bentham—both early observers of the “is-ought problem”—fall prey to the fallacy?? Well, both seem motivated by a felt need for a criterion on which to base ethical calculations—“moral science.” Setting aside even the possibility of other criteria (the dominance of that culture, e.g.), one could easily read this proof as a reductio ad absurdum: so much the worse for a so-called science of morals. The intuition that there must be one such is, again, perhaps the paramount weakness of utilitarianism, especially for modern readers, much less sanguine about any such project.

Adam Smith, Scotland (1723-1791)
David Ricardo, England (1772-1823
Thomas Malthus, England (1766-1834)
John Stuart Mill, England (1806-1873)
Karl Marx, Germany (1818-1883)
Leon Walras, France (1834-1910)
Alfred Marshall, England (1842-1924)
Thorstein Veblen, USA (1857-1929)
John Maynard Keynes, England (1883-1946)
Irving Fisher, USA (1867-1947)

More at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

In class, I was ask to explain how John Stuart Mill used religion in his argument for Liberalism.

And I choose to read this section of the book out loud to the class:

“He delights in you, God delights in you”

and I don’t know why, but I got hit in the soul by the thought that many of my classmates have never heard that truth before.

-liz

Last time James proclaimed “my first act of free will… to believe in free will.” Now we begin to find him acting assertively, though still experimentally, on that belief. Results are panning out well. He’s discovering the power of intention– not Wayne Dyer’s recent invention– and especially of attention.

As this week’s installment begins in 1874, 32-year old William has just returned from yet another European trip and is sitting down to break bread with the septuagenarian, aphasic, addled Emerson, now clearly in mental decline. The Sage’s large influence on William, as a frequent household presence throughout childhood but more importantly in maturity as philosophical source material, was attested firsthand  in William’s remarks at the 1903 Emerson centenary.

Richardson notes as well Emerson’s poetic imprint, as William copied out passages of Emerson’s poem “Give All to Love.” The concluding lines “When half-gods go, The gods arrive” may have struck young James as an invitation to open himself to personal possibilities of growth and creativity he’d not imagined, “gods” signifying goals and ideals rather than transcendent deities. Emerson’s message of individualism and self-reliance would have found eager ears in the young man who’d at last wholeheartedly embraced his own free will and attentive powers.

James must’ve registered and filed in long-term memory this passage from “The American Scholar,” which he marked in his personal copy: “Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet a man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth.” As noted in a previous post, James’s pragmatic view of truth is that we must unpack the facts and apply them to the actual circumstances of living before we can begin to speak of truth (and falsehood).  Truths emerge from facts when we act, not before. Truths don’t come ready-made, pre-packaged, and labeled in advance for our use.

Another big influence beginning now to impress young James was the utilitarian and libertine John Stuart Mill (“of his own free will,” the Pythons sang), later Pragmatism’s dedicatee as the philosopher “from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today.”

During this time James is teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard, putting his medical degree to use. But he is also beginning to think and write philosophically. He publishes “The Sentiment of Rationality” in 1878, arguing for a concept of rationality marked by “a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest [and] a feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment.” This is not a narrow scientific rationality (though he did not see it, nor do I, as incompatible with scientific values). It is a proposal to regard our happiness as a reasonable aspiration, and reality as potentially “congenial” and cooperative.

Thinking of Pascal’s Wager, he proposes a shift of metaphors: belief is not a gamble, it is a vote. “The decisions we make about how to live are not bets but ballots for a particular kind of world.” The forward-looking meliorist philosopher is starting to surface.

In May 1877, William (age 35) proposes (again) to Alice Gibbens. She accepts. By the end of the following summer, Alice is  pregnant. The conflicted, indecisive, self-berating, noncommittal young man of all those earlier crises is just about gone for good. Life is being built, as he’d forecast, in “doing and creating.” And not, at last, in  so much pointless self-absorbed “suffering.”

“That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

“John Stuart Mill was born May 20, 1806 in London.  His father was James Mill, an historian, philosopher, and social theorist.  His mother was Harriet Barrow, and seems to have had next to no influence on him!  His father decided to use the principles of utilitarianism and associationism (in consultation with his good friend, Jeremy Bentham) to educate John “scientifically.”

