Chesterton for March XXXI

I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

Source: What's Wrong with the World

The Other Wesley

The 29th was the 224th anniversary of the death of Charles Wesley. Together with John Wesley, he was founder of the Methodist movement within the Church of England; Charles tended to counsel John to take as irenic a course as possible with regard to the Church of England, and as he lay dying he insisted that he was still a member of the Church of England, and requested an Anglican burial, which he was given.

Charles Wesley is best known for his hymns, of which he wrote literally thousands. Probably the most widely sung is "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," but there are many others, like the following.

Christ, from Whom All Blessings Flow
by Charles Wesley

Christ, from whom all blessings flow,
perfecting the saints below,
hear us, who thy nature share,
who thy mystic body are.

Join us, in one spirit join,
let us still receive of thine;
still for more on thee we call,
thou who fillest all in all.

Move and actuate and guide,
diverse gifts to each divide;
placed according to thy will,
let us all our work fulfill;

Never from thy service move,
needful to each other prove;
use the grace on each bestowed,
tempered by the art of God.

Many are we now, and one,
we who Jesus have put on;
there is neither bond nor free,
male nor female, Lord, in thee.

Love, like death, hath all destroyed,
rendered all distinctions void;
names and sects and parties fall;
thou, O Christ, art all in all!

You can find more of Wesley's hymns at the Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition.

Free-Rider Problem

The free-rider problem has been discussed a fair amount in the past few weeks in talking about health insurance, and the more I hear about it the less certain I am that there is really such a thing. There are free-riders, of course, in some sense of the term, but people rarely define the sense in which they are using it, and when you try to pin it down, the sense in which the free-rider problem constitutes a genuine problem becomes very elusive. For instance, children are in some sense always free-riders. Infants don't pay taxes; in fact, they don't do much at all except inconvenience other people. But they benefit from all sorts of collective action. If you look at the definitions most people use to describe free-riders, infants are clear examples, receiving benefits they do nothing to support. But obviously there is no problem with infants riding free on the system. No one complains that infants get the full benefits of fire, police, and other emergency services despite not contributing to the support of these services. Likewise, nobody claims about the massive free-rider problem of children receiving rather expensive public educations on public dime, all paid for by people who are manifestly not children.

Thus the mere fact that anyone is riding free on the system doesn't mean that there is any actual problem. If people receive services to which they are entitled, but are actually unable to help pay for them, there is likewise no free-rider problem: if they're entitled to the services independently of whether they can pay, then they are fully within their rights to take the services whether they pay for them or not. If the entitlement doesn't depend on the payment, who is paying for the service is a completely different issue from who is receiving it. The one is simply not relevant to the other. And in fact a lot of services and benefits are set up this way precisely so that no one will miss out even if they can't pay. It's not the only reason, but it is one of the reasons we engage in collective action in the first place -- so that some people can ride free, if they have to.

What most people are really talking about when talking about the free-rider problem is evasion of the responsibility to contribute, perhaps combined with the question of how to make the system sustainable. But this is a completely different matter from people receiving benefits and services to which they do not contribute. We see this with the infant case: the reason there is no problem with infants riding free on the system is that they have no responsibility to contribute. But the reverse direction shows it as well: someone may have the responsibility to contribute even if they themselves don't benefit at all. We see this with taxes: as a citizen your tax responsibilities are set without any regard whatsoever for whether you get any benefits at all. To be sure, virtually everyone who pays taxes does receive benefits that are supported by taxes. But there is no intrinsic necessity to this, and the responsibility itself is not fixed (for instance) with any concern for whether the rich are getting their fair share given all that they put in, or whether they are in fact just subsidizing a lot of poor people who can't pay taxes. The sort of collective action involved in government simply doesn't work that way. We do it because we all recognize the benefit; only then does the practical problem arise of how to make the benefit sustainable, and this happens any way we can manage it. Only in light of this plan for sustainability does the responsibility to contribute actually get decided, and the best plan for sustainability might well allow for, or even guarantee, free-riders. And if it's really the best plan for sustainability, there is simply no problem with there being free-riders.

So the problems people are really talking about have nothing whatsoever to do with whether anyone is riding free on the system; what people are really talking about are responsibility-evaders who endanger the sustainability of the system. Whether the free-riders are responsibility-evaders, or vice versa, has to be shown, not assumed. And thus the whole talk of free-riders ends up being otiose and obfuscating; all the work is done by assumptions about who is responsible for contributing. Which is perhaps a good thing, since if we actually understood 'free-rider problem' as broadly as Hardin does in the SEP link above, we are almost all free-riding almost all the time.

I think the problem here is that there is a genuine abstract 'free-rider problem', in game-theoretical discussion of the logic of collective action, that has begun to be used to model all sorts of behaviors that don't necessarily meet the original game-theoretical assumptions (e.g., that responsibility is equal or at least proportional to ability to contribute and that the benefits are made possible by consent of the contributors), and which has no moral or political implications on its own, being simply a problem about optimal and suboptimal strategies. But we all know the irritating character of the Freeloader who manages unfairly to get by on our work rather than his own. So the combination of these leads to people using some loose, vague mix of these to describe all sorts of situations that seem unfair. But it doesn't actually contribute anything. What you really want to know is whether the system is worth it, whether it is sustainable, what division of responsibilities is best for sustaining the worthwhile systems, who is actually evading their actual responsibilities, and what can be done (if anything) to prevent such evasions. These make the problem precise, whereas it seems to me, more and more, that 'the free-rider problem' is just thrown in as a vague diagnosis without much critical examination, and always signals that the discussion is going to become less useful.

Chesterton for March XXX

The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else's thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else's philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness. Men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy.

Source: The Common Man

Shepherd on the External World III: Independence

We have previously seen how Lady Mary Shepherd breaks up the question of how we know that the external universe exists into three different but related questions. Two we have already discussed:

(1) How do we know that anything continues to exist when we aren't perceiving it?
(2) How do we know that there is anything external to us?

That leaves the third question:

(3) How do we know that there is anything that doesn't depend on our minds?

Shepherd gives five ways in which we know that there is a continuing, external world that is independent of us.

First, we can extend the reasoning that was used for discussed the externality of the external world. Shepherd doesn't develop this at great length, because it is not her primary approach to the topic, but the basic ideas is that causal principles show us that the causes of our sensations are external to that internal world which we call our minds, understood as the capacity for sensation in general. But if these causes, when not being sensed, continue to exist and are wholly external our minds when they are doing so, then they must be independent of our minds.

Second, we can consider again the five organs of the senses and motion (which Shepherd elsewhere says is like a sixth sense) and how they relate to the world. There are objects that are ready to appear through our sensory organs; we previously recognized that they continue to exist even when not sensed. But of these ready-to-appear objects, we find many that have changed some of their qualities or properties while they were continuing to exist unperceived. The grass is a little longer, perhaps, than when we saw it last time; the color of something has faded or bled a bit; the mailbox was knocked down. Since we didn't observe those changes, and they took place outside our minds and unperceived, the processes and operations that made them must be independent of our minds.

In many ways, Shepherd's third approach is the most interesting. One of the early modern philosophers who come closest to holding that the whole external world is dependent on our mind is George Berkeley. He doesn't quite get there because he thinks that there are actually many minds, and that the external world is just the collection, so to speak, of all the sensations of these minds insofar as these sensations can be signs of each other. But to get this far, he has to argue that we have reason to think that other minds exist. This he does in A Treatise Concerning Principles of Human Knowledge, section 145:

From what has been said, it is plain that we cannot know the existence of other spirits otherwise than by their operations, or the ideas by them excited in us. I perceive several motions, changes, and combinations of ideas, that inform me there are certain particular agents, like myself, which accompany them and concur in their production. Hence, the knowledge I have of other spirits is not immediate, as is the knowledge of my ideas; but depending on the intervention of ideas, by me referred to agents or spirits distinct from myself, as effects or concomitant signs.

Shepherd agrees that this is the primary way we know that other minds exist, but she also argues that Berkeley's argument for other minds can be generalized to become an argument for the mind-independence of the external world. On her view, we cannot know the existence of the external world otherwise than by the ideas (sensations) excited in us by them; Shepherd thinks we only know the external world by way of effects or concomitant signs. We perceive several motions, changes, and combinations of sensations that inform us that there are particular causes effecting them. These causes are like ourselves in being continuously existing causes but that differ from us in ways proportionate to the effects they causes.