This seemed to work quite well:  John began learning Greek at three, Latin at eight.  At 14, he studied French, mathematics, and chemistry in France.  At 16, he began working as a clerk for his father at India House, headquarters of the East India Company.  By 18, John was publishing articles on utilitarian philosophy!

But at 20, he had a nervous breakdown, which he describes in his Autobiography (1873).  He attributed it, no doubt rightly, to his rigid education.

In 1830, he met Harriet Taylor, a married woman.  He remained loyal to her until her husband died 21 years later (!), at which point they married.  Sadly, she died only seven years later.

During this time, he served as an examiner for the East India Company.  He also served as a liberal member of Parliament from 1865 to 1868. (“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”)  He died at his home in Avignon, France, on May 8, 1873.

His best known work is On Liberty, published in 1859.  His most important work as far as science and psychology are concerned is A System of Logic, first printed in 1843 and going through many more editions through the rest of the 1800’s.

He began with the basics established by Hume, his father James Mill, and others:

1.  A sensory impression leaves a mental representation (idea or image);

2.  If two stimuli are presented together repeated, they create an association in the mind;

3.  The intensity of such a pairing can serve the same function as repetition.

But he adds that associations can be more than the simple sum of their parts.  The can have attributes or qualities different from the parts in the same way that water has different qualities than the hydrogen and oxygen that compose it.  So J. S. Mill’s associationism is more like “mental chemistry” than mental addition.

J. S. Mill agrees with Hume that all we can know about our world and ourselves is what we experience, but notes that generalization allows us to talk with some confidence about things beyond experience.  And he believed that there are real causes for consistent phenomena!

This is often called phenomenalism.  He defines matter, for example, as “the permanent possibility of sensation.”  This persepctive would have profound effects on 20th century logical positivism (Wittgenstein, Ayer, Schlick, Carnap, and others) who provided the philosophical foundation for most behaviorists.

He promotes a scientific method that focuses on induction:  Generalizations from experiences lead to theory, from which  we then develop alternative hypotheses;  We go on to test these hypotheses by observation and experiment, the results of which allow us to improve theory, and so on.  This circular notion of scientific progress is known as the hypothetico-deductive method.  In this way we slowly build up laws of nature in which we can be increasingly confident.  This method proved to be very popular among the scientists of his day.

He more specifically outlines five procedures for establishing causation.  The simpler ones go like this:

1.  The method of agreement:  If a phenomenon occurs in two different situations, and those two situations have only one thing in common, that “thing” is the cause (or effect) of the phenomenon.

2.  The method of differences:  If a phenomenon occurs in one situation but not in another, and those two situations have everything in common except for one thing, then that “thing” is the cause (or effect) of the phenomenon.

3.  The method of concomitant variations:  If one phenomenon varies consistently with the variations of another phenomenon, one is the cause or effect, or is otherwise involved in the causation, of the other.  This, of course, is the foundation for correlation which, although it cannot establish the direction of causality, does indicate some causal relationship.

When it comes to psychology, he argued that it could indeed someday become a science, but was unlikely to ever be an exact science.  Predicting the behavior of human beings may be forever beyond our abilities, leaving us to limit ourselves to talking about tendencies.

His utilitarianism recognizes that happiness is not restricted to physical pleasures (or the avoidance of pain), that there may be different kinds or qualities of happiness.  ”It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”  So, although we certainly begin as simple pleasure-seeking creatures, over time we can acquire far more humanistic motivations.  Ultimately, this means that high moral values can be taught, and are not dependent on innate qualities of character.

When looking at social issues, J. S. Mill applies his expanded utilitarianism:  Does a certain institution add to human welfare?  Or are there better alternatives?  He argues, for example, that women should be allowed to vote because women’s self-interests can add balance to men’s self-interests, and lead to a better society.  He argues for personal freedom because it allows creative individuals to better contribute to society.  On the other hand, he notes that free-market capitalism tends to result in inequity and poverty, and we would be better served by some form of socialism.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 3: The 1800’s

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