Fourth, we can use this kind of argument for other minds in a different way. Let's use it to conclude that there are other minds. Then let's think about what happens when five different minds perceive one pond. If there were nothing about the pond that was independent of the mind, then this situation would be impossible: five different minds would perceive five different ponds. In order for their to be one pond seen by all five minds, there has to be something, continuing to exist when unperceived, that in its unperceived state is independent of, and external to, each of the five, so that the pond can be ready to appear to any of the five. She recognizes that Berkeley has a response to this, but she doesn't find it convincing; I won't go into any details of why here.

Fifth, and this is the point at which Shepherd most sharply deviates from Berkeley (who rejects the claim that there are abstract ideas), we can run, with minor modifications, many of the arguments we've looked at for abstract truths and relations. We find the abstract relations of mathematics as ready to appear as any sensible form, and by the same reasoning we have given, the only conclusion to be drawn is that in some way these relations, even when unperceived by the intellect, continue to exist independently of, and external to, our minds. Our discovery of a truth does not cause it to be true; rather, our minds discover it to be true because it is true. Our discovery of an abstract relation in, say, mathematics, does not make that abstract relation to exist; rather, the existence of that abstract relation makes its discovery possible, and is part of the explanation of the discovery. When physicists discover a certain mathematical law in the world around us, for instance, it can only be because there is some continuing, external, independent cause that makes the phenomena behave according to that mathematical principle. It is more abstract, but as straightforward, as the argument that some kind of continuing, external, independent cause makes us see green on leaves.

Given this, we can form an abstract idea of existence. Every sensation springs up and passes away, but what begins to exist must have a cause. On the basis of this, Shepherd argues, we can conclude that there is some existence that is neither a particular sensation (which is in the mind), nor a mere capacity for sensation in general (which would be the mind), which can be a cause of particular sensations in the mind. Thus we can formulate the idea of an indefinite unknown existence -- as we might put it, the idea of a something-or-other that exists. Berkeley, of course, rejects the possibility of such an idea, but Shepherd is unimpressed with his arguments, and says in response:

...we can always separate or abstract the most general quality of an object from the rest, whether that quality be supposed among them by the imagination, known to be among by the senses, or concluded to be among them by reason, as a result from their mutual bearings. (EPEU 85)

All this is somewhat brief, and Shepherd herself goes over some parts very quickly when she discusses independence as such, although she discusses many of these parts in more detail elsewhere. But if any of these arguments work, Shepherd has established what she set out to show: we know that there is an external world (continuing, external, and independent); we know it by reason and not (e.g.) by mere assumption or by a trick of the mind; and this rational inference is of a sort that it can be quite extensive -- even children have some grasp of it. If you asked an ordinary person why she thinks that the world is not wholly dependent on her mind, she might well appeal to its externality, to the shared experiences of the human race, and so forth; and on Shepherd's account such arguments, however primitive, are quite good when the essential causal principles underlying them are recognized.

This is not the whole of Shepherd's account of how and why we perceive there to be an external universe. There is a very important test case for whether any account of our knowledge of the external world is viable -- any such account must be able to distinguish between dreams and waking life. But that will take another post.

Chesterton for March XXIX

Man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of; thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.

Source: The Common Man

The Seven Captains of the Howling Army

I have been trying to finish up grading projects for my Intro course and failing miserably because of the humidity. My air conditioner has been wonky lately, and while I have a dehumidifier, it has been running and running and not making much of a dent. So instead I'll post something on the Seven Deadly Sins, since that's what we looked at in my Ethics class today.

The Seven Deadly Sins as we know them were worked out by St. Gregory the Great. He was building on predecessors. Evagrios had a similar sort of list, as did St. John Cassian, but Evagrios's list isn't really the Seven Deadly Sins in the proper sense, first, because it is a list of eight; and second, because Evagrios is actually talking about kinds of temptation (distracting thoughts) rather than vices. Cassian could reasonably be considered the first person to speak of them (although he attributes them to Abbott Serapion) precisely in a form that makes them a list of vices, since he speaks of them as principal faults. And Conferences 5 makes an interesting, if extraordinarily complicated, set of arguments that will clearly inform the later tradition. But Cassian, like Evagrios, is concerned specifically with monastic life, and his list is not quite the same as the later list, although one can see that it's pretty close:

There are eight principal faults which attack mankind; viz., first gastrimargia, which means gluttony, secondly fornication, thirdly philargyria, i.e., avarice or the love of money, fourthly anger, fifthly dejection, sixthly acedia, i.e., listlessness or low spirits, seventhly cenodoxia, i.e., boasting or vain glory; and eighthly pride.

To get the actual traditional list of Seven Deadly Sins, we have to go to Gregory's modification of them in the Moralia in Job. Gregory generalizes Cassian's list, gives it a simpler and more straightforward organization, precisely characterizes why these are the principal faults, gives the order that will become standard, and does it all in an image so striking that it's not at all surprising that it grabbed everyone's imagination. You really need to read it for yourself (this is from Book XXXI). He's been talking about life as a heavenly soldier fighting for virtue, all very interesting, but then he hits Job 39:25, which talks about captains and a howling army, and he takes that and outdoes himself:

87. For the tempting vices, which fight against us in invisible contest in behalf of the pride which reigns over them, some of them go first, like captains, others follow, after the manner of an army. For all faults do not occupy the heart with equal access. But while the greater and the few surprise a neglected mind, the smaller and the numberless pour themselves upon it in a whole body. For when pride, the queen of sins, has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins, as if to some of her generals, to lay it waste. And an army in truth follows these generals, because, doubtless, there spring up from them importunate hosts of sins. Which we set forth the better, if we specially bring forward in enumeration, as we are able, the leaders themselves and their army. For pride is the root of all evil, of which it is said, as Scripture bears witness; Pride is the beginning of all sin. [Ecclus. 10, 1] But seven principal vices, as its first progeny, spring doubtless from this poisonous root, namely, vain glory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust. For, because He grieved that we were held captive by these seven sins of pride, therefore our Redeemer came to the spiritual battle of our liberation, full of the spirit of sevenfold grace.

He goes on to note that each of these vices spawn many more vices (giving precise examples), that five are spiritual vices and two (gluttony and lust) are carnal vices, and gives a brief account of how each of these vices take root. In later lists, avarice, being a sort of borderline vice, sometimes gets treated as spiritual and sometimes as carnal. We do have here all seven of the Seven, and, what is more, we have them in the order that will become standard. Notice that there is a sense in which there are still actually eight principal vices: there's a super-vice, the queen of vices, which is pride, and pride is the source of the Seven, as her generals. This will be part of Aquinas's account, too, since Aquinas's account of the Seven is essentially Gregory's, but given a carefully laid-out philosophical backing. Aquinas's account will later become the major source on the subject. But in Aquinas's account the connection between pride and the Seven is not so clear as it is in Gregory, due to a different format, and is certainly not put in such a striking way. Because of this very late accounts of the Seven will sometimes conflate pride and vainglory; this simplifies things a bit, but also makes it unclear how the Seven are related to each other, whereas this is very clear in both Gregory and Aquinas. It also tends to trivialize pride, which as a vice was traditionally understood as something far and away more insidious, encompassing, and dangerous than vainglory (although vainglory, as being the worst and most dangerous vice springing from pride, has always had a special connection with its root). And it's important to recognize that each of the Seven, even lust, gluttony, and avarice, can be considered as an extension of pride, as a kind of pride in a broad sense. Once this sense is lost we begin to get a sort of an impoverishment of the way people understand the Seven. There are still some major and important contributions once this has begun to happen: Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio are based on them, and the Parson's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (the 'tale' told as the pilgrims finally approach Canterbury and therefore need to get into the right frame of mind after their various vices have been put on display), is just a confession manual based on the Seven that is adapted into a sermon by added some funny touches as the pious but stern Parson speaks the truth but sometimes gets off track a little or unintentionally says something funny (my favorite point is in his discussion of pride, when he ends up ranting somewhat inordinately about the clothes kids wear which show off their backsides as if they were she-baboons, which is not quite what one would expect from a sermon on pride). But most of the contributions from this point end up being in striking images more than in substantive clarifications or improvements.